Within a week of returning to Worcester to begin his second term at university, Stephen was contacted by an aunt. She informed him that his father had died. Stephen frowned. His response was just a soft “Oh.” He waited for a wave of grief to wash over him, but it did not come. He had known for a long time that the logical conclusion of his father’s cancer was that it would eventually kill him. When he first learned of the diagnosis, years earlier, he’d spent a whole night crying while Ben Weaver, round for a sleepover, snored on the floor of his bedroom. But in his residence hall bedroom, at the age of twenty-one, Stephen did not seem sure how to respond. “Although I had my issues with my father, I still considered him someone quite close,” he remembers. “I have a strange way of processing things.”
Peter Jackley remains an enigmatic, unresolved individual. Stephen still does not seem to understand the man his father was. He was somebody whose character was clearly marked by his own issues with mental health, but these were not issues he fully accepted or addressed. He appears to have been stubborn, secretive, controlling, obsessive, and quick to anger. His attempts at charm seemed to only repel people. Stephen believes that his “heart was in the right place,” but from the outside looking in, it is impossible to decide whether it was Peter Jackley who kept his small, dysfunctional family together, or whether it was him who dragged them down, compounding their isolation and creating an atmosphere of conflict and tension.
That said, it is also clear that Peter Jackley faced many challenges beyond his control. He could not help that he suffered from bipolar disorder. He could not help that Stephen never received an Asperger’s diagnosis, which would have at least given him the chance to understand aspects of his son’s behavior and perhaps even begin to support him more effectively. He could not help that his wife was schizophrenic. Unless, like Ben Weaver and even Stephen up to a point, you believe that there was something about her condition that he liked—the vulnerability or malleability—and may have attracted him in the first place.
The day after he received the news about his father, Stephen flew to Amsterdam for the weekend. He had booked the trip when he had returned to Worcester to find the unreliable campus drug dealer was nowhere to be found, so he’d resolved to fly out and smuggle some cannabis back himself. Looking back, Stephen thinks that his fixation on this mission may have meant there wasn’t space in his head to accept and process his father’s death. “Plus, I saw myself as someone else, in effect. It kind of got pushed out of my mind that he had died.”
Returning to Amsterdam was a huge risk. It had been less than a year since Stephen pulled a knife on the Dutch hostel employee he felt was trying to fleece him before making off with a fistful of euros. But as he boarded his flight he reassured himself that everything would be fine. Nobody seemed to have connected him with the crime, which seemed strange. The hostel had made a photocopy of his driver’s license when he checked in, so the Dutch police knew his name. Yet for some reason they never contacted British authorities to let them know that a Stephen Jackley was wanted in connection with an armed robbery.
Or perhaps they did, but nobody was able to work out exactly who he was. Because, by chance, Stephen’s driver’s license contained a misprint. His date of birth was wrong. He can no longer remember exactly how wrong, but it was evidently wrong enough to make tracking him down very difficult. After his plane landed, he stood in line at Schiphol airport passport control until he was beckoned forward. He handed his passport to the Dutch border control officer, who scanned it before waving him through.
Stephen spent two days smoking and drinking in Amsterdam. He sat in the corner of cannabis cafés with his notebook, getting increasingly stoned, writing down plans for robberies and the Organisation, as well as long, meandering poems and stream-of-consciousness treatises on the nature of reality. Looking back, he wonders if the real reason he returned to Amsterdam was because, subconsciously, he wanted to get caught: that however much he was relishing his new identity as Robin Hood, there was still a part of him that remained an insecure boy from Sidmouth who wanted this all to end.
After two days in Amsterdam, Stephen began to descend to Earth, and the reality of his father’s death started to seep into his psyche. He realized the simple finality of it, and of the fact that it was now just him and his mother. He looked around him and saw strange faces speaking strange languages and felt an overwhelming need to return to Sidmouth. He abandoned his plan to smuggle a supply of weed back with him. Pale, pink-eyed, and exhausted, he returned to Schiphol. He went to the check-in desk, presented his passport, and was handed his boarding pass. Then, passing back through airport security, he was stopped by a member of staff who politely asked if he by any chance had a driver’s license with him.
