Stolen Hearts: Cops and Robbers | 7

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For our listeners in the US, the following episode contains references to geysers,

which are men, not hot water springs. There's hard geysers, the sort that would challenge you

to a fistfight over a spilt pint, and naughtiest geysers, men who are truly bad but somehow also

nostalgically charming. And finally, an old geyser, which is just your average gentleman who's grown

a little long in the tooth. It also contains some strong language.

You know, a lot of people listening will say you're sick, you're horrible,

you're nasty, and then right, absolutely right.

This bonus episode is going to be a little bit different from the other episodes of Stolen

Hearts. We're going to be giving you a more unfiltered look into the world of Dean Jenkins.

Over the course of making Stolen Hearts, we spent a lot of time talking to Dean about

robbing banks, about how he did it, why he did it, and what it felt like to do it.

The adrenaline rush that you'll get doing a bank robbery, that buzz, that whole buzz,

it was fucking mental. It was mental. There is nothing like it. I've never taken a drug in my

life, but my drug was the banks. Dean Jenkins is not a normal guy. Most people would be terrified

to rob a bank. Not only that, they wouldn't even think to do it in the first place. But for Dean,

bank robbing is like an old flame that he can't quite let go of.

It's like your first rush or your first kiss, nerves. This feeling. Once you've had it,

it's like, oh, God, that's what it's like. A little bit of a higher scale.

Dean's not the only one who gets butterflies in his stomach thinking about those days.

It was quite a buzz, I've got to say. Remember Steve Smith? He's one of the firearms officers

involved in the operation to arrest Dean on that fateful Halloween night in 2006.

It turns out the cops get just as much of a kick out of it as the robbers.

It was exciting work, from my perspective. I'd go to work not knowing where I'd be that evening,

what we'd be doing in the day. Back in 2006, Dean was one of those old school armed robbers.

The heyday for this kind of crime was in the 1970s and 80s. I'm sure you know the type,

immortalised in endless British gangster movies.

Lockstock and all that, they go in, there are geysers, they have a little tear up,

they have a bank robbery, they get out, they laugh, they scream happy. It's all about robberies and

guns and fast cars and good living. And there's millions of them films. You know,

they're good fun to watch, but that's it. They're not real life.

40 years ago, it was more common for there to be the kind of high student expect to find in fiction.

By the time Dean was arrested, the cops thought that bank robbers were a dying breed.

We thought we'd kind of seen the back end of armed robberies.

From the late 90s onwards, it would become a much more rare event.

One of the reasons for that is that being a bit brutal about it, we killed a lot of bank robbers.

That's police marksman Tony Long, dubbed the Metropolitan Police's serial killer, I might add.

We shot, you know, a serious amount of armed robbers and many of them died.

And I think a lot of the old lads were like, excuse my French, fuck this.

You know, why would I want to die?

When Tony and Steve first got the briefing on the Halloween morning of 2006,

that they were going to be taking down Dean and Bob, it felt like one last hurrah.

A final showdown between the cops and the old school sawn off shotgun wielding bank robbers.

And to Dean and Bob, it felt much the same.

Only days earlier, they'd been sitting in Bob's garden talking about retiring from the bank robbery game.

We were sitting down, it was in Bob's house, we were both laughing about it and said,

we've got to give it up, you know, it's getting too much, it's too old.

Maybe this is the last one.

We always said, never say it's the last one.

Even if it was the last one, we shouldn't have said this is the last one.

Even if we thought it, we shouldn't have said it.

We shouldn't have said it.

Just one more job and we all know how that ended.

From Wondery and Novel, I'm Kerry Godleman and this is Stolen Hearts, episode seven.

Cops and Robbers

There's a couple of people you need to meet.

These are the producers behind the microphone who've been asking all the questions.

They've heard and seen things whilst making this podcast that we haven't been able to include.

Things about Dean Jenkins that would make your hair curl.

Joining me are Tom Wright.

Hi Kerry.

And Anna Simfield.

Hi.

So go on guys, spill the tea.

Well, we spent about nine months in total interviewing Jill and Dean.

We travelled to Wales to see Jill and then with Dean we would meet him in recording studio

in various locations in South London.

Unlike Jill, obviously we always knew that Dean was a bank robber.

And so pretty much in the first interview it was one of the first things that we wanted to talk to him about.

So now I can ask a question.

Yes, man.

How do you rob a bank?

Is that on still?

But it's that we're sawing off shotgun.

And discounting money.

We used to call it our homework.

So we'd have to go and sit there.

Monday to Friday.

See which days that they would turn up.

We'd watch, learn, time, routes, cameras, everything.

And only once we're happy, we decide we're going to do it and we plan when to do it.

It sounds easy saying it, but it's a damn lot of hours.

A lot of hours doing that sort of thing.

Boring some nights, freezing cold other nights, watching some guys doing up an event to deliver money.

So at first you're there for the week.

Then you do the same thing the next week in case there's any change in pattern.

Once you know their pattern, you have to then go just on the days that you know they're going to be there to double check the times.

Then you follow it for another couple of weeks, maybe another month to check the times.

So to do one bank, it would be two months worth of homework just to watch, to see, to be 100% accurate.

You could be watching a bank for six months and not do it.

But then you watch another one, but you do it because you know the roads, you know the route.

You learn everything inside out, but you had to learn it by memory because you can't write these things down.

We would have looked at maybe 20, 30 banks to see which is right, which is wrong.

And we'd go by our guts.

If one of us would have said, doesn't feel right, it's off the list because you've all got to be okay, we feel safe here.

I'm looking at that, someone's looking at that.

Whatever our position was on that job, it had to be thought of, everybody had to think with it.

Could you jump that wall? Could you get to the shop?

You've got two to three seconds to get into that bank from wherever you are.

And wherever you are, no one can see you.

That's not a lot of time.

That's how we used to work.

It was planned meticulously.

One of the things that kept coming up, both in our interviews with Dean, interviews with the police officers,

was this thing about how he and Bob would wait until the fourth or the fifth cash box had been there.

Had been delivered before they would go in?

It seems that the fourth cash box is a telltale sign that they had done their homework.

Only people who work within the industry know that you should go for the fourth or the fifth cash box

because the first one or two could be a dummy box, something that you take into the bank first

to ward off any potential bank robbers so that they come in, they take it and then they leave disappointed.

And this is something that Dean highlighted to us and it was also something that the cops

highlighted as being a telltale sign of their MO.

And so it got us kind of wondering, how did he know that?

Could it possibly be that he had somebody on the inside,

like somebody working for the security guard company or working for the banks?

And so obviously we asked him.

We knew people that used to work in the places that we robbed.

Yeah, absolutely.

On some occasions we was giving heads up about what days they'd be there

so that we didn't have to do so much homework.

You have to know how to take the cassettes out of the machine.

You have to one know it's a cassette and not the box that it's been delivered in

because it may explode with the ink or whatever they got in it.

The machine has certain buttons and knobs that you have to twist to pull it out.

So we had to get that information before we could do it.

There was several people that we knew that worked in a job that gave us heads up

and had a nice holiday of it.

How did you get those out there?

How do you recruit them?

It wasn't a recruitment process, but it was a friend of a friend who knows a friend

and you'd be amazed at who does what in the world.

And you realise you actually know someone who does something.

You're like, oh, really?

How does that happen?

I think there was one omission from the series, which is that Dean's dad had a rather surprising job

with Securacool, which were the cash and transit firm that Dean and Bob were targeting.

So you might remember that Dean had these two lookouts posted on the high street

and Dean got angry with them for shaking hands outside the bank.

Well, one of those lookouts was Dean's dad, which is obviously a pretty intriguing detail.

And then also when Dean's dad was caught trying to escape the scene of the Halloween robbery,

he was in Dean's blue jaguar that he bought from Jill's brother.

And then there's also the fact that Dean played guilty, whereas his dad played not guilty.

Which meant he had to go through a week-long trial only to eventually be found guilty

and sentenced to 10 years.

But Dean wasn't there for this trial, he was locked up.

So we spoke to his sister, Debbie, about it.

My dad pleaded that he found out what Dean was doing and he went to stop him.

I love him to death, but it was a lie.

It was a lie.

He was guilty and I didn't know it was going to happen.

It's just such a load of mixed feelings.

I remember feeling angry, but still wanting to just break down and cry for this silly man

that tried to get away with it this way.

So when we found out that Dean's dad used to work for this company,

we obviously had to ask Dean about it.

But he declined to comment.

He basically just did not want to talk about it.

But we asked Debbie.

One of the details that stood out for us was that your dad used to work for Securacore and

they are a cash-in-transit company.

Is that a coincidence?

Yeah, I'm concerned, yeah.

Do you think his knowledge of those bands would have been something that was helpful?

Don't know.

So awkward.

I actually get tense.

The bottom line is that the courts and the judge who sentenced Dean's dad

said explicitly that he didn't consider there to be any connection between his old job

and his new vocation as a bank robber.

Yeah, and his dad wasn't keen on talking to us about it either.

And I think because the courts came to that conclusion and the story is a really complicated

one that kind of therefore leads nowhere, we decided not to include it because it felt like

a little bit of a narrative cul-de-sac.

But instead, Dean did like to talk about other connections he had like in the police force.

And that's something that really interested us because as soon as you hear this story,

you start to ask questions like, how much did Jill know?

Was he only with her because she is a police officer?

Was she somehow an accessory to bank robberies in Kent by being a police sergeant in Pembrokeshire?

From everything that we read, all of our interviews and the conclusions that various

investigation teams made, it's clear that she really wasn't involved in any of Dean's crimes.

But he already had connections in various parts of the police force,

and he was more than happy to tell us about them.

We knew one or two police officers, yeah.

There's a lot of bank coppers out there, let's have it right, a lot.

And if you find them, they're a weak link and they don't mind a couple of quid.

Like everybody else, they'll have debts, you know.

If you can give someone a drink to help out, that's what you do.

Things like, what's the busiest period?

You know, how busy are they on a Friday?

Is it a double team?

Is it a weekend team?

They've got more staff at the weekends.

Have they got more staff on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays?

Is it going to be easy to get away from them on a Monday because there's only half the team?

They knew he was up to something.

Maybe once we got done, they would have been, oh, shit.

But you know what?

They're safe.

Nothing would ever come out of anybody's mouth.

So after Dean's got all of the information he's needed, after, you know,

many cold winter nights sat out staking out a bank,

there's one last practical thing that he needs to do.

Don't want too much hair follicles, DNA.

So I would go and get my head shaved.

I'd have a black balaclava.

So you could just see my eyes, nothing more.

Everything was stitched up.

I'd have a black nylon jacket on with a radio taped inside so I could talk to someone.

Like a sports black trousers.

And I used to have a pair of black boots, almost like sports running boots, but all black.

Everything black.

Why everything black?

And black leather gloves.

So that it was always nighttime and you wouldn't be seen.

I was once told, you are what you look like.

They caught me on the off and I didn't have an answer.

And I was like, hmm, I don't know what bank robber looks like.

But yeah, sure.

I don't know.

Do I look like a bank robber?

Tell the truth.

I think you just hear me coming in in that clip saying yes really quickly.

I think something that we found funny talking to Jill is that the first thing that attracted

her to Dean was that he had this kind of rugged, Vin Diesel bald bad boy look.

And while for her that was just an aesthetic for Dean, it was his uniform.

But obviously we're not here to talk about haircuts.

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So on the day of the actual bank robbery, Dean acts like a normal person.

Yeah, and that's something that I find so bizarre about this in that he could be a boss.

He could be the other parent dropping his kids off at school.

He's texting his girlfriend. He's a totally normal guy,

but he's got this kind of weird little secret.

What made me empathise with Dean in this moment is that inside, he'd be shitting himself.

Yes, it's a funny old day, the day of that. You need to spend a lot of time on your own.

You'd spend probably two hours on the toilet and then you'd be vomiting.

Just doesn't know a thing. Just because you know what's coming up.

By the time it comes to the evening, I was ice. I had no emotions whatsoever.

Absolutely no feelings whatsoever. My body was ice and it was calm.

Then we'd make contact and arrange the meet.

I think what you can tell from listening to that is that over the course of that day,

something slightly scary happens to Dean.

And it's not just the two hours on the toilet.

It's like whilst he's on the toilet, he goes through this process of turning off a bit of himself.

And it kind of makes it hard to interview him as well,

because our questions will often be around, how did you feel in that moment?

And the way Dean describes it, he always describes it as the absence of feeling.

Like, oh, I felt nothing. I felt ice cold.

And as a result, he tends to instead focus on the practicalities of the robbery,

like the mechanics a bit more.

And he would talk about how they would start two or three people,

maybe a couple of lookouts as well, depending how big the job was.

And one or two of them would go into the bank and get the money.

And then one getaway driver, which was mostly Dean's role.

The getaway driver is like the conductor.

So he has the radio, he watches the cash-in-transit van arrive and the security guard

come out with the cash boxes.

And he counts and he says go when he deems it's the right time.

But he's also the person who then can ultimately call it off.

So in many ways, it's like he's in charge.

You know, we were talking a lot about how you assume a getaway driver is somehow less accountable.

But actually, that's not the case.

So Jill said to us quite a few times that she comforted herself with the idea that

Dean was, you know, just the getaway driver.

But the truth is there were times where he went inside the bank with Bob.

Keep calm, relax.

It's not your money.

Open up.

Open up.

Bob, he's a big man.

I'll be running behind him.

You know, I was 16 and a half stone at the time.

I was a strong fella, 36 and a half stone of two men walking in.

There's not much lead you need.

No screaming or shouting.

Just do it.

It was all very calm.

So the way that Dean describes it, they're just trying to be menacing.

They're not actually wanting anybody to get hurt.

But there were times where that didn't happen.

There's one occasion where one of the guards got hit over the head with the butt of one of the

sort of shotguns and obviously that would have been an incredibly scary experience.

So I think also Steve Smith, who is a firearms officer, who we feature in episode two described

to us that there were moments when they would take one of the guards back towards the van

with a gun at the back of their head, telling them to get more money and release it to them.

We probably did get a living.

Daylight's out of people, which, you know, people are going to hate one.

And I get that.

I totally get that.

Now I get that.

At a time, I didn't care. It wasn't something that I thought,

poor guys, because I wasn't interested in them.

I was interested in the money.

There was a sick, sick bastard in a way.

It's the kind of grim, grubby bit of the job where there's real victims and it's just a

pretty nasty thing to do.

And I think Dean's explanation for this is that while they never intended for people to get

her, if it did happen, it was a sign that the job was getting kind of sloppy.

In the vans that were delivering the money, they have a panic button or a police button.

The moment they pushed that, there was a two minute response.

So we have to assume the moment we walk in a bank, they've touched that button.

So we need to be out, in a car, and away before that point.

And it was never that long.

It's never that long.

Never that long.

How long would it normally be?

I suppose if you're doing a decent size one, 90 seconds, that's it.

Let's go crazy and say 15 seconds.

You could be in and out with 50, 80, 100,000 quid.

You know, obviously it's really unglamorous, right?

The bit where they're thrusting shotguns in people's faces

and bullying unarmed security guards to hand over cash.

But the flip side is that the getaway driving bit, that's objectively quite cool.

Yeah, it's really cool.

Actually, it's quite clever and that pains me to admit.

