Saving Gary McKinnon (8 page)

T
he following day Gary agreed to go to the TV studio and do the interview as promised. The studio sent a car to take him there and Lucy went with him to support him.

Wilson and I switched on the TV in time to catch the beginning of Gary’s interview. As it transpired, it was one of the most important interviews Gary ever did, and agreeing to it, even when he was severely traumatised, was in retrospect one of the best decisions Gary ever made.

Gary was so traumatised by the interview that he refused to do any more. Lucy scolded Ben Scotchbrook for his harsh questioning, but Ben was a nice person who hadn’t realised how much it had affected Gary and had only been doing his job.

I thought then that I shouldn’t have talked Gary into doing it.
He was far too traumatised for such an ordeal. But I am so glad now that I did: after the interview was aired, Gary’s solicitor’s office was inundated with people ringing and writing in to say that he had Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. Initially the receptionist apparently hung up on some of the callers until a young lawyer named Dinkledine picked up the phone during the receptionist’s lunch break and took the information seriously.

We’d never heard of Asperger’s and, like most of the general public, thought that autism meant you had low intelligence and could barely speak. We had never heard of high-functioning autism, but Mr Dinkledine and Karen Todner insisted that Gary should be assessed and, despite our misgivings, we eventually agreed.

Karen arranged for Gary to be assessed by Dr Thomas Berney, a consultant developmental psychiatrist and a leading expert in the field. We also took Gary to see Luke Beardon, who did not officially diagnose him, but said that in his opinion Gary had Asperger’s syndrome.

Gary was already severely traumatised and now we were telling him that he might have autism, which was upsetting him even more.

The tests on Gary were long and intensive and took several days. Dr Berney gave Gary puzzles to solve and spoke in depth to our entire family, to Lucy and to Gary’s ex-partner, Tamsin. It was another of those cathartic questioning sessions which compels you to look deep inside and to analyse everything.

After assessing all the data, on 23 August 2008, Gary was officially diagnosed as having lifelong Asperger’s syndrome, a pervasive developmental disorder. When the doctor explained the effect it has on behaviour, perception of the world, and comprehension of some very basic things, I was astonished at how much it explained. I couldn’t believe that I had never
heard of Asperger’s. So much of Gary’s behaviour, problems and misunderstandings – even the meltdowns that caused his intellectual faculties to totally fail – were at last understandable.

Riding on her chariot at lightning speed, within days Karen provided the European Court on Human Rights (ECHR) with this medical evidence to show that extradition would be disproportionate and to ask them to take on Gary’s case.

The very next morning – 28 August – the ECHR refused to even consider taking on Gary’s case. Yet on the same day the ECHR took on Muslim cleric Abu Hamza’s case and halted his extradition on terrorist charges. How would they even have had time to look through the brand new medical evidence on Gary that Karen provided them with?

We were now all feeling paranoid in the extreme, as the authorities could literally come and snatch Gary for extradition at any point. The unrelenting state of fear we were in waiting for the hand on Gary’s shoulder made me acutely aware of the terror slaves were subjected to when being dragged from their homes, families and the land they were born in.

At one point, in the corridors of the court, the prosecutor said that a plane would be arriving – possibly even as soon as that night – to extradite Gary. I was trembling, but still determined that it wasn’t going to happen.

Contrary to popular belief it was not only black people who were kidnapped and sold as slaves. The same thing happened to Scottish and Irish people as recently as the seventeenth century. Human beings were kidnapped, betrayed and sold by their own people and sent to American colonies and plantations.

Tens of thousands of these white slaves were children, which is where the word ‘kidnapped’ comes from. According to the Egerton
Manuscripts in the British Museum, the law enacted in 1652 allowed judges to ship Scottish people to a foreign colony or plantation.

This law was repealed when a British Bill of Rights came into force in 1689 and that same Bill of Rights, which disallows cruel and unusual punishment, is still in force today but is being ignored by our courts.

