Stephen drove away from Parro’s gun store, keeping to the speed limit and heading east into the small town of Waterbury. His forearms trembled as he gripped the wheel. Nevertheless, he reviewed what had just happened and looked for positives. Had he really done anything so wrong? It’s not like he’d snatched the gun before he ran out or made threats to anyone. Yes, the owner seemed to be on the phone to the police. But even if he was, were they likely to send officers to investigate a fake ID? And if they did, how urgently were they really going to respond? If he could just put some distance between himself and the gun store, then he would be in the clear. The key was to behave normally. He drove past rows of pretty colonial houses, their timber walls painted white or deep russet red, with neat green lawns and American flags out front. At a roundabout, he took a left onto Route 100, which headed north out of Waterbury, over the interstate and past the factory where, he had read in a tourist leaflet, they made Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
He drove for ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds. Then up ahead, at a junction for cars coming off the interstate, he spotted a police cruiser with lights flashing. This did not worry him immediately. Over the past few days, he had often seen police cars waiting at roadsides, lights on, letting drivers know they were there watching for speeders. Stephen kept driving. He passed the interchange, aiming his car down the wide, quiet road and toward the thickly forested hills crowding the horizon. More seconds passed and nothing happened. He pressed the accelerator down just a fraction. Trees sped past him on either side. Something in the heavy gray sky caught his eye. He wondered if it was a bald eagle.
Sirens sliced through his thoughts. He immediately checked his mirrors. The police cruiser was about twenty yards behind him and closing, flashing him to pull over. Stephen complied, bringing the Dodge to a halt beside the metal guardrail, beyond which was open country. From his side-view mirror, he watched the state trooper approach his car, his right hand on his holster, rain flowing over the edges of his broad-brimmed hat. Opening the window, Stephen saw that the trooper was a young, clean-shaven man with a crew cut and dark, impassive eyes. He asked to see some ID, and Stephen handed him his genuine British driving license. “Then he said, ‘I would like a few words with you, please,’ ” remembers Stephen, who stepped out of the car and into the rain. “He said, ‘Have you been at Henry Parro’s gun store?’ I denied it at first. For a fleeting second I looked at the car and thought…can I jump back in and drive away?”
A few moments later, a pickup truck pulled up behind the police car. Henry Parro stepped out with his gun, but deliberately kept his distance from the two men before him. “One of the things that we do is that when a police officer is dealing with someone, I always stay back, because it could be intimidating or overwhelming if two people are trying to talk to them,” he says. It was, he continued, an incredible coincidence that Stephen happened to drive right past the police car when he did. Parro chuckles. “There was a trooper that just by luck was coming off the interstate, and Mr. Jackley drove straight past him. The trooper pulled out, turned his siren on, and stopped him within a hundred yards of where he was passed. It was just perfect timing.”
On the roadside, the trooper briefly glanced back at Parro, who gave him a nod. Then he told Stephen he was under arrest. He said that he had reason to believe that he had been involved in a hit-and-run. Which was true. He had failed to stop after backing into a truck when leaving the gun store, a fact Parro had made sure to tell the police dispatcher. Stephen was handcuffed, placed in the trooper’s car, and driven toward the state police barracks in the nearby village of Middlesex. There was a large German shepherd in the rear of the cruiser, impassive and still behind a wire mesh. Stephen looked out the window and saw what seemed like smoke rising from a valley below. It puzzled him. He asked the trooper what it was. Just condensation, he replied. Rising up from a creek.
As Stephen was driven through the countryside, his mind turned. He could get out of this, he reassured himself. It may involve paying a fine. It may involve posting bail. But he could afford that. He was just an English geography student on holiday who tried to get a gun as part of a stupid bet with a friend. They had believed him in Istanbul. They would believe him here.
A very short time later, Special Agent Scott Murray of the ATF was driving to the Middlesex police barracks in order to interview Stephen. Short and in his midthirties, with close-cropped dark hair and bright, appraising eyes, Murray was a former officer with the Phoenix Police Department. He joined the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2001. The laxness of Vermont’s gun laws meant that the state was a magnet for arms traffickers, and there existed a circular underground trade as organized criminals from the big East Coast cities came to Vermont to obtain cheap and readily available high-powered weapons that could then be smuggled out of state and back to New York or Boston. As part of the process, cheap and readily available drugs from New York and Boston were brought into Vermont and sold at a healthy markup. New England junkies were happy. Big-city gang members were happy. Special Agent Murray was busy.
