It’s late March 2016, and I’m in a small, drab meeting room above a thrift shop in Bristol, located in the southwest of England. Sitting across from me is Stephen, holding a mug of tea in both hands. It is the first time we have met. My initial impressions are that he is quiet, unobtrusive, and not particularly big on eye contact. In fact, everything about him seems calculated to deflect attention, from his plain T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms to his cropped dark hair to his simple rectangular glasses. Five minutes earlier, a pair of friendly elderly volunteers on the thrift-shop floor had told me where I could find him. And as they directed me to the staircase at the rear of the building, I couldn’t help wondering: Do they know? Do they actually know who Stephen is? Do they have any idea what he has done? Or where he has been? How would they respond, I ask myself, if I told them that Interpol, the FBI, and police forces in four countries all have files on the shy young man who works upstairs? By the time I finish this thought, the elderly couple have gone back to arranging old boxes of jigsaws on the shelves. So I thank them and make my way up. At the top of the stairs, I see that Stephen is already waiting for me, standing in silence. He wears an impassive expression, but keeps his eyes fixed on me as I climb.
I introduce myself, and as he leads me through the empty gray-beige office space where he rents a desk, I attempt some small talk. It quickly becomes clear that Stephen is not very good at small talk. Open-ended, conversational questions are answered quickly and directly, often with one word. Silences hang in the air, long and unbroken. I remind myself that this is a young man who spent months in solitary confinement, conditions defined as torture by both the United Nations and Amnesty International, and who experienced the best part of his twenties behind bars.
In May 2015, he was released from prison on probation, and from his manner it’s hard to know whether he is nervous, suspicious, or just ill-attuned to the kind of casual chitchat that regular society tends to demand of you. He makes us some tea and we move into a poky room with just enough space for a round wooden table and a couple of chairs. As he shuts the door behind us, I take out a notepad and place my digital Dictaphone on the table between us. He pauses, looks down at it, and for the first time a self-conscious smile plays on his lips. He says that it feels strange to finally talk to someone face-to-face about everything that has happened. About everything that he has done.
“Looking back, the thing that strikes me is my naïveté,” he says gently, eyes fixed on the Dictaphone in front of him. “My inability to understand the full impact of my actions. I was someone who not only went off the rails, but who lacked an understanding of both the world and the consequences of what I was doing.” He looks up and pauses, choosing his words. “I thought what I was doing was necessary and right. But now I can see that, no, no, that was not the case.”
Two weeks earlier I had cold-called a Bristol telephone number. A quiet, somewhat wary-sounding young man answered, and when I introduced myself and asked if it was possible to speak to Stephen Jackley, the line seemed to go dead before the voice told me that Stephen was not around, but that I could send an email explaining what I wanted. So I sent an email. I explained that I was a journalist who had heard about his heists, his obsession with Robin Hood, and his eventual capture and arrest during his attempted U.S. “mission.” I explained that I wanted to know how a shy, socially awkward geography student from rural Devon had arrived at the conclusion that it was his “duty”—a word he would use often—to rob from the rich and give to the poor as the global financial crisis unfolded. I wanted to know how he was able to steal thousands of pounds from banks while evading the police for months, and I wanted to know how and why he ultimately found himself languishing alone in a six-by-nine-foot concrete cell in the high-security wing of an American prison. I finished my email by asking if he would be willing to meet up so that we could talk about all of this. I honestly didn’t expect that he would. But you have to ask.
Three hours later, I received a short reply. He would, he said, be willing to do an interview. Which is how I came to be sitting with him in the odd little room above a thrift shop in Bristol. Over tea, he begins to speak, tentatively at first but then with an increasing composure. He does not rush or mumble, but instead talks with a kind of steady, slightly formal precision that reminds you, ironically enough, of a police officer. He has a mild squint. He looks, I realize after some time, very tired. We talk for around two hours, during which time we discuss his crimes, his double life as an unassuming geography student, and the methods he employed as a would-be Robin Hood. “Anyone with half a brain can rob a bank,” he says, evenly, on more than one occasion. “Without wishing to encourage it, it is extremely easy.”
More than anything, though, Stephen talks about how his bank robberies had, at least to begin with, stemmed from a genuine desire to do something good. To change the world for the better. “I was portrayed in the press as a mad university student that suddenly decided to rob banks,” he says. “But it wasn’t a sudden process. It was gradual, and it happened due to different factors.”
He is remorseful about his actions and the terror he caused, and I get the strong impression he is still trying to comprehend exactly how and why his previously quiet, solitary existence exploded into such wild, unpredictable drama. It would only be later, when I listened to the recording of our interview, that I would realize what the strangest thing about Stephen is. Hearing him talk in his steady, measured voice about events that were frenetic, dangerous, and daring, I realize that I had expected someone different. Given the scale and scope of his crimes, given the chaos he caused, I’d imagined that he would be somehow larger than life, a charismatic savant, fizzing with energy and vision. An actual Robin Hood. Instead, Stephen seems…normal. Or if not quite normal, then something very close: just a half step behind normal, an individual who could have easily passed his life in the same quiet, anonymous way he seems to be doing now.
Prior to his heists, he did not have a criminal record, or even a passing prurient interest in crime. Instead, he liked hill walking, natural history, astronomy, and philosophy. He liked Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, A Brief History of Time, and writing teenage poetry. He wanted to get a geography degree. He wanted to get a job. He wanted a girlfriend. These are normal things. He was, as he entered his late teens, increasingly anxious about humanity’s disregard for the environment and increasingly angry about the inequality perpetuated by global capitalism. Today, these concerns are so mainstream as to be uncontroversial beliefs shared by millions. To be anxious and angry about these things is normal.
The interview runs in The Times. Over the weeks that follow, we remain in touch. I keep asking if he will do another interview, and he eventually agrees. We speak on the phone for a couple of hours and make plans to do so again. As the months pass, we speak regularly. Sometimes he comes to London and we arrange to meet at a café or vegetarian restaurant or at the Times offices so that I can ask him more questions.
I try, on these occasions, to construct a picture of his life, although this is not easy. His living situation seems transient and precarious. He lived in Bristol. Then he moved to Glasgow. He spent long periods of time in southern Europe, leading an ascetic life and working as a farm laborer. He never mentions a girlfriend. He never mentions any friends, full stop. He barely has any family. An only child, he lost his father in 2008, and his mother will pass away in 2018. Most relatives more or less disowned him after his crimes were discovered. I know he has a parole officer, but beyond that, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone so alone.
I sometimes email him questions or ask for more details on certain topics, and his responses are thoughtful and highly detailed, often essay length. He thinks that he might have something close to a photographic memory, as he is often able to recall long sequences of numbers and sketch intricate floor plans of American high-security prison wings. At times, when talking about the terror he deliberately caused in order to get bank staff to hand over money, he’ll shut his eyes and almost seem to shrink into himself with self-reproach.
One wet winter evening, we are eating veggie burgers in an East London café and discussing his crimes. At one point it becomes too much and he breaks away from the conversation. He puts his head in his hands. “What was I doing?” he quietly asks himself. The rain outside beats down, and we both sit in silence for what seems a very long time.
One day we arrange to meet up and Stephen arrives holding several large plastic bags. Some are transparent and have her majesty’s prison services printed on them in large blue letters. They contain dozens of notepads, sketchbooks, and cardboard envelopes filled with sheets and sheets of correspondence, prison paperwork, legal documents, and more. The notepads date back to his early adolescence, when he first began keeping a diary. This was one of the reasons why, upon his eventual capture, securing a conviction was not particularly difficult: He had already confessed to everything.
The notepads also contain pages and pages of poems, essays, short stories, cosmological theories, and pencil sketches of landscapes. In addition to these papers, Stephen gives me old family photo albums and rolls of undeveloped film. The rolls turn out to contain dozens of photographs of the Devon landscape, from rings of Neolithic standing stones on high, windswept moors to blurry snaps of rock formations, the significance of which only Stephen can know.
I take these bags home and begin, very slowly, to work through the contents. Ring-bound notepads. Workbooks. Thoughts and feelings scribbled on the backs of photocopied sheets of prison regulations. A quiet young man’s life in the form of hundreds of thousands of mostly handwritten words, stacked in rough piles on my bedroom floor.
I pull, at random, some stapled sheets of paper from one of the plastic bags and find that it is a copy of a complaint he made to the UK Ministry of Justice in 2013 while in jail. The nature of his complaint? That the prison had been built on a lapwing habitat, and yet he has not seen any nesting boxes provided for them.
“You must ask the question,” he wrote in the box provided on the official complaint form, “what was this location before it was a prison? If another building, what was it before then? A marshland? Forest? Arable fields? In any case its rightful residents (native wildlife) have been dispossessed and as a public body you should be taking steps to help existing species, ie, the lapwing population.”
I put this paper down and reach for a small, black hardback notebook with a red spine. Opening it to the middle, I see that it contains pages of what appear to be theories relating to cosmology and time, of contracting and expanding universes, the possibilities of different dimensions and of light-speed travel. It dates from 2001, when Stephen was fifteen, and is written out longhand, in blue fountain pen. It is dense and hard to follow. One page starts with a quote—“Time is the ultimate motion of existence”—and a small diagram with “Beginning,” “Nothing,” and “End” all joined together by a series of arrows forming an infinite loop, like some endless Scalextric track. He’s jotted a thought next to this.
Nothing is keeping the beginning and end apart, therefore they are the same ‘event’
There is a fault in my model of the universe; all evidence points towards there being a big-bang, so how can the universe expand and contract if the end is the same as the beginning? This needs to be sorted out!
I keep flicking. Phrases like “gamma rays,” “general relativity,” and “supermassive black holes” flash and vanish amid the stream of scratchy blue handwriting. On one page he writes about how, at nine p.m. on December 14, 2001, he observed a “spectacular meteor” appear above Devon.
I was able to see a green-white streak go across the lower sky and could also see it burn up. Very lucky indeed.
There are, in and among the piles of notepads, wads of what seem to be photocopied extracts of diary entries. Stephen explains that these are copies made by the police and were used as evidence during his prosecution. When I contact the Crown Prosecution Service to ask about retrieving the original diaries, I am told they have almost certainly been destroyed.
One evening, going through the mass of papers, I find one of Stephen’s old university essays titled “Social Harm and Social Justice.” One paragraph has been underlined in black ballpoint pen.
The notion of what constitutes a crime needs to be re-evaluated in terms of the social harm it causes. In many ways power and authority are the greatest legitimising forces on Earth. They determine right from wrong, justice from injustice, business transactions from outright crime. The wealth, power and influence of global corporations and governments provides a screen to their more nefarious activities, which often go right to the heart of causing social harm and injustice….In this way what can be seen as ‘just’ in one place actually causes massive social harms in another. To truly measure what is socially just, we must look at things on a global scale.
In a short note at the end of the essay, Stephen observes that this topic covered “issues I had strong feelings about, but I’ve tried to present the discussion objectively.”
He is not joking about “strong feelings.” Stephen, on one occasion, walked breathlessly into a university lecture having come directly from the scene of a bank robbery. He took a seat toward the back of the hall and sat upright and attentive. Unlike the other students around him, however, he did not pull out a pad and pen and start taking notes. Instead, he kept his backpack on the floor, firmly between his feet. Inside it were the thousands of pounds he’d just stolen from an international banking system that was, in his view, already collapsing under the weight of its own avarice. The lecturer spoke and Stephen watched their lips but did not hear a thing.