The unusual suspect

But Stephen Jackley was not like most geography students. He had travelled to America with a plan to obtain a gun illegally – a Glock 26 semi-automatic pistol – a plan he bungled and that led to his arrest. It was this moment that signalled the end of a criminal career so extraordinary, so unlikely and at times so surreal that it’s difficult to know where to start when trying to make sense of it all. This, it turns out, is a sentiment Jackley shares.

“Looking back, the thing that strikes me is my naivety and my inability to understand the full impact of my actions,” he will tell me later, quietly, mug of tea in hand. “I was someone who not only went off the rails, but who lacked an understanding of both the world and the consequences of what I was doing. I thought what I was doing was necessary and right. But now I can see that, no, no, that was not the case.”

Already, at this point, you may have some questions. I know I did, even having read his short, self-published book sketching his experiences in the US penal system and the circumstances that led him there. So perhaps a good starting point might be to ask, why did Stephen Jackley need a gun? The answer is that he needed a gun because he was conducting a string of solo bank robberies back in the UK and had come to the conclusion that he could probably use one. But why was he robbing banks? Because he had decided that there was so much inequality in the world that something needed to be done. He’d developed an obsession with Robin Hood – Jackley’s Asperger’s syndrome was as yet undiagnosed – so formulated a simple plan that involved robbing from the rich and giving to the poor while ostensibly being nothing more than an insular, socially awkward student. He stole thousands of pounds from banks, bookmakers’ and building societies across the southwest, sometimes using nothing more than a blond wig, a replica gun and a note passed to a cashier informing them that, yes, this was indeed a robbery.

“Anyone with half a brain can rob a bank,” he says. This is something he tells me on more than one occasion. “You have to have a sense of planning and an awareness of things like CCTV and whether there are police stations nearby and stuff like that. But without wishing to encourage it, it’s extremely easy.”

If this sounds like bravado on Jackley’s part, understand that it is not. If anything, he seems regretful that his crimes had been so easy to commit, and says that he wishes he’d been caught sooner. Police made appeal after appeal, but Jackley was never suspected, let alone questioned, instead returning to his university halls of residence or family home after each robbery as though nothing had happened. Before leaving the scene, he would sometimes leave coins etched with the initials “RH” – Robin Hood – as calling cards. Homeless people would find themselves handed cash marked with the same two letters.

From a distance, the gonzo nature of his crimes often lends them an almost comic dimension. At one point, during a getaway following a failed building society robbery, he caused Exeter city centre to be evacuated thanks to a fake bomb he’d constructed and carried with him for just such an eventuality. “It was essentially just a plastic bottle filled with a mixture of Coca-Cola and milk, with wires taped to the side,” he explains. Reflecting on it now, he half-winces at the sheer ludicrousness of it. “It was just a crazy back-up option.”

But one of the things that makes Jackley’s story so compelling is that, no matter how crazy, time and again his plans actually worked. It’s part of the reason why his rap sheet today is so long: he managed to commit an awful lot of crime in the few months between embarking on his spree and being arrested in the US. After being extradited back to the UK following almost a year in American jails, he was eventually charged with 21 offences including robberies, attempted robberies and firearms possession. He pleaded guilty to 18 of them and was sentenced to 13 years in prison, which was later shortened to 12 to reflect the effect his Asperger’s may have played in his actions. In May last year, he was released.

Which brings us to where we are today: in a small, drab meeting room in an office space above a charity shop in Bristol. The office is used by a number of local social enterprises, and Jackley, now 30, has a desk in one corner, from which he runs a tiny publishing company called Arkbound, which he set up with the help of the Prince’s Trust.

“It’s quite awkward, isn’t it?” he says once we’ve managed all the small talk we can muster and the interview we’d spent a few weeks arranging via email actually begins. There’s a pause. He looks down at the digital voice recorder on the table between us. “I’ve never really spoken into a Dictaphone before.”

Stephen Jackley

TOM JACKSON

My fear at this point – my fear before even meeting him – was that he wouldn’t really talk. I knew he’d written letters to local newspapers while he was in prison in an attempt to explain his actions (letters described by the Mirror as “bizarre”) and I’d read Just Sky, the slim volume about his experiences (half the proceeds have been given to two charities, Victim Support and Prison Fellowship). But to sit down, face to face, and go through it all with a stranger? I didn’t know if he was up to it. I kept expecting our interview to be cancelled. And when it wasn’t, part of me imagined that he simply wasn’t going to show.