“The majority of the cases that I work are related to heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, things like that,” he says. “A lot of gun cases that we do are using firearms in the furtherance of drug trafficking, or related to robberies and murders.”
When Murray arrived, Stephen was being held in a small interview room. He had been advised of his Miranda rights and had signed a document waiving them. He was ready to talk. Murray sat opposite him with an ATF colleague and began to ask questions. It was not the kind of interrogation you see in movies, says Murray, where men with rolled-up sleeves lean over a suspect and try to break his will or catch him out somehow. “For me that has never worked,” he says. Instead, Murray spoke to him directly but with a matter-of-fact congeniality. Above all, he wanted to listen to what Stephen had to say and judge to what degree it seemed coherent. “The general thing you are looking for is, does the story they are telling make sense to you? Do the set of facts they are telling me come easily to them? Do their answers come easily? Or are they grasping and trying to think up a story, rather than just telling you the truth, which should come out pretty naturally?”
Initially, the story Stephen presented seemed to have elements of truth to it. He explained that he was a geography student from the United Kingdom and that he was on holiday. He told them where he was staying. He admitted that the ID he had was fake, that he’d bought it online, and that he had tried to buy the gun at Parro’s store in order to win a £100 bet with a friend. He told Murray that had he succeeded, he would most likely have just taken a photograph of it and then tried to sell the weapon before returning to the UK.
Special Agent Murray frowned internally at this explanation. It sounded…well…odd, and Stephen presented it in a vague and halting manner. “He was a little elusive about what his intentions were,” says Murray. But the ATF agent did not want to rush to any conclusions. It was not impossible that this awkward young British man really was just doing this all for a strange bet. It was no more or less likely than him being a wanted criminal. “If an average person looked at him walking down the street, they would not think of him as a bank robber, right?”
Even so, something about his story and, increasingly, his countenance did not feel right. Stephen had never been very good at lying to people. For one thing, his social isolation meant he’d had little practice. And, as is the case with many people on the autism spectrum, when Stephen did interact with others, he tended toward directness and unfiltered honesty. It’s not that he was incapable of lying, because the whole “bet with a university friend” story was one. But, rather, he struggled to lie on the spot, to convincingly improvise. He was acutely aware of this, and so preferred to talk around potentially incriminating questions rather than just come up with something untrue. “I guess it’s part of the Asperger’s,” he says. “But even with the police, even with people I saw as the enemy, when they asked me difficult questions, I had to circumvent them rather than lying directly.”
And there was something else that Special Agent Murray noticed and did not like. Stephen was not at all subtle about his desire to get out of the small, secure space. Every so often, Murray and his colleague might leave the room for a few moments, and then on their return, catch Stephen peering out the window, glancing about for cameras. “You could see his thought bubble,” says Murray. “He was constantly looking around, thinking, ‘How do I get out of this situation that I am in?’ ”
After an hour or so of questioning, Murray asked Stephen if he would allow them to search his car. Stephen says that he was told they would be able to do this with a judge’s permission anyway, but that securing this permission could take some time. If he just gave his consent for the search now, they could get it over with and then perhaps he’d be able to go. “He made it seem as if they just wanted to check that there were no guns in the boot.” So with the possibility of release in sight, Stephen agreed.
The agents searched the car. They found a United States Postal Service shipping box. They found a backpack. Inside the backpack, Murray found a red notebook. It was Stephen’s diary. To this day, Stephen does not know why he thought it would be a good idea to bring his diary—a book that absolutely implicated him in a one-man web of crime and chaos—along with him on his attempt to illegally acquire a firearm. “I could have left it at the guesthouse,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t know why I took it with me. It’s crazy. I thought there was a chance they might flick through it. But I didn’t think they would actually read the thing.”
In a separate room, Special Agent Murray actually read the thing. He scanned the handwriting and tried to get a handle on precisely what it all meant. As he worked through it, he saw that in some ways, it did seem to confirm what Stephen had already claimed: that he was a British student on a sightseeing trip to Vermont who wanted to hike the wilderness, see black bears, and also, if possible, get a gun.