A
man who worked in antiques offered to hide Gary for the next few years. The next few years! We knew JC on a casual basis but didn’t know him well, yet he was prepared to do this for Gary. JC was Jewish and understood better than most the absolute terror we were living in. We had always known he was a good man, but such courage and compassion overwhelmed us. Men with that kind of courage are thin on the ground. I’ll never forget what he was prepared to do to help us, but I knew I couldn’t allow him to put himself at risk. His kindness and bravery made me cry.

For Gary, living on the run would have been a terrifying prospect. I knew he would never survive as a fugitive; he just wasn’t made that way. We had to win his freedom legitimately if we were to have any hope of saving his life and returning to some sort of normality.

Karen wanted Gary to have another medical opinion to confirm his diagnosis and to strengthen his case to be tried in the UK. Autistic rights campaigner Nadine Stavonina de Montagnac, who had two autistic children, was one of the first people who immediately recognised that Gary had Asperger’s syndrome. Nadine was warm and intelligent and extremely
helpful and knowledgeable. She told us that Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Richard Mills, Dr Berney and Professor Digby Tantam were renowned leaders in this field.

Karen always engaged the very best of experts for Gary and never once compromised on that. Nadine helped us to get an urgent assessment and Karen arranged for Gary to be assessed by Professor Baron-Cohen at his clinic in Cambridge on 8 September 2008.

When Wilson and I took Gary to be assessed he was terrified of suddenly being snatched. I figured that the police would have to contact Karen first and she would make sure that things were dealt with properly. I didn’t think anyone knew our address, so they wouldn’t be able to snatch Gary without warning. Would they? Now that thought was in my head I couldn’t shake it.

Taking Gary there was the most terrifying thing as we got it into our heads that Gary might suddenly be arrested there and then, and we knew we had to have the assessment done before any arrest took place – we felt that having both Dr Berney’s and Professor Baron-Cohen’s reports could help to save Gary from extradition.

Gary was unshaven and looked tired and rough. I hadn’t been taking care of myself either – my hair needed a wash and I looked tired beyond belief.

Wilson was shattered too and was driving us to Cambridge. The drive was fraught with anxiety and our minds were focused with a healthy measure of paranoia. Wilson drove with his eyes as much on the mirror as on the road, constantly watching to see who was behind us. Several times a suspicious car seemed to be following us only for it to finally turn off, but, as Wilson pointed out, a proper tail involved more than one vehicle for the very purpose of not raising suspicions, so we remained worried.

A car eventually did appear to lock onto us, starting from a
few cars back and now matching its speed to ours. If we slowed, it slowed. If we sped up, it did likewise. Every turn we took, the car behind took too, and Gary was in panic mode, while I was trying to think of how we could escape if we were cornered.

We desperately needed this assessment done at all costs.

I asked Wilson to take a different route. He waited until the car was close behind, then on the next roundabout did two full circles, bringing us behind the car where we could then follow, see where it went and avoid it. Wilson eventually convinced me that we were no longer being followed, if we even ever had been, and Gary agreed, so we continued to Professor Baron-Cohen’s premises, which turned out to be an old building in large grounds surrounded by trees.

We arrived there looking dishevelled and afraid, like deer caught in the headlights.

As we pulled into the huge driveway we saw two big vans parked there with blacked-out windows, one of which was an armoured security van. I was terrified, convinced that it was the Americans waiting to pounce. We drove up the side and stopped out of sight of the vans and Wilson went in first to find out if everything was OK. Simon Baron-Cohen and his assistant were really nice, and reassured Wilson that the vans were just delivering and not collecting anything or, more importantly, anyone.

While Gary was being assessed, Wilson and I were continually checking the drive and surrounding area, shooting furtive glances around to make sure that no one was lying in wait to kidnap Gary.

