the most ingenious escape attempts ever devised. The Governor and his staff were in a disoriented state when I arrived. Henson paced around his office, pressing his hands against the bookshelves and re-arranging the furniture, as if not trusting its existence. Home Office and Special Branch people were everywhere, but I managed to calm Henson and piece together the story.
Since my previous visit they had relaxed Young’s regime. Mysteriously, the Samuel Palmer illustration in Sotheby’s catalogue had somehow calmed him. He no longer defaced his cell walls, volunteered to steamhose them, and had pinned the Palmer above his bunk, gazing at it as if it were a religious icon. (If only it were a Keating — the old rogue would have been delighted. As it happens, Keating’s reputation as a faker may have given Young his plan for escape.)
Young declined to enter the exercise yard — the high British Telecom aerials clearly unsettled him — so Henson arranged for him to use the prison chapel as a recreation room. Here the trouble began, as became clear when the Governor showed me into the chapel, a former private THE OBJECT OF THE ATTACK cinema furnished with pews, altar, pulpit, etc. For reasons of security, the doors were kept locked, and the warders on duty kept their eyes on Young by glancing through the camera slit in the projection room. As a result, the warders saw the interior of the chapel from one perspective only. Young had cunningly taken advantage of this, rearranging the pews, pulpit and altar table to construct what in effect was an Ames Room — Adelbert Ames Jr, the American psychologist, devised a series of trick rooms, which seemed entirely normal when viewed through a peephole, but were in fact filled with unrelated fragments of furniture and ornaments.
Young’s version of the Ames Room was far more elaborate. The cross and brass candelabra appeared to stand on the altar table, but actually hung in mid-air ten feet away, suspended from the ceiling on lengths of cotton teased from his overalls. The pews had been raised on piers of prayer books and Bibles to create the illusion of an orderly nave. But once we left the projection room and entered the chapel we saw that the pews formed a stepped ramp that climbed to the ventilation grille behind the altar table. The warders glancing through the camera slit in the projection room had seen Young apparently on his knees before the cross, when in fact he had been sitting on the topmost pew in the ramp, loosening the bolts around the metal grille.
Henson was appalled by Young’s escape, but I was impressed by the cleverness of this optical illusion. Like Henson, the Home Office inspectors were certain that another assassination attempt might be made on Her Majesty. However, as we gazed at that bizarre chapel something convinced me that the Queen and the President were not in danger. On the shabby wall behind the altar Young had pinned a dozen illustrations of the American and Russian space programmes, taken from newspapers and popular magazines. All the photographs of the astronauts had been defaced, the Skylab and Shuttle craft marked with obscene graffiti. He had constructed a Black Chapel, which at the same time was a complex escape device that would set him free, not merely from Daventry, but from the threat posed by the astronauts and from that far larger prison whose walls are those of space itself.
Colonel Thomas Jefferson Stamford, USAF (ret.). Born 1931, Brigham City, Utah. Eagle scout, 1945. B.S. (Physics), Caltech, 1953. Graduated US Air Force Academy, 1957. Served Vietnam, 1964-9. Enrolled NASA 1970; deputy ground controller, Skylab III .1974, rumoured commander of secret Apollo 20 mission to the Moon which landed remote-controlled nuclear missile station in the Mare Imbrium. Retired 1975, appointed vice-president, PepsiCola Corporation .1976, script consultant to 20th Century-Fox for projected biopic Men with Fins.
1977, associated with the Precious Light Movement, a California-based consciousness-raising group calling for legalisation of LSD. Resigned 1978, hospitalised Veterans Administration Hospital, Fresno. On discharge begins nine months retreat at Truth Mountain, Idaho, interdenominational order of lay monks .1979, founds Spaceways, drug rehabilitation centre, Santa Monica .1980-1, associated with Billy Graham, shares platform on revivalist missions to Europe and Australia .1982, visits Windsor Castle with President Reagan .1983, forms the evangelical trust COME Incorporated, tours Alabama and Mississippi as self-proclaimed 13th Disciple .1984, visits Africa, SE Asia, intercedes Iraq/Iran conflict, addresses Nato Council of Ministers, urges development of laser weapons and neutron bomb .1986, guest of Royal Family at Buckingham Palace, appears in Queen’s Christmas TV broadcast, successfully treats Prince William, becomes confidant and spiritual adviser to Princess Diana. Named Man of the Year by Time Magazine, profiled by Newsweek as ‘Space-Age Messiah’ and ‘founder of first space-based religion’.