Dean told us a lot about how it would work on the jobs that they got away with.

So picture the scene, Bob's in the bank, Dean is outside in the car.

In a stolen car, it's a very fast car, something which has got proper grunt on it.

And I'll put my hand in action because my job's still in hand.

We need to get away.

So I don't need to talk to no one about that.

I want absolute peace and quiet.

I don't need to hear no one scream, no one shout, no laugh, and no talking to me.

If I'm getting your way, you need to know you're safe.

So you just enjoy the ride or close your eyes.

That's when adrenaline's really kicking in.

That's when you've got full power of everything that's about to happen.

You in control, you in control, you then go and blow the car up

and then we'd have cars set up in certain locations where we'd change and change and change.

Set the car on fire, so it's a distraction.

And then you drive to another car before you work your way down to a legal car.

Literally, and that legal car will be a false fiesta, which is worth about 200 quid.

It was a catch me if you can system, put a flat cap on and grow a beard or have a pair of glasses on.

You're an old geezer in an old banged up car.

It's make yourself look like a piece of crap that wouldn't do that or wouldn't harm a flyer.

We're safe because there's no one following that car.

No one wants to know you.

They'd probably let you go.

Then you start to relax.

The adrenaline calms down.

You start praising each other.

Damn, you got there quick.

Oh, did you see that one?

Oh, yeah, that was good.

One second.

Damn, you're breaking records here.

Then you laugh.

So this next bit, I always assumed would be the fun bit, right?

Which is where you've gotten away.

You've got thousands of pounds worth of cash.

You're high on adrenaline.

And Dean and Bob would go to a discreet location to count the money.

It was hellish.

It was horrible.

It was boring because it takes hours, hours and hours.

We didn't have machines because machines can go wrong.

Man make it, man break it.

So it was thousand bundle.

Thousand bundle.

When you're doing it and you're double checking it,

because you wouldn't trust anybody.

It's a pound note.

So let's be honest with each other.

We were colleagues, but we didn't trust each other.

On the job, we trusted each other.

When it come to reality, I didn't trust him.

He didn't trust me or any of us didn't trust any of us.

So let's count it once, count it twice,

double check the Queen's heads in the right place,

and then pile it and then divv here.

We shake hands, we depart.

It never happened.

I had a sports light blue Nike rucksack.

I'd slink your open shoulder and just jump in the car and drive away.

I used to listen to classical music.

And I put that on, relaxed my whole body.

It's the complete calm down and release.

It's done.

I'm away.

I'm in the car.

I mean, you put the key in your front door.

I'm home.

I'm safe.

And then Dean just apparently goes back to his normal life.

I think detective Andy Dampier said it really well.

He said, so what happens?

Does the balaclava just go in the wash?

You know, what does a bank robber do after he comes home having robbed a bank?

He had a family.

He also had several jobs and ways of making money that seemed legit.

And he was like ultimately people's manager.

I'm sure most of them, if not all of them,

wouldn't have had any idea that he was robbing banks.

And then on top of all of that,

he has this body wash range called the governor with bank robbing suggestive titles and stuff like that.

It's just so audacious.

And I think that audaciousness is how he's managed to get away with it for quite a long time.

The lie is too obvious.

He's hiding in plain sight in front of everybody.

No one, no one had an absolute clue.

That's what my wife was about.

My wife used to go crazy.

And I said, I've been working, you know, I've got to work.

We've got a nice house, we've got nice cars.

It doesn't come from nothing.

You just get into the mode.

This is work.

It has to be done.

It wasn't an issue.

Sleep, what do I need sleep for?

You know, sleep when I'm dead.

We'd probably leave it for about a week or so before we link up a DNA feeling yet.

Do you want to go out for some dinner?

Let's get me for coffee, get a bit of breakfast and say, what sort of date we're looking at for the next one?

And so for actually quite a long time, this was Dean's life, you know, rob a bank, count the money,

take a week off, get some brekkie, rinse repeat and do it again.

But it was kind of all bundled up in this charming package.

And people bought into the lie until eventually they obviously did find out.

So now, look, I'm sure you're all wondering, if Dean was such a bank robbing mastermind,

how come he and Bob ended up getting caught?

Why were the police lying in wait for them?

Well, that is something that has really bugged Dean,

and it's something that he brought up to us a lot.

They must have been informed.

One million percent.

Listen, you don't get a 45-year-old bill waiting for you to do a bank robbery without someone saying something.

That's a fact.

It never came from me.

I don't know for Bob because he's not here to answer himself.

He's got a theory based on something that happened in prison.

There's a guy called Steve.

He came in one night and he had a magazine in his hand and he kept saying,

I'm looking for Dean Jenkins, I'm looking for Dean Jenkins.

He's a big lump, so I thought, here we go.

We found each other and we went into my cell.

He put his hand out of the shape of my hand.

He said, I just want to say happy Christmas.

You should read this.

I just read it and closed it.

Do I know him?

I don't know him.

I haven't got a clue he is.

I have a newspaper clipping of an informant being shot on his doorstep

and he was an informant for our job, it says, in black and white.

But it worked out that he knew Bob.

Dean showed us the newspaper clipping and we were really excited to get a hold of it

and we thought it was going to unlock a whole new area of our story.

But then when we read the article, it's basically just hearsay, wasn't it?

Just a load of old bollocks basically, some bloke from Kent called Mad Matt

who'd ended up getting shot and after he was shot, there was this really gossipy

article, like little nib in a local Kent newspaper that said, oh, maybe he was shot

because he might have been an informant.

But it turned out that actually he was shot because he was trying to break into somebody's home

and the guy whose house he was breaking into was cleared and found not guilty of murder.

You know, this is the thing about the world of bank robbers, right?

Like there are little grains of truth and, you know, deceptions

or little whiffs of bullshit that can take you down, all sorts of different rabbit holes.

And in order to tell this story properly and ethically,

we needed to be able to back up what we were saying.

So we did a pretty big effort to contact as many of the police officers

as we could possibly find who were involved in investigating Dean and Bob.

So we spoke to people in the Met Police Flying Squad who gathered the initial intelligence,

firearms officers who arrested them and the detectives from Kent who were involved

in the investigation into Dean after he was arrested.

And so what we found when we contacted all of these people

is that a lot of the details of the investigation have kind of got lost in the mists of time.

The police's perspective is that they got the robbers,

they convicted them for multiple bank robberies, case closed,

that's kind of the end of the story.

But two of the firearms officers that we spoke to, Steve Smith and Tony Long,

remembered the briefing that they got.

And Steve even took notes which we think are probably

some of the only surviving documentation from before the arrest.

The gang were all white men in their late 30s,

running businesses in Kent, living in large houses and driving big flash cars.

And that some of the jobs could be traced back 10 years.

They were hard to follow using conventional methods

as they were quite surveillance conscious and aware.

And there was no harder evidence to convict them

for the previous robberies, hence today's job.

It would almost certainly have come from a human intelligence source.

But once they got that human intelligence source,

of course, there's legal means of acquiring additional information.

And most of that is covered by technical observation.

But in this country, unlike most countries,

you can only use phone taps for intelligence.

We can use that intelligence gathered from those tapes

to then mount an operation to try and catch you in the act,

or to get more evidence, direct evidence to convict you.

Or we can't utilize the actual tapes.

So I've no doubt that they probably had taps on

that the team's phones, private phones, mobile phones,

perhaps they'd bug the cars.

I was never being watched.

No, I was never being watched.

I had my eyes everywhere.

I know for a fact I wasn't being watched.

No one was ever watching me, not me personally, no.

However it is they got the intelligence,

the Flying Squad's information does seem to have been pretty sketchy.

Yeah, they didn't seem to know about Jill

or about his bank robber themed toiletries range.

