Stephen stood in a silent, sun-dappled meadow. The air was warm and still, heavy with the scent of lavender and hot, dry grass. In one hand he held a long, curved bow. In the other, he held an arrow fletched with white feathers. Breathing slowly, he planted his feet, notched the arrow, and then raised the bow to eye level, drawing the string back to his cheek. As he held the pose, his chest rose and fell and his arms began to quiver gently under the mounting strain. Then, with an exhale, he let go. It took a little over one second for the arrow to fly two hundred feet and bury itself into a butt at the far end of the meadow with a gentle thud. Stephen lowered the bow and squinted to see how close to the bull’s-eye he had struck. He was not far off. To his right, he heard a pair of hands clapping softly. Stephen turned to the old Japanese man who had been supervising him. He was in his late eighties and wore a simple brown robe and large, square glasses. He smiled encouragingly at Stephen, who responded with a small bow of respect. Doing his best to hide a satisfied grin, Stephen reached for another arrow. He took aim. And let fly.
It was the summer of 2007, and Stephen was in central France, living on a rural Buddhist retreat outside the town of Limoges. He was working there as a gardener and groundskeeper while studying meditation, yoga, and the ancient art of kyudo archery. Almost ten months had passed since he’d returned from his travels on the other side of the world. Adjusting to life back in the small house in the small coastal town of his childhood had proved incredibly difficult. He had experienced freedom for the first time in his life but then, suddenly, he was back on Manstone Avenue, the site of so much of his childhood trauma, trapped between the looming figure of his father and the distant, distracted figure of his mother. After she’d endured years of psychotic episodes and long-term stays in institutions, Jenny Jackley’s doctors had finally found the right combination of drugs to keep her relatively stable but, at least from Stephen’s perspective, painfully vacant.
Peter Jackley seemed particularly distressed that the young man who had returned to the family home seemed so different from the one who had left it. Peter’s prostate cancer had continued to spread and there were signs, from early 2007 onward, that he was beginning to suffer from dementia. His daughter, Lisa, describes how he had called her up one day after Stephen had returned from his travels.
“My dad thought Stephen had been kidnapped while he was away and that someone different had come back,” she explains. “He used to say that he was worried it wasn’t the real Stephen. He was worried that he had been kidnapped and that it was to do with Nazi gold or something.”
Stephen had not been kidnapped. He had just changed. His travels had made him more sure of himself and less afraid of the world. Socialization was still incredibly difficult, but he knew it was possible. He did not bang his head or pull his hair or simply flee when faced with it. He still possessed the same sense of injustice about the world, about capitalism and global income distribution. Only now it was underpinned by firsthand experience. And he had returned to Sidmouth with something more empowering than anything he could ever have imagined: He possessed in his mind a possible solution. A course of action he could take. The final weeks of his travels, which saw him fly from Fiji to Los Angeles, only cemented the possibility of robbing banks for some greater good. He wrote in his journal about the homeless buskers and beggars of Santa Barbara, viewing them as the unforgivable collateral damage of a system focused exclusively on the pursuit of profit. “Money, money money,” he wrote from L.A. “Here it is the ruling god. The rich grow richer, the poor poorer. There is no equality of justice or opportunity, since money can effectively buy both.”
On his flight from L.A. to London, he wrote “Careers” at the top of a page. He began by brainstorming some options under the subhead “unconventional.” The first was simply “bank robber (‘hustler’)” with the further possibilities of “counterfeit money producer,” “diamond smuggler (Amsterdam—London),” and “drug dealer.” He also included “property developer (mortgage low, develop, sell high),” “stock exchange/share dealer,” and “currency buyer/seller.” Then he moved on to more genteel options: travel journalist, writer (“physics—not philosophy”), writer (“fiction/poetry”), independent retailer (“crafts, books, fossils”), independent tour operator, apprentice builder, landscape gardener, “UN (military) personnel,” astronaut, marine biologist and, finally, geographer.
Arriving back in Sidmouth, though, his priority was to secure some work. And just as before, he struggled. Interviews led nowhere. Rejections mounted. The autumn of 2006 turned to winter, and Stephen slipped back into the same pattern of daytime drinking, petty gambling, and isolation. He drifted into depression, signed on for £45 worth of jobseeker’s allowance a week, and found his mind returning again and again to the possibility of bank robbery as the catalyst to a better world. He began to think seriously about how to make it work. Because to Stephen, it was not a fantasy. If he committed to it, he could make it real. As the Buddha said, it is your mind that creates the world. “I thought, right, I can make a difference. I had this concept that if something was first an idea and then an action, then it can happen.”
