In late September 2007, Stephen caught the train north and arrived at the small, functional campus of the University of Worcester. A former teacher-training center and higher education college, Worcester has grown in reputation but it’s fair to say it’s not an elite educational establishment. He took his bags to his new room. If greeted, he nodded and muttered a reply, but kept walking, eyes down. There was still a bruise on his face from where Raymond Beer had struck him with the butt of his own pistol.
Once he was settled, he sat at a small writing table and opened a new notebook. He picked up a pen and began to write on the first page.
This book belongs to Stephen George Dennis Jackley
Flat 5, Room 5
Wyvern Hall
University of Worcester
Henwick Grove
Worcester
WR2 6AJ
The contents are dangerous. Do not read.
He also included his mobile telephone number. The fact that Stephen wrote his full name, address, and contact information at the start of a book in which he would minutely detail over a half dozen separate crimes is worth considering. Why go through all the care and effort of planning elaborate Carl Gugasian–style robberies with planted caches of clothes and multiple planned escape routes only to then just confess to everything, in your own handwriting, in a notebook you’ve made absolutely clear belongs to you? From a rational perspective it just doesn’t make any sense. Only, the possibility of capture didn’t occur to him at all. “I just didn’t see that eventuality,” he says. “It didn’t even cross my mind.”
This apparent contradiction, between extreme naïveté and surprising efficiency, quickly became a hallmark of Stephen’s criminal career. On the one hand, he absolutely shut himself off psychologically from the prospect of failure or arrest. On the other, he was able to apply a robust, clear-eyed logic to the question of “How might you successfully rob a bank?” He had already determined that it was perfectly possible and far more straightforward than most people allowed themselves to believe. On an intellectual level, you don’t really need anything more than common sense. The hard part—the part that makes most people tell themselves that a bank heist is impossible—is having the courage to actually do it. To pull on the ski mask and go in there with the replica gun and come out with a backpack full of cash.
Stephen had that courage. By the time he arrived at Worcester, he had already proved that to himself. There was a part of him that wanted to prove it to Rebecca, too. He says that he kept in contact with her via email and phone calls, hinting of his actions. “I didn’t tell her directly, but she knew where I was coming from. She knew my intentions. So I sort of said it in a way like ‘I am continuing with this mission to alleviate inequality,’ and she knew exactly what I meant by that. I didn’t tell her that I had robbed X bank on X date; it wasn’t like that. It was more the sense of, ‘I am continuing with this until I reach the goal,’ which was the £100K.”
In his heart, Stephen knew that the chance to have any kind of meaningful relationship with Rebecca had died when he opted to return to England rather than go with her to Colorado. He describes a coolness setting in as the reality of their situation became clear and he began to entertain the possibility that she was not the long-awaited soulmate he had been dreaming of. “Also, logically, how is it going to work? She’s in America, I’m in England and now I’ve made this choice, I can’t just suddenly fly over and stay there,” he says, a note of irritation creeping into his voice. “I was quite paranoid as well. That she had already met someone and just hadn’t told me.”
With each passing day, he sank deeper into a conviction that he was “at war” with a callous capitalistic society that was destroying the planet and ruining lives for no good reason. Everywhere he looked, he saw evidence of this. A form of confirmation bias set in. In the university library, he read the work of American academic, environmentalist, and activist David C. Korten. In his book When Corporations Rule the World, Korten writes about the need to rebalance the power of multinational corporations with environmental sustainability and what he describes as “people-centered development.”
For the sociology modules of his course, Stephen read the work of German political economist Max Weber, who built on the ideas of Karl Marx and described how exploitation is hardwired into capitalism, a system that demands social stratification, a division of the weak and the powerful, the haves and the have-nots. He made pages and pages of notes. He thought of the children sifting through rubbish heaps in Cambodia, the barefoot Thai villagers who fed him and helped him get back to his holiday lodge. He thought of the anxious pensioners queuing to retrieve their savings from Northern Rock. He thought of himself, and of his mother and father, in their shabby little council house on Manstone Avenue. He thought about the Organisation constantly. “I was so obsessive. It was the sole thing on my mind.”
Although, this does not seem strictly true. Rather, a kind of cognitive dissonance was at play. Yes, he was committed to becoming the new Robin Hood he felt he had no choice but to become. But he also seemed to know that university represented his best chance at quietly slipping into the conventional, carefree existence enjoyed by millions of young people all over the world. Like everyone else around him, he wanted to earn qualifications, make connections, and experience a rite of passage.
