The Unusual Suspect

by Ben Machell

  If people got hurt (mentally) through my actions it was never what I intended. And some did get hurt…casualties of my war against banks and bookies. There’s no justification for that. If there is one reason I should be imprisoned, that’s it.

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  —

  Years passed. Stephen was moved from prison to prison. In 2011, he consulted another solicitor who advised that the possibility of autism was worth exploring. Eventually, in February 2013, Dr. Suleman met Stephen and compiled a full psychiatric report in which he concluded that “there is little doubt that Mr Jackley suffers from Asperger Syndrome.”

  The following month, Stephen launched an appeal against his thirteen-year sentence. In a skeleton argument submitted to the Court of Appeal, Stephen’s new solicitor argued that his Asperger’s should be considered a mitigating factor for three key reasons:

  (i) As can be seen from Dr Suleman’s report, the Appellant’s condition has been present for some considerable time and has impaired his ability to relate properly to the world around him. Typically, his social interactions have suffered significantly; he displays some paranoid traits and he has an obsessive personality. All are consistent with his diagnosis.

  (ii) The combination of these traits are bound to have affected his culpability in that, once the idea entered his head to commit the robberies, he became obsessive about them and was unable to ‘reason’ with himself, despite knowing that it was wrong.

  (iii) He was unable to evaluate the harm he was causing to the people caught up in his wrongful actions as a result of his condition.

  Against the advice of his solicitor, Stephen also presented the judge with his typed seven-page essay titled “Desperate Times.” Within it, he attempted to explain what it was he had been trying to achieve and why. The central chunk of it runs thus:

  For every so-called progression, for every monetary fortune, there is usually a cost. As Mario Puzo said, ‘behind all riches lies a crime’. This is true just as much for humanity as for the natural world. In a finite world there is one cruel but insurmountable inevitability: when one has more, the other must have less….I made a promise, perhaps more accurately termed a vow, to change things. To make a difference. And I knew time was running out.

  Even five years ago the awareness of an ecological crisis was strong. Drastic, unprecedented courageous actions were required. But for every goal and dream there is one crucial ingredient to bring it to fruition. It is the same ingredient that all human endeavours now require, regardless of effort or need. Yes, money was what I required.

  I decided on a drastic, almost revolutionary course of action. There were two points, A and B. And all I could think about was getting to B. The end of global inequality, the survival of humanity, the exploration of space…all this I aimed for. It would take time. It would mean many sacrifices. But—and this was the idea I clung to most—it was possible.

  Banks, bookmakers and building societies are icons of the current socio-economic system, presided over by the global oligarchy. They are more than just exchanges of money and legalised loan sharks. They were, to me, a legitimate target—not for the money they controlled but rather for what they represented. This was a time when banking CEOs were paying themselves millions in bonuses, when the City’s top echelons were buying new yachts and prestige cars. Why should they care that ‘the economy’ was struggling; that unemployment and financial uncertainty was spreading like a plague?…History’s greatest injustice was being repeated: the poor and the vulnerable suffer, whilst the rich and powerful escape unscathed.

  The appeal was not a success. In hindsight, Stephen admits it was probably a bad idea to include the essay. The judge, Lord Justice Treacy, dismissed the arguments put forward by Stephen’s solicitor about the mitigating effect of his Asperger’s. Stephen, he said, was intelligent enough to complete his A levels and secure a place at university. He had previously lived a law-abiding life, and so he knew the difference between right and wrong. He must have known his actions would have terrified his victims and, he continues, “his modus operandi was to strike such fear into his victims so that they would comply with his demands.”

  Lord Justice Treacy did make two small concessions. He accepted that once Stephen had freely chosen to begin his crimes, his Asperger’s made it more likely that he would become obsessed with doing so and continue to offend. He also acknowledged that his “rigid thinking and aversion to change” made life in custody more challenging for him than most prisoners. So because of his Asperger’s, Stephen’s sentence was reduced by twelve months. From thirteen years to twelve.

  Dr. Suleman says he had hoped his report would have helped Stephen secure a much greater reduction in sentence. The problem was that it was much harder to do this on appeal. The courts don’t have the same kind of leeway the second time around, he explains. Stephen’s Asperger’s should have been part of his original 2009 defense. He holds his hands up, smiles, and sighs. “I personally feel that if the report was done and the diagnosis was made the first time, he would have got much less of a sentence.”

  * * *

  —

  During his time in British prisons, Stephen studied for a degree in sociology with the Open University, which he achieved with first-class honors. He wrote poems and short stories for Inside Times, the UK prison newspaper. He won an arts charity award for creative writing. He embarked on a series of lengthy one-man legal battles against his sentence, all of which came to nothing. He moved prison eighteen times.

  He envisaged the creation of a social enterprise that would publish the writing of ex-offenders and other vulnerable members of society, which he created upon his release and called Arkbound. He began to write two books. The first, Good Intentions, is a novella about a young couple named John and Sarah who live a Bonnie-and-Clyde-like existence, conducting casino heists and using the takings to help those in need. The second, Just Sky, is a slim autobiography. Both books would later be published through Arkbound.

