Robert Maudsley, a man who is often dubbed the most dangerous serial killer in Britain, is no stranger to making unusual requests from his glass-caged cell.
The quadruple murderer, in his 70s, was sent to jail for 50 years after being found guilty of garrotting convicted child molester John Farrell, aged 30, in 1974. But the killer has continued to make headlines since, most recently for his hunger strike. The prisoner has been refusing to eat after prison guards confiscated his PlayStation and TV last month, along with his hi-fi and books. But after health concerns were raised by his family, Maurdsley called it off.
The killer spends his time in a specially-built cell in Wakefield Prison, which is 18ft by 15ft, with a concrete slab for a bed. He’s considered such a risk that he will remain isolated in an underground cell until he dies. Maudsley is not allowed to associate with other prisoners or even prison guards, spending all of his time in the tiny see-through room that has been his home for decades.
He earned his nickname Hannibal The Cannibal amid the grisly claim he had dug a spoon into the brain of one of his victims, which he denies. Maudsley went to court in 2000 asking to be ‘allowed to die’, and in a letter, he once asked why he couldn’t have a pet budgie, promising to love it and ‘not eat it’.
The killer’s cell has large bulletproof windows, with a table and chair made of compressed cardboard. His toilet and sink are bolted to the floor and entry is gained by a steel door which opens into a small cage encased in thick Perspex. This has a small slot at the bottom through which he is passed food.
Maudsley’s home has been described as remarkably similar to that of Anthony Hopkins in the film Silence of the Lambs, where he played Hannibal Lector. In a letter, he once described his cell as ‘like being buried alive in a coffin’ and asking for a TV to ‘see the world‘. If this was turned down he said he would ‘ask for a simple cyanide capsule which I shall willingly take and the problem of Robert John Mawdsley can easily and swiftly be resolved’.
Maudsley is believed to be Britain’s longest-serving prisoner after Moors murderer Ian Brady, who died in 2017 after serving 51 years, just one more than the serial killer. One of 12 children, he was taken into care when he was still a baby, he spent his early years living at Nazareth House, a Catholic orphanage in Merseyside.
When he was eight, Maudsley’s parents came to take him and his siblings home, and he was subjected to years of violent abuse. He fled when he was 16, spiralling into drug addiction, which he funded by earning money as a rent boy.
A client of his, John Farrell, was the first man he murdered in 1974. Maudsley garrotted him after he showed him photographs of children he had sexually abused. The murder was so violent police nicknamed the victim ‘blue’ because of the colour of his face.
Maudsley was jailed for life with the recommendation that he should never be released and sent to Broadmoor Hospital, which has been home to notorious criminals including Peter Sutcliffe and Charles Bronson. In 1977 he and fellow prisoner David Cheeseman barricaded themselves in a cell with convicted child molester David Francis. Francis was tortured for nine hours and when prison guards managed to break through the doors, he was dead.
He was moved to the maximum security Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire where a year later, he garrotted and stabbed wife killer Salney Darwood in his cell, hiding the body under the bed. He stalked the prison wing for his next victim and attacked Bill Roberts, who had been jailed for sexually assaulting a seven-year-old girl.
The serial killer stabbed Roberts to death before hacking at his skull with a makeshift dagger. When Maudsley was certain Roberts was dead, he coolly walked up to a prison guard and told him there would be two less for dinner that night.
Deemed too dangerous for the general prison population, work began on constructing a special glass-caged cell in the prison basement and by 1983, it was ready. “He’s asking to be on his own because he knows what can happen,” said Maudsley’s nephew, Gavin Maudsley on Channel 5’s Evil Behind Bars. “Put him on a wing surrounded by rapists and paedophiles – I know this because he told us – he was going to kill as many paedophiles as he could.
“I’m not condoning what he did. He did very bad things. But he didn’t kill a child or woman. An innocent person didn’t go to work that day and never return home. The people he killed were really bad people.”
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