Could this much-admired former astronaut, a folk hero who clearly fulfilled the role of a 1980s Lindbergh, have been the real target of the Windsor attack? Lindbergh had once hob-nobbed with kings and chancellors, but his cranky political beliefs had become tainted by proNazi sentiments. By contrast Col. Stamford’s populist mix of born- again Christianity and anti-communist rhetoric seemed little more than an outsider’s long shot at the White House. Now and then, watching Stamford’s rallies on television, I detected the same hypertonic facial musculature that could be seen in Hitler, Gaddafi and the more excitable of Khomeini’s mullahs, yet nothing worthy of the elaborate assassination attempt, a psychodrama in itself, that Matthew Young had mounted in his Lilienthal glider.
And yet… who better than a pioneer aeronaut to kill a pioneer astronaut, to turn the clock of space exploration back to zero?
10 February 1988. For the last three months an energetic search has failed to find any trace of Matthew Young. The Special Branch guard on the Queen, Prime Minister and senior cabinet members has been tightened, and several of the royals have been issued with small pistols. One hopes that they will avoid injuring themselves, or each other. Already the disguised fashion-accessory holster worn by Princess Diana has inspired a substantial copycat industry, and London is filled with young women wearing stylised codpieces (none of them realise why), like cast members from a musical version of The Gunfight at the OK Corral.
The Boy’s former girlfriends and surviving relatives, his probation officer and fellow programmers at Virgin Records have been watched and/or interrogated. A few suspected sightings have occurred: in November an eccentric young man in the leather gaiters and antique costume of a World War I aviator enrolled for a course of lessons at Elstree Flying School, only to suffer an epileptic seizure after the first take-off. Hundreds of London Underground posters advertising Col. Stamford’s Easter rally at Earls Court have been systematically defaced. At Pinewood Studios an arsonist has partially destroyed the sets for the $100 million budget science-fiction films The Revenge of R2D2 and C3PO Meets E. T. A night intruder penetrated the offices of COME Inc. in the Tottenham Court Road and secretly dubbed an obscene message over Col. Stamford’s inspirational address on the thousands of promotional videos. In several Piccadilly amusement arcades the Space Invaders games have been reprogrammed to present Col. Stamford’s face as the target.
More significant, perhaps, a caller with the same voiceprint as Matthew Young has persistently tried to telephone the Archbishop of Canterbury. Three days ago the vergers at Westminster Abbey briefly apprehended a youth praying before a bizarre tableau consisting of Col. Stamford’s blood-stained space-suit and helmet, stolen from their display case in the Science Museum, which he had set up in a niche behind the High Altar. The rare blood group, BRh, is not Col. Stamford’s but The Boy’s.
The reports of Matthew Young at prayer reminded me of Governor Henson’s description of the prisoner seen on his knees in that illusionist chapel he had constructed at Daventry. There is an eerie contrast between the vast revivalist rally being televised at this moment from the Parc des Princes in Paris, dominated by the spotlit figure of the former astronaut, and the darkened nave of the Abbey where an escaped mental patient prayed over a stolen space-suit smeared with his own blood. The image of outer space, from which Col. Stamford draws so much of his religious inspiration, for Matthew Young seems identified with some unspecified evil, with the worship of a false messiah. His prayers in the Daventry chapel, as he knelt before the illusion of an altar, were a series of postural codes, a contortionist’s attempt to free himself from Col. Stamford’s sinister embrace.
I read once again the testimony collected by the Special Branch: Margaret Downs, systems analyst, Wang Computers: ‘He was always praying, forever on his confounded knees. He even made me take a video of him, and studied it for hours. It was just too much…’
Doreen Jessel, health gym instructress: ‘At first I thought he was heavily into anaerobics. Some kind of dynamic meditation, he called it, all acrobatic contortions. I tried to get him to see a physiotherapist…’
John Hatton, probation officer: ‘There was a therapeutic aspect, of which he convinced me against my better judgement. The contortions seemed to mimic his epilepsy..
Reverend Morgan Evans, Samaritans: ‘He accepted Robert Graves’s notion of the club-footed messiah — that peculiar stepped gait common to various forms of religious dance and to all myths involving the Achilles tendon. He told me that it was based on the crabbed moon-walk adopted by the astronauts to cope with zero gravity..
Sergeant J. Mellors, RAF Regiment: ‘The position was that of a kneeling marksman required to get off a series of shots with a bolt-action rifle, such as the Lee-Enfield or the Mannlicher-Carcano. I banned him from the