  From prison, he sent a letter to Dechen Chöling and explained everything. “I was leading a multiple-life of traveler, student and bank robber,” he wrote, matter-of-factly. “Most people I tell my story to don’t believe it.” He asked if anybody at Dechen Chöling would like to write to him. Maizza Waser, the autistic German woman, said she would. The two of them corresponded for a while, making observations about the weather, about the changing seasons at Dechen Chöling, about his crimes, and about Buddhism. Sometimes his mother would come to see him, brought to whichever jail he was in by Ken and Judy, her born-again Christian friends, though her condition made these visits rare. He made her small decorative items in the prison workshops. She sent him a harmonica.

  Stephen was released on parole in May 2015, almost exactly seven years after being pulled over by a state trooper on a rainy afternoon in Vermont. He was twenty-nine years old. The world he reentered was very different from the one he had left behind. The global financial crisis had changed everything. Popular protest movements like Occupy and Extinction Rebellion had seen millions of ordinary people march against Wall Street, the 1 percent, and capitalism’s banzai charge toward ecological oblivion. Inequality had only grown. America needed to be made great again. Brexit Britain wrestled with itself as nativism spread across Europe and the far right muscled into the mainstream, pointing fingers, screaming at scapegoats. Around two thousand migrants drowned each year crossing the Mediterranean in an attempt to escape war, poverty, and the impact of climate change. Globally, the last five years had been the hottest five years ever recorded. Sea levels continued to rise. In 2019, the Greenland ice sheet lost eleven billion tons in a single day.

  * * *

  —

  Rereading Stephen’s teenage diaries from what is now almost twenty years ago, it’s hard not to feel that he really was a canary in the mine: that from his little bedroom in his cramped council house in Sidmouth, he was able to
see the threats facing humanity and predict their damage with more clarity than world leaders or so many professional prognosticators. The economic, ecological, political, and social problems facing the world, he concluded, cannot be tackled one by one because they have become so interlinked that they are, effectively, one and the same. And the only way of saving humanity was to take urgent, radical action. Today, there are millions of people who hold these same convictions—convictions that form the basis of their very identities. They believe what Stephen believed.

  Did Stephen’s radical course of action—his righteous, self-appointed Robin Hood mission—become warped? He admits that yes, in so many ways it did. There were times he enjoyed the power that came with being an armed robber. There were times he enjoyed the notoriety and the ego-stoking fantasies of playing some pivotal role in the salvation of humanity and of going from anonymity to folkloric renown. There were times he enjoyed the money he stole, predominantly when traveling. The idea of escaping, whether into a world of fantasy or just away from his life in England, underpins so much of what Stephen did.

  Does this mean that there eventually came a point when he was simply in it for himself? That the Organisation was just some fantasy fig leaf that allowed him to continue a fundamentally selfish lifestyle of smash-and-grab raids while telling himself he was more than just an ordinary criminal? This is, essentially, the interpretation presented by his prosecutors. That Stephen’s crimes were cynical, calculated, and not at all what he presented them as.

  But Stephen never lost sight of his driving motivation. He remained convinced that the world was hurtling toward ecological and economic catastrophe. If he simply wanted money for his own personal use, then he was daring and resourceful enough to just put a brick through a jeweler’s window. But he was fixated on robbing banks, not because banks are easy to rob, but because banks have stolen from ordinary people and are engines of inequality. The defaced pound coin calling cards, the apologetic repayments to the NSPCC, the letter to the police saying they’ve got the wrong man…these all form part of Stephen’s moral landscape during this period.

  Looking back, he describes the Robin Hood identity he had adopted as an “invisible uniform” he was incapable of taking off. It wasn’t simply that this identity provided him with a sense of purpose or that it allowed him to indulge in private delusions of grandeur, but, more than anything, what Stephen’s secret new persona provided him was a clear set of rules for behaving in the world.

  Stephen did not know he was on the autism spectrum, but he knew that he found negotiating life challenging, sometimes overwhelming. If, as Dr. Suleman says, having Asperger’s can feel like living in a foreign country without knowing the rules, then what if you could give yourself a set of rules to live by? It may involve robbing from the rich to give to the poor. But at least you would know where you stood. This was partly the reason why Stephen persisted with robbing banks. If he just wanted £100,000 to start the Organisation, there were many safer—and perfectly legal—ways of doing this. But Robin Hood robs. From the rich. This does not make it the right thing to do. But it’s what he did.

  It is this sense of absolute belief that characterizes his crimes more than anything. Why, for example, did Stephen believe that tinfoil would scramble the airport security x-rays? Ostensibly, it makes no sense at all. His journals were packed with page after page after page of handwritten notes and diagrams relating to cosmology, string theory, space-time, and quantum physics. If you knew about this kind of stuff, it seems almost inconceivable that you did not also know that x-rays detect metal. And even if the tinfoil did repel the x-rays, all that would mean is that the security officers would see a load of strange, x-ray-repellent items in his bag. Which would be suspicious.

