Last Saturday morning, Stephen Chamberlain left his home in an English village near Cambridge for a morning run, logging his route on the popular running app Strava. He didn’t return.
At about 10:10 a.m., according to local police, the 52-year-old Chamberlain was struck by a blue Vauxhall Corsa. He was taken to a local hospital and put on life support. On Monday evening, his lawyer, Gary Lincenberg, a defense attorney at Bird Marella in Los Angeles, released a statement saying Chamberlain had died. “He was a courageous man with unparalleled integrity. We deeply miss him,” his note said.
Since then, tributes for Chamberlain, a tech executive, father of two, and former volunteer finance director for his local soccer club, Cambridge United, have been shared across social media. “The last message I got from Steve whilst sunning myself on holiday last month was ‘Get out and run you lazy bastard,’ one person wrote on Strava. “Today I ran and will continue to run inspired by Steve.”
Police have said they saw no evidence of anything “untoward” about Chamberlain’s death. But the tragic incident has still become the focus of conspiracy theories and widespread attention well beyond Cambridgeshire.
Hours before Chamberlain’s death was announced, news emerged that his former boss, Mike Lynch, a.k.a. “the British Bill Gates,” was missing in a yacht accident off the coast of Sicily—an accident that has since captured the world’s attention and prompted Italian authorities to consider opening a manslaughter investigation. Lynch, too, has since been declared deceased.
Chamberlain had worked for Lynch as VP of finance for the now-defunct software firm Autonomy, and the pair had been acquitted in June in a major case in the U.S. where they faced charges of defrauding Hewlett-Packard when the Silicon Valley giant purchased Autonomy in 2011. In fact, Lynch’s yacht outing was meant to be a celebration of their recent acquittal in that Northern District of California trial and long legal battle.
In all, seven of the 22 people who had been on Lynch’s family yacht, the Bayesian, when it encountered a violent storm, have perished. Besides Lynch, the deceased are Chris Morvillo, a New York attorney with Clifford Chance who had defended Lynch in the U.S. case; his wife, Neda Morvillo, a jewelry designer; Jonathan Bloomer, chair of Morgan Stanley International and a former nonexecutive director of Autonomy; his wife, Judy Bloomer; Lynch’s daughter, Hannah Lynch; and crew member Recaldo Thomas, a chef.
Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, and Charlotte Golunski, a partner at Lynch’s venture capital firm, Invoke Capital, who had also worked at Autonomy, were among the survivors, along with Golunski’s husband and infant, and several crew members.
Chamberlain was connected to his tycoon boss, and his lawyer, as well as Jonathan Bloomer, because of the U.S. lawsuit, where Bloomer had been a key witness. Chamberlain also worked at Autonomy at the same time as Golunski. What’s more, after leaving Autonomy, Chamberlain worked at Darktrace, a cybersecurity firm bankrolled by Invoke Capital. He started as CFO, in 2016, and then became COO before taking leave to deal with his legal battle.
Darktrace, which had ties to several intelligence agencies, thus further fueling conspiracy theories about the same-day deaths of Lynch and Chamberlain, was staffed by several executives linked to Autonomy, too. Its CEO, Poppy Gustafsson, previously worked at Autonomy, for example, and was deposed during the U.S. legal battle.
“So many brilliant people have died, with so much left for them to do … at a time when both Mike and Steve were so recently acquitted, it feels too cruel,” Gustafsson wrote on LinkedIn on Aug. 23. “But also such a relief to know that they died with the world knowing their innocence.”
A former Darktrace employee who spoke to Fortune, and asked to remain anonymous because of the attention the case has attracted, said Chamberlain was “kindhearted” and a strong leader who inspired the staff. “Every email I saw from him addressing employees was straightforward, but got the message across [and] motivated employees,” this person said. “He always commended them for even the smallest things.” Chamberlain was unfailingly kind to everyone at the company, at every level, the person added.
“Even with all the controversy surrounding him,” the ex-employee said of Chamberlain, “he held his head high.”
During his testimony in the U.S. criminal trial, Lynch similarly said Chamberlain “was very liked” and “reliable,” though was also not someone he saw or interacted with often.
“I don’t know how this translates, but he’s had the reputation of a good bloke, so the kind of guy that, you know, likes to watch the soccer on a Saturday afternoon and gets on well with everyone,” he continued. “I don’t think I ever heard anyone that doesn’t like him. Solid, straightforward, not particularly ambitious.”
Who was Stephen Chamberlain?
Born in June 1972, Chamberlain studied management and mechanical engineering at the University of Birmingham, graduating in 1994, the same year he began working at BDO Stoy Hayward as an auditor. He later spent six years as an auditor at Deloitte before he joined Autonomy in 2005, nine years after Lynch cofounded the company.
Chamberlain worked at Autonomy, a maker of software that promised to give businesses insights by analyzing raw data, for just under seven years. Those years arguably defined the rest of his life.
