Loveinia Grace Mackenney will meet Robert Maudsley, the quadruple killer dubbed ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’, at HMP Whitemoor, Cambs, for the first time in four years
The UK’s longest serving prisoner is trying to see his girlfriend for the first time – but will be forced to stay behind a screen for her visit.
Loveinia Grace Mackenney will meet Robert Maudsley, the quadruple killer dubbed ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’, at HMP Whitemoor, Cambs, for the first time since they first made contact more than four years ago. He would like her to visit before Christmas and has made an application for a visiting order. But like the fictional Hannibal Lecter played by Anthony Hopkins’ in “Silence of the Lambs”, Maudsley will be behind a screen so they will not be able to hug or hold hands.
Loveinia Grace told the Mirror : “Bob has put in an application to visit. It gives them something to think about; it is absolutely disgusting the way that he is being treated so it is good that he has someone like me working on his behalf.
“He cannot have an open visit so even if I am granted a visiting order, I cannot give him a hug. He told me: ‘You will only be able to see me through a glass window’. But he has made the application for me.”
She has written to Prisons Minister Lord James Timpson to voice her concerns about Maudsley’s welfare. He said that the officers should be treating him with ‘dignity, respect and care’.
Londoner Loveinia Grace, 69, a mum-of-one, added: “That clearly is not happening. I sent him two cards a couple weeks ago. They were withheld because they said they were laced with drugs; I honestly could not believe it. I think that is because they do not want me to see him.”
Maudsley asked to return to Wakefield, West Yorks., where he was held for decades in a ‘glass cage’ so staff could see him before entering his cell. His family has been unable to visit him since his transfer to Cambridgeshire. His two elderly brothers live on Merseyside. “He has had no visitors whatsoever in Whitemoor,” added Loveinia Grace.
“He has asked to go back to Wakefield but that has been refused. It is such an ordeal for him. It has gone beyond the punishment of removing his freedom. He feels victimised now.”
She cares for her disabled adult son Thomas, 46, and told how she felt an instant connection with Maudsley after seeing the 2020 TV documentary ‘Killer in the family’ and got in touch with him shortly afterwards.
Maudsley has spent 47 years in a single cell and has just passed the landmark of 17,000 consecutive days in solitary confinement. He went on hunger strike over the removal of his PlayStation, TV and other privileges in March this year. Once regarded as the most dangerous inmate in the penal system, he was then moved from his specially built cell in Wakefield.
He was transferred 125 miles to HMP Whitemoor, and held on F wing, in a unit specifically designed for inmates with personality disorders. In Wakefield, a perspex window for his cell was used to check on him due to his record of extreme violence.
He has access to a phone in his cell and was given his belongings back after ending his hunger strike. Earlier this year, his nephew Gavin Mawdsley told how his uncle had spent almost 40 years in Wakefield, and had not reacted well to the change of his move.
Speaking to Behind Bars TV, he said: “In Whitemoor, to the best of our knowledge, he hasn’t got his stuff. His regime is an hour out of his cell each day, and that is not an hour in the yard, within this hour you have to get your shower and all that. Any time you take a shower, that comes off your yard time.”
Last Christmas was his uncle’s 51st in jail. Maudsley was sentenced to life in 1974 for killing child abuser John Farrell, 30. While behind bars he has killed three men he believed to be rapists and paedophiles.
After killing his last two victims, he was said to have told a prison guard: “There’ll be two short on the roll call.” From 1983 to April this year, he spent 23 hours a day in a glass cell 18 ft by 15 ft wide in Wakefield, which he described as “being buried alive in a coffin”. He became the UK’s longest serving prisoner after the death of Moors murderer Ian Brady, who served 51 years, in 2017.