  For someone who approached his crimes and escapes so methodically and so rationally—a trait that every police officer involved in his case readily acknowledges—Stephen was still capable of doing stuff like this. Returning to Amsterdam when he knew he was wanted there. Breaking into the NSPCC offices in the belief that he would find an easy route into the bank branch below, only to be shocked to find a “massive metal door” blocking his path. Using a cheap battery-powered angle grinder to try to cut through the metal bars protecting a bank window. Employing a disguise that made people stop, point, and laugh as he walked by. What, you can’t help wondering after a while, did he really think was going to happen?

  And the answer is…he thought it would work. He had to. He was obsessed with carrying out these crimes and inhabiting the Robin Hood role he had created for himself.

  But if he’d approached these crimes with perfect, unflinching rationality, there would have been a problem. And that problem was that he would see, very clearly, that it was not going to work: that robbing banks on his own in order to create a start-up fund for the foundation of a pan-global, supra-governmental philanthropic new world order was simply a dream. He would be arrested and go to jail. So, instead, he allowed himself to believe that tinfoil can scramble x-rays and all the rest of it. Because if he didn’t believe it, then he wouldn’t try. So he made sure he believed it.

  It’s the reason that so many of his crimes seemed like 85 percent smart, pragmatic, patient planning and then 15 percent total fantasy. Once he had reassured himself that the blank-firing pistol he accidentally bought in Istanbul would be perfectly adequate for his purposes, why even take the risk of smuggling it through customs? He could have just come back to the UK and ordered one online. That isn’t cynicism. It’s blind faith. It’s fire walking. And he kept going and going. Until he finally got burned.

  * * *

  —

  The last time Stephen and I met, it was for a meal at a vegan curry house in north London. It was a dark, drizzly night. He said that he had been spending more and more time doing farm work in different parts of southern Europe. It seemed an austere and solitary life. He said he enjoyed doing manual labor in the outdoors, staying in small, anonymous villages, going on long runs in the evening, and then sitting down and writing at night.

  He was not the boyish figure with the uncertain squint whose photo made the papers ten years ago. His dark eyes seemed deeper set, his face careworn. He explained that he was writing a book about his experience of the UK justice system, about his journey as an inmate with Asperger’s spending time in almost twenty different prisons. He did not say as much, but his life was difficult. He was isolated. His mother died in 2018, which left him “devastated for weeks and weeks.” He says that none of his extended family has been in regular contact with him since his crimes were uncovered. Lisa, his half sister, admits he did email her about the possibility of him paying her a visit up in Liverpool, but she’d felt uncomfortable with the idea and it never happened.

  Slowly and reluctantly, he has come to understand how “debilitating” Asperger’s is. He upsets people without realizing it. He struggles to find common ground with others. He sets himself goals that are not realistic, but which he finds impossible to veer from. He knows he can seem difficult, stubborn, and pedantic when he really does not mean to be. Seeing the perspective of another individual and empathizing with how they may be feeling is still a guessing game.

  For a long time following his formal diagnosis by Dr. Suleman, he’d just accepted his condition, or was at least able to shrug it off. These days he finds he feels a constant resentment toward it. If he had a choice he would rather be in a wheelchair than on the autism spectrum. “The fact is, it prevents people from living in society, from being accepted and integrated into society, and we’re talking about a species that is, by definition, social. It’s like being a fish without fins.”

  The role that Asperger’s syndrome played in Stephen’s crimes cannot be quantified or neatly calculated. It is almost impossible to imagine him robbing banks in the way he did had he not been on the spectrum. But nor did he rob banks simply because he was on that spectrum. What it is possible to say, I
think, is that Stephen’s social isolation did as much as anything to lead him down the path he took. And the irony—the tragedy, really—is that social isolation is not a symptom of Asperger’s. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be. By the time he had reached adolescence, he desperately wanted to be included in normal, day-to-day life. Only, he wasn’t. So he drifted further and further away, retreating into the echo chamber of his own thoughts, beliefs, and anxieties.

  There is a temptation to assume that Stephen was somehow let down by “The System.” And while an early diagnosis in his childhood or teens would have certainly helped, this is not necessarily to blame the various doctors, social workers, and community nurses who monitored Stephen and tried to shepherd him through a childhood they had already identified as traumatic. He was under a child protection plan and passed in GCSEs and A levels at the special school in which he had been placed. He did not slip through any net. He was always there.

  And what so much of Stephen’s story shows is that we cannot simply expect psychiatric professionals or clinicians to somehow deal with people like Stephen, or his mother and father, on our behalf. To worry about them so that we don’t have to. Stephen had only one real friend in Sidmouth, Ben Weaver. But what if there had been two Ben Weavers? What if there had been three? How many interwoven friendships—or even just friendly acquaintances—would it have taken before Stephen began to feel a part of something and started to look outward rather than inward? Would he have slowly begun to learn more about the emotions of others? Would there have come a point when he wouldn’t need it explained to him that aiming a fake gun at a stranger might, in fact, be a terrifying ordeal for them long after the moment passed? And even if the idea of becoming the new Robin Hood had entered his mind, would one or more of his friends have been able to say, Look, Stephen, that’s just a really bad idea and it’s not going to work?