In his new university journal he reiterated this to himself via a short series of bullet points.
3 reasons for staying here come to mind.
To gain a degree
To meet friends—or better, a soul mate
To have a ‘base’ to commit crime and gain money and experience
True to his word, for the first week or so of term, Stephen did his very best to socialize. Wyvern Hall was a small, modern low-rise complex with a series of shared kitchens and communal living areas. Stephen discovered that most of his immediate neighbors were Chinese. “They were quite nice, and they used to make curries and we sat down to eat on a couple of occasions,” he says. More difficult was getting on with his fellow British students. Within days, the majority of the freshmen in Wyvern Hall had fallen into a close group, piling round to one another’s flats for drinks before heading out to the student union disco.
Louise Alice Cawood arrived at the University of Worcester from Leeds to study physical education, and quickly found herself a part of this Wyvern Hall mob. “We all knew each other and we would all go off in groups together, to do laundry or organize stuff,” she remembers. “It was like a little community within the university.”
Stephen, though, never found himself part of this instant community. “He was relatively anonymous. Which I suppose in a way is kind of strange, because everyone else in our halls all knew each other,” Cawood continues, frowning. “We knew what degrees we all did, we knew which friendship circles we all hung out with, which societies we were in and stuff. With him, nobody really asked, I suppose. But he was never there for any of us to ask. I never saw him in town or anywhere else on a night out. Even when we had nights at the student union, I never remember seeing him. After the first couple of weeks, people just forgot he was there.” It occurs to her, now that she thinks about it, that Stephen often seemed to receive a large number of packages and parcels. But beyond that minor detail? “He just melted into the background.”
It’s not that Stephen wasn’t trying. It was just that he very quickly concluded that he had nothing in common with the students he encountered. His sensitivity to loud noises was a massive hindrance, and his Asperger’s meant that, for all his experience in Australia and Dechen Chöling, he still struggled with small talk, social cues, body language, and jokes. He was struck by how little his fellow students seemed to know or care about the wider world and the threats it faced. Cawood admits that, among the Wyvern Hall group, an impending financial crisis and the impact of climate change were not hot topics. “I don’t really think it crossed our minds. Mostly because we were at the start of university. Everything was about what outfit are you going to wear that evening and stuff like that. We were in a bubble.”
Stephen joined the university’s kayaking society, but when he went out on a pub crawl with them, he was struck not just by their ignorance, but by their callousness. “I remember they were laughing and joking about a homeless guy, and I said, ‘Why the fuck would you do that?’ It was like…there’s something amiss here. There’s something they don’t get and I do. Because of that, I didn’t go to that group anymore.”
Instead, he kept to himself. He stayed in his room, planning his next move and doing his best to keep abreast of the police investigations into the crimes he had already committed.
Read on the internet (I’m continually searching for ‘armed robbery’ related articles) found the police in Exeter are still pursuing the failed Lloyds-TSB heist. Damn it! But it seems they’ve got no clear CCTV images of me.
He drifted off on his own to explore Worcester. He quickly realized that it bore many similarities to Exeter. Both are small cathedral cities with populations of less than 150,000. Both are surrounded by miles of rolling countryside. As he walked around the small city center, scouting for financial institutions he could target, he found himself passing the same department stores and the same billboards advertising the same brands. A historic English town suffocating in a corporate stranglehold. He looked in shopwindows and saw mannequins wearing clothes stitched by children in sweatshops to be sold to people who did not need them. He saw banks cheerfully offering hardworking people loans and the promise of stability and support while quietly making billions from their debt and stress.
The world is being consumed. Eaten up by the greed of an elite few (what David Korten calls the ‘stratos dwellers’, who live in luxury across a vast gap that most of humanity can never cross). These are the controllers. These are the rulers. I saw it today: people’s faces downcast and suspicious, brand shops pumping propaganda, market researchers assailing shoppers, beggars on street corners. And high up watches a camera, like the demented eye of a vulture, each lens seeking out some infraction—a possibility of a rule breaker. All for what? To protect? To maintain order?
In another entry he wrote:
To take just a drop hoarded by the rich and scatter but a little to the poor. Is it justice to keep millions languishing in poverty as a few hundred enjoy excessive wealth?