He began to conceptualize a process. He would steal enough money to set up a “legitimate enterprise” that he gradually came to refer to simply as “The Organisation.” Once the Organisation was up and running with stolen seed money, he would grow it into a kind of umbrella NGO, funding hospitals, schools, and scholarship programs for the global poor. It would be a banner to which like-minded people across the planet could rally. Its goal was nothing less than the eradication of world poverty and the prevention of ecological catastrophe. Stephen’s heart beat fast with thoughts of the different possibilities.
“There were clear steps in my mind,” he says, trying to explain that while this might all sound vague and fanciful to us, it absolutely wasn’t to him. “It wasn’t some illusive, cloudy thing. It was something I would create. I just needed the means to do so. In hindsight, I had this target of £100,000 in my mind. Once I hit that point, I would stop. No more robberies. Because the money would then be going into something sustainable that wouldn’t overtly break the law.”
By February 2007, with this possibility still dominating his thoughts, Stephen left Sidmouth for a second time. He says that another lucky win on the horses helped him earn enough money for a cheap trip abroad. Escaping the “black hole” of Manstone Avenue, he moved through Europe, traveling from Amsterdam to Paris, then down through France. It was here he discovered the Dechen Chöling meditation center near Limoges. Composed of a small eighteenth-century château plus outbuildings set in rolling green countryside, Dechen Chöling attracts visitors from around the world seeking instruction in Shambhala Buddhism, a modern, secular form of Buddhist teaching. Central to Shambhala is the belief that individuals can, through their own actions, help to establish an enlightened society. The mythical hidden kingdom of Shambhala was, in Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, a place of dignity, equality, and compassion. Stephen arrived at the retreat, first staying as a paying guest before continuing his travels south, into Spain and Morocco. When his money ran out, he returned to Dechen Chöling, finding work as a member of the community’s staff, tending to the grounds, working in the kitchens, and doing odd jobs in exchange for room and board.
As the spring of 2007 turned to summer, the Dechen Chöling staff moved from their rooms in the main château into large tents in order to make room for the hundreds of guests who would soon flock to the community. Stephen found himself sharing a tent with an American man named Ralph Williams. Bald, cheerful, and wearing one silver earring, Williams had worked as an exhibition and theater designer before “burning out” in 2005 and starting a semi-itinerant life of travel and work at different meditation centers. He remembers Stephen very well.
“He was young and he was socially awkward, but for me not really alarmingly so. Just a little odd,” he says. “My sense was that the community in general didn’t quite know what to make of him. There was always a little bit of uncertainty. I could see in him that he was a really sensitive guy who just wanted to fit in, but who didn’t really know how to communicate in a relaxed way with others. He was still trying to figure out the rules for life, and how one is meant to behave and connect.”
Lisa Steckler worked at Dechen Chöling as part of the human resources team. A chatty Canadian not much older than Stephen, Steckler admits she has a tendency to ask a lot of questions, which was something she says Stephen never responded well to. “The quality I remember which made him distinct is that when I would ask probing questions or just try and check in, there were times when he would just look at me,” she says. “I would be waiting for him to answer and he wouldn’t.” This confused Steckler because in her experience, people came to the center to unburden themselves, to share their feelings and experiences. But Stephen seemed to be the opposite.
Steckler says that there was also something else. When he arrived, he did not present himself as Stephen Jackley. Instead, he told everyone that his name was Steve Mason. Stephen had experimented with alternate surnames since adolescence. In one of his early journals, he wrote the name “Steve Mason” several times, trying it out, the same way you or I might repeat a phrase in our heads. He says that in his opinion there wasn’t anything particularly unusual about this. “It sounded better than ‘Jackley.’ And sometimes when I had to say my name to people, I had to keep repeating it and spelling it out, which I found a bit annoying.” Mason, he continues, is a surname from his mother’s side of the family. “I thought it was a good-sounding name, so it seemed like a good one to pick.”
The diaries I have from this period show Stephen in a state of conflict. He loved Dechen Chöling but still felt isolated. He was torn between his developing plans for the Organisation and living a peaceful life in line with the teachings of Shambhala. “Rainy days pass by and I am still alone, without a soulmate,” he wrote in April 2007. “Only dreams of the stars and walks through the forest provide awe and happiness. Last night I got little sleep but felt so ‘full’ and happy—towards everything that exists.”
Later, he wrote about the internal tension he felt there.
