In May 2008, Stephen crossed the Atlantic in order to carry out a specific objective. This mission—he always referred to it as a “mission”—had taken him weeks to plan and, if executed successfully, would have allowed him to take his crimes to dangerous new levels. But this is not what happened. Instead, the mission ended in disaster, and Stephen was held in a high-security prison unit. And while he would go on to spend 132 days in the Hole at Vermont’s Southern State Correctional Facility, this was not where his experience of the U.S. penal system began. Instead, he started off by spending a little less than a month at the Northwest State Correctional Facility.
A short drive from St. Albans, Vermont, NWSCF is surrounded by field after field of farmland and occasional patches of thick forest. The prison is set back one hundred yards or so from a quiet country road, behind a row of plump conifers meant to soften the view. But the low redbrick buildings the evergreens are supposed to hide are unmistakably meant for confinement, ringed as they are by fencing and razor wire.
Stephen arrived at NWSCF on May 22, 2008, escorted by a pair of U.S. Marshals. The two men had judged his behavior in their custody to be both erratic and suspicious, and they had called ahead so that, when they finally arrived and pulled Stephen from their secure van, there were already eight prison guards standing there waiting for him. No chances were taken.
“They were really cautious of me when I arrived,” he says. “I think they strip-searched me about eight times.” Handcuffed, legs shackled, and under constant observation, he was processed, given a red prison uniform, and assigned a cell in Echo Unit, the prison’s “close custody” wing. He was to be kept apart from the general prison population. He couldn’t eat his meals in the canteen. He was not permitted to go outside. Aside from Stephen himself, the only things taking up space in his six-by-nine-foot prison cell were a metal toilet and sink plus a hard, narrow cot. The brick walls were painted a creamy off-white that only exacerbated the swampy glow of a single ceiling light as night began to fall. Once an hour a guard peered through a small square window in order to observe him. Trays of food were passed through a slot in the door three times a day. As a precaution, he was kept in his restraints, which meant his wrists and ankles remained bound.
Stephen very quickly became an object of curiosity at NWSCF. Baby-faced, insular, and English, he was unlike the inmates usually consigned to Echo Unit. After a few days of solitary incarceration, during which time he was reprimanded for scribbling poetry on the walls, he was finally allowed a brief period of time away from his tiny cell. A guard escorted him to a small “rec room”—a bare room where three other inmates were sitting around a table playing cards. For the next three weeks, these men were the only other inmates Stephen encountered. One of them was a tall man in his fifties with swept-back gray hair, a deep voice, and eyes that seemed to have a kind of opal glow. He told Stephen that he was involved in drug trafficking and that he was waiting to stand trial for three counts of murder. His name was Trevor, and Stephen was immediately frightened of him. “I was pretty convinced he was some sort of psychopath.”
The second man was young, loud, and ridiculously muscle-bound. His name was Paul, and he had arrived at NWSCF on drug charges and had been moved to Echo Unit after assaulting a guard. He would react angrily whenever he lost a hand of cards, though this was almost entirely for show. The third inmate was thin, fortyish, and pallid, with a receding hairline. Stephen did not know what he was doing there, and the man did not discuss it. For an hour or so every day, Stephen was escorted from his cell to this small room to stand awkwardly in the corner while the same three men played cards or watched the wall-mounted TV.
After a few days of this, Stephen picked up a local newspaper during one of his enforced visits to the rec room. His heart skipped as he saw on the front page a photograph of the thin middle-aged inmate sitting across the room playing cards. His name, he read, was Brian Rooney, and he was a construction worker who had just been convicted of the rape and murder of a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Vermont named Michelle Gardner-Quinn. Stephen felt something like vertigo mixed with nausea upon realizing who he was locked in a room with.
But at the same time, he felt something else. Deep inside him, he began to realize, was a bubbling urge to understand why somebody could rape and kill an innocent person. Very quickly it became essential for him to know what had driven this man to do what he had done. “I just couldn’t get my head around it,” says Stephen, frowning. “I didn’t understand the logic to it.” He bit his tongue. Finally, during one of the endless games of cards, Stephen could no longer contain the burning wish to know. So he snapped. And he cleared his throat. And he asked.
“Why did you kill that girl?” he called over to Rooney.