But I think what we found was that there's a distinction

between what we as storytellers would like to know

and what is ultimately necessary for the police to know

in order to be able to arrest somebody.

The bottom line for the police officers is

they knew that Dean and Bob were robbing banks.

They knew that that involved firearms

and they knew that they were going to be a new Romney that night.

They also clearly didn't have enough on him

to be able to arrest him there and then,

so they had to lay a trap and catch them red handed.

Which caused a bit of a row between the detectives

and the firearms officers.

So we want to try and intervene

at the earliest possible proceedings

before the bad guy with the gun gets anywhere near potential victim.

But of course the Flying Squad will be like,

oh yeah, we're saying that, but you know,

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but actually

they almost want the robbery to take place

because then it's a lot easier to convict the person.

So there's all sorts of office politics going on.

You know, they want to catch him on the plot,

sticking a shotgun up the security guards nose.

And we all know how that operation ended

with Bob being shot and Dean being arrested.

And the story of that night has been told before

in a few different slightly schlocky TV documentaries

about, you know, like Britain's naughtiest gazers.

Yeah, Britain's worst gangs.

Looking at the kind of crime elements of it.

Whereas obviously we were making something

that had a love story at its heart

and was all really about emotions and feelings.

So I think that we spent much more time with Dean

asking him about his feelings

and about how he was able to manage his feelings

during what was obviously such a crazy period.

If I went through something as traumatic as that

and then had to spend many, many years in jail afterwards,

I think you'd find yourself tortured

with a lot of images at night.

And Dean did talk to us about that, didn't he?

The first time we interviewed him,

I got him to tell the story of that night and what happened.

And I remember him being quite emotionless

in talking about it.

And I was going away and listening to the tape

and going, we need to talk to him about this again.

So then I think in our third or fourth interview with him,

you and I sat down and we spent the entire interview

basically talking with him about that night.

And then there was a moment at the end

where you started to ask him some quite probing questions

about how he felt, which is where I think

he gave the most revealing answers.

I've been wondering a little bit after talking to Debbie.

She was talking about how there's a little bit of a Jenkins trait

to not really grieve things.

True.

Would you say that you've grieved people?

No, no, I haven't been to his grave.

I know where he is.

I know pinpoint exactly where he is.

No, I don't grieve.

I haven't grieved over a lot of things yet.

It's a fucking trait as well, it's a bad one.

I don't like it because I need to.

We all need to, but you can't.

Why do you think you're avoiding that?

Probably because I'm scared to, if I'm honest.

I don't want to.

I've got no fears if I watch a sad film at home,

I'll sit and cry like a girl.

I really will cry because it's sad.

But when it's real life, I will probably cry afterwards

talking about it, then I would actually join it.

But I can't do it, not yet.

I'm not ready to.

Not yet.

When I go and see him, and I will go and see him,

and I'll talk to him about a couple of things,

then I'll grieve.

But I'm not ready for it yet.

But I will.

It's a long old time to be holding onto those emotions

and not processing them.

I think 15 and a half years, 16,

yeah, of course.

It's a long time.

My mind's telling me not to do it yet.

I don't know why.

But I will just put London down on my own,

have a cup of coffee with him, and have a talk.

Tell him what we've done, tell him how we've done.

Because he has no idea.

One of the most revealing things that he said

is that he still, to this day, hasn't been to go and see Bob's grave.

Yeah, I think he actively avoids being in situations

where he is vulnerable.

And I think being at Bob's grave side

would be a really vulnerable place for him to be,

because it's clear that he hasn't grieved,

and that he does find it really sad when he thinks about it.

There's also consequences of actions, right?

I think Dean has talked to us a lot about the hurt

that he inflicted on lots and lots of people.

But ultimately, that hurt is repairable in one way or another.

He's been out of prison, he's now back in everybody's lives,

but Bob's death is one consequence of his actions

that he can't make better.

I had so much unfinished bullshit in my life that I had to deal with,

and prison made me deal with it, which is good.