In 2011, Autonomy was a tech darling in the U.K. and an acquisition target for tech giant Hewlett-Packard. The latter closed a deal to purchase Lynch’s firm in the same year. HP, led by CEO Léo Apotheker at the time, paid $11 billion for Autonomy, but later claimed losses of $4 billion from the deal because of alleged fraudulent statements and financial shenanigans. Apotheker departed after the botched purchase.
HP “largely won” a lengthy civil trial in the U.K. against Autonomy that ended in 2022. In a separate case tried in the U.S., Autonomy’s former CFO, Sushovan Hussain, pleaded guilty to fraud and was sentenced to five years in prison, a sentence he finished in January of this year. But U.S. prosecutors failed to convince a federal jury in San Francisco that Lynch and Chamberlain were involved in any cooking of books.
Prosecutors in the case alleged that Chamberlain’s job was “to lie to the auditors and to manage the auditors, and to help Mr. Hussain manage earnings and meet particular goals and make particular adjustments when he knew they were not justified,” according to court documents.
Lincenberg, however, made the case that accounting requires judgment calls, its rules are arcane, and Chamberlain always acted in good faith. The defense also asked several witnesses who testified for the prosecution whether they could recall a time when Chamberlain knowingly misled anyone, Lincenberg told Fortune. Without exception, the answer was no, he said. Chamberlain ran his finance department “with a culture of openness and never once tried to deceive the auditors. That was the heart of our defense: good faith,” Lincenberg said. “The jurors got it.”
“The government’s witnesses basically all said that Steve Chamberlain was open and honest and acted in good faith,” Lincenberg also said during the trial. Those witnesses included an auditor from Deloitte whom Lincenberg characterized as the government’s star witness and others who, in Lincenberg’s telling, said of the defendant, “This guy never lied.”
“That’s part of the story behind the story,” the lawyer argued, the transcripts show.
Lincenberg and his team decided not to have Chamberlain testify.
A straightforward guy next to a rock star
Early in the trial, Reid Weingarten, one of Lynch’s high-profile defense attorneys, likened Mike Lynch to a “rock star” at the center of a media circus, when describing the U.K. trial to the California judge, court transcripts show. Lynch chose to fight extradition to the U.S.—though he was eventually forced to appear before the court and lived in San Francisco for months through the trial.
Chamberlain, on the other hand, received relatively little press and voluntarily traveled to California because he was, as Lincenberg told Fortune, “a straightforward guy.” (The indictment stated that Lynch earned more than $800 million from Autonomy’s sale to HP, while Chamberlain made $4 million.) Seeing Chamberlain’s willingness to be in California gave the U.S. courts faith that Chamberlain wasn’t a flight risk, which in turn allowed him to travel between the U.S. and the U.K. as needed for the six years it took for the case to go to trial. “He just wanted to confront this accusation and defend and clear his name,” Lincenberg said.
Between leaving what became HP Autonomy and starting at Darktrace, Chamberlain spent four years in another CFO job that—predictably—ended when news of the lawsuit went public. Darktrace was one of the few places where the ongoing and public legal crisis was not a barrier to employment. But Federal prosecutors looked unfavorably upon Darktrace’s hiring of Chamberlain. In a superseding indictment, prosecutors alleged that hiring Chamberlain was a form of obstruction of justice because of Lynch’s connections to the cybersecurity company. (Lynch also paid Chamberlain’s legal fees in the U.S. case, public documents show, as Chamberlain didn’t have the means to cover the costs, as his lawyer explained.)
In their closing arguments, prosecutors attempted to debunk what they saw as a false narrative Chamberlain and his legal team had created. “Mr. Chamberlain wants to persuade you that he’s just a paper pusher, that he gets something from the sales team and passes it off to Deloitte and there’s no independent judgment going on, and it’s all Sushovan Hussain who makes the decision,” the prosecutor said. “Steve Chamberlain was the vice president of finance. He received substantial compensation for what he did, and he was a professional who knew right from wrong.
“Some witnesses have told you he’s a nice guy. I believe that. I accept that,” the lawyer continued. “That’s not the point.”
Nevertheless, Lincenberg won the case for his client. In a photo of Chamberlain and his wife from that day, the lawyer told Fortune, you can see the “glow and exuberance that we all felt.”
In his last LinkedIn post, two months ago, Chamberlain praised the lawyers who had cleared his name in the U.S. “I cannot thank this team enough for everything they did for me. I hope no one else is ever in the same position as me, but if you are: call Gary and team and then call me. We can help,” he wrote, adding a thumbs-up emoji.
Police in Cambridgeshire say the 49-year-old woman who drove the car that struck Chamberlain was cooperating with their investigations. But they are asking for witnesses who may have seen the collision that killed Chamberlain to come forward.