But he does. He wears a T-shirt, black tracksuit bottoms and wire-framed glasses. Jackley is slim but muscular – he practises yoga and enjoys kayaking – and is reserved, although without necessarily seeming nervous. Later, he will laugh and even fetch some childhood photos and copies of his American prison paperwork, but to begin with he speaks with the kind of slightly formal precision that reminds you, ironically enough, of a police officer.

He talks about his childhood. Growing up alone, with no siblings, his father worked as an industrial engineer while his mother was an artist. Both parents struggled with their mental health. His father “had manic depression, I think, although I may be wrong”, he says a little absently, although his mother’s diagnosis was all too straightforward: she was schizophrenic, a woman who would draw pictures of strange creatures and post them through neighbours’ letterboxes, or find the finger of suspicion pointed at her when bicycles would begin appearing in nearby rivers.

Sometimes, he says, he would return from school and she would just be gone, having been hospitalised while he was away. In his book, he describes these as the “fortunate occasions”. Far worse was when he’d be locked in his room hearing her screaming as she was forcibly removed. “Several times the police came and dragged her off,” he tells me. “And I suppose it gave me a very negative association with them. It was the same with psychiatrists and any kind of figurehead. I started to see authority in a negative way.”

Listening to him, I’d say the impact of his mother’s illness is almost impossible to calculate. “I mean, they say the link with your mum is really important,” he says almost cautiously, as though it were something he remembers having read. “But I had such a tenuous connection, in that she was always going to hospital, sometimes in quite traumatic circumstances. I think that played a part in how I developed.”

Given his circumstances, you can perhaps see why Jackley’s Asperger’s flew under the radar. “I didn’t really find out I had it until I was actually in custody,” he says. “They made me see a psychiatrist. Although, when I was younger, I did have contact with mental-health services and they identified me as having a ‘social phobia’ or something along those lines.”

Jackley found it difficult first to make friends, and then to keep them. “It was always a struggle for me, forming those relationships,” he says. Instead, as he entered his teenage years, he became increasingly reclusive, immersing himself in subjects such as astronomy, geology, theoretical physics and quantum theory, or simply exploring the rolling bleakness of nearby Dartmoor.

In his late teens he claims he fell under the sway of an older cousin, a builder, and began gambling, studying the form of horses and initially winning more than he lost. Shortly after turning 19, he won enough to fund a round- the-world, gap-year-style trip. Backpacking through southeast Asia, the poverty and inequality he witnessed had a profound effect. He began to think – I don’t think it would be unfair to say “obsess” – over what he perceived to be the evils of global capitalism and the “injustice” of some nations having more than they could possibly need while others remained destitute. “I am contemplating the fruition of unconventional financial gain,” he wrote in a journal entry during this trip. “That is, a project that would see me ‘stealing’. Some bank or financial institution would do.” Although it would be another two years before he attempted his first robbery, the seed had been planted. He was on his way.

A CCTV image of one of Stephen Jackley's Exeter robberies

It’s worth mentioning a few things that happened during those intervening years that almost certainly contributed to Jackley’s eventual actions. First, on returning from his travels, he was interviewed for dozens of jobs – from gardening to office admin – without success. “I always had difficulties with social interactions, in terms of forming friendships and in-group activities. I always seemed to be the person who sat on the outside, who was excluded,” he says. That no employer wanted to take him on only made these feelings more acute. “I felt rejected and discarded from society.”

Around this period, he began regularly to smoke cannabis and take cocaine. This, in combination with bouts of heavy drinking – whisky, mostly – eventually enabled him to get over “the fear factor” of actually robbing a bank. “I used alcohol and cocaine, which are like disinhibitors,” he says. “It takes you outside yourself. Instead of being the normal, regular citizen with a nine-to-five job, you can be someone different, with the confidence to do stuff that you wouldn’t do otherwise.”

Finally, there was the financial crisis, which only confirmed Jackley’s belief that “financial institutions and faceless corporations” were evils to be targeted. All of which is how he came to find himself sitting by a window in an Exeter library, peering down at a city centre bank he had been watching for several days. His plan was to ambush a delivery man he’d observed leaving via a rear entrance at closing time, and demand he let him into the bank. Brandishing an air gun, a 6in combat knife he’d bought on eBay and a bag containing his Coca- Cola bomb, he cornered the delivery man on the street and shouted at him to open the door.