He asked himself this question again and again. One day, he approached a lecturer who had just given a talk about how society’s attitudes toward crime change over time. “We were talking about how crime is relative and how crimes today were not necessarily crimes in the past, and how crimes of the past could be regarded as positive things in the future, and how ultimately crime is about harm, and that if you prevent harm, it is the opposite of crime,” he remembers, talking briskly. “That kind of reasoning.”
It is quite possible that the lecturer who’d just been buttonholed by an earnest undergraduate enjoyed the conversation. Perhaps they felt flattered by the attention Stephen had clearly been paying to the themes discussed. What they could not have known as the young man walked away was that in his room there was a commando knife. There was a ski mask. There were boxes and boxes of items he had ordered off the Internet. Disguises. Wigs. Fake beards. A portable angle grinder. A replica pistol. And pages and pages of detailed plans for what were, as the two of them had already agreed, the very opposite of crimes.
On October 31, 2008, almost exactly one year after his conversation with the University of Worcester sociology lecturer about the relativity of crime, Stephen was sitting inside the holding pen at Strafford County jail in New Hampshire. Opposite him was a man dressed as a Halloween killer clown, his death-white face and gaudy outfit splattered with what appeared to be blood. Stephen had, finally, been moved from the Hole at Vermont’s Southern State Correction Facility while British and American authorities tried to work out what to do with him. He looked around anxiously. The silent Halloween clown was not the only other person sitting in the pen. There were recently arrested drunks being booked and inmates who, like Stephen, had just been transferred from other prisons. These men eyed him with interest. They tossed questions at him and then grinned and shared glances when they heard his English accent. They edged slowly toward him, asking the same question that everybody asked: What are you doing here? It was the first time Stephen had been so close to so many other people for at least five months, and it made him feel tense and afraid. It was not just their proximity, but the way they shouted questions at him and how their tones became harder and more goading the longer he tried to avoid answering them. A prison officer kept watch from behind a desk decorated with cheap cardboard jack-o’-lanterns.
After a few hours, Stephen was released from the holding pen and escorted by a pair of guards to a secure room where he was made to change out of his red SSCF inmate’s uniform and into a strange blue jumpsuit made out of a paper-like fabric. He was then handcuffed and marched through layers of security. Nobody told him where he was going or what was happening, though he assumed he was about to be placed in some form of segregation. Instead, he was taken somewhere odd. It was a brightly lit cell. Instead of a wall, the heavy door was set in some kind of transparent Perspex screen. Stephen was shoved inside, and the door was locked behind him. He saw that, on the other side of the screen, across the corridor, a prison officer sat behind a desk. This meant that, at least in theory, he was under constant observation. It was like something you might find in a zoo.
He did not know what was happening. Even worse, he didn’t know what would happen next. While this would be stressful for anyone, because of his Asperger’s it was exponentially so for Stephen. It took him a few moments to notice that, inside the empty cell, there were a pair of shapes lying on the floor, each covered in a green blanket. Suddenly, a bald head emerged from beneath one. Stephen almost screamed. The man’s face looked pale and weary, his eyes dull and impassive.
Stephen looked down and, before he could think, started to speak. “Why am I here?” he asked the bald man. “What is this place?”
The figure on the floor looked at him. Then rolled over and drew the blanket back over his head. The other figure sleeping on the floor did not move, so Stephen walked to the Perspex screen and banged on it with both fists, attempting to attract the attention of anyone who could tell him what was happening. Eventually, the prison guard slowly got up from behind the desk and approached the screen. He was a small man who could have been in his seventies. Talking quickly, Stephen asked again why he was there. The guard said nothing, peering at him with only faint interest before turning and walking away. Stephen shouted after him. He wanted to make a phone call. A legal phone call. He wanted to know what was going on. From the other side of the screen the old man pointed a bony finger at Stephen. “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care,” he said calmly. “Just shut up and fuck off.”
The commotion woke the second figure in the cell. A young man with greasy, matted blond hair emerged from beneath the blanket. He rubbed his eyes and looked at Stephen. He asked if he’d just arrived. Stephen nodded. The young man’s voice sounded beyond weary and strange, as if his whole mouth was numb. Stephen asked him the same urgent questions: What was this place and why were they here? In response the young man said nothing but pulled a sheet of paper from under his blanket and, holding it up to the light, began tracing shapes on it with his finger.