Oh, well.

Being honest with my wife and my children,

you know, let them see for the prick I was at the time,

for not having the balls to be honest about what I was doing,

to tell them about why I was the way I was.

A shit husband, but I would say quite a bad father,

because I didn't give them the time.

I was forever watching the next pound coin.

I shat on all these people that I loved with Jill.

I wanted to protect her. She's a copper.

So I wouldn't say those things like that,

because she'd be like,

you're fucking crazy. You put everything it was because you could get a buzz.

And I used every excuse in the book to try and cover my ass.

Why would I talk about it?

You know, I don't want to get caught.

So you don't say nothing.

Loose lips, sink ships.

So you keep quiet.

I think he is remorseful to individual relationships

that he has affected by his actions,

and you can see that.

But does that mean that he would change anything

or not do it again given the opportunity?

I don't know.

One of the things that was interesting for us was we saw all of Dean's prison reports, right?

And they are glowing.

I mean, like, prison officers are falling over themselves

to recommend him.

You know, he's described literally as a model prisoner.

And when you see that,

you'd imagine that a model prisoner would feel a huge amount of regret

for their life of crime.

But Dean doesn't seem to regret it all that much.

Do you ever have any moments where you think that maybe you could just do one more?

Yeah, everybody says one more.

Everybody says, oh, I know there's one more.

Will I do it?

I don't know if my boy looks good all out.

I get the buzz thinking about it.

But no, I'm too old now.

I'd fall over running away.

I'm sure there'll be people out there saying I'm a complete prick

and they don't agree with me.

And that's fine. I'm cool with that too.

You know, I turn things around for the right reasons.

And I'm pleased with that.

I wouldn't change my life.

No, I'd do exactly the same.

I think I speak for every woman in this story when I say,

Dean, you'd better not rob any more bloody banks.

Anna and Tom, thank you so much. It's been great.

Thanks. Yeah, it's been such an interesting story to work on.

I know. I can't believe it's over.

Well, I hope you've enjoyed that.

I certainly did.

The whole thing has been bananas.

I cannot believe that Jill didn't smell a rat.

I can't believe that anyone could be as deceitful and so successfully deceitful as Dean.

Like, he does sound a bit charismatic,

but I can't believe he's so charismatic that he got away with this facade.

It's mad.

Jill doesn't sound like a complete plant pot.

So why did she fall for it?

Maybe I'm unromantic.

Maybe the floor lies in me.

I just, I don't have enough romantic fantasy in me to make this story work somehow.

I seriously hoped to God I wouldn't be susceptible to falling in love with Dean.

There's something very certainly compelling about Dean,

but at the same time utterly terrifying and sinister.

Don't fall in love with a bank robber.

And also stop, you know, like, know when to bail.

Just know when to bail.

Jill, come on.

If you've enjoyed Stolen Hearts, make sure you leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks so much for listening.

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From Wondery and Novel, this is the final episode of Stolen Hearts.

Stolen Hearts is hosted by me, Kerry Godleman, and written by Kim McCaskill, Tom Wright, and Anna Sinfield.

Our producer is Tom Wright, Associate Producer, Anna Sinfield, Assistant Producer, Amalia Sortland,

Additional Production by Leona Hamid.

Fact-checking by Andrew Schwartz and Fendle Fulton,

Managing producers are Lutter Pundia, Olivia Weber, Cherie Houston, and Charlotte Wolfe.

Music Supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frisson Sink,

Music and Sound Design by Nicholas Alexander, Additional Engineering by Daniel Kempston.

For Novel, Willard Foxton is Creative Director of Development.

Executive Producers are Max O'Brien, Mithy Lee Rao, and Johnny McDevitt for Novel.

Executive Producers are Erin O'Flarity, George Lavender, Marshall Louie, and Jen Sargent for Wondery.

I'm scared now that Dean's gonna hunt me down and go, I can't believe you said that.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.