More Norman Wisdom than Robin Hood – the sociology student with a sideline in bank robbery
The Unusual Suspect: The Remarkable True Story Of A Modern-Day Robin Hood Ben Machell Canongate £16.99
As geography and sociology students go, Stephen Jackley was far from typical. When he arrived at the University of Worcester in September 2007, he still had a bruise from being hit on the chin while trying to raid a bank.
The raid had failed to go as planned. Jackley had plotted to collar a courier as he left the Lloyds TSB in Exeter and make him reopen the door. Once inside, he would force the cashiers to let him into the bank vault, where he could fill his bag with thousands of pounds.
He had duly pulled a black woollen cap over his face and pointed a fake pistol at the courier, but then his plan had gone belly-up: his victim did not work for Lloyds, so had no means of reopening the security door. Furthermore, the courier realised the pistol was fake, wrenched it from Jackley’s hand, and hit him hard in the face.
With police sirens wailing, Jackley managed to flee to a nearby park, where he had hidden a change of clothes in a tree. He returned home bruised and empty-handed, but undaunted. He was determined to become a successful bank robber, fuelled by the idea that, like Robin Hood, he would rob from the rich and give to the poor.
In his mid-teens, he had developed a burning sense of the world’s injustices. For years, he continued to fill notebooks with political ruminations, simple and clearly expressed. Had his life taken a happier turn, he could well have found gainful employment as a columnist on The Guardian.
‘Whether by intention or inheritance, the global oligarchy is a primary architect of the world’s devastation… Humanity persists in a relentless path of destruction and blind competition – all in the name of “progress”… Few realise that nearly all money is created more or less from thin air.’
Unlike other political theorists, he was determined to put his ideas into action. He planned to raise £100,000 from a series of raids on capitalist enterprises, such as banks and bookmakers. He would then channel his swag into an organisation which would help the poor. ‘It became apparent that I could fulfil the role of a hero, following in the footsteps of a man who had lived in similar times – a legend who had broken the law in order to bring wealth and justice to people. I could become a modern-day Robin Hood,’ he later explained. Like many shy, socially awkward people, he had a highly developed sense of his own worth.
Over the next few months, he would interrupt his university studies to conduct a series of lone raids on banks and bookmakers, in Worcester and Exeter, though none of them ever went according to plan. This was Robin Hood as played by Norman Wisdom.
At the Britannia Building Society, the lady behind the desk refused to fill his backpack with cash, throwing it back at him and yelling: ‘Get out of my branch!’
When he ordered the manager of William Hill in Worcester to freeze, she ignored him and bolted the front door, locking it behind her. Failing to spot a great sack of cash, he managed to clean just £530 from the tills before running out the back door.
Attempting to break into the HSBC in Worcester from the offices above, he found a massive metal door was blocking his way. In a fit of pique, he decided to ransack the offices, little realising that they belonged to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children – just the sort of charity he had always planned to help.
Seeing himself as a master of disguise, he prepared to raid the HSBC in Ledbury, planning to pass unnoticed by donning a shaggy auburn wig, a stick-on goatee beard and a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses. He ended up resembling a pantomime version of Phil Spector, so much so that as he strode to his destination across a park, a group of teenagers started pointing and giggling ‘I like your hair. Is it real?’ and ‘Can I touch it?’
Arriving at the bank, he walked to the
cashier’s desk, handed the lady a paying-out slip for £8,500 addressed to ‘Robin Hood’, and placed his imitation pistol on the counter. The lady took the slip and said she would be back shortly. After a few minutes she failed to reappear. His confidence already dented by the jeering teenagers, Jackley lost his nerve and ran emptyhanded from the bank.
Ben Machell has titled his fascinating book The Unusual Suspect for good reason. Jackley eluded any standard criminal profile, which is why, despite all his incompetence, the police took such a long time to bring him to book.
An only child, he was raised in a council house in Sidmouth, Devon. His parents first met in a psychiatric ward: his mother was a schizophrenic, his father – a ‘vile’ and ‘horrible’ man, according to a neighbour – was a manic depressive. On several occasions, his mother was dragged away by police and then hospitalised, which may have inspired Stephen in his later attempts to make the police appear foolish.
Aged 14, Stephen was placed under the Child Protection Plan. Later diagnosed with Asperger’s, he found school a terrible trial, never uttering a word, refusing to eat with others, and sometimes banging his head against the wall. He hated being in the classroom, and would walk in circles, mumbling, screaming and shaking.
In Machell, he has found the most sympathetic and intelligent of biographers. ‘Stephen’s Asperger’s is woven into him,’ he writes. ‘He cannot be separated from it. It is not the only thing about him, but it informs everything about him.’
The Unusual Suspect raises important questions about our ideas of guilt, idealism and the nature of responsibility. Does Stephen’s Asperger’s absolve him from the terror to which he subjected all those workers he held up at gunpoint? A fellow student, Luke Twistleton, was working part-time at the Worcester branch of William Hill when Stephen placed a gun to his head. He thought he was going to die. For years afterwards, he slept for only two or three hours a night. He only overcame his trauma when, at his wife’s insistence, he signed on with a psychologist.
At the same time, Stephen now appears properly contrite at the pain and stress he caused others. After he had been captured and sentenced to 13 years in prison, he wrote a letter to Luke, explaining his actions. ‘It was sort of an apology,’ Luke told Machell. ‘ He was saying he was targeting these organisations and going after business but not thinking of the people who work there. But I’m not business. I’m not rolling in money. I’m working there so I can pay my rent.’ Machell then says that Luke issued a ‘brittle chuckle’ before saying, ‘He suggested some reading I should do so that I would better understand what he was trying to do.’
The Unusual Suspect zips back and forth in time. It starts with Stephen in prison in the US, and then, within a few pages, goes back to a bank robbery in Devon, then forward to America, then forward, post-prison, to 2016, then back to Devon. This can sometimes be confusing. But this is my only criticism. For the most part, it is a tremendously invigorating book, scrupulously researched, sympathetically told, a picaresque tale of modern life, by turns funny and sad.