Robert Maudsley, the quadruple killer dubbed ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’, turns 72 today amid growing concerns about his health and in dispute with prison authorities
Britain’s longest serving prisoner is spending his most miserable birthday behind bars today – the 51st consecutive one alone in his cell.
Robert Maudsley, the quadruple killer dubbed ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’, turned 72 amid growing concerns about his health following a hunger strike. It is his 51st consecutive birthday in prison. But it is his first in Whitemoor, Cambridgeshire after decades in Wakefield jail. He asked to move back to the glass cage where he was held in the jail dubbed ‘Monster Mansion’.
Maudsley has spent almost 47 years in a single cell. It now equates to more than 17,000 consecutive days in solitary confinement. His request to return to Wakefield has so far been denied, and it is difficult for his family to visit from his native Merseyside. He has told girlfriend, Londoner Loveinia MacKenney, 69, not to visit, though she sent him a card with £300 in cash for a present.
Once identified as the most dangerous inmate in the country, Maudsley was moved from his perspex box in Wakefield jail after a row over his privileges, and went on hunger strike earlier this year. