NEW BOOK: THE UNUSUAL SUSPECT

The name of the young man in the interview room at Vermont’s Southern State Correctional Facility was Stephen George Dennis Jackley. He was twenty-two years old and came from a small town called Sidmouth on the South Devon coast. He was a geography student at the University of Worcester. As a rule, geography students from Devon do not tend to find themselves consigned to the Hole. Or known to Interpol. Or being interrogated by a pair of U.S. federal agents. Or, for that matter, being the subject of a multiagency, multinational criminal investigation. But Stephen Jackley was not like most geography students.

This was not the first time Special Agent Scott Murray had encountered Stephen. He had interviewed him some months earlier, on the afternoon of his arrest in May 2008. Since then, Murray had been liaising with British detectives on a case. “I do a lot that involve firearms and explosives,” he says. “Every case is different, but this one is memorable. I guess that’s the best way to put it.”

Stephen Jackley had, like many young people, looked around and concluded that the world was not fair. And like many young people, he’d wanted to make a difference. It’s just that, rather than going on protest marches, involving himself in politics, or running sponsored marathons, Stephen ended up robbing banks. Over a seven-month period in 2007 and 2008, he struck repeatedly and successfully. “You could not expect an educated person in his early twenties to commit a series of armed robberies across the country and internationally,” said one British detective, speaking to the press after his eventual capture. “It has been a complex and protracted investigation.”

Special Agent Murray had spent enough time with the young man in front of him to judge that he was both intelligent and about as far from a typical bank robber as you could get. But there was something about him that he still struggled to understand, a side of his character that remained elusive and was hard to associate with the high-security surroundings they both now shared. He was calm, quiet, incongruous. Murray frowned. “I never felt I got a full scope of who he is.”

One thing that struck everybody, though, was Stephen’s unusual habit of writing everything down. As British and American investigators dug into the evidence surrounding his case, it had become clear that Stephen had what seemed a compulsive need to commit his thoughts and deeds to paper. Everything he planned, he wrote down. Everything he did, he reflected on in his diaries—page after page after page filled in his careful, steady handwriting. “He was methodical in the way he wanted to write down what he wanted to do in the future and what he had done in the past,” says Murray.

Back in the interview room at SSCF, the austere gray-haired agent explained to Stephen what the FBI was and what they did. In a deep, measured voice he said that the agency was helping British police with their investigation into his crimes. He produced a pile of photocopied papers covered in writing, numbers, dates, and strange codes. He sifted through them slowly and deliberately, found what he was looking for, and slid it across the table. It was a photocopy of a British banknote with the letters “RH” scrawled on it. The FBI man glanced at Murray. Could Stephen tell them, he asked, what it means? Stephen glanced at it. And he nodded.

To read the complete article, see:
THE BRITISH STUDENT-TURNED-BANK ROBBER WHO BECAME "A MODERN-DAY ROBIN HOOD" (https://crimereads.com/the-british-student-turned-bank-robber-who-became-a-modern-day-robin-hood/)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web