But then there was more to it than that. In and among the pages of poetic odes to nature and thoughts on the general cheerfulness of Americans, there were references that were unambiguously about crime. “He talked in some of these writings about prior bank robberies,” says Murray. “He even wrote in his diaries about potential interest in committing an armed robbery here in the United States before he goes back. And so as an investigator you first look at that with a healthy skepticism. You think, okay, it’s written down here, but is it true?”
Special Agent Murray came back into the interview room. It was now evening. He sat down opposite Stephen and told him they had “obtained some detailed information from your vehicle,” though initially he did not reveal that he had read the diary in detail. He asked about the shipping box and Stephen told him that, okay, yes, he had considered trying to smuggle the Glock back to the UK in the post, but that he doubts he would actually have gone through with it.
Murray asked about the diary. And while Stephen was cautious, he was still not too concerned. He seemed to believe—or perhaps he just allowed himself to hope—that the contents weren’t so incriminating. Even today, he says the diary was mostly just observations about New England. Which is true. Apart from the bits that aren’t. In a signed affidavit provided to Vermont’s District Court the following day, Special Agent Murray described how he found “handwritten notes inside alluding to the commission of an intended armed robbery. Notes were made about the ‘multi-missioned USA trip’ where Jackley listed obtaining a Glock pistol with ammunition, silencer, stun gun, stun grenades, wigs, beards and makeup.”
Did Stephen plan to commit a heist in America? He says that he’d briefly considered it prior to setting off but ultimately rejected the idea. Same with the apparent desire for “stun grenades” and disguises. They were just thoughts that had passed through his head, which he had written down and then forgotten about or abandoned in favor of other ideas. “There was an irony in the fact that he was an intelligent person. But he was writing down his plans and prior involvement in criminal acts on paper that could be used as evidence against him,” says Murray, with patient good humor. “Some of his writing showed intelligence for sure. But it’s just not stuff that most people would want to write down.”
He still did not confront Stephen directly with the specific contents of the diary. Instead, he continued to ask straightforward, general questions before then homing in on what seemed like very specific things that helped corroborate some of what he had seen written down. Special Agent Murray somehow got Stephen to divulge that he was wanted for armed robbery in the Netherlands, though he insisted the charges were false and that there was no warrant out for his arrest. Murray made a note and thanked Stephen for the information.
“I think he was very clever,” says Stephen. “I don’t think they ever showed their hand. Agent Murray was clever in his questioning by leading the conversation on casual things—what I studied, what university was like and so on—before suddenly firing a drilling question that I needed to answer really carefully, like why did I want that specific type of Glock or what had I been doing in London the previous week. And I would think…how did you know I flew from London?”
Stephen encouraged Murray to disregard the contents of the diaries, claiming most of the entries were written when he was stoned or drunk. At one point, they found a handwritten receipt for the Glock Stephen had ordered from the private dealer hidden in his sock and showing that he had paid $500 and needed to pay only a final $75 to take the gun. “Nonetheless,” Murray noted in his affidavit, “Jackley denied it.”
Night had fallen around the Middlesex police barracks. The ATF had by now contacted the British Consulate and explained that Stephen had been arrested and that he was going to be charged by the U.S. Attorney’s office with knowingly providing a false statement and providing false identification intended to deceive a licensed firearms dealer in the attempted acquisition of a firearm. Stephen was told that he would be held until he could stand before a judge, who would then rule on bail terms. He was handcuffed and escorted to a waiting police car. He would be driven the thirty or so miles to the city of Burlington, where he would be detained at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility.
From the back of the car, the passing hills loomed inky black and looked even more beautiful for their mystery. Stephen gazed at them and thought about black bears, and whether he might still get the chance to see some in the wild on this trip. Despite everything—despite the odd sensation he had experienced at the summit of Owl’s Head Mountain—he did not feel as though his mission was now over. “I thought, okay, I’m going to spend a couple of days in a county jail. But all I need to do is get bail, which I didn’t see as an obstacle. I don’t think at that stage they had indicated they had read the diaries,” he says quietly. “Or that they would be contacting the UK police.”
