It was a drizzly evening in March 2008 and Stephen was sitting in the corner of a small pub in a housing development not far from Birmingham city center. It was dimly lit and smelled of stale smoke. He sat on his own, nursing a pint of lager. The pub was quiet, but the handful of regulars watched Stephen with a mix of amusement and suspicion. Across the room, at another table, two tall Afro-Caribbean men talked quietly into the ears of an older man who watched Stephen with heavy, impassive eyes. Eventually, all three stood up. Two of them, including the older man, left the pub and climbed into a car parked just outside. The third man walked over to Stephen and peered down at the blinking figure in an anorak and holding a hiker’s backpack between his legs.
“Come with us,” the man said.
Stephen got to his feet, clutching his bag. He followed the man outside and climbed into the back of the waiting car. The old man was behind the wheel. He turned around to look at Stephen again. Then, slowly, the car pulled away into the inner-city night. Stephen looked out the tinted passenger window and saw streetlights, raindrops, and darkness. Nobody spoke. He was on his way to do something he knew he must. He was on his way to buy a real gun.
Birmingham is forty-five minutes from Worcester by train, but the two cities could not be more different. Worcester is small, compact, and old. Birmingham is the second-largest city in the UK after London, a sprawling conurbation replete with sparkling high-rises and modern shopping centers. But like all large cities, it has areas of poverty, deprivation, and crime. Birmingham, in particular, has a problem with gangs and guns. Stephen knew this. Or at least he did by the time he had carried out some online research in Worcester, which told him that one of the most likely places to acquire a firearm in the UK was, so to speak, just down the road.
He signed up on a website called Couchsurfing.com, a sort of hippieish precursor to Airbnb that allows users to find hosts willing to offer free accommodation. Stephen created a profile in the hope that he would find somebody in Birmingham to put him up for the night. Stephen’s Couchsurfing.com profile page still exists, although he listed himself as “Stephen Mason.” It includes a photograph of him half-smiling at the camera as well as some basic biographical information. In the About Me section, Stephen created his own subheadings, which he then answered as follows.
CURRENT MISSION
To defy the odds
ABOUT ME
A traveller and seeker of truth
PHILOSOPHY
“It is your mind that creates the world”—Buddha
A Couchsurfing.com host read his profile, thought he sounded like a nice guy, and offered him a place to stay for the night.
When Stephen arrived, he began, “very discreetly,” to ask his host about guns. He explained that he was a university student and that part of his degree required him to conduct a study into crime in Birmingham, and he wanted to know the kind of areas where somebody might go and buy an illegal firearm. His host, who Stephen remembers as being Greek, wasn’t quite sure what to say. People who sign up to karma economy websites in order to offer Buddha-quoting strangers free accommodation do not generally know where to purchase illegal firearms. Nevertheless, there were certain areas of north Birmingham that did have reputations. Lazells. Ladywood. Balsall Heath. Stephen nodded as he jotted these down. Then thanked his host and left.
Stephen spent the next few hours traipsing these areas of inner-city Birmingham. As evening fell, he spotted what he judged to be the most disreputable-looking pub he’d seen all day and entered. “It was a Jamaican-type pub,” he remembers. He ordered a pint and loitered at the bar. Something about his manner seemed to invite an approach, and a pair of tall men moved beside him and asked, in friendly tones, if he needed anything. Was he looking for drugs? Weed? Coke? Stephen, still in his anorak, shook his head. “I said, ‘Look, I am looking for a firearm.’ ” Upon hearing Stephen say this with his matter-of-fact directness, they instantly became far more circumspect, almost concerned. They told Stephen to go sit in the corner, then quietly conferred before one of them made a phone call. Some time later, the older man arrived and then, some time after that, they all piled into his car to begin the process of finding Stephen a gun.
Stephen felt anxious. He was worried not for his safety, but that they might not succeed in getting the gun. The three men told him that for £2,000 they could get him a shotgun. “Which I thought was ridiculous,” he says, frowning. As they drove, Stephen and the men negotiated until they finally settled on £750 for a pistol.
Over the next hour, the men in the car made a number of stops, with one of them leaving the car to enter a building for a while before returning. None of this was explained to Stephen. Eventually, though, he was told that the next stop would be where they get the gun for him, so he needed to produce the cash and stay in the car while they went to retrieve it. Stephen hesitated. He wasn’t stupid and didn’t feel comfortable just giving £750 to a group of criminals at nighttime in a dark corner of a city he didn’t know. But then, he really wanted that gun. It felt so close. He gave them the cash. They pulled over on a quiet street, and the two younger men stepped out of the car. Stephen could see them dividing the money between them, which made him frown. He began to say something when, suddenly, they ran. In opposite directions. “They just…ran off with the money.”