The three other men all stopped what they were doing and looked at him. Instantly, Stephen knew he probably should not have asked that question. He would go on to learn that, when in prison, it is both pragmatic and polite to play along with the fiction that all inmates are innocent of the crimes that landed them inside. “You don’t ask, ‘Why did you do it?’ ” he explains. “You ask, ‘Who set you up?’ ”
But Stephen had been in prison for only a few days and did not yet know this. And in any case, he had always been direct when dealing with other people. When someone behaved in a way that he couldn’t understand or which did not seem rational, he questioned or challenged them regardless of whether it was a good idea or not. A confrontation was averted only by Paul and the sudden arrival of a guard. Stephen felt a wave of relief as he was escorted back to his cell. For the remainder of his time at NWSCF, he did not say another word to Rooney, and Rooney did not say a word to him. “Which was a perfectly acceptable arrangement.”
The days at Northwest State Correctional Facility passed by in dull, soupy nothingness. Stephen couldn’t accept the fact of his capture nor the reality of solitary confinement. He could walk the length of his tiny cell in just a few steps, the sole of his foot banging into cold whitewashed brickwork before he planted it a fourth time. He crossed the cell’s breadth in one stride. When the sun was high in the New England sky, he got, at best, up to two hours of natural light through his barred window. But either side of that, Stephen’s world was one of muted, flickering fluorescence and walls that seemed ready to squeeze the life from him. For the first few days he mostly slept, curled up on a thin plastic mattress. “In my dreams I was always running, trying to get out, often along a corridor,” he remembers. “But it was always blocked by a dark figure.” This figure mocked and threatened him in the voiceless language of dreams.
Anonymous eyes periodically peered through the viewing slot. He could hear the voices of other prisoners up and down the corridor—men shouting, whispering, complaining to prison staff, even singing—but never saw their faces. They were each confined to their own cell for twenty-three hours a day. The only other prisoners at NWSCF he ever actually met were the psychotic Trevor, the muscle-bound Paul, and Brian Rooney, the man convicted of raping and killing the young woman. He continued to write snatches of poetry on pieces of paper while the other men played cards or cursed at the TV. Then, after a time, guards came and walked each of them back to their cells. It became a routine that, after a week, seemed to have been in place forever.
Stephen had not spoken to his mother since before his arrest, and he had no desire to do so now. He couldn’t bear the idea of calling home and hearing her soft, cautious voice on the other end of the crackling line and not knowing whether she would understand or how she would react. He sat in his cell and, even though it was agonizing, shut his eyes and pictured the vast, open spaces of his childhood: from the high cliffs of the Jurassic Coast to the coarse, sweeping wilds of Dartmoor, where the wind would whip around ancient druidic stone tors and seem to whisper and sing for him while he stood there, terrified and enraptured.
The prison staff were, for the most part, courteous. The two agitated U.S. Marshals who’d delivered him to NWSCF had insisted that Stephen be subject to nightly strip searches. The staff did not do this. The marshals had wanted him to remain shackled. But Stephen had his chains removed in exchange for a promise to stop drawing on the cell walls. Some of the guards gloated and teased him for his accent and his glasses and his incessant scribbling, but by and large, he seemed to be treated with polite interest.
On one occasion, Stephen was given a disciplinary write-up when a prison officer saw that he had been removing the white caulking from around his cell window. Stephen tried to explain that he was not trying to escape or anything. He was just bored and fidgeting. “The windows had thick metal bars over them and a metal mesh. Even if I had managed to get the plexiglass window off by removing the caulking, it wouldn’t have made any sense whatsoever.”
He continued to ask questions that led to trouble. In the rec room, he casually asked the two inmates he was still in communication with whether anybody had ever escaped from the prison. And, if so, did they know how they went about doing it? The question was dismissed with irritation by Trevor, who told him to shut the fuck up. A few more minutes passed in relative silence as the other inmates played cards and Stephen glanced at them from over a newspaper. Then he piped up and wondered aloud what the best way to kill yourself might be.
He didn’t actually want to kill himself. It’s just that, the question had been on his mind for a while and he couldn’t help asking. “I was just curious how people do it,” he says, shrugging. Same with escape. He would have loved to escape but appreciated it was very unlikely. That didn’t mean he didn’t want to find out more about how it might, theoretically, be done. The fact that other inmates might not want to discuss either of these topics did not occur to him.