Tired and foggy-headed, Stephen thought this was a strange question. But he “gormlessly” handed over his license. What happened next is jumbled in Stephen’s recollection, but he was told that he was going to be arrested. If he did have a subconscious desire to be captured, then in the moments that followed he did not act like it. He dropped his bag and turned to run, bolting toward a quiet-looking corridor leading away from security. He pumped his arms, but it felt like running from something in a dream, horribly slow and uncoordinated. Strong hands grabbed him from behind, and though he tried to prize himself free, it was useless. Stephen was placed in an armlock as travelers and airport staff stared at him impassively. His head was throbbing. His mouth was dry. All he could hear was the distant sound of departure announcements and of the two large men who had him by the arms chuckling and talking in Dutch. “They were just laughing and joking about it,” says Stephen. “I thought, shit. This is it. This is the end.”
He was taken to a small, bare holding room in the bowels of Schiphol. Every hour or so, a member of the cheerful security staff would pop their head in and ask if he would like a pack of cigarettes. “They were massively into smoking. I remember thinking I don’t want to say ‘no,’ because that would seem kind of rude. So eventually I just accepted.”
Dutch police came and explained to Stephen that he was being charged with “robbery or theft or something.” He was put in handcuffs, escorted to a van, and transported to Rotterdam, where he was placed in a holding facility. He had his fingerprints taken and then attended a court hearing in which a judge and other legal officials sat down with Stephen and explained that he would be held in a Dutch prison until a date for his trial was set.
It was Stephen’s first experience of incarceration, and the shock of it was overwhelming. Knowing that he was no longer free, he felt a wave of nauseous horror flush through his body. His pulse raced and he breathed in short, shallow bursts as he was processed and taken to his cell. At the time, he could have cried, though he admits that, looking back, this Dutch prison cell was incredibly comfortable compared to what he would later endure. “You walk into this massive room with an en suite bathroom. There are cakes on the table and loads of croissants and food everywhere. It was really unusual,” he says. “They have a different perspective on imprisonment there, I think.”
There was plenty of recreation time, prisoners were free to wander the wings of the jail, and Stephen dutifully smoked the cigarettes the guards kept giving him. When he finished a pack, they brought him more, so he felt obliged to smoke even more. They made him light-headed and giddy. Inside his comfortable cell he tapped his foot. He was convinced it was just a matter of time before everything would come crashing down. The Dutch police would contact their British counterparts to let them know of his arrest, which would somehow result in him finally being connected to the robberies. He chewed on a croissant and despaired.
Then, just like that, he was able to walk away. After a week or so in the Dutch prison, he was informed that he was being allowed to leave on compassionate grounds. Stephen had told them about his father’s recent death and impending funeral, and while this had not appeared to sway the authorities initially, it seemed they’d had a change of heart. He was told that he would be contacted in due course, when a court date had been set, and that he must then return to the Netherlands to stand trial when instructed. He agreed. And so they let him go.
Stephen arrived at his father’s small funeral in Exeter to be greeted with a flurry of hushed but urgent questions from his relatives. Where had he been? Nobody had been able to get in touch with him for the past week. Stephen looked at these people blankly. He was not close to any of them. He told everybody that the reason he had been out of touch was that he had been arrested over some “drugs issue” in Amsterdam, but that it was all sorted now. He was chided by some, but he didn’t care. He sat beside his mother during the service and then stood at her side during the wake. Lisa Watson, Peter’s daughter and Stephen’s half sister, remembers watching him and feeling uneasy, though not being able to say exactly why.
“I didn’t really understand everything that was going on because obviously you couldn’t really get much information from Jenny. I don’t know whether she was oblivious or just didn’t understand,” she says. “You only really heard snippets from other members of the family. But Stephen was being very mysterious at the funeral. I found him…he was mysterious over what he had done.”
Lisa describes how Stephen didn’t just appear unmoved at the funeral. There was something else about him: an air of slyness and superiority. “I just thought it was strange that he didn’t seem to be upset. He just seemed to be…he had a smug expression on his face for half of the time, like a grin if you like. And I just found that really strange.”