A voice came from behind Stephen. From beneath his blanket the bald man was trying to say something. “You’re in the medical section,” he explained, forcing the words out with what seemed like extreme effort. “Under su…sue…suzie…” He couldn’t get the words out, and appeared to drift back into semiconsciousness. Under the cell’s bright fluorescent lights, Stephen looked at the two men. It felt like a woozy through-the-looking-glass existence of frustration and oblique non sequiturs. He stood against the cell wall watching the two men in silence.
Suddenly, the bald man shouted. He forced syllables from his mouth in a way that reminded Stephen of dirty water spouting from an old rusty tap in fits and starts. “We are under,” he strained through clenched jaws, “suicide watch.”
Stephen was stunned. He looked down at his paper boiler suit and then around the cell, which was stripped of everything save for the green blankets and thin foam mattresses on which the two men slept. His thoughts flashed back to when he first arrived at Strafford County. At one point during the processing procedure he’d been asked a series of questions about his health and well-being by a prison nurse. “She asked if I’d ever felt suicidal,” he says. “I just honestly said yes. I felt suicidal many times in the Southern State Correctional Facility, but never made an attempt to commit suicide or self-harm. When I felt down, I told myself that the experience was only temporary, with escape always being a possibility.”
To Stephen, the fact that he had been placed on suicide watch after innocently admitting to regularly feeling suicidal was a surprise. More than that, it felt like a slap in the face for having been honest and straightforward with the nurse. He sat on the floor with his head in his hands.
It was a dark October evening in 2007, and a nineteen-year-old student named Luke Twisleton had almost finished his shift at the largest branch of William Hill betting shop in Worcester. Twisleton was in his second year of a business degree at the university, but had applied for a job as a cashier in order to earn a bit of extra money. A member of the university’s rugby team, he was strapping, confident, and affable. After his job interview with William Hill, he’d been offered employment “on the spot,” and that was that. It was closing time and after gently encouraging a few lingering customers out the door, Twisleton was helping empty the slot machines and cash out for the night.
As he worked, he noticed a pair of gloves on one of the tables. He paused and wondered whether there was still a customer on the premises, possibly in the men’s toilet. He decided to go and check. He pushed open the door and saw a man gripping both sides of a sink and staring at himself in the mirror. He was wearing a black ski mask. Beside him, on another sink, was a knife and pistol. The man spun around and for a split second, Twisleton saw a look of frantic fear in his eyes. Twisleton filled the toilet doorway. He was nearly six feet tall and weighed 225 pounds. But he was still processing what was in front of him. “I was a bit shell-shocked and said, ‘What are you doing?’ But he had a ski mask on, so I think I knew what he was doing.”
There was then a race, spanning a matter of milliseconds, to determine which of them could react quickest. The masked man won by a fraction. Overcoming his terror, he grabbed his weapons and charged at Twisleton. “He put the knife up to my chest and the gun to my head. Then he told me to get on the floor, which I refused to do. I don’t know if you have ever been in a bookies, but the toilets are not that clean. So all I did was put my hands behind my head and backed out. When I got out of the toilet I put my back to the wall and slid down.”
From behind his ski mask, Stephen scanned the shop floor. He saw Twisleton’s manager, a middle-aged woman, and screamed at her to freeze. She ignored him and bolted out the front door, locking it behind her.
Stephen muttered a curse. The previous night, he had concluded a diary entry with a rallying call to himself.
MAKE SURE YOU DO THE HEIST AND DO IT WELL!
But the heist was not going well at all. His plan had been to force a member of the staff to open the safe before an alarm could be raised. Now there would be no time for that. The police would arrive in a matter of minutes. So Stephen leaped over the cashier’s counter and opened the tills, stuffing banknotes into his backpack. Overhead CCTV monitors relayed everything that was happening, and he almost jumped when he caught sight of a black-clad figure in a ski mask. It took a second to realize it was simply an image of himself. From his position on the floor against the wall, Twisleton could see that Stephen’s actions were manic and unfocused. There was a bag in plain sight containing cash that the manager had been in the process of emptying from the slot machines. “You used to pull thousands from those machines,” he says. “But he completely missed it.”
