Robber with a dream
One afternoon in the spring of 2008, a young man named Stephen Jackley called the police saying he was a geography student working on a college essay. He wanted to know how information was shared among police forces in Europe. If someone committed a crime in one country, would that be automatically reported to others?
The forensics expert he spoke to told him records were only shared if a foreign police force asked for them. Jackley was relieved, but also incensed at the wasted opportunity. When he was eventually imprisoned in America, he wrote to the police in the UK, saying, “Look, this is an issue. You need to sort it out.”
The Unusual Suspect is replete with such bizarre moments, recounted to Machell, a feature writer for The Times of London, who first met Jackley when writing an article about him. Jackley was a would-be Robin Hood, driven by almost wholly good intentions. For a period of time in 2007-8, he raided banks and betting offices first in his hometown of Exeter, and then the university town of Worcester where he was studying geography, committing 10 robberies in total. He would often arrive at lectures fresh from a heist, with thousands of pounds in his backpack. Police were stumped by the pattern of his crimes, which seemed like the work of an established gang; they never thought to investigate the local college campus.
The driving force behind Jackley’s misdeeds was to right the wrongs of society. He distributed much of the proceeds to homeless people, marking the notes with the letters RH for Robin Hood. He felt that banks (rather than, say, jewellers’ shops) were an appropriate target because of their role in upholding the global financial system. “The dream of the RH is to break the status quo and release those in poverty from a hidden slavery established by the rich and powerful. To steal from the rich and give to the poor. To create new possibilities and equality,” he recorded in his diary.
Machell deploys flashbacks to highlight the unlikely shifts in Stephen’s life: from his home in the seaside town of Sidmouth to a Buddhist retreat in France; from the University of Worcester to America’s brutal prison system. He clearly got to know his subject intimately and reconstructs his thought processes with care, making his account of Jackley’s development an intriguing psychological thriller. Machell also had extensive access to Stephen’s diaries, and includes excerpts that reveal their writer’s unusual thoughtfulness and sensitivity. On the environment, Jackley observes, “Only comparatively recently has humanity realised that the planet is a delicately balanced, interconnected system; that its resources and biological diversity can easily be extinguished.”
Working alone — apparently unusual for a bank robber — Jackley struggled to sufficiently intimidate his victims, who sometimes did not take him seriously and refused to comply with his request to hand over cash. He resorted to Scream horror masks and fake guns to appear more threatening. The stress of going
through with a robbery — the fear, the shouting, the potential for violence — weighed on him, and occasionally he would take cocaine to help him carry it out.
Jackley, who was later diagnosed with Asperger’s, is portrayed as hyper-intelligent but naive, an idealist who believes that anything is possible. When he becomes convinced that a gun would help, his search for one takes him to Canada and the US. The trip proves his downfall, and he ends up doing time in a series of US prisons. In one of them, the chief of security ordered that because of the high profile of his case, he should be manhandled and moved often, which was especially distressing treatment for a person on the autism spectrum. Unable to read the reactions of the men around him, Stephen keeps getting into trouble, and is taken by surprise when his musings about escape are reported to prison guards, and lead to further punishment.
Machell’s spare style is light
ened by an eye for incongruous details. He tells of the letter Stephen wrote to a local paper after the police made an arrest, keen to clarify that they had the wrong man and he was still at large. He notes the irony of the fact that in September 2007, police had chosen to name their investigations after the theme of “famous wizards”. The search for Stephen was called Operation Gandalf, meaning that, “unbeknownst to Stephen, he was now being hunted by a character from one of his favourite books”.
What is most notable about Jackley’s goals is how reasonable they now seem. In highlighting his concerns, the book is a commentary on global imbalances and ecological collapse, and the state of US prisons, filled with men who were “normal, grounded, intelligent and remorseful”. Machell suggests that coming before Occupy Wall Street and Extinction Rebellion, Jackley was just a few years ahead of his time. As Stephen tells him, speaking shyly, during one of their meetings, “We can all take action and we can all take small steps to make it [the world] more sustainable and fair.” He adds, “Just not by robbing banks.”
Machell suggests that coming before Occupy Wall Street and Extinction Rebellion, Jackley was just a few years ahead of his time