Robert Maudsley killed four men – all of which he has said were rapists, paedophiles or sex offenders. Up until April 2025, he had been housed in a specially-built glass prison cell in solitary confinement
Robert Maudsley, 72, has earned a number of gruesome nicknames over the years; ‘Blue’ on account of the colour of his first victim’s face as he slowly strangled him, and ‘Spoons’, a gruesome reference to another killing where he left a spoon sticking out of the skull of one victim, who was left with part of their brain missing. Reports at the time claimed that Maudsley ate one of his victims’ brains, earning him comparisons to Hannibal Lector. He has denied this, but the conditions in which he has been kept over the years bear striking comparisons to the fictional cannibal.
Having spent over 17,000 consecutive days in solitary confinement at HMP Wakefield – which is more than 46 years – he made repeated requests to be in the “presence of other humans”. That wish was finally granted in April 2025 – but with strict caveats. After more than four decades in isolation, Maudsley was transferred to another high-security facility, HMP Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire earlier this year.
He has been placed on the F wing, a unit designed for inmates with personality disorders. This move reportedly came after he went on a hunger strike to protest the confiscation of his personal belongings, including a PlayStation, TV, and books. While he is no longer in the specific glass-walled cell, he reportedly remains under heavy isolation in the new facility.
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Regarded as the “most dangerous” serial killer, Liverpool-born Maudsley is the longest-serving British prisoner in solitary confinement. All four of his victims, he says, were paedophiles and sex offenders.
Since 1983 until this year, he spent his time inside an 18ft by 15ft glass cell deep within Wakefield Prison, in West Yorkshire, 23 hours a day, every day.
The cell featured bulletproof windows, a table and a chair fashioned out of compressed cardboard. His cell lavatory and sink were bolted to the floor and the door had a small slot at the bottom where food was passed to him. In 2021, he lost an appeal to spend Christmas with other inmates. He claimed to have “wanted to spend Christmas in the presence of other humans” but had been “told no,” as previously reported by the Daily Star.
Maudsley’s first killing took place in 1973 after he garrotted a man who showed him a photograph of a child he had abused. He was then just 21. After being convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, Maudsley was sent to high-security psychiatric hospital Broadmoor, where his spree continued.
In 1977, Maudsley and another patient took a paedophile hostage, barricading themselves in a room where they tortured him for nine hours before garrotting him and showing his lifeless body to guards through the spy hatch, The Times reports. This time around, as per BBC News, psychiatrists deemed Maudsley untreatable.
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He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in the normal criminal justice system, which saw him sent to Wakefield. It was here where, in 1978, he slaughtered two other inmates in the course of just one afternoon.
Following the brutal slayings, Maudsley was considered to be too dangerous to be kept alongside other inmates and the construction of his current cell was carried out. He once described the cell as “like being buried alive in a coffin,” and previously campaigned for better treatment.
Maudsley, who blames his criminal behaviours on his traumatic childhood, became Britain’s longest-serving prisoner following the death of Moors murderer Ian Brady, who served 51 years in prison and died in 2017.
In one letter penned to The Times, Maudsley questioned why he wasn’t even allowed to converse with fellow prisoners through a window. He further pleaded for the terms of his solitary confinement to be relaxed, begging for access to classical music tapes, a television, pictures, toiletries and a budgerigar.
He wrote, in part: “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 further correspondence, he remarked: “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.”
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Born one of 12 children, Maudsley was taken into care when he was still a baby, and 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.
Maudsley 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.”