Instead, the delivery man yanked the gun from Jackley’s hand, punched him in the face and kicked him in the leg. In a scramble for the bag containing the fake bomb, Jackley says he drew his knife and screamed at the man to move away. “I went to get the bag and the gun back off him, and he advanced towards me, and the knife then connected with his uniform. Fortunately, it wasn’t serious,” he says.

Now, given Jackley had, by his own admission, been drinking and taking cocaine prior to this, we have to treat his claim that his knife accidentally made contact with the man with a degree of scepticism. Nevertheless, he says the incident left him shaken. “As I ran away I thought, ‘What the hell have I done?’ I was quite shocked by it, and almost that in itself was enough to stop me. But my mentality was, ‘OK, I’ve taken the first step. Now there’s no turning back.’ ”

In the following months, Jackley attempted to rob “around ten” banks and bookmakers’, “seven or eight” of which were successful. He would stash bags with changes of clothes in nearby locations and often entered buildings wearing a disguise. His use of a long blond wig and large sunglasses caused some media outlets to describe him as a “cross-dressing bank robber”. He grins when I ask about this. “I thought it would be a good disguise, but looking back, it was probably quite strange.”

You might want to describe his crime spree as being somehow tragicomic. Only that doesn’t seem like the right word because, again and again, he actually succeeded, sometimes returning to his geography lectures with a backpack full of cash or making his escape via country footpaths, posing as a rambler. Most of his robberies were the kind of “note jobs” he described, but it’s when he tried to veer from this simple system that he struggled. On one occasion, he waited till 2am to cycle to a bank near his university with a battery-powered angle-grinder, but had to abort his attempted break-in when the batteries died. He then got a flat tyre. Even worse was the time he mistakenly broke into a charity housed above a bank. He’d thought he was in the bank’s administration offices and planned to find a way down into the vault, but when he found his way blocked by “a massive door”, he decided to take what he could from the office and get out. It was only later he realised he’d looted a charity. He grimaces. “It was the exact opposite of what I’d intended.”

Robbing the charity – he’d grabbed a camcorder and done some damage during the break-in – had a profound effect on Jackley. “I was extremely angry with myself, and I even sort of self-harmed,” he says. To make amends, he says he began stuffing envelopes full of cash – first £250, then £500, then £750 – and posting them through the charity’s letterbox, with the plan being eventually to repay them £25,000. It was around this time, however, that it began to dawn on Jackley that, for all his success in evading capture, his takings were not of the scale he had envisaged. Some robberies had only resulted in a few hundred pounds being handed over by cashiers; his total haul was around £11,000 – not bad for a beginner in a relatively short space of time, but still nowhere near the £100,000 he’d set himself as a target, after which he planned to stop.

To make things worse, he had yet to give more than a fraction of the stolen cash to those in need. He chastised himself for this in his journal – although I don’t get the sense he’d thought much about exactly how he’d distribute this money to the poor of southeast Asia – and decided that what he needed was to commit a robbery that gained him access to a bank’s safe. “That was my ultimate ambition,” he says. This is why he resolved to get a real gun, something he could fire into the air to force bank workers to lead him to the safe. “My intention was never, ever to use it for harm, to hurt someone with it,” he says, although this isn’t quite true, as he also admits that he liked the idea of having a gun so he could kill himself if faced with capture. “I wanted that option. I got it into my head that I would never get caught, no matter what. I would have shot myself if I saw that coming.”

Which is why, in early 2008, he travelled to Vermont with a fake ID and attempted to buy a pistol from a gun store. The owner knew that something was not right and called the local police, who promptly apprehended Jackley. To begin with, he told them he was buying the gun for a bet with a friend, and gave them permission to search his car. “I didn’t think they would scrutinise all of my diaries, which were full of references to robberies. I had this mentality that the police were incompetent, which they weren’t. They were extremely proficient,” he says, laughing.

The American authorities contacted the British police, who searched Jackley’s halls of residence room to find a treasure trove of evidence: replica guns, more journals, bank robbery plans, disguises and yet another fake bomb, which prompted a partial evacuation of the campus. But even at this stage, Jackley wasn’t necessarily destined for the Hole. However, while he was being transported to court by US marshals, he made “a faint-hearted” bid for freedom, attempting to open the van doors despite being handcuffed.