Cambridge is a beautiful English university town steeped in tradition. It is the home of Grantchester Meadows and has the most magnificent historic architecture set in the most stunning surroundings, with settlements dating back to Roman times. Happy, carefree students cycled along quaint narrow roads,
surrounded by street markets and cafés. In stark contrast, we were trapped in fear. I felt that everyone could see we looked hunted; it’s an animal thing that one human being picks up from another. I glimpsed concern in the eyes of some passers-by.

When Gary’s assessment was eventually completed we felt, for whatever reason, as though a weight had been lifted. We had hope, which is all a human being needs to keep going. We drove back to our house and, once again, we waited.

Professor Baron-Cohen’s report conclusively diagnosed Gary as having Asperger’s syndrome and deemed him at risk of suicide. That was the thing: Gary had told Professor Cohen intimate things that he had felt unable to tell us. Some of those things confirmed the risk to his life and as we hadn’t known, Karen didn’t know, so hadn’t been able to use it in evidence.

Asperger’s syndrome is a condition that is often masked by intelligence. This makes it much more difficult for other people to understand why some people with autistic spectrum disorder can often find it so difficult, and sometimes impossible, to grasp some basic concepts, while understanding the most complicated of things.

When Gary was a toddler, whenever I took him on a bus he used to scream continually and throw himself around. Nothing would calm him but as soon as we got off the bus he was quiet again. He was afraid of travel.

At the age of nine Gary would buy books on body language and study them and I couldn’t understand why. I now I realise that he couldn’t understand what the various expressions on people’s faces meant and he was trying to learn it all by himself.

Gary took everything literally; so much so that it tended to cause confusion.

Gary’s mental breakdowns when we took him on holiday as a child and in his early teens were likely to have been induced by his fear of travel and his inability to be far from home and familiar surroundings.

Gary’s collapse on the platform of the tube when he was sixteen years old and the loss of his intellectual faculties was probably because he had left his local surroundings on his own for the first time ever, to start work in town, causing him to go into meltdown.

His obsession with computers which had caused his downfall was also an Aspie thing. Gary’s world was a literal world, one of logic and obsession, and the logic of computers made perfect sense to him.

If we hadn’t been living in such intense fear we could have taken comfort from the knowledge we had just acquired. It was like a jigsaw puzzle that had fallen into place. We always knew Gary was vulnerable and eccentric and different in many ways – but we were different and our unconventional lifestyle included many very eccentric friends. Gary was just Gary, more fragile and more vulnerable and more eccentric than many eccentrics, and we loved him.

ASD wasn’t recognised by the World Health Organization until Gary was around thirty years old, so it would have been impossible for him to have been diagnosed as a child or for me to have known anything about Asperger’s at that time.

Surely Home Secretary Jacqui Smith would now refuse to extradite Gary. The doctors’ reports made it crystal clear that Gary’s obsessions and search for the truth were connected to his ASD. He had no clue that he might face extradition for accessing US computers, given that the 2003 extradition treaty hadn’t
been written and no one else had ever been extradited from the UK for computer misuse – even in other cases deemed by the judges to be significantly more serious.

On 13 September 2008 we got more bad news. Jacqui Smith refused to stop the extradition and, just to finish Gary off, she refused to give him fourteen days’ grace to allow the new medical evidence to be considered.

I couldn’t understand how this crucial medical evidence could just be dismissed out of hand by the government, but Karen flatly refused to give up on Gary and said defiantly, ‘I’m putting the new medical evidence in anyway and Jacqui Smith will just have to consider it.’

I was so glad of Karen’s fiery nature and of the fact that despite awesome odds she fought and managed to keep Gary here until we could eventually win his freedom.

For the first few years I said barely a word in public, respecting Gary’s wish not to make him feel silly by having his mum speak up for him. But when the situation became bleaker and bleaker, embarrassment was the least of our worries.

Gary was shutting down and deteriorating mentally at a rapid rate, unable to tolerate the constant stress and rollercoaster of emotions when hopes raised were continually crashed to the ground.

