On September 8, 2007, Stephen woke from a restless sleep and winced. The area beneath his left eye was swollen and painful, and there was a rust-red bloodstain on his pillow. He sat up, touched his face, and quickly looked around. He was in his bedroom, on Manstone Avenue, back in Sidmouth. Downstairs, he could hear a kettle boil and the faint sound of a radio news station. As everything rushed into place, a deep lurch in the pit of his stomach pushed him back to the mattress. He had failed. After all his planning, after all his belief, he had failed to force his way into the Lloyds TSB opposite the Exeter public library and make off with the hundreds of thousands of pounds he was convinced he would. Yes, he had succeeded in using his stashes of clothes and his fake bomb to help him escape the police. But by allowing his replica pistol to be taken from him by the courier he had attempted to ambush and who then promptly used it to bust open his cheek, he knew he had provided the police with a sample of his DNA. He could have cried with frustration. The same blood covering his pillowcase would, by now, be in a forensic laboratory. It would be sampled, analyzed, and kept on a police database. A sword of Damocles, hanging over him forever.
He had found the whole thing terrifying; the act of approaching Beer with his replica gun had felt like a queasy out-of-body experience. He had not wanted to do it, but felt he had to do it, like a young man volunteering for war because he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t. “I felt like it was a duty,” he says. “I felt as if…I don’t know how to describe it, but I felt I had this obligation. And that by not doing it I would be failing people and failing myself as well. That was the mindset I had.”
Stephen told himself that he couldn’t lose momentum now. Which was why, at 9:15 p.m. that same day, he burst into a branch of Ladbrokes betting shop on South Street in the Exeter city center. He entered through a rear door that he’d accessed via a backstreet.
He pushed open the door and strode across the empty shop floor toward two startled male staff members who were counting up for the night. Stephen threw a small, hard object at the wall behind the men, then quickly rushed toward them. He was wearing a black ski mask, a black leather jacket, and black gloves. He was holding a commando knife and a hammer. He shouted and screamed at them, instructing them to empty their tills. He forced the branch’s assistant manager to fill his backpack with cash before rushing out the same rear door. The whole thing was over in about ninety seconds.
Stephen walked briskly. It was Saturday night, dusk had passed, and the streets were busy with people going to pubs and restaurants. Groups of young men and women shouted and laughed with one another. He sprinted away from the area surrounding the betting shop and into some gardens adjacent to a number of flats. Just like the day before, he had already planted a change of clothes. Streetlights cast a dull glow, but it was dark and quiet enough for him to tear out of his clothes and into some new ones without being seen. Walking back through Exeter, Stephen kept his eyes on the ground and tried to regulate his breathing. The sounds of shouting revelers and half a dozen different upbeat pop songs blaring out of half a dozen different pubs assaulted his ears. But he breathed deeply and sat at his bus stop, impassive and anonymous. An hour later, he was home. His parents were sleeping. In his room, he took the cash out of his backpack and counted it. He had stolen exactly £886. He put it in a large envelope, which he would later stash in a tree. Then he climbed into bed. And fell asleep.
By Monday, September 10, 2007, the Exeter Express and Echo was carrying stories about the attempted Lloyds TSB robbery as well as the successful Ladbrokes heist. Within these reports, the Devon and Cornwall Police made appeals for information, offering descriptions of the suspect who was, in both cases, described as slim, young, and around five feet ten inches tall. Stephen was relieved to read that Raymond Beer had not been hurt, the courier cheerfully describing to the Express and Echo how he’d disarmed the masked man before forcing him to flee.
Detective Constable Alex Bingham of the Exeter Criminal Investigation Department was on duty when Stephen robbed the South Street Ladbrokes. He was sure they were dealing with the same man who had attempted to rob the Lloyds TSB a little over twenty-four hours earlier. The sites were less than two hundred yards away, and these kinds of crimes were relatively rare in this part of England. “In Devon it is very uncommon,” he says. “It is still a great place to live and we don’t have high crime stats. We have a very low rate in knife crime. We don’t have that kind of organized criminal living down here.”
Bingham is cordial and systematic, though there are hints of a police officer’s black humor when he discusses the case. As Stephen’s crimes mounted, Bingham was the man who led the attempts to find him. The official name of the investigation was Operation Gandalf. There was no particular reason for this. DC Bingham says that each month a new theme was chosen for the naming of new operations. In September 2007, it just so happened to be “famous wizards.” So, unbeknownst to Stephen, he was now being hunted by a character from one of his favorite books.