“Immediately, that sparks concern,” he says. “They knew the English authorities were very keen to get their hands on me and that it would be pretty poor for me to go missing in America. So they didn’t want to take a risk and they put me straight into solitary confinement.”

Jackley’s account of his time in the US penal system is, like so much of his story, almost dreamlike in the telling. And yet for all the trauma of incarceration, it’s hard not to smile at the way he describes some of his experiences with an understated Englishness. For a while, he was forced to share a tiny exercise pen with a known “snapper”, prison talk for someone who’d raped another inmate. “I did my best to avoid him,” he says, frowning. With a rush-hour commuter’s tut and roll of the eyes, he talks about an inmate in an adjacent cell being a compulsive and vocal masturbator. Later, when he was transferred to a prison in New York, he found himself sharing a cell with a Haitian witch doctor. “He was quite interesting,” he says brightly. “He had some very strange ways, although he was a great cook. He could turn some really sh***y food into something decent. He was decent, I suppose. Just unusual.”

It’s an assessment you could equally apply to Jackley. Or at least, that’s the temptation. Part of the problem with his story is that it’s so remarkable and moves with such momentum that, as you try to keep up with everything, you start to lose focus on the young man at the centre of it all. What was he thinking? Why did he do it? What did he think would happen? When it comes to understanding his motivations, we have to take his word for an awful lot, and sometimes I’m not sure he quite understands everything himself. That’s not to say he was lying about wanting to help people and becoming the new Robin Hood, but rather that he is not a character in a film or comic book. His is no more the story of a kind-hearted eccentric than it is the story of a drug-addled sociopath. He never got round to giving the vast majority of his money to the needy, but it’s my belief that he would have done so eventually, had he not been so preoccupied with the robberies themselves.

The British police would make much of this, later dismissing Jackley’s claims that he had committed these crimes for altruistic reasons. “There is no evidence whatsoever to confirm his intentions were to give the proceeds of those crimes to ‘the poor’, despite the fact he claimed he was a modern-day Robin Hood,” said Detective Inspector Jim Fox of the West Mercia police, following Jackley’s extradition back to the UK.

Although even he acknowledged that, yes, Jackley had gone out of his way to give money back to the charity he’d accidentally broken into.

During a 2013 appeal court hearing – when his sentence was reduced by a year on account of his Asperger’s (he ended up serving six years) – Lord Justice Treacy delivered his own assessment. “Stephen Jackley has been a loner since childhood and became more isolated as he grew up and his interests became his obsessions,” he said. “He wanted to save the earth and its resources, and the desire to collect money became an obsession.” This, I think, is as close to a tidy conclusion as anyone will get.

Back in the cramped little meeting room, I ask Jackley about the role he thinks his Asperger’s played in his actions. “I didn’t appreciate the emotional impact of my actions on people,” he says. “I didn’t realise that going into a bank and pointing an imitation gun at them … that it could be real to them. In a vague sense I knew it would obviously cause fear, but I didn’t see it from an emotional or individual level. I saw myself just going from A to B, going to the bank, robbing the bank and getting the money. I didn’t really think about the implications it would have on the people involved.”

He also says his Asperger’s helped foster what he calls an “excessive mindset”, by which I think he means a stubbornness and willingness to keep going once his plan was in place. “I said, ‘OK, I’ve taken the first step so I’ve got to keep going. I have that plan in my head now.’ Even today, with my business, there are plans I will have set myself to achieve that just aren’t feasible. But I’ll continue to go down these routes.”

Like many ex-prisoners, he says that he’s struggled to adapt back into society because of his criminal record. “A lot of times, I’ve made strong links with companies, people, potential clients, only for those links to evaporate for no apparent reason. Obviously, they have done a bit of research and don’t want to associate themselves with that guy. Which is fair enough,” he says, shrugging. “But sometimes I wish people could look beyond the past and see someone’s potential.”

Sometimes, he says, part of him can look back and laugh at the sheer strangeness of his experiences – particularly the time he spent with American inmates once he’d left solitary confinement, many of whom seemed to regard him with fondness and curiosity. But on the whole he is a man who is remorseful and whose actions damaged nobody more than himself. For all that, he’s still optimistic and an idealist about the world and how it should be.

“The world is in a very precarious place. And it could get a lot worse. We can all take action and we can all take small steps to make it more sustainable and fair. Just not by robbing banks,” he says with a tired chuckle. “No.”