Instead, Stephen cleaned out the tills and rushed to the back of the betting shop where there was a fire exit. When he’d entered William Hill twenty minutes earlier, posing as a customer with his hoodie pulled low over his head, he’d known that he would escape via the rear, into the tight warren of alleyways and backstreets he had determined would suit his purpose perfectly. He bolted past Twisleton, through the fire door, and into an alley. Twisleton leaped to his feet and slammed the door shut, because he knew that at the end of the alley was a high gate. He hoped it would leave the robber trapped. Within a matter of minutes, the police arrived at the front of the shop and demanded Twisleton let them in. He explained that he couldn’t, because the manager had locked him in, but directed them around the back. Shortly after, the manager appeared with the keys. Armed police and a dog team poured in through the shop and then out through the fire exit at the rear. But the alley was empty. The gate had been scaled. The masked man had vanished into the night. A police helicopter thrummed overhead, scanning the streets for any sign of him.
They found none. Stephen had already changed his clothes. He had planted a changeover bag and a bicycle in some bushes near an alley. From there, it was a five-minute cycle back to Wyvern Hall. He hurried past his Chinese flatmates as they watched TV in the communal area, and locked the door of his room behind him. Hiding his replica pistol before emptying the banknotes onto his bed, he quickly counted them. In all, the robbery had yielded £530. It was not nearly enough. The Organisation would not arise from petty cash smash-and-grabs. Going after the betting shop had been, as much as anything, a reflex. A need to prove to himself that he was still Robin Hood. Later, Stephen would take a red felt pen and mark some of these banknotes with the initials “RH.”
“To begin with, I just didn’t bother,” he says. “But then I saw it as a point of principle that these notes had to be marked. Don’t ask me why.”
Marking the notes seemed like an act of defacement. As much as Stephen needed money for the Organisation, he also hated it. He hated the fact that we all allowed ourselves to believe that banknotes have any actual real, inherent worth. Of course they don’t. In the past, you could at least theoretically take your cash to a bank and exchange it for its true value in gold, even though it would have been impossible for everyone who trusted in their cash to do so simultaneously. But today? Today you could not even do that. The banknotes Stephen had stolen had value only because we agree that they do. In his residence hall bedroom, he stopped scrawling “RH” for a moment and stared at the pieces of paper in front of him. He let his eyes trace the fine detail of a £20 note, the words “Bank of England” etched in an elaborate, florid script, the portrait of the queen looking back at him, festooned in jewels, gnomic and unblinking.
He thought of the words of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist. “The pieces of green paper have value because everyone thinks they have value.” It’s not just paper money that this applies to. Every hour, billions of pounds appear, vanish, and reappear on stock markets and investment bank balance sheets around the world. This money is not real, any more than the cash in your wallet is. But the idea of money—money as we know it today—has been foisted on us. We have constructed an entire society around the pursuit of it, and now nobody wants to see or say the truth. He wrote in his diary:
Wealth is the greatest trick ever played. It is a worldwide illusion that enslaves mankind in a conveyor belt of work, produce and consume. An illusion which people give up their lives to pursue. Wealth is the foundation of all inequality—the primary tool of the rich and powerful.
He decided that a portion of his takings should go directly to those in need. Wearing a long coat and doing his best to cover his face, he would go out at night and drop small rolls of his “RH” banknotes in the laps of the homeless without breaking stride. “I remember a couple of them shouting after me, just really grateful, like they couldn’t believe it.” On one occasion, a homeless man actually got up and chased after him, which, in turn, forced Stephen to break into a sprint in order to avoid being identified. “That was in Worcester,” he says quietly. “That was funny.”
Luke Twisleton was interviewed by police at the scene of the crime until eleven p.m. He returned to his flat, went to bed, then got up very early to make a six a.m. rugby training session. He explained to his teammates what had happened to him the previous night. Some were convinced he was joking. He showered and then went to a morning lecture. And then, from nowhere, he crumbled. “I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I collapsed, pretty much,” he says. “All of a sudden it hit me. What happened and what could have happened.” He went back to his family home in Bristol, where he remained for a month, unable to eat or sleep. He was prescribed sleeping pills. “Any confidence I had at that point vanished. My rugby went downhill. I gained a lot of weight.”