I want to stay here till August, maybe even longer. They have me doing mostly physical work here and consequently my physique has improved. Regularity and discipline! But what can I do? How can I make a living? I can’t foresee a life of one-off heists if I follow the Dharma.
Opposite the tent shared by Ralph and Stephen was another, belonging to sixty-five-year-old Maizza Waser, a German woman who worked for Dechen Chöling organizing the workers and allocating jobs. Waser, like Stephen, is autistic, although, unlike Stephen, she had long been aware of her condition at this point. She remembers that Stephen was shy and awkward and that he seemed to struggle with many of the physical tasks. “Most of the work is manual work, either in the kitchen or garden, and he was not very skilled in moving his body,” she remembers. He once accidentally cut down a young sapling. “He was nice to talk to, but when it came down to giving instructions? That was not so easy.”
Waser says that the fact she is autistic does not mean she was therefore able to identify that Stephen was also on the spectrum, though in hindsight, she can see that it would make sense. One morning, she remembers, the two of them bumped into each other outside their tents and began discussing the dreams they’d both had that night. As they walked together through the tall grass to the shower block, Stephen described a recurring dream. “It was very intense. He said that he was always running. Running away from people. Running, running, running,” she says. “I still remember him saying that.”
Ralph Williams chuckles when describing how Stephen would obsessively do intense aerobic exercise routines right in front of the château, either oblivious to the onlookers going about their days or, on some level, hoping that they would see him. “But I also saw his deep love of nature, and there was this one moment that stood out for me in the tent,” he says. “I was resting between shifts and he came in from having his day off and he had this dandelion behind his ear, and I could see that he had been out in nature for hours in this blissed-out state. When he came back, he was completely at peace. Almost in a trance.”
Lying a few feet apart from each other every night, Williams found that he often ended up listening to Stephen voice his concerns for the planet. “We had discussions about the injustices of the world, the banking system and corporate model, capitalistic stuff. He did reference wanting to equalize that in some way, that Robin Hood thing of wanting to rob from those institutions. I remember telling him that you can’t do that—I was sort of lecturing him in a way—because you’ll get into trouble.”
Amid all of this, Stephen still yearned to meet someone. “Soon there will be a large influx of people, which I must deal with,” he wrote from Dechen Chöling before the summer rush. “Perhaps out of the 200+ there will be someone to share happiness with.”
And then, one early summer afternoon, he saw her. A large group of new guests arrived by coach and made their way to the château to find their beds and dump their bags. Among them was a tall, slender young woman in her early twenties with dark blond hair that fell to her shoulders. She walked with a languid, unselfconscious grace. From a distance Stephen watched, transfixed. Later, after a group meditation session, he did something he had never done before in his life.
As the room started to empty, he ignored the urge to slope his shoulders, look at the ground, and move quickly away. Instead, he put his shoulders back and slowly, calmly approached the girl. He asked her where she was from. She said that she was from Colorado and then, smiling, asked if Stephen was from England. He said that, yes, he was from England. Speaking in a soft, gentle voice, she told him her name was Rebecca. (This is not the name Stephen told to me; I’ve changed this name to disguise Rebecca’s identity.) Stephen said he asked how she’d come to be interested in Shambhala Buddhism and, before he could really process what was happening, he and Rebecca were having a conversation. And it was the easiest thing Stephen had ever done. She made jokes. She asked questions. She listened to what Stephen had to say, nodding her head slowly, occasionally moving stray strands of hair back behind her ears. She had a funny, infectious laugh that initially gave Stephen a bolt of panic when he realized that, upon hearing it, he was laughing, too.
As the days passed, the two of them gravitated toward each other more and more. Stephen says that their mutual interest in Buddhism made things easier for him, in the same way a mutual interest in cosmology had paved the way to a friendship with John Paige, and a mutual interest in horse racing served to bring him and Julian together. When Stephen was not working, they would go on long bike rides through the French countryside, play Scrabble, or just sit in the long grass and talk. “She was quite philosophical and a deep thinker, but at the same time she didn’t have that aloofness that many intellectually inclined people have. I wanted to spend all of my time with her and nobody else. She became the focus of my world. I guess it’s fair to say I was in love. Certainly, I’ve never really felt the same about anyone else I’ve met,” Stephen says. “She also revealed much in her past, which had similarities to mine. Minus the crime and mum being hospitalized bits.”
