Robert Maudsley has been kept alone in a glass cell-within-a-cell for more than 40 years
According to a prison officer who spent years surrounded by murderers, quadruple killer Robert Maudsley is being treated unfairly.
The 70-year-old has spent longer in solitary confinement than any other prisoner in modern history, left to rot in a small glass cell since 1983.
In one sense, he has been hard done by. His nickname, ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’, is based on reports he ate one of his victims’ brains which were revealed to be false.
But there is no disputing Maudsley’s capacity for violence: the victim in question was tortured and stabbed to death with a filed-down plastic spoon which was found jammed in his ear.
Given Maudsley’s past, it’s hard to imagine many will be quick to back calls for leniency by the likes of Neil Samworth, who served at HMP Strangeways for over 10 years.
Why was Maudsley jailed?
Robert Maudsley had no major criminal history before his first murder at the age of 21, but suffered a horrific childhood.
Born in Speke, Liverpool, in 1953, he was sent to a Catholic orphanage with three of his siblings despite both his parents being alive.
They took the children back in when Maudsley was eight, and he was physically and sexually abused by his own father until he was taken away by social services and shunted around various foster families.
By the age of 16, Maudsley had moved to London and spent years in and out of psychiatric hospitals after becoming addicted to drugs and repeatedly attempting to take his own life – telling doctors he could hear voices telling him to kill his parents.
Maudsley says he doesn’t mind solitary but hates his cell and lack of time outside (Picture: BBC)
He then turned to sex work to fund his drug addiction, which put him into contact with his first victim in 1973.
After labourer John Farrell picked him up and showed him pictures of children he had abused, Maudsley flew into a rage and garrotted him.
The following year, Maudsley walked into a police station and confessed, but was found unfit to stand trial and confined to psychiatric care at Broadmoor Hospital.
There, he and a fellow inmate took another inmate hostage and tortured him before famously stabbing him to death with a plastic spoon.
Having been sentenced to life in jail for manslaughter over the incident, he was sent to Wakefield Prison, otherwise known as Monster Mansion, where he was quickly dubbed ‘cannibal’ and ‘brain-eater’.
How did Maudsley end up in solitary confinement and where does his nickname come from?
In 1978, Maudsley lured Salney Darwood, who was jailed for killing his wife, inside his cell and slashed his throat before hiding his body under his bed.
He set out to kill another six inmates in the same way but only managed to ensnare 56-year-old Bill Roberts, whom he stabbed in the skull with a shiv before repeatedly striking his head against a wall.
Maudsley has been at HMP Wakefield for more than 45 years
Maudsley then walked into the prison guards’ office, placed the weapon on a desk and told staff the next roll call would be two short.
Convicted of murder, Maudsley was bizarrely sent back to Wakefield, and was now completely unable to mix with other inmates for both their safety and his.
He was placed into an 18ft by 15ft cell, that includes a secondary cell-within-a-cell with thick glass walls through which he is passed food.
With the obvious comparisons to Hannibal Lecter’s living conditions in Silence of the Lambs, it wasn’t long before Maudsley’s nickname grew to ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’.
What is Maudsley’s life like now?
Maudsley’s cell has a concrete slab for a bed and a table and chair made of compressed cardboard.
For one hour a day he is allowed outside, but must be escorted by six prison officers.
He has spent the last decades complaining about his conditions, at one point penning a series of open letters to the press begging for classical music tapes, a TV, pictures, and a pet budgie – promising he would ‘not eat it’.
In one letter, he wrote: ‘I am left to stagnate; vegetate; and to regress; left to confront my solitary head-on with people who have eyes but don’t see and who have ears but don’t hear, who have mouths but don’t speak.
Maudsley’s living conditions have been compared to those of Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs (Picture: Shutterstock)
In another, he asked: ‘Why can’t I have a budgie instead of the flies and cockroaches and spiders I currently have? I promise to love it and not eat it.’
‘If [the Prison Service] says no then I ask for a simple cyanide capsule which I shall willingly take and the problem of Robert John Maudsley can easily and swiftly be resolved.’
In Channel 5 documentary HMP Wakefield: Evil Behind Bars, Mawdsley’s nephew Gavin from Liverpool revealed how his softly spoken, ‘well-read’ uncle is content to be locked away from the rest of the world.
He added: ‘[If you] put him with rapists and paedophiles, I know because he told us, he is going to kill as many paedophiles as he can.
‘I’m not condoning what he did, but…the people he killed were really bad people.’
Maudsley is in solitary confinement to protect the likes of Roy Whiting, who murdered eight-year-old Sarah Payne in 2008 (Picture: PA)
Ex-detective Paul Harrison, who specialises in interviewing mass murderers, said of Mawdsley in 2018: ‘You’ve got the image of a monster… an evil man. I’d got all these preconceived ideas. If you didn’t know him and what he’d done, and you saw him in the bar… he’s a really intelligent guy, who made you smile.
‘He’d talk about everyday things. A lot of serial killers are intense and narcissistic and talk about themselves. I didn’t find him like that at all. I thought, “Wow, this is something different to any serial killer”.’
Mawdsley previously said he is ‘happy and content in solitary’ but hates his cell and lack of outdoor time, which he said is ‘like being buried alive in a coffin’.
In 2000, he launched a legal bid to the courts requesting to be allowed to die.
In a letter to the courts, he asked: ‘What purpose is served by keeping me locked up 23 hours a day? Why even bother to feed me and to give me one hour’s exercise a day? Who actually am I a risk to?’
Mr Samworth, the prison officer, said of Maudsley: ‘He is in total isolation and [it] is not fair.
‘I think his crimes are historic now and he represents no real danger to others. It’s a bit like Charlie Bronson.
‘Yes, he has had lots of fights in the past but he is an old man now.’
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