What Stephen did to the nineteen-year-old Twisleton left a permanent mark. Twisleton says that he felt ashamed for not having been able to stop him. He thought he was about to be murdered by a terrified-looking stranger in a ski mask. He did not fully address the trauma for years. “I buried a lot of the stress, and I probably only dealt with that a few years ago. It was my wife who convinced me,” he says. “She has known for a long time that I needed to go and speak to someone. I couldn’t sleep without a light on. If it was dark, I couldn’t get out of bed if there wasn’t a light on because I couldn’t go into a dark place. I went years of sleeping two or three hours a night. I finally went to see a psychologist through the [National Health Service], and I thought it was going to be a complete waste of time, but it was the opposite. I would like to say I am completely over it, but there are still little ticks. It had a big impact on my life.”
Over the course of his crimes, Stephen’s actions and deliberate use of threats and violent intimidation similarly impacted many people’s lives. Victim statements provided in advance of Stephen’s eventual trial in the UK show this. Ordinary working people were left traumatized. One statement provided by a bank worker and summarized by police described how Stephen “pointed a gun at them and that led them to become hysterical. The victim was taken to hospital after the incident because she was so distressed and was told she was suffering from severe trauma.”
Another of Stephen’s victims told police that “the effect of the robbery has left her nervous at work and wary of strangers coming into the shop. If she has to face the suspect, it is likely she will become distressed and unable to give her account.” Others talked of feeling physically sick. Of an inability to return to their place of work or simply not knowing how they would cope with day-to-day life.
Stephen says he now understands that his Asperger’s made it hard for him to appreciate the emotional impact of his actions on others. When Ben Weaver described his friend as being able to have empathy for people and their problems in a general, abstract way, but struggling to have empathy for an individual in front of him, this is what he was talking about.
In planning and executing his early crimes, Stephen understood that pointing a replica gun or commando knife at somebody would, in that moment, make them afraid. It was a shame that he had to do so, but then making them afraid was the whole point. But once he’d made his getaway, he did not spend much time worrying about how his victims felt. At least, not to begin with. Inasmuch as he thought about it at all, he reasoned that their fear would pass, they would see they were not dead, and then they’d presumably just…continue with their lives. When he later learned this was not how they felt, it was a shock.
It’s a bit like the genuine surprise he felt when, upon telling the Strafford County jail nurse that he had felt suicidal many times, he found himself being put straight onto suicide watch. Even if he had entertained suicidal thoughts, it was obvious, to him, that he was not actually going to kill himself. He couldn’t empathize with the nurse who’d heard him say this and then worried that he might actually do it. To Stephen, it was obvious that he was not going to kill or deliberately hurt anybody during his crimes. Doing so would make absolutely no sense. But the person at the other end of the replica pistol didn’t know that. At some level, he didn’t seem to understand this.
“I couldn’t appreciate that going into a bank and pointing a gun at them…they didn’t realize it’s an imitation,” he says. “It could have been real to them. And I didn’t appreciate how that would convey to them. In a vague sense I knew it would cause fear. But intellectually, I couldn’t understand how it would affect them on an emotional level.”
Later, Stephen reflected on how his Asperger’s impacts his ability to understand people’s feelings. “I don’t know how big the empathy thing with me is, though, because I care about others, deeply. The issue is more relating to their emotions, or rather understanding how things impact their emotions. It’s still a guessing game.”
When it came to his crimes, this problem was made worse by the fact that Stephen had come to view banks and betting shops purely as institutions. Faceless, soulless, and malign. When Stephen finally stood trial for his crimes, he was surprised, confused, and then somewhat outraged to see that each charge listed him as robbing from individuals who had actually been given names. “I remember saying to the solicitor, ‘Are you sure the charges are correct?’ Because all the evidence was that I never saw it as individuals, I saw it as corporations. I wouldn’t have any contention saying I wanted to steal from corporations. But I was charged, in effect, with stealing from individuals.”
Luke Twisleton says that Stephen wrote to him from prison, sending a letter to the university that ultimately found its way to him. It was a gesture of contrition, but also an attempt to make Twisleton understand what he had been hoping to achieve.
“He was pretty much calling himself Robin Hood; that was how he saw himself. He was taking on these big corporations and giving back to the people,” says Twisleton. “It was sort of an apology. He was saying he was targeting these organizations and going after business but not thinking of the people who work there. But I’m not the business. I’m not rolling in money. I’m working there so I can pay my rent. He suggested some reading I should do,” he adds with a brittle chuckle. “So that I would better understand what he was trying to do.”
Twisleton no longer has the letter. He kept it for a long time. But one day his wife uncovered it when they were in the process of moving. So she took it. And ripped it up. And threw it away.