In response to his last question, though, Paul did something that surprised him. He got up and began to fiddle with a radiator in the rec room. Grinning, he managed to retrieve a disposable shaving razor from behind it. Inmates are permitted to use these in the main prison, but here in segregation, they were forbidden. “He had obviously deposited it there for whatever reason,” says Stephen. He handed the razor to Stephen with a smile. Stephen couldn’t tell if this was being done in jest or whether the large, loud inmate was genuinely trying to provide the means for him to end his own life. Stephen had struggled since childhood to identify when people were joking with him. But right now, in the rec room, he thought it was probably best to just take the razor. He hid it in his uniform and later placed it on a ledge above his door.
That evening his cell was searched and the disposable razor quickly found. As a punishment, Stephen was placed in an observation unit. It was just as small as his usual cell, but the lights were on constantly and there was a video camera mounted in one corner. The lights gave him a headache. Sitting on the bunk, he put a T-shirt over his head while he tried to read a paperback. When a guard saw this, he immediately barked at Stephen to stop. So Stephen let the T-shirt fall around his shoulders and continued reading. Moments later, the door of his cell clanged open as several guards stormed in.
“They were all shouting ‘He’s making a noose! He’s making a noose!’ ” he says, with a little irritation. “They took me to this shower room and strip-searched me. Then they gave me the blueberry suit.”
A “blueberry suit” is prison slang for an anti-suicide smock used in U.S. prisons. It is a heavy, padded, tear-resistant gown into which prisoners can be tightly and securely fastened, and is designed to be impossible to tear or otherwise be turned into a noose. They are often blue and give wearers the swollen, shuffling appearance of the character Violet Beauregarde in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the little girl who eventually swells up into the shape and color of a gigantic blueberry. A naked Stephen was strapped into one of these and then pushed back into his observation cell. He couldn’t know for certain, but he was pretty sure one of the three other inmates in the rec room had told the prison authorities that he had been talking about escape and suicide, and had a razor blade. He was chilly. He waddled across the cell to sit down and noticed, with a sigh, that all his bedding had been removed. He turned around to see a pair of eyes peer at him through the viewing slot in the door, then vanish.
After almost four weeks at NWSCF, Stephen was moved. He gulped down the fresh air as he was loaded into a prisoner transport vehicle. He was driven southeast through Vermont, following the Winooski River. It was June and the sky was vast and blue. Rolling down I-89, he passed lakes and ranges of hills blanketed in dense greenery: the Centennial Woods Natural Area, the Mount Mansfield State Forest, the Camel’s Hump State Park. Stephen couldn’t see any of this because he sat within a cage inside the van, and its grilles covered the thick security glass windows. He sat alone, his body gently swaying with the roll of the road, the tight cuffs around his wrists making the tips of his fingers numb.
He arrived at the Southern State Correctional Facility. Even more guards were waiting for him than when he arrived at NWSCF. He was strip-searched then half-led, half-dragged to the Foxtrot Unit—“the Hole”—the highest-security unit of the highest-security wing of a high-security prison. “I went to the Hole under their ‘administrative segregation’ system, which can be applied to any prisoner thought to be an escape risk, a risk to other inmates, or a risk to themselves.”
Stephen, wearing just a pair of shorts after his strip search, was escorted by four guards to his new cell in the Hole. Prisoners in their cells heard the boot-stamp of the guards and came to their doors. A slow, slurred chant went up.
“Dead man walking! Dead man walking!”
Metal doors were beaten and banged, making Stephen blink and wince as he was pulled toward his cell. He had never coped well with loud noise, and he was, by now, completely disoriented. His head pounded, and his breathing was shallow and fast as the guards pushed him into a cell. It was the same tiny size as his last, but filthy. The toilet had shit smeared all over it. One of the guards shouted a command at him, but it didn’t register. He shouted again, but Stephen either couldn’t hear or didn’t understand what was being asked of him. Then, without warning, the four guards rushed him and forced him to the ground, knocking the wind from his lungs. A flurry of blows rained down, leaving him gasping, half-naked, on a cold concrete floor.