The Southern State Correctional Facility was, at the time of Stephen’s incarceration in June 2008, a state-of-the-art prison. It had been only a few years since its opening, and it was one of the most secure federal facilities in New England. Constructed on a twenty-seven-acre site hewn from thick forest, it sits surrounded by trees about half a mile from the Connecticut River, the border between Vermont and New Hampshire. It can accommodate up to 370 inmates, the majority of which are categorized as “general population” and held together in the main prison building known as Alpha Unit. There is a communal canteen and a gymnasium with basketball hoops and volleyball nets. Outside, a baseball diamond is chalked out in a large grassy field within the high perimeter fencing.
Stephen, however, was not in Alpha Unit. The cell in which he was left shivering and sobbing by the group of escorting guards was inside Foxtrot Unit, a separate, smaller, self-contained building within the prison grounds. As the weeks passed and Stephen’s random cell moves continued under the specific direction of Chief of Security Potanas, he gradually began to piece together a picture of his surroundings. Foxtrot Unit was divided into three wings: F1, F2, and F3. Stephen was in F1, which was reserved for prisoners on “disciplinary segregation.” Here, the concrete slab that served as a cot came without blankets or pillows, just a thin plastic mattress. Each wing contained two stories of cells. On the first floor, the cells opened onto a wide gray corridor. On the upper floor, they opened onto floating walkways, seven or eight feet high. The concrete block walls were a dull cream, the heavy metal doors and railings the kind of pallid sage green you only ever see inside institutional buildings. Despite the overhead lighting, there was something intensely soporific and numbing about the environment. This, Stephen would eventually conclude, was probably not a coincidence.
The three wings of Foxtrot Unit extended away from one another, like the north, east, and west points of a compass. The southern point was the Secure Housing Unit’s entrance, while at the center there was “the Bubble,” a secure control room from which prison staff could view each wing, monitor the corridors via CCTV, and electronically lock and unlock cell doors. Stephen, like all the inmates in the Hole, was consigned to his six-by-nine-foot cell for twenty-three or more hours a day. Unlike his time at NWSCF, there were no supervised trips to rec rooms or the chance to interact with other prisoners face-to-face. At the end of each unit was an outdoor metal cage that, in theory, allowed prisoners to get fresh air. But they seemed to be rarely used and were never made available to prisoners in F1. Instead, Stephen’s daily exercise would at best involve being allowed to walk his unit corridor in handcuffs and leg-irons. Each inmate took his turn to clank up and down in this manner. There was a yellow line on the floor, half a yard from the cell doors. To cross this line—to stray too close to another inmate’s cell door—was prohibited and could result in punishment if spotted by the guards.
Punishment was an unavoidable fact of life. The forty-seven-page SSCF Inmate Handbook contained dozens and dozens of rules and regulations, a minefield of potential infractions and misdemeanors. Solitary confinement fosters both woolly-headed slow-wittedness and festering, rebellious anger in equal measure. Allow either of these to subsume you and you will, inevitably, find yourself breaking rules and facing the consequences. Stephen sat on his bunk and listened to the different noises echoing up and down the corridor and reverberating through his cell: the electric buzz when cell doors were unlocked by guards and the harsh, heavy clang when they were thrown open; the stamp of guards’ feet; the fuzz and crackle of their walkie-talkies; and the various moans, screams, and songs of the men all around him, each held in his own little concrete box.
There was something delirious about the atmosphere in the Hole, hyperreal yet interminable. Stephen heard voices of men talking to one another from their cells, but never saw their faces. Snatches of conversation drifted into his cell and into his dreams and he dozed, only to be woken by guards and told to place his hands through the slot in the door so he could be cuffed and moved, yet again, to a new cell.
During Stephen’s daily thirty-minute walks up and down the corridor, other inmates called out to him. Some goaded him, but others asked questions, eager to know who Stephen was and why he was subject to what even they could deduce were special security measures. The fact he was English was of intense interest to some—it didn’t take long before he was referred to simply as “English” by guards and inmates alike—and he was peppered with questions: Had he ever met the queen? Did he know an inmate’s niece, who lived in London? Was Big Ben taller than the Empire State Building? What’s the food like? What’s he doing thousands of miles from home in the high-security wing of a federal prison? The scrutiny made him feel self-conscious and anxious, but he answered the questions as best he could.
As the days passed, Stephen came to know some of the voices on his wing. One man was named Gene, a squat, round-faced man in his late twenties with a deep, sad singing voice. At the encouragement of other inmates, he would often sing for the unit as evening came, performing Kenny Rogers’s The Gambler in a graveside delivery.