One hot afternoon, Stephen and Rebecca were lying together by the shores of a lake. They were both wet from swimming, and their bicycles were resting against a nearby tree. He turned to her and, finally, told her something he had not told anyone. He was wanted by Dutch police. He told her that after leaving Sidmouth in February, he’d traveled to Amsterdam where he proceeded to get very stoned. He was staying in a hostel dorm, and one night, he said he was woken by an angry member of hostel staff insisting that he had not yet paid for his bed and needed to provide the cash. Stephen, groggy, insisted that he had already paid, but the man wouldn’t leave him be so he eventually handed over some more money and drifted back to sleep. Stephen said that the next morning, when he was checking out of the hostel, another member of staff insisted that he needed to pay before he could leave.
“I didn’t have a lot of money on me, and this guy was saying that he wanted me to pay three times, which was crazy,” he remembers. He felt that he was being extorted and intimidated. What happens next is not entirely clear. To begin with, Stephen says that he leaped over the front desk, grabbed a fistful of money from the till, and “stormed out.” Then, he admits, he produced a knife. “I grabbed over the counter, got the money, and then he stopped in front of me, so blocking me from leaving the place. So I just opened my bag and he saw this knife, and he just backed away.”
He sprinted away from the hostel. The day was overcast and wet, and raindrops beat against him, dripping down his glasses and steaming up the lenses. He ducked into a taxi and rode away, but his identity was no secret, because the hostel had made a copy of his driver’s license when he first arrived. He sat panting in the back of a taxi, his backpack damp on the seat beside him.
Beside the lake, he told Rebecca all of this. He emphasized his deep concerns for the world. “We talked about inequality. I talked about how the financial system worked and how it created money from thin air, and where the world was headed. And she agreed with me that the destination it was going in was total destruction and suffering for people, and that unless drastic action was taken it would just keep plodding down this route,” he explains, talking clearly and with force. “Yes, there might be ways people could delay it, but those passive ways wouldn’t actually change things. They might inconvenience the powers that be a little bit, but they wouldn’t result in any significant changes. I think she understood,” he says. “In fact, I am pretty confident she understood. But she didn’t want me to do it in the robbery sense. She wanted me to make money conventionally, and then when I had made money, to spend it on building this organization that I envisioned.”
The weeks at Dechen Chöling passed, Stephen working during the day and spending the evenings with Rebecca. He continued to train in kyudo archery under the tutelage of the resident octogenarian Japanese master, and to exercise and meditate. But from time to time he sat at one of the computers in the central office, where he researched the careers and methods of real-life bank robbers. Two in particular enthralled him.
One was an American named Carl Gugasian, who stole in excess of $2 million over the course of fifty robberies spanning three decades. Gugasian, Stephen read, was widely considered to be America’s most successful bank robber. A neat, unremarkable-looking man from Pennsylvania, he served in the army before earning a PhD in statistics. In his spare time, he began to plan bank robberies, almost as a hobby. An intellectual exercise.
Eventually, Gugasian started to carry these robberies out in real life. They were meticulously planned. He would go to the library to find maps of small towns that had banks close to wooded areas with access to a nearby freeway. He’d create caches in the woods in order to stash evidence—clothes, weapons, money—in the immediate aftermath of his robberies. He’d stake out a bank for days, learning the comings and goings and habits of employees, before striking at closing time on a Friday night in the belief that this would mean fewer customers and a greater amount of cash. He would burst into the bank wearing bulky clothes to conceal his build, move quickly and in a crab-like fashion in order to make judging his height more difficult, and wear a gruesome horror mask for maximum intimidation. Brandishing a pistol, he would vault the counter, demand the terrified cashiers empty their tills, and then flee in a process designed to take less than two minutes.
Stephen clicked on dozens of articles about Gugasian, absorbing them all, entranced. He learned about how he would keep a dirt bike in the woods near the bank, then use it to flee to a van parked several miles away and make good his escape, only returning to the woodland cache of evidence and money days later, once the coast was clear. This went on for thirty years until dumb luck saw a pair of teenage boys discover a cache of weapons stored in a drainpipe in some woods near Gugasian’s home, which ultimately led to his arrest in 2002.
The other man Stephen spent hours researching online was André Stander, a South African police detective who, during the 1970s, led a double life as a bank robber. Like Gugasian, he was prolific. He’d rob a bank at lunchtime using a disguise, a pistol, and a lightning-quick entrance and exit. By the afternoon, he would be investigating the very crime he had committed. The fact that Stander later claimed his motivations stemmed in part from his disillusion with South African society under apartheid only added to the allure of his actions. Sitting alone in the admin office of a Buddhist meditation retreat, Stephen allowed himself to conclude that with the right combination of forethought and boldness, robbing banks was possible. And just as important, he allowed himself to believe that you could do this while still being a good person. A mild-mannered statistics professor. A cop jaded by a racist society. “I very strongly identified with these people. They played a massive part in the Robin Hood persona that I developed.”
