As serial killer Robert Maudsley goes on hunger strike, the Mirror looks at Britain’s longest-serving prisoner’s lonely life in his ‘prison inside a prison’ and why he can never mix with his fellow inmates
For 46 years, Robert Maudsley has been kept in solitary confinement, spending 23 hours a day in an 18ft by 15ft glass cell he’s previously likened to being “buried alive in a coffin”. But why is the criminal kept so firmly locked away from the world in comparison to other serial killers?
The 71-year-old, who is currently on hunger strike, is regarded as far too dangerous to mix with his fellow inmates, even on Christmas Day, and at the time of writing, holds the record for the longest-serving British prisoner in solitary confinement.
He is also Britain’s longest-serving prisoner, following the death of Moors murderer Ian Brady, who served 51 years in prison and died in 2017. Maudsley, known as ‘Bob’ to family members, was first jailed in 1974 for the murder of child abuser John Farrell, who he garotted after the paedophile showed him images of children he’d abused.
Then, at just 21, Maudsley was convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and was sent to Broadmoor. However, it was while at the high-security psychiatric hospital that his killing spree really got going.
In 1977, Maudsley and another patient took a paedophile hostage and tortured him for nine hours inside a barricaded room. They then garrotted the sex offender and showed his lifeless body to guards through the spy hatch.
Following this disturbing incident, psychiatrists deemed Maudsley untreatable. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in the normal criminal justice system, which saw him sent to Wakefield prison. But the killings didn’t stop, and in 1978, Maudsley brutally murdered two other inmates in just one afternoon, having originally set out to slay seven.
At this point, Maudsley was regarded as too dangerous to be kept alongside other inmates, and so, since 1983, he has been kept in a solitary cell. Sensationalist reports at the time claimed Maudsley had actually eaten one of his victims’s brains, earning him the nickname ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’.
Maudsley has denied that any cannibalism occurred during the attacks. However, the conditions in which he is kept bear remarkable comparisons to those of the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter.
Complete with bulletproof windows, Maudsley is given food through a small slot in the door. His table and chair have been fashioned out of compressed cardboard, while his cell lavatory and sink are bolted to the floor. Over the years, he has made attempts to improve his state of complete isolation and, in 2021, lost an appeal to spend Christmas with other inmates. At the time, he claimed to have “wanted to spend Christmas in the presence of other humans” but had been “told no,” as reported by the Daily Star.
In one letter penned to The Times, Maudsley questioned why he wasn’t even allowed to converse with other prisoners through a window. Opening up about his experiences in the ‘glass cage’, Maudsley wrote: “The prison authorities see me as a problem, and their solution has been to put me into solitary confinement and throw away the key, to bury me alive in a concrete coffin. It does not matter to them whether I am mad or bad. They do not know the answer, and they do not care just so long as I am kept out of sight and out of mind.
“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. My life in solitary is one long period of unbroken depression.”
He continued: “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.”
This week, the Mirror revealed Maudsley had gone on hunger strike after prison guards took away his PlayStation, TV, books and music system, vowing not to eat again until guards returned his prized possessions. It’s believed this hunger strike was triggered by an “operational exercise” carried out at Wakefield on February 26. Maudsley’s family understands that the jail went into crisis mode – with the inmates ordered out of their cells so they could be searched – following reports that a gun had been smuggled in.
Speaking exclusively with the Mirror, Maudsley’s brother Paul Maudsley, 74, said: “He’s been refusing food since last Friday so we are very worried about him. He called me from prison that day and he sounded angry and anxious. He told me, ‘I’m going on hunger strike so don’t be surprised if this is the last time I call you.’
“He used to have access to a phone inside his cell, but he’s stopped calling us back so we think they must have taken it away. Bob is 71 now so we don’t know how long he will be able to survive without food.”
Paul, from Liverpool, continued: “Bob is held inside a prison within the prison. “For some reason, the main prison went back to normal after the operational exercise, but Bob’s section was out for a couple of days. Bob complained and he’s normally polite, but the prison officers accused him of being abusive. When he finally got back in his cell, they had taken everything – his TV, PlayStation, books and radio.
“He’s back to how he was 10 years ago when he didn’t have anything to stimulate him and he would just sit there and vegetate and was in danger of going mad. He loves playing war games and chess on his PlayStation and he’s always watching old films on TV and reading factual books.
“They’re so important to him, it’s not fair to take them away without a good reason. We can’t get through to anyone to find out what’s going on and we are very concerned.”
The Ministry of Justice previously declined to comment.
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