A man named Howie showed Stephen how to play games of chess and battleships with other inmates by drawing grids on prison notepaper with the tiny, unreliable flexi-pens and then shouting coordinates to your opponent down the corridor. Howie and several other of the voices in Foxtrot Unit communicated in pig Latin, which left Stephen baffled until the concept was explained to him. There was a tall, handsome Native American inmate the guards simply referred to as Bothways and who seemed imperturbable, a kind of real-life Chief Bromden from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The man who kept making the loud, exaggerated orgasmic noises was called Solomon, a wild-haired young man about the same age as Stephen. Everyone in the Hole just called him Stinky because of his refusal to shower and his horrific personal hygiene. Stinky was a compulsive masturbator, and one afternoon Stephen took a paperback from the book trolley only to open it and discover that Stinky had ejaculated on several of the pages. Instinctively, he flung it across his cell with a cry of shock and disgust, then rushed to scrub his hands in the small metal basin. Stephen developed an anxiety that, with all his cell moves, it was only a matter of time before he would be forced to move into a cell where Stinky had been kept for months on end. He imagined what it must be like—the accrued filth, the state of the toilet, the smell of that cramped airless chamber—and it made him retch.
Stephen struggled. Life in segregation within a federal prison is hard. The special regime that he was subjected to—the calculated disorientation, the constant changes, the sudden strip searches, and the deliberately disturbed sleep—made things even harder. This would be the case for anybody, but for Stephen it was particularly unbearable. Since childhood, he’d had a very specific and very intense need to know what was going to happen in the immediate future.
He remembers, as a child, complaining to the BBC when he found that the scheduled episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation would not air one evening. Star Trek was his favorite TV show. He deeply admired Patrick Stewart’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and he would watch it religiously every Wednesday. Only one night, there was something else on. Perhaps it was a sporting event that had gone on longer than expected, or a special news report, or some other kind of one-off broadcast. Stephen cannot remember. All he can remember is becoming hysterical, having a meltdown, and sobbing uncontrollably in his small, ramshackle living room.
But Stephen’s response to his favorite show not being on TV would not have come as a shock to his parents. He had always responded badly to changes in routine. Specific meals had to be served on specific days. Specific TV shows had to be watched at specific times. Amid the chaos and stress of his parents’ illnesses—his mother’s schizophrenia, his father’s manic depression—and their repeated house moves, Stephen was a young boy who seemed obsessed with regimens and clockwork predictability.
“The Star Trek thing happened when I was about eight, but there are loads of different examples really,” he says. “Looking back, I can just remember feeling really anxious when these things changed. It’s like I had this overwhelming need for them to be the same, when most other people wouldn’t have been that way.”
What nobody knew during his childhood, and what nobody knew during the course of his crimes, and what nobody knew during his entire period of incarceration in the United States was that Stephen had Asperger’s syndrome. Stephen himself did not know this until it was conclusively diagnosed in February 2013 following a series of psychiatric appraisals undertaken while he was in British jails.
“Part of me always sort of knew that I had this…thing,” he says one day over a plate of salad in the Times canteen, his brows furrowed, his hands stretched out before him, seeming to wrestle with something heavy but incorporeal. Those with Asperger’s syndrome—a form of autism spectrum disorder—see, hear, and feel the world in a way that is unlike most other people. And because it is a spectrum disorder, it affects different individuals in different ways and to different degrees. But individuals with the condition often have difficulties in a few key areas.
Social communication and social interaction are problematic. If you have Asperger’s, you may find it hard to express yourself emotionally and struggle to read other people or pick up on subtle social cues. You do not always intuitively understand gestures and facial expressions, or know when to start or end conversations. You will sometimes employ what to others seem like needlessly complex words and phrases. Figurative language can be confusing, and you will often interpret what others say to you very literally. Jokes, colloquialisms, and sarcasm do not always register. Socialization can be very challenging. You may wish to form friendships, but you don’t seem to know the best way of going about it. Often, if you find yourself in a large group of people—a classroom, for example—you will feel overwhelmed and experience the urge to seek out time alone, or to soothe yourself by rocking or swaying. Others may come to regard you as aloof or insensitive. The world will often seem confusing and unpredictable, which is why you may be so predisposed to routines, rules, and timetables. It is likely that, from a young age, your interests have been highly focused, sometimes obsessive, and you may end up with a deep knowledge of subjects that interest you. You may also have certain sensory difficulties. Strong smells, loud noises, and bright lights could cause you anxiety, distress, or even physical pain.