Duncan Campbell from
The Guardian
asked me if I wanted to write a piece in the paper’s ‘Comment is Free’ section. So on 22 September 2008 I did just that. I wrote about Gary and extradition and how just the threat of it destroys lives.

Among the mostly positive responses, loads of negative and even abusive comments started to appear, many from people
sounding American. One of those posts retained a link that someone had accidentally included in their post. I was amazed to discover that the link was to a website exclusively for American prison officers, soldiers and police, and that my
Guardian
piece was posted on the front page of this US website, from which most of the negative comments seemed to be emanating.

I was genuinely shocked at this and at just how far the US prosecutor’s PR machine goes, that they apparently even have comments flooding our system, in an attempt to combat supportive articles written on someone they want to prosecute.

In September 2008 I arranged a protest to demonstrate outside the American embassy in London. If it’s inside the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) area, you have to inform the police of the names of the key protestors, the steward you nominate and a rough estimate of the numbers expected, so that they know how many PCs are needed to police it.

Because ARM, the Autistic Rights Movement, was joining us, police with experience of autism were also used. The Autistic Rights Movement made huge, impressive banners that looked like solid stone. The demo was well attended and gained a lot of TV coverage. It was both a plea to President Bush and a protest against what was happening to Gary via the UK’s horrendous extradition treaty.

Gary was in a deep depressive state and there were serious and justifiable concerns that his life was at risk. He believed that death was preferable to being removed from everyone and everything he had ever known.

I felt as though I was wandering through a wilderness and calling out for help but no one could hear me. So many things had happened that I believed should be more than enough to change the government’s mind, but they all led to nothing. Government hearts seemed cold and untouched by the cruelty being inflicted
by outlandish threats. I needed to make my voice heard and to fight harder to make people aware of what was happening.

On 29 December 2008 I was looking through the newspapers online and discovered that Duncan Campbell had made Gary one of the ‘Brits who stole the show this year’ in
The Guardian
. This was amazing.

As if that wasn’t enough of a boost to our spirits, Nadine had been in contact with Peter Howson, the famous Scottish artist, and in January 2009 Peter unveiled his impressive and powerful portrait of Gary, leading to extensive press coverage all over the country.

Suddenly people were coming on board from all directions to help us, and at a time when we most needed it.

The Home Office in the then Labour government wrote to Karen asking her to ask Gary’s supporters to stop writing to them, as the volume of mail was stopping them getting on with their work. I couldn’t believe the cheek, and let’s just say that my heart didn’t exactly bleed for them.

Gary’s life was under threat and they were upset because they had received too many letters in his support?

It felt to me as though Gary was on death row and we were fighting to prevent his execution. In Gary’s case extradition would have meant execution, but by Gary’s own hand.

Before I opened my eyes in the morning my heart was filled with dread that Gary might not have made it through the night. The unrelenting fear of losing him and working 24/7 on fighting for Gary was physically and mentally exhausting.

I once fell fast asleep during a conversation with my friend Pauline on the phone and woke up with her shouting down the phone, ‘Janis! Janis! Wake up, Janis, you have to go to bed, you have to sleep.’

I also regularly fell asleep in front of the computer in the early
hours of the morning and Wilson would come down to take me up to bed.

Wilson was wonderful and without him by my side, life would have been infinitely harder. Wilson is gentle to the core. He fed me and made me endless cups of tea and understood that sometimes when I seemed irritable it was because I was beginning to crumble and was fighting hard to keep it together.

Wilson helped give me the confidence I needed to do what I was doing. I was shy and hated talking on the telephone, rarely answered the door and had never spoken on TV. Suddenly I had to do so many things that I wasn’t prepared for and didn’t know if I could do without falling on my face, but I couldn’t afford to fail.

Wilson held me in the night when silent tears were falling and rubbed my back until I drifted into sleep. When I woke at an unearthly hour every morning, he would get up at 5 or 6 a.m. to make me tea and toast and to help me to find the information I was searching for on the internet. We’ve been married for thirty-nine years and together for forty-two and still love each other deeply.