She says that knowing about his Asperger’s might have helped her understand why he didn’t appear as upset as she’d thought he would be. But his expression was unsettling. Later, after the funeral, Stephen walked with Lisa and her husband near the seafront. “He was talking about money,” she says. “And he said, ‘I can give you a thousand pounds today.’ My husband and I said, ‘How can you do that?’ And he said, ‘I’ve got money hidden around Exeter.’ I think he said he had some money hidden in a tree by Exeter Cathedral. Three grand in a tree by Exeter Cathedral.”
Lisa and her husband looked at each other. Neither believed what Stephen was telling them. “We just thought it was fantasy.” Later, as the three of them passed a quayside, Stephen pointed at one of the boats. “He was saying to my husband, ‘I bet you I could jump down there onto that boat.’ Or something like that. My husband was like, ‘We’re at your dad’s funeral here. Why would you be doing stuff like that? I don’t even know you and you are making bets with me.’ ”
Stephen wandered off, but both Lisa and her husband were left unnerved. They discussed what happened later that evening. “My husband said, ‘He’s dead behind the eyes, he’s quite scary to look at.’ There was just no emotion there. He didn’t seem upset. There was just nothing behind the eyes.” She sighs. “He just seemed so separate.”
After his father’s funeral, Stephen returned to Worcester in early February 2008. Late one stormy night, alone in his room, he says that he called Rebecca. He described how immediately, upon hearing her voice on the line, he knew what was coming. In his heart, he had known since they parted at Dechen Chöling that a future together was only a faint hope and that their long-distance relationship was never going to be sustainable. But it still cut jagged and deep when she quietly told him that she had met somebody else at her university.
She said that she’d never meant to hurt him and that she was sorry. She had tried calling him the previous week, but he’d never answered. Stephen told her that was because he’d been in a Dutch jail, and when she exclaimed shock and asked what happened, he simply brushed her off, ignoring the question. Instead, angry and on the verge of tears, he hung up on her. Immediately, he regretted it, and tried to call her back. She did not answer. He would never speak to her again.
Stephen felt his throat contract, and he clenched his eyes tight to stem the tears he could already feel forming. He stormed out of his room and into the cold, wet night, making for one of the playing fields just behind Wyvern Hall. He broke into a run and began to do lap after lap around the soccer pitch. Letting himself go as he ran, he gasped for breath between deep, ugly sobs, hot tears and cold raindrops streaming down his face. After twenty laps, he dragged himself back indoors and fell asleep on his single bed, exhausted and despondent.
Stephen finds talking about Rebecca difficult. He believes that, had they physically been together during this period, she would have been the only person able to talk him out of continuing with his crimes. That’s not to say she would definitely have been able to—“it could well have been that I had committed to this thing and nothing whatsoever would have deviated me from that path”—but, rather, she would have represented his last best chance at breaking the obsession and pulling away. “She is the only thing that could have stopped me.”
With Rebecca now gone, Stephen committed the very last wavering vestiges of himself to his mission. He had nothing else to commit to, nothing else to live for.
Stephen explains that he would rather not provide any details that might allow Rebecca to be tracked down and approached for an interview. He says that he does not want to intrude or impact on her life in any way, or run the risk of landing her in trouble, because while he is never entirely clear about the exact extent to which he revealed his plans and actions to Rebecca, he worries he may have said enough to incriminate her in some way or another. He also admits that there is an aspect of psychological self-preservation to all this. He does not particularly want to discover that she is now married, or that she has children, because it would only emphasize what he’d once had and lost. “Rebecca,” he writes in one email, “was like a beacon of light in a very cold cave, at a stage in my life when I was starting to lose hope and direction.”
Nobody from Dechen Chöling is able to recall her. Ralph Williams, Lisa Steckler, Maizza Waser…they all remember Stephen very well, having spent weeks working and living alongside him. But none of them remembers him having a relationship with a tall girl from Colorado with auburn hair, who enjoyed playing Scrabble and going on long bike rides, and who had a gentle but infectious laugh. Waser, the older German woman whose tent was opposite Stephen’s and who has autism herself, admits she is probably not the best person to ask about these things. “I am sorry; there are many romantic relationships that completely bypassed me. I just don’t have a sense for that. It has never developed in me all my life.”