At some point over the next few days, between the twentieth and twenty-second of May, detectives with the West Mercia Police were contacted by federal agents in the United States. Detective Inspector Jim Fox says it was the FBI who first got in touch by email. They explained that a University of Worcester student had been arrested in Vermont, that he had tried to buy a gun using a fake ID, and that based on the evidence they had recovered they had reason to suspect he was connected to further, deeper, altogether more dangerous levels of criminality.
One of the things that seemed to concern the growing number of U.S. law enforcement officials who had now read Stephen’s diaries was his habit of using the word “we” when writing about his plans for robberies and the acquisition of firearms. We will do this. We will do that. We must be careful. It is not uncommon for people with Asperger’s to sometimes refer to themselves in the first-person plural like this. But the ATF and FBI agents poring over the diaries recovered from Stephen’s car did not know he had Asperger’s. Nobody did. So to find out more about the odd young man currently being held at Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility, they asked if Worcester CID would be able to search his residence hall room. They said that of course they would.
A search warrant was quickly issued, and on Friday, May 23, detectives arrived at Wyvern Hall and started to root through his small, spartan bedroom. They began to take replica pistols and real knives and place them into evidence bags, but they did not get very far. One of the detective constables discovered what he suspected was an improvised explosive device. There were some urgent conversations among officers and, very quickly, an evacuation of the entire area was ordered. Students, teachers, and small children were ushered outside and into the spring afternoon. Army bomb disposal experts were called in. A tight police cordon was quickly established.
Louise Alice Cawood was returning to Wyvern Hall with a group of fellow residents around midafternoon when they spotted the heavy police presence. Approaching a uniformed officer, they asked what was happening. “All we got told was that there was a policing incident and investigation in the top flat,” she says. Quickly, rumors began to spread among the students. “We were hearing stuff about all these machine guns and knives and blades being found.” Everyone present seemed to agree that it was almost certainly something to do with the quiet guy whose room was in the top flat. None of them could recall his name, but it just made a sort of sense. “One of the rumors was that he was going to set fire to our halls. Or that he was going to go around and do that American thing when they go round and kill loads of schoolkids,” she says. “We never even got told the truth.”
The bomb disposal team realized that the bomb Stephen had constructed was not really a bomb. DI Fox was not at Wyvern Hall at the time, but grins when he describes what he later heard about the incident back at the station. “I am told a detective constable came wandering down the stairs holding a bomb, and I think some advice was given to the DC on procedures when finding a device and which didn’t involve carrying it down the stairs and saying ‘Sarge! I’ve found a bomb!’ We had a forensic report done, and it did actually have a firework involved,” he quickly adds, a little more somberly. “So it would have made a bang and sparks and stuff.”
After hearing about the bomb and some of the items found in the room, DI Fox decided he wanted to visit Wyvern Hall and see for himself. Because as wildly unlikely as it sounded, a possibility was beginning to form in his mind. The fake guns. The fake bomb. The knives. “We realized he was potentially our robber,” he says. On May 27, Fox entered the empty room on the top floor of Wyvern Hall. He saw the letters “RH” carved on the wall, and a jolt shot through him. He opened folders and found maps of nearby towns with the locations of banks clearly marked, along with escape routes and changeover locations. He picked up diaries and read. He saw plans. Dates. Times. Amounts. Descriptions of the robberies that had succeeded and descriptions of the robberies that had failed. Descriptions of driving home to Devon and further robberies committed there. He found the clothes and backpack he recognized from the CCTV stills. He found the “paying-out” slip made to Robin Hood. He found the silly blond mop-top wig the teenagers had jeered at. He found everything, there, in a small bare room on the local university campus.
After taking the time to absorb it all, Fox stood in the center of the small room and let out a breath.
“Christ,” he said, to nobody in particular.
A few days earlier, four thousand miles away, Stephen was escorted to a pretrial hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome J. Niedermeier. It was taking place in the Federal Building in Burlington, a large complex home to several different agencies, including the local ATF field office where Special Agent Murray was based. It was a bright blue morning, and Stephen was escorted from the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility by a pair of U.S. Marshals. As well as apprehending fugitives and guarding federal facilities, the responsibilities of U.S. Marshals include the transportation of federal prisoners, and the two men who came for Stephen were businesslike but friendly. One of them was young and broad, the other much older, with neat gray hair, a pressed short-sleeved shirt, and a distinctive bow tie.