The guards marched out and the heavy metal door slammed shut. The shouts and jeers of the other inmates echoed and bounced along the corridor. Pale and shivering, Stephen lay curled on the floor and cried. Not the frustrated, angry tears of his first few nights at NWSCF, but rather pathetic, heaving sobs of despair.
The days in the Hole passed in feverish uncertainty. Stephen was never allowed to settle, to establish any kind of routine. Guards appeared at random times and conducted strip searches. Several times a week, he was moved from one cell to another and then to another. Guards banged on his door in the middle of the night and ordered him to place his hands through a slot so that he could be cuffed before they entered. He slept in fits and starts. It was not just that he never knew when he would be dragged to a new cell or be forced to undergo yet another search, it was that there was an atmosphere of delirious mania in the facility. Some of the other prisoners seemed unhinged. Some sang strange nonsense verses for hours on end. Others screamed abuse at guards, or made loud animal noises. One had a habit of making exaggerated, orgasmic moans. Now and then, Stephen could hear teams of guards storming a cell followed by the screams and curses of an inmate.
Stephen’s treatment was neither accidental nor arbitrary. The constant searches, the cell moves, the disorientation and despair…this had all been carefully preplanned by a tall, thickset man with a dark goatee. Mark Potanas was, at the time, chief of security at SSCF. He has a deep voice and a cool, methodical way of describing the demands of the role. Stephen, he explains, had been moved to the Hole at the specific behest of the director of facilities for the Vermont Department of Prisons. Stephen was an inmate who was under investigation by federal agencies in the United States as well as by police forces overseas, had been flagged by the U.S. Marshals as a potential escape risk, and had been found removing the caulking around his cell window as well as being in possession of a contraband razor blade. Potanas says that, in advance of Stephen’s arrival at SSCF, he established a program for him.
“The plan I put in place was very simple. It was not to allow him to become comfortable in his cell. And by ‘comfortable,’ I mean not staying in one cell for any period of time. So I gave instructions to the supervisory staff that his cell assignment was to be moved randomly at least three times a week. So this was to happen at any time. Maybe he would come out from a shower or his recreation period and find all his belongings in a new cell.” This, says Potanas, was to prevent Stephen from “working” on any one cell over a period of days, whether that be attempting to loosen window frames or conceal items that could be used as weapons. “There is a certain psychological aspect to it, of course,” Potanas admits. “When you are not allowed to stay in the same bed for more than a couple of nights, I imagine he was constantly thinking about what would happen.”
Still, he says, it was important not to emphasize the fact that Stephen was subject to extra measures. “We tried to avoid giving any inmate any kind of superstar status. Obviously, other inmates knew he was getting a kind of special treatment because they weren’t getting it themselves. So the security staff, the supervisors, were aware of his history.”
On one occasion, Stephen was made to share a small exercise space with a large man who, the guards gleefully informed him, was a known “snapper,” someone who is in segregation for raping other prisoners. Stephen spent thirty minutes awkwardly doing squats and push-ups while doing his best to keep the tall, silent man in his line of vision. Guards occasionally peered in and sniggered. Sometimes, depending on which cell he found himself consigned to, Stephen could press his face to the barred window at night and catch glimpses of the stars in the night sky. He strained to identify constellations. To find comforting familiarity in the heavens above as everything around him seemed in constant, terrifying flux.
In 1912, the British astronomer Norman Lockyer won support for the construction of an observatory on a wooded hill overlooking Sidmouth. Lockyer had, among many other things, discovered the element helium, and had retired to the Devon coast after a distinguished career. When he died in 1920, the white one-story facility with four large gray domes was renamed in his honor and became home to an amateur astronomical society.
It was to the Norman Lockyer Observatory that a shy and socially isolated Stephen would often retreat after moving to the town. Stephen had always experienced obsessive interests as a child. But astronomy would prove to be the most profound and long-lasting of all, doing more to shape him and his view of the world than any other. He practiced his handwriting by copying out words like “Milky Way galaxy” and “Andromeda.” On the door of his family’s small living room, he tacked a poster of the Horsehead Nebula, a photograph of a beautiful and eerie intermolecular dust cloud, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, swathed in pink and gray and punctured by the iridescent light of countless stars.