Williams shared a tent with Stephen for six weeks. Under the canvas they had long late-night conversations about global income inequality. But Williams says they never talked about love or relationships. “He wasn’t dating anyone at the time; there were no romantic interactions and I got the feeling that I was his only kind of friend there. That I was his safe place.”
Williams left Dechen Chöling in late June or early July 2007, while Stephen stayed until the start of September, developing his obsessions with the likes of Carl Gugasian and André Stander. So it is quite possible that Rebecca arrived after Williams had gone. And his account of Stephen’s lack of a love life doesn’t mean it was impossible for him to form a relationship. In Stephen’s telling, the fact that Rebecca was able to see past his awkward exterior is what made her so special. That was the whole point.
Lisa Steckler, the chatty, outgoing head of human resources at Dechen Chöling, says that she has a good memory for people and simply cannot remember a Rebecca from Colorado matching Stephen’s description. Her brow furrows, and she puts a finger to her cheek. “I am going to do a little research because there is a part of me—and I hope this is not mean—that thinks…did he make her up?”
This is what DI Fox thinks. He says the whole thing is “bullshit.” He has Stephen’s journals from Dechen Chöling and reviewed them after they were seized. “A girlfriend in France, 2007? That didn’t happen,” he says brusquely. “I have got diary entries from every day when he was in France, and it’s all about how lonely he is and how nobody likes him and he has got no mates. There is no girlfriend. That is a fairly consistent theme through his stuff, that he is lonely. I am sure Rebecca or whoever exists and was there. But he certainly has not referred to any relationship or some sort of holiday romance or anything like that.”
Stephen laughs when he hears this. “Maybe he thinks I’m too ugly for a girlfriend,” he says, before saying that DI Fox is simply wrong. “I did write about her many times in the diaries. It just goes to show that he didn’t pay much attention.” Stephen thinks that Fox is subconsciously reinforcing his own view of Stephen as a dysfunctional loner. “It’s a phenomena. People see what they are looking for. He has probably constructed this image of me in his mind, a stereotype of a guy who was totally outside society.”
He says that he thought that, in and among the various materials he’d given me, there were police photocopies of diary entries that contained references to Rebecca. There are not. Within the material I have from the period and subsequent months, the name “Rebecca” does not appear once, though this material is by no means complete. There are a number of romantic and somewhat sensuous poems written later, after he returned from France. In one of these Stephen describes cycling from Dechen Chöling with a nameless young woman—“her auburn hair streaking behind in the wind as she cycles before me”—passing fields and châteaus as they traveled through the countryside.
Dr. Sajid Suleman says it is not uncommon for people with Asperger’s to invent imaginary or “fantasy” friends. But, he continues, when Stephen told him about his relationship with Rebecca during the compilation of his psychiatric report in late 2012, Dr. Suleman absolutely believed it to have been real. He still does. “I clearly remember the discussion,” he says, smiling. “At the time I didn’t have any impression of him making it up. The way he described it was, in my experience, quite typical of the way people with autism spectrum disorder form romantic relationships.”
So the fact that they both shared a deep interest in Buddhism was the common ground that first enabled Stephen to begin and then maintain a rapport with her. Then, as the relationship developed, Stephen found that he was more comfortable in group situations when she was with him, that he was able to take certain cues from her. This, says Dr. Suleman, is what he sees all the time in relationships in which one person has Asperger’s and the other does not. And if, as DI Fox maintains, the relationship was “bullshit,” that would mean Stephen contrived to concoct a fantasy account that somehow lines up exactly with what an expert in Asperger’s syndrome would expect to see. Dr. Suleman shakes his head. “It didn’t come across like that. She pushed him to do social things with others. I felt it was a real relationship.”
And Stephen has always maintained it was. His cycling poem, which is charged with emotion, describes an idyll. It may be a memory. It may be a daydream. A wish. The poem finishes with him and the auburn-haired girl arriving at a lake.
We both plunge into the sparkling water, washing away the sweat of the ride. And then, reaching the other side, we make love in the tall grass. A moment of heaven. There, in France.