It was May 22. In the two full days since his arrest, Stephen had been assigned a public defender, a bespectacled man with a goatee who Stephen described as scatty, meek, and suffering from a bad case of halitosis. The two of them entered the courtroom, Stephen in handcuffs and watched over by the two marshals. The judge sat in front of a large Stars and Stripes, and displayed on a screen in large black letters was a single sentence:
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA VS STEPHEN JACKLEY
The hearing began. Stephen was already agitated and struggling to contain a fizzing, nervous energy when, almost immediately, it became clear this was not going to end how he’d hoped it would. As soon as the prosecutor began to speak, he realized that they had read his diary from cover to cover. Nothing about Stephen’s references to stun grenades, disguises, heists, evading “the pigs,” and gun smuggling would make Judge Niedermeier sympathetic to the idea of allowing bail. Stephen Jackley, the prosecution continued, was not just an individual who’d broken federal law, but someone who may well have committed offenses in other countries, too. They explained that they were already liaising with UK police forces about this strong possibility. There was still much about the true nature of Stephen Jackley’s identity that needed to be uncovered, and to allow him to walk away would be not just unwise. It would be dangerous.
“They mentioned something about Interpol saying that I was a flight risk, and they mentioned Holland as well, that I might be wanted globally, that I might be part of a terrorist cell,” says Stephen, sighing at the recollection. “They were really drawing it out of proportion.” Months later, when Stephen was interviewed by an FBI agent at Southern State Correctional Facility, this concern was still present. “He asked me some pretty far-flung questions, most of which were completely irrelevant to my case or anything I have ever done. Stuff about criminal organizations, explosives, and anarchism. Perhaps some of this explains the nightly strip searches and cell moves.”
Whatever his attorney then stood up and stammered had no effect. Stephen couldn’t even hear his words. The judge would not grant bail. The two marshals escorted Stephen back to a small holding cell within the Federal Building. The choking panic that had begun to slowly creep up his torso during the hearing now had him by the throat. Strange faces regarded him blankly as he was led down corridors in handcuffs. He needed to be free. Not simply for freedom’s sake, but so that he could try to think of some way to dispose of all the evidence in his residence hall bedroom before the police found it. Perhaps he could call someone—anyone—and ask them to clear his room. But he couldn’t do that from inside a cell.
The marshals locked the door and left him. He began to pace agitatedly, covering his eyes with his hands and muttering in distress. Suddenly he stopped, slammed his head against the wall, and fell to the ground in a heap. He lay there, twitching every few moments, spittle dribbling from his mouth. After some time, the younger of the two U.S. Marshals came to check on him and found him prostrate. “He was on the floor, stiff as a board, foaming out the mouth and twitching uncontrollably,” remembers Deputy John Curtis. “It was what you’d see if a bad actor were having a seizure on television. I opened the cell and asked him if he was okay, and he looked up at me then rolled his eyes back into his head. He would stop for a while, maybe fifteen to twenty seconds, and then get right back into it.”
He called for the older deputy in the bow tie, and the two men stood over the sporadically convulsing Stephen, trying to work out what to do. Deputy Curtis did not believe Stephen was having a fit. His intuition was correct. Stephen was faking it. His hope was that he would be taken to a hospital, where an opportunity to escape might present itself. Mimicking full-body spasms on the floor, he ignored the two marshals’ patient demands to stop. Instead, he just kept making himself shake and spray drool. “I was twitching and shaking because when I’ve seen seizures, people generally move slightly,” he explains. “So I was doing that constantly. But it was surprisingly tiring just doing this constant small movement. I was exhausted.”
Protocol demanded that the marshals provide Stephen with medical attention. An ambulance was called, and under the constant supervision of the two men, he was driven to the University of Vermont Medical Center. Upon arrival, he was placed in a wheelchair and assessed by a doctor and a team of nurses. Stephen’s actions were not founded on total fantasy. Two days earlier, prison staff had observed that he had a rasping cough and fever. After completing a medical questionnaire in which Stephen had truthfully answered that he had visited East Asia in the past few years, he was taken to the hospital for some tests, most likely to guard against the possibility of him having avian bird flu. He had noticed then that, even though he was under escort, security had been relatively low-key and relaxed.