Stephen pulled open the car door and chased after one of the men. Behind him, he heard the car accelerate and speed off into the night. Stephen didn’t even turn to look. He had one of the men in his sights and was gaining on him, pacing past streetlights, parked cars, and dark high-rise council blocks. Then, suddenly, up ahead, Stephen saw what he thought was a police car. This made him hesitate and break his stride. If the police saw Stephen chasing after somebody through inner-city Birmingham in the middle of the night, they would probably have questions. Questions he couldn’t exactly answer honestly. Rational thought began to whirr into gear. Because even if it wasn’t a police car and he did succeed in catching the man who had half his money, what then? “I reasoned with myself that, even if I did catch up with him, he would probably have beaten me in a fight,” he says. “Probably beaten me senseless.”
He returned to Worcester deflated. But in a pattern that was now established, any setback was simply interpreted as a reason to keep going with even more conviction. Inadvertently commit armed robbery at an Amsterdam youth hostel? Just a reason to keep going. Accidently vandalize a children’s charity? Just a reason to keep going. Ripped off by gangsters in Birmingham? Just a reason to keep going. Even his arrest in Holland was a reason to burrow deeper and deeper into his obsessive world. In his mind, it was just a matter of time before Dutch police shared his forensic information with British police, at which point both the Devon and Cornwall and West Mercia forces would receive an alert informing them that their man was named Stephen George Dennis Jackley and that he was a twenty-one-year-old student from Sidmouth.
As a result, Stephen developed a sense that he did not have much time to hit his target. “I had this increasing sense of a giant clock over me,” he says. He imagined that once he’d hit his £100,000 goal, he would have to assume a new identity and leave the UK forever. On some level, he hoped this was what he would have to do. But doing this would likely require even more money. So just another reason to keep going.
By February 2008, something else was happening, too. For the first time in his life, Stephen was beginning to know what it felt like to have access to money. Not loads of money, but still, several thousand pounds stashed in trees around Worcestershire and Devon. The exact status of this cash was ambiguous. Stephen says his plan was not, and never had been, to reach his £100,000 in increments. Instead, everything depended on him pulling off one big heist: forcing his way into a bank, cleaning out a safe, and vanishing forever. So the money he had already stolen served as a kind of expense account. Yes, he’d given a percentage of what he’d stolen to the homeless, possibly something in the region of £600. And he was anonymously paying back the NSPCC in installments, a sum that would stand at £1,255 by the time he was finally captured. He spent much of the rest on materials relating to the mission: disguises, fake beards, battery-powered angle grinders, half a dozen replica pistols. He had just lost £750 on the Birmingham debacle. These things started to add up.
But he was also spending money on himself. Of the eventual £100,000 he hoped to steal and use as seed money for the Organisation, he earmarked a percentage that would serve, effectively, as a salary. “I think it was either 30 or 40 percent,” he says today. “I don’t think it was as high as 40. It might have been one-quarter. But there was a bit that I designated for me, for traveling and seeing the world.”
He told himself that traveling back to East Asia, to Thailand or Cambodia, would tie in with his overall philanthropic mission anyway. It would be like fieldwork. Going to Amsterdam to spend two days smoking cannabis, on the other hand, cannot be rationalized away. Stephen accepts this. “It would be wrong to say that ‘he did this exclusively for the greater good and not for himself,’ because I did write that there would be a percentage that I would keep personally.”
The West Mercia Police—the force who would ultimately prosecute Stephen—made much of the fact that he had planned to spend some of his stolen money on himself. DI Fox says that in the diaries they hold, there were lists of the things Stephen planned to acquire for himself, from laser eye surgery to round-the-world travel to his own flat. He does not believe Stephen’s plans for the Organisation were genuine. “He talks about setting up a company to look at living on the moon,” he says, before describing how strange he finds much of Stephen’s writing. “I think sometimes it’s almost like a brain fart. It comes out and appears on the page and then that’s that. It might not ever appear again.”
The question of how to interpret Stephen’s diaries is important. Because they are preserved in black and white, in his own handwriting, the temptation is to view everything on the page as Stephen’s considered final word. So if he writes that he would like to pay for laser eye surgery with some of the money he has stolen, then this must mean he is absolutely committed to doing so. Likewise, if he writes that he wants to start moon colonies, then this must mean he is completely delusional if not mad.
But Stephen did not chisel his diaries in stone. They were not his final word on anything so much as a written record of a mind in motion: snapshots of thoughts and ideas as they passed through his head. If he imagined buying his own flat with some of the money he would steal, then there was a good chance he would write about it. If he imagined moon colonization or underwater cities as a solution to global overpopulation, then there was also a good chance he would write about it. It didn’t mean that either of these things were driving his actions the following day, or crossed his mind for the weeks or months to come. They were just things that occurred to him and which he wrote down. Like DI Fox says, brain farts. Everybody has them. Stephen just spent a lot of time committing them to paper. We also have to keep in mind that he went through periods of smoking a lot of cannabis. “That’s another thing to be aware of. Just because I wrote something doesn’t mean it is exactly what I think,” he says. “It might have been clouded by my weed smoking.”