In one journal entry, dated January 6, 1995, he wrote about a visit to the observatory and how he had looked at the Orion Nebula. Six months earlier, at the age of eight, Stephen had been at the observatory to witness the Shoemaker-Levy comet impact Jupiter. Peering through one of the giant lenses, he observed the surface of our solar system’s largest planet and was left awestruck by the sight of the gas giant’s red-brown atmosphere being whipped by supersonic winds. An object 600 million miles away and observable in fine detail from the top of a hill a mile or so away from his council house in a quiet corner of Devon.
For Stephen, it was not a simple feeling of euphoria and wonder. The Shoemaker-Levy impact was the first time humanity had been able to directly observe an extraterrestrial collision: in this case, huge pieces of rock and ice more than a half mile in diameter slamming into a planet at 134,000 miles per hour, disrupting the gas giant’s atmosphere and leaving prominent scars on the surface, visible for months afterward. Stephen saw this entire event play out before his very eyes, and as he traveled back down the hill to his home, he felt leaden with existential dread. What if that had been Earth instead of Jupiter? How many giant chunks of rock are out there, flying through space at incredible speeds? Life on this planet had come close to eradication after an impact before. Why not again? The prospect, to Stephen, didn’t just seem possible. It was probable. Inevitable.
It was a “seed of doom” planted in his mind. The more he learned about the vastness of the cosmos, and the more he was able to directly observe everything from the rings of Saturn to the very heart of galaxies, the less significant Earth seemed. We were vulnerable, and life on this planet could not be more precarious, he concluded. It was sheer chance that we had ended up orbiting the Sun at a distance that allowed humanity to evolve. The smallest shift in this orbit would mean the end of everything. Death by heat. Death by cold. He began to read about the phenomenon of geomagnetic reversal, random events whereby a planet’s magnetic north and magnetic south swap positions. He visited the Exeter library and borrowed books detailing theories about how a magnetic reversal led to the loss of Mars’s protective atmosphere, stripping life from its surface and leaving it a barren wasteland.
He read about how there have been an estimated 183 reversals on Earth over the past 83 million years, and how they have been linked to mass extinctions. The last such reversal took place 780,000 years ago. When will the next one occur? It had to happen at some point. So why was nobody talking about it? Why did nobody seem to want to acknowledge what to Stephen was becoming increasingly clear: that life on Earth is terrifyingly fragile? That we were teetering so close to annihilation that it gave him a head rush just thinking about it. When he was hiding from his teachers in the long grass field next to his school, or walking by himself along the banks of the River Exe, or sitting alone in his tiny bedroom at night, these were the thoughts that pulsed through his head.
The danger wasn’t just from stray chunks of space rock, either. As Stephen entered adolescence he began to understand that the greatest dangers to humanity are manmade. Nuclear weapons. Greenhouse gases. A shortsighted disregard for nature in the pursuit of productivity. On October 9, 1998, the twelve-year-old Stephen produced an untitled poem for National Poetry Day. It was written in blue fountain pen in his determined cursive.
At a time the world had
beautiful trees sparkling water
and fascinating animals but
then a species arrived they
cut down the trees and built
horrible factories they made
the water black and smelly
they polluted the air with
there smoking choking fumes
and they killed and hunted
the other animals how could
a species do this?
the species was
Man!
These concerns only deepened as Stephen moved into his teens. His mother still had Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament pamphlets from the 1960s and ’70s, and decorated their home with pebbles painted with the CND logo, as well as with her own pencil sketches of hedgehogs and paintings of trees. At night Stephen looked up at the sky and wondered why, despite the overwhelming odds in favor of there being intelligent extraterrestrial life among the billions of stars in our galaxy, humanity had never made contact with an alien race. He read about the Great Filter theory, which solves this paradox by positing that all advanced races at some point acquire the technological means to utterly destroy themselves. And that most galactic races unwittingly do this before they are able to master interstellar travel. Hence the lack of alien contact. He wrote:
This concept worries me. Do all races destroy themselves when they reach our technological level? This may be a ‘natural defense’ against beings advancing further and further until they have the power of gods.
