Serial killer Robert Maudsley, dubbed Britain’s “most dangerous” criminal, is looking ahead to another Christmas in solitary confinement, where he’ll be kept locked away from the world in an underground glass cell
As families up and down the UK tuck into their Christmas dinners, one violent killer dubbed ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’ – believed to be too dangerous to share the day with fellow inmates – will be kept isolated in an underground glass cell.
Robert Maudsley, 71, 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 the life out of him. There’s also ‘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’s brains, earning him comparisons to Hannibal Lector. He denied this, but the conditions in which he is kept bear striking comparisons to the fictional cannibal. And having spent more than 216,800 consecutive days in solitary confinement, he’s reportedly expressed hopes of spending Christmas in the “presence of other humans”. This wish has yet to be granted.
Regarded as the “most dangerous” serial killer, Liverpool-born Maudsley, who has taken four lives, is the longest-serving British prisoner in solitary confinement. However, he has claimed he only poses a threat to sex offenders, and has previously begged for a budgie to keep him company in the long, lonely years in his 18ft by 14ft box.
Since 1983, Maudsley has spent his time inside an 18ft by 15ft glass cell deep within Wakefield Prison, in West Yorkshire. The 71-year-old is due to spend Christmas Day in the cell with no exceptions forthcoming. Day after day, Maudsley is held in the cell for 23 hours. He will never be freed from prison and will instead remain in the tiny room for the rest of his life.
The cell features bulletproof windows, a table and chair fashioned out of compressed cardboard. His cell lavatory and sink are bolted to the floor and the door has a small slot at the bottom where food is 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. 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 he 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. Shedding light on 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.”
Muadsley’s nephew Gavin from Liverpool, previously told Channel 5’s Evil Behind Bars that the killer had accepted his fate: “He’s asking to be on his own because he knows what can happen. 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 returned home. The people he killed were really bad people.”
A former Strangeways prison office previously told The Manchester Evening News, that Maudsley should be removed from solitary confinement. Neil Samworth, who worked at Strangeways, has shared his experiences in two books, said in February of this year: “I think it’s wrong the way he has been treated. He is in total isolation and 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.'”
This is a view shared by others with knowledge of Maudsley’s existence. In the book Inside Wakefield Prison: Life Behind Bars in the Monster Mansion, authors Jonathan Levi and Emma French spoke with prison insider Pete, who argued that it would be kinder to let Maudsley die. Pete shared: “The sad thing is, if he were living with someone else, he’d kill somebody else. It’d have been more humane to just put him down.”
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