Dr. Sajid Suleman is the consultant psychiatrist who in 2013 produced a thirty-seven-page report confirming that Stephen has Asperger’s syndrome. Then the lead clinician at the Lewisham Adult Autism Spectrum Disorder Clinic, Dr. Suleman interviewed Stephen for several hours over the course of two visits to HM Prison The Verne, Dorset, in December 2012. The first interview was not a success. Dr. Suleman remembers that Stephen had not expected the interview to take place in the prison’s busy visiting room, around other people, and as such was “extremely anxious.” At one point, according to the report, Stephen “required a toilet break to escape from the situation,” and the interview could not be completed on account of his restlessness. The second interview, a few weeks later, was more successful for the simple reason that the visiting room was almost empty.
In more than three dozen pages of densely typed paragraphs arranged under various headings and subheadings, Dr. Suleman described Stephen’s psychological landscape in short, clinical sentences. As you scan the pages, the words flow with a kind of terse, maudlin rhythm. A litany of difficulties, tapped out like telegrams.
He cannot initiate conversations and his communication is not to and fro. He is only interested in talking about his interests and cannot do small talk or social chit chat. He has informed me that he finds it difficult to understand others’ emotions. He informed [me] that once his mother was upset but he thought she was happy. He therefore said something to her which made her upset even more. He is too direct when talking to others and is socially naive. He informed me that he has got himself into trouble in prison on several occasions due to this. He gave me an example that in prison there is a procedure of turning chairs on the dinner table after finishing. He felt that by doing this, tables get dirty again and need cleaning again so he told them that this was stupid, which offended others.
Cleanliness and hygiene are preoccupations of Stephen’s. He is, wrote Dr. Suleman, “obsessed” with numbers and gives them unique shapes and attributes. The number two is, in Stephen’s mind, square and dark blue. Three is longitudinal. Stephen explained to Dr. Suleman how, when he did calculations, he imagined in his mind how the shapes of different numbers intermingled with one another. He would sometimes invent words. For example, “gratolucowocun” describes “when someone is happy in a situation but the happiness is due to an unrelated external event.”
Stephen’s mother told Dr. Suleman that her son’s speech was often monotonous as a child. When traveling in the car he would repeat the phrase “We cycle sometimes.” He would not point at things that interested him and he did not make use of conversational gestures, such as waving goodbye. He did not share things with other children or engage in social play. He was sensitive to loud noises. On a trip to visit Dover Castle with his parents, Stephen became extremely upset when a cannon was fired. He kept screaming, his mother explains in the report, “for a long time.”
Among a pile of old photographs there is one taken at what looks like a party for his sixth or seventh birthday. Five other children look at the camera, standing on either side of a homemade puppet theater replete with stage, curtains, and sign (stephen’s puppet theatre beneath a rainbow and smiley-faced star). A real effort seems to have been made. There are balloons on the floor, and his mother and father stand behind the theater, both with awkward half smiles. His father is even wearing a paper party hat. But Stephen is just sitting on the floor, his face turned away from the camera. Instead, he just looks pensively at a stuffed puppet in his lap. You could draw a small bubble around him. There may as well be nobody else there.
The report concluded with Dr. Suleman stating that “there is little doubt” that Stephen suffers from Asperger’s syndrome. In a prison diary entry from the time, Stephen reflected matter-of-factly about the possibility that this had been the elusive thing that had made him different for so long.
If I have Aspergers, then this makes perfect sense.
The temptation is to shout, “Of course it does!” It is easy, with hindsight, to observe the sweep of Stephen’s life and conclude that there was something crying out to be diagnosed: from his behavior at school to his inability to form friendships with anyone other than Ben Weaver to his constant journal keeping, obsessive interests, hysterical responses to changes in routine, and everything else detailed by Dr. Suleman. Had this been your child, you tell yourself, you would have intervened. You would have done more to understand what was wrong and how it could be addressed. But Stephen was not neglected. He had regular contact with mental health professionals during his childhood, both on account of his mother’s schizophrenia and because of his own difficulties coping with school. He was under a child protection plan. He was seen by family therapists and social workers. He was the subject of meetings between his teachers and doctors and social workers. Angela Thompson recalls one such conference when Stephen was fourteen or fifteen.