On the flip side, what you do see in his diaries is Stephen’s inability to lie to himself about himself. Even though he had created a world in which he was heroic, a new Robin Hood, he nevertheless confessed that one of his motivations was “power and wealth.” A fan of The Lord of the Rings, in one diary entry he compared the corrupting effect of crime and money to the dark lord Sauron’s ring of power. Frodo Baggins, a naïve hobbit from the countryside, sets off with the intention of destroying this evil only to find that the longer he is exposed to it, the more the evil whispers seductively. Stephen wrote that “the allure” of wealth was doing the same thing to him.
Like the ‘One Ring’ it is subtle, so small—yet there is a draw in money—one which accompanies the feeling of getting momentary control.
Then there was his mother to think about. In the spring of 2008, Stephen returned to Manstone Avenue for her birthday. He told her he was going to take her out for dinner to celebrate, and drove her down to the Sidmouth seafront, where he had made a reservation at the Hotel Riviera. A posh hotel that seemed to pride itself on belonging to another era, it had an imposing faux-Georgian façade and an atmosphere of hushed propriety. It was popular with the kind of affluent retirees Sidmouth had always attracted, as either residents or visitors, and was used to serving them. It was not used to serving schizophrenic women from local council estates and their socially awkward sons. But Stephen felt an overwhelming desire to do something special for his mother. So a waiter walked them to their table and left them there, facing each other, as the sea rolled and broke on the beach outside.
Earlier that day, Stephen had returned to the quiet woodland outside of Sidmouth where he had hidden £1,000 in cash. He located the old oak tree and hoisted himself up, climbing its branches until he could see the nook where he had hidden the money. But after fishing it out and lowering himself back to the ground, he found that the plastic bag he had wrapped it in had done nothing to stop rain and damp reaching the now soaked banknotes. It was a warm morning, so he decided to dry them out in the sunshine, laying a long row of notes out on the grass. He sat beneath the tree, waiting contentedly. At one point, a pair of dog walkers passed within ten yards or so of him, but didn’t spot the money. They waved at Stephen. He waved back.
He used £70 to pay for his mother’s birthday dinner. Back at the Hotel Riviera restaurant, the two of them looked at each other and smiled a little awkwardly. “This is nice,” his mother said after a while. Yes, Stephen nodded. It was nice. He ordered his mother a series of desserts, knowing that she was unlikely to eat anything else. He quietly asked the waiter if he could put a candle in one of the slices of cake, but when it arrived his mother was not quite sure what to say or do. People, Stephen noticed, were looking at them. His mother’s hair was frizzy and wild, her clothes bright and mismatched. “She didn’t know,” he says. “She always saw people in a very positive way, even when they were clearly not that, which used to frustrate me sometimes. But I didn’t say anything. I just tried to ignore them.”
As he entered his teens, Stephen had tried to understand why his mother was like this. Was she born with schizophrenia? Or did she develop it somehow? Jenny had grown up in Paignton, a town thirty miles down the Devon coast from Sidmouth. Her father had worked in telecommunications and her mother had been a Labour councilor. Stephen’s mother had been considered a “rebellious” teenager by the standards of 1950s Devon and ended up spending time in some kind of “care home,” where she suffered abuse, the exact nature of which Stephen does not know. He remembers his father still being angry that Jenny’s parents had allowed her to be taken away. In the 1960s, she became involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Devon’s hippie scene. It is possible, says Stephen, that a combination of abuse and exposure to psychedelic drugs exacerbated an underlying psychological issue.
Equally, though, she may have simply inherited her schizophrenia. Her uncle Noel also had the condition. He once made the news for canoeing around the fountains in Trafalgar Square. “He was a really eccentric person apparently,” says Stephen brightly. “He ended up getting lost at sea. That was the demise of Uncle Noel.”
At the Hotel Riviera, Stephen and his mother sat there, sharing ice cream. Because of her medication, normal conversation was impossible, but there was still a sense that they were both trying their best. “It was an effort on both our parts,” says Stephen. Perhaps they came close to feeling some kind of connection and intimacy, the kind that Stephen had only the faintest memories of but had craved his whole adult life. He enjoyed the act of paying for her dinner. He told himself that, with his father dead, he had an obligation to support his mother financially. At this moment in time he couldn’t really do that. But once the Organisation was up and running? Then he would. It was just another reason to keep going. Everything was.