In August 2007, Rebecca returned to the United States. Before she left, Stephen says, she made him an offer. To come back with her. They could live together, enjoying the mountains and forests of Colorado. Stephen could find work while she finished college. It was in so many ways the moment Stephen had yearned for. But he did not go with her. He felt he couldn’t. He knew how much he already depended on Rebecca emotionally, to help guide him through social situations, and that worried him. What’s more, if Stephen couldn’t find work there—and his experience of gaining long-term employment had not been good—then he imagined himself becoming dependent on Rebecca in every possible sense. “Because of my background, I was scared that I was being wholly reliant on her. I would feel like I was a leech latching on to her, if that makes sense, and I hated that notion. I also felt like I had an obligation to be independent, for both her sake and for mine.” It’s not that he didn’t love her and want to be with her. He just wanted to feel as though he was worthy of her.
And there was the Organisation. “There was this sense of an obligation as well, about making a difference in the world, that was still digging at me. I thought if I went down the path of being with Rebecca, then I would be turning my back on the obligation I had seen myself as making. After everything I saw on my travels, that seemed really callous and selfish even. That sounds weird, I guess,” he says, softly. “The idea that it’s selfish not to rob a bank.”
The pain of letting Rebecca go was “unbearable.” But they agreed that one way or another, they would reunite within a year. With Rebecca now gone and little else to occupy his mind, Stephen was almost locked into his course of action. He had been turning the idea over and over since New Zealand. Researching and understanding the methods used by successful bank robbers had become an obsession for him. He gave it the same unblinking focus that he gave to global inequality or, previously, the cosmos, geology, or any number of his past special interests, which, as someone with Asperger’s, he’d always pursued with single-minded intensity. Because of what he had done in Amsterdam, he told himself that he had already crossed a line. That he was already a criminal. But there was still a part of him that wanted to know—or to believe—that his plan to rob from the rich to give to the poor was morally watertight.
Which is why, one day, he approached an old Buddhist monk who was passing through Dechen Chöling. Quietly and respectfully, he asked the monk if it would ever be permissible to steal. The old man smiled and shook his head. The teachings of Buddha say that it would not. Stephen absorbed this and then rephrased the question, asking if it would be okay to steal so long as you then did great good with the proceeds. Again, the monk shook his head. Stephen smiled and said, yes, but what if people really, really needed the proceeds of this hypothetical theft? The monk, increasingly perplexed, said that stealing is stealing. They went back and forth like this for some time before Stephen eventually asked if it would be okay to steal if the money he was stealing had been stolen from the people, who would then, effectively, be having the money returned to them and which would, in turn, allow them all to improve their lives immeasurably. The exasperated monk eventually said that, well, yes, it could be that under those precise circumstances, perhaps it would be permissible to steal. It was all Stephen needed to hear. He thanked the old man, bowed respectfully, then walked away, feeling lighter than air.
At almost exactly this time, 250 miles north of Dechen Chöling, a decision was made that would accelerate and intensify Stephen’s actions. On August 9, 2007, French bank BNP Paribas, one of the largest in the world, announced they were freezing all withdrawals from three of their investment funds. The U.S. housing market was tanking, people were defaulting on their subprime mortgages at a terrifying rate, and with BNP Paribas’s books full of increasingly rotten CDOs, they solemnly explained that they could no longer calculate how much their holdings were actually worth. As such, the amount of money they were willing to lend and invest would be reduced significantly.
For many economists, this represents the moment that the global financial crisis began: an admission, by a huge international bank, that because of their own activities, they simply did not know how much money they had. BNP Paribas would receive immediate aid from the European Central Bank, but by then it was far too late. Larry Elliott, The Guardian’s economics editor, later described August 9, 2007, as having “all the resonance of August 4th, 1914. It marks the cut-off point between ‘an Edwardian summer’ of prosperity and tranquility and the trench warfare of the credit crunch—the failed banks, the petrified markets, the property markets blown to pieces by a shortage of credit.”
Stephen left Dechen Chöling at the end of August. He returned to Sidmouth, but only briefly. Before making the trip home, he had applied through clearing for a place at the University of Worcester in order to study geography and sociology. If Carl Gugasian could earn a PhD, then there’s no reason why Stephen couldn’t get some qualifications along the way. Plus, he wanted to go to university and to experience what it had to offer. A criminal career and a life as a student need not be mutually exclusive.