To Stephen’s annoyance, things were very different on this occasion. The two marshals were taking absolutely no chances. “I remember them being really keen that I was handcuffed to the wheelchair. They were totally obsessed about security,” he says, frowning, as though this were some curious personality quirk of theirs. “I didn’t expect them to be constantly watching over me.”
He continued his bouts of fake convulsing. Doctors and nurses ran a plethora of tests. The room was filled with people, but Stephen’s plan required that he be left alone for at least a short period of time. “I thought that if I could get out of a window, then I could just run and outpace them,” he says, never mind the fact he was in handcuffs and leg-irons. “I am not a violent person, but worst-case scenario, I thought I will be able to disarm one of them. My preferable option would have been just jumping out a window. From there, I would have just run into the wild.”
All the tests showed that Stephen was fine. He sat slumped in the wheelchair, pretending to be unconscious. Then the room began to empty. The voices of medical staff and the older marshal drifted away and a door shut. All Stephen could hear now was the low steady beep of a heart-rate monitor. Finally, he was alone. He let a few moments pass to be sure.
“Then he opens his eye real quick, thinking no one else is in the room,” says Deputy Curtis, who had been standing over him in absolute silence. “He sees me and then closes his eye immediately. I have a quick conversation with him about how I am here and I just witnessed what he did and that it’s time for us to get back to the office. It wasn’t too long after that he recovered from his symptoms. I think he just needed someone to say, ‘The jig is up, you can stop with the act, this isn’t working and we have places to be.’ ”
Deputy Curtis says that given the nature of his job, he was well used to being around some very desperate and upset people, and the key to managing these situations is to be firm but patient and understanding. “It’s the worst day of their lives, and I’m not trying to make it any harder.”
Even now, handcuffed in the back of a secure moving vehicle, the front of his orange jumpsuit drenched in his own spit, Stephen had still not given up hope of escape. But he knew that he didn’t have much time. “I realized the doors were locked, but I thought there might be a way to disarm the lock, so I was discreetly trying to reach the buttons,” he says. Deputy Curtis could see what Stephen was thinking—he could see the thought bubbles over his head—and intervened. “He was paying way too much attention on how to exit the vehicle. I got his attention off the door and onto me and told him that it wasn’t a very good idea.”
The marshals then made what seemed to be a series of long phone calls from the front of the van. They were speaking to the staff at the Northwest State Correctional Facility, where Stephen was being taken, and advising them about his behavior. Despite his crime and despite his diaries and despite the possibility he was wanted in other countries, at the start of the day, it was not guaranteed that Stephen would be placed straight into solitary confinement. But like a panicked child trying to free himself from a Chinese finger trap, the more he strained toward freedom, the tighter the grip around him became. “I am sure that information was passed on to the facility about his alleged seizure and his behavior,” says Deputy Curtis. “And the facility is going to treat it as they see fit. He happened to act up on one day with the marshal service while he was in federal custody. That’s it really.”
When Stephen arrived at NWSCF, there were eight armed guards waiting for him in an underground parking garage. The doors of the van swung open and he was ordered to lie on his back. Large, heavy hands reached out and pinned his ankles to the floor as leg-irons were clamped and locked around him. The guards surrounded him and he was half-marched, half-dragged through the prison intake area. He passed the marshal with the bow tie, who was talking to a man in a suit. Both men watched Stephen as he passed, but said nothing.
They entered a corridor. The chains around his legs made a long, eerie groan as he lost his footing and was pulled along the hard polished floor. Voices from the cells lining the corridor called out, shadowy faces pressed against doors, but Stephen’s eyes were on the floor. The procession stopped outside a six-by-nine-foot prison cell, and he stumbled inside as the door buzzed shut behind him. Breathing short, shallow breaths, he looked around him. All he could see was solid wall. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. He shut his eyes and tried to wish himself free. Images flashed and dissipated. He saw the view from Owl’s Head Mountain. He saw a Cambodian forest at dawn. He saw a lake in the French countryside. From high in the branches of a tree he could see a small Devon town nestled beside a vast green sea, and it looked beautiful. He thought of Robin Hood. He thought of children searching through scrap heaps and of beggars in Exeter and of cities on the moon. He opened his eyes, and the walls were still there. It was the end. It was over. He sat down on his concrete bunk and cried.