“I can remember we had this multi-agency meeting,” she says. “I think this might have been after something had happened at home with his mother. She’d set fire to cars, and she also stalked people. I remember she stalked one of the people who worked in the chemist in town. But there was a meeting, and a doctor was there, a social worker, I was there, school’s head teacher was there, it was a room full of people including a psychiatric doctor who knew the parents.” Thompson says that the possibility of Stephen suffering from a mental condition beyond a social phobia was raised at this meeting, but the psychiatric doctor dismissed the idea. “They said, ‘Well, he’s far too young to have a diagnosis. I don’t want to label him at this age.’ ”
It is also important to know that many people go through childhood with their Asperger’s undiagnosed. Dr. Suleman—who is, in person, the very opposite of his report in that he is warm, lively, and effusive—says that he wouldn’t have the job of diagnosing people in adulthood if this was not the case. There are reasons the adults around Stephen may not have sought to confirm that he was on the autism spectrum. For one thing, we simply knew less about Asperger’s twenty years ago than we do today. It was less well known and less understood. It’s also the case that children with the condition are generally high functioning, meaning they are of at least average intelligence and are able to develop intellectually and academically without any issues. Children who are not able to do this, perhaps because of more severe forms of autism or conditions such as dyslexia, generally receive a lot of attention because there is something demonstrably “wrong” with them.
But in the case of Stephen, it seemed to most observers that the only thing wrong with him was his home environment. That whatever behavior he exhibited was the result of the stress, conflict, and social isolation that came with life with his mother and father. An evaluation carried out by a consultant psychiatrist when Stephen was nineteen did not flag the possibility of Asperger’s, even though he’d had years of contact with mental health services. Dr. Suleman, summarizing this evaluation in his own report, writes that it described Stephen as being
an insecure young man who on account of his mother’s longstanding mental health problems and the consequent marital conflict had been inadvertently psychologically traumatised through his childhood.
So if Stephen seemed anxious, depressed, and unable to socialize with other children, then, given his home life, this all stood to reason. If Stephen was weird then, well…look at his parents. The problem was Stephen’s nurture, not his nature.
The truth is that it was both. Asperger’s syndrome is a developmental disorder, which means that it begins to manifest in childhood not because of environmental factors but because of biological ones. You are, as far as we know, born with it. You do not start to “get” it because your mother keeps escaping from psychiatric wards and your father seems to have a compulsive desire for control and never leaves the house.
In other words, Stephen could have had the most well-adjusted parents and stable home life in the world and still grown up with Asperger’s. The fact he had neither of these only made things that much worse. “It was a double whammy,” says Dr. Suleman. By sheer coincidence, during the period of their friendship, Ben Weaver’s father was an intervention worker with autistic children. Although, perhaps this is not a coincidence at all. The fact that Stephen’s only friend had a parent who knew about autism and who had educated his son about it is probably the reason Ben was able to maintain his friendship with Stephen for so long. He was able to accept him for who he was. “I was aware of there being people who are slightly emotionally different, and my family were also very aware of that,” he says. “My father said he was probably on the spectrum, but there wasn’t much discussion beyond that.”
Given that Stephen would shortly embark on an international criminal career that will see him rob a string of banks while successfully evading teams of police detectives, it would be easy to view his Asperger’s as some kind of superpower, a means by which an unremarkable young man could operate as a daring criminal savant. This is not what it was. He did not do anything in a “fit” of Asperger’s. He did not come round from an “attack” of autism spectrum disorder to find he was somehow in possession of thousands of pounds’ worth of stolen cash. These kinds of interpretations play into the idea that inside someone with Asperger’s there is a “normal” person. And that if it were possible to somehow isolate and neutralize the condition, as if it were a cancer, then there would be a normal person left behind, blinking in the light of their newly normal world.
Instead, Stephen’s Asperger’s is woven into him. He cannot be separated from it. It is not the only thing about him, but it informs everything about him: from how he has developed to how he sees the world to how he forms relationships. Dr. Suleman says that in order to appreciate the depth to which Asperger’s forms part of someone, it sometimes helps to regard it as a type of personality rather than a condition. “Sometimes I say to patients it’s like living in a foreign country where you have to live by that country’s rules. You have to keep learning those rules while, for others, it just comes naturally,” he says. “It’s not something that ‘covers’ them. It’s just how they are.”
And while it’s true that none of this would have happened if Stephen did not have Asperger’s, it did not happen simply because he did. If that were the case, then everyone with Asperger’s syndrome would be out there robbing banks or otherwise breaking the law in a ceaseless wave of crime. But they are not. The majority of them do their best to mitigate and manage the effects of their condition in order to live day-to-day lives in which their Asperger’s does not dominate. “I wish I knew earlier because then I could be in a better position to handle it and maybe seek support,” says Stephen. “Just understanding helps. It really does.”
Only he never had the opportunity to do this. His condition did dominate. The consequences of which would, in concert with his own choices, change his life forever.