On the final page of one diary, Stephen wrote that he believed that humanity will destroy itself in 2039. It will be, he concluded, “the year of self-annihilation.”
For all his pessimism, though, the teenage Stephen never descended into nihilism. In fact, he did the opposite. His appreciation of nature—of existence itself—intensified. His long, solitary walks around the wilds of Devon produced in Stephen a kind of bliss state. The plants, trees, birds, streams, fossils, and rock formations all took on an almost spiritual significance. He appreciated, when viewed on a cosmic scale, how miraculous it was that the world around him even existed.
“Nature is perfect,” he scrawled in his diary at age sixteen. “When you gaze up at the night sky you are looking at the most beautiful thing anyone will ever see. It is the universe, all that there is. Galaxies, stars, time, everything.”
He developed an overwhelming urge to travel, to see the world beyond Devon, to escape the stress and chaos of life at Manstone Avenue and enjoy the planet while he was still able. He wrote a short poem in his journal called “I Want.”
I want to climb to the top of trees.
I want to swim in the deep blue sea.
I want to smell mint in the forest.
And I want to lie in the desert at night looking up at the stars.
He spent hours looking at the globe, tracing journeys he might one day make. He frustrated his math teachers by spending lessons drawing maps in his workbooks. Stephen allowed himself to imagine that when he was older, he would play a part in helping the Earth to avoid ecological disaster. To sidestep the Great Filter. He imagined cities built underwater and the colonization of distant stars. To Stephen, this was not science fiction. This had to happen. It was necessary forward planning.
From the age of sixteen, Stephen found himself becoming more and more angry about the state of the world. He began to view his existential concerns through a social lens. “Why does ‘the greed of the few outweigh the needs of the many’?—this seems to be what the human race has lived by,” he wrote in one journal entry. “As certain individuals or groups gain power, they eventually abuse it….Power is the medium of corruption, all power in the hands of anyone is bound to corrupt them to a certain extent.”
During their long country walks together, he pontificated to Ben Weaver about these things. He started to find the existence of poverty and the divide between the rich and poor intolerable. In hindsight, Weaver wonders whether this was a result of Stephen’s gradual realization that he came from a poor family. “I think a lot of the poverty stuff came from his father, because they didn’t have much money, and there just wasn’t really a way for him to get work.”
Stephen held forth on these issues as the two teenage boys rambled across fields or sat in front of Stephen’s PC playing strategy games like Command and Conquer and Civilization long into the evening. “It always seemed like there were only absolutes for him,” Weaver remembers. “There was a right answer and a wrong answer, and gray areas never existed.” Stephen’s concern for humanity always struck his friend as sincere but also detached somehow. “When he talked about issues like poverty he had empathy for people, but only on an abstract level. It was like ‘this is happening and it’s bad.’ But on an individual level, he wasn’t really able to have empathy for other people. He wasn’t able to relate to others on that level. There was this emotional barrier.”
Which I don’t think is necessarily true. It may have seemed like that to his friend because of the way Stephen expressed his emotions in person. But Stephen’s concern for those worse off than him goes beyond the abstract. In a red spiral-bound notebook, seventeen-year-old Stephen wrote a meandering prose poem about a homeless man who approached him in Exeter that evening, asking for some spare change. Stephen described how he walked past him without responding, but then turned around to see the man ask other pedestrians for whatever they could spare. Seeing this scene play out in the third-person, Stephen was horrified. Not just by the pathos of it, but by his own hypocrisy in simply putting his head down and striding past the outstretched hand.
How can one have the heart and soul to refuse? Yet in my rush I did just this, while in my bag was tucked pounds, pennies galore. Why did I not stop? Guilt wracks my heart even now. Pray that this man approaches me again.
Knowing the right thing to do in these situations—when faced with poverty or somebody in immediate need—was something that Stephen struggled with. He knew it was right to give money to those who needed it, but it seemed to him that there was no perfect way of doing so. “I can often remember that feeling, the feeling that I did something wrong, whether it be not giving money to someone on the street, or not giving them enough, or giving it to the wrong person because I’d then pass someone further down the street who could have needed it more,” he remembers. It was a dirty feeling that, as the years passed, never quite left him. If he was ever going to make a real difference, he was going to need more than his own pounds and pennies. Much, much more.