The materials uncovered at Wyvern Hall proved beyond doubt that Stephen was the mysterious figure at the center of Operation Gandalf. Prosecutors would later describe his room as being a “treasure trove of evidence.” DI Fox admits he has never seen anything like it. “You start reading this stuff where he’s basically confessing to the robberies in his diaries and you just think…he’s copped it for us,” he says, puffing out his cheeks. “I think the Americans call it a ‘slam dunk.’ ”
DI Fox and Special Agent Murray conferred. Federal agents in the United States provided British police with Stephen’s fingerprints and DNA, helping to make the looming case against him watertight. The Dutch police issued a European Arrest Warrant after Stephen failed to respond to their requests to return to Amsterdam, and there was some to-and-fro among authorities in the UK, the United States, and the Netherlands over procedure. Upon learning the full facts of the case, though, the Dutch seemed more than happy to walk away. “I think they were pretty much like, ‘If you have him for eight armed robberies you can keep him,’ ” says DI Fox. “ ‘We don’t really want him that badly.’ ”
The British police built their case against Stephen while, at the same time, he waited to be tried for his crime in America. After a month at Northwest State Correctional Facility, Stephen was moved to SSCF, to Foxtrot Unit and the Hole, to Stinky and the snapper. According to records held by the Vermont Department of Prisons, Stephen spent 134 days, 5 hours, and 36 minutes at SSCF. A few weeks before he left he was visited by Special Agent Murray and an FBI agent who briefly questioned him again. In late October 2008, U.S. Marshals escorted Stephen to the U.S. District courthouse in Burlington, where he stood trial for his attempt to buy a gun from Henry Parro using a fake ID. He was sentenced to ten months in jail, inclusive of the five he had by then already served. When asked if he wished to say anything upon being sentenced, he stood up. “I am sorry for breaking your law,” he said quietly, before being taken away.
He was moved to Strafford County Jail, where he endured suicide watch before joining the general population. Then he was transferred to MDC Brooklyn, to the witch doctor, iglesia, and New Year’s fireworks over Manhattan. In February 2009, he was visited by a woman working for the British Embassy who explained to him that upon the completion of his U.S. sentence, he would be deported to the UK. If he contested his deportation, she said, he would simply be extradited. He agreed not to contest it. He was then moved to New York’s Orange County Correctional Facility, where he spent a further seven weeks serving out the remainder of his sentence, before being transferred to Varick Street Detention Center, a facility in Manhattan run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He spent almost two months there, guarded by ICE agents and waiting to be deported.
On May 12, 2009, Stephen was escorted back to the United Kingdom. He spent the flight from JFK to Heathrow wedged between a pair of federal agents and was arrested the moment he stepped off the plane. That night, in his cell at Worcester police station, he wrote a long, rambling poem in black pen, filling both sides of a sheet of notepaper.
Sitting in a jail cell, deep in the black night
back from America, one year in prisons;
back to the Isle—my home, my punishment;
no chances, no ways—nabbed off the flight,
first breaths of Freedom flew like a cloud
just like the vapour the aeroplane passed
I stole from the rich, gave to the poor,
took from gambling houses, banks and corporations—
now they’ve put my face on 21 cards;
but no game of Blackjack is this, no Ace and King—
it was sweet, when I ruled the world,
when every horizon was a dream and opportunity,
when the wind blew strong and fresh,
the sky so high and clear—no barriers, no boundaries…
but now these four stale walls border my world
casting darkness deeper than the night outside
The lamentation and self-reproach went on and on and on. There was angst but also a perceptiveness and self-knowledge that seemed to belie his actions over the past two years. One line, jotted at the bottom of the first side of paper, is jarring in its clear-eyed analysis.
O learn this well and know the moral:
Chase not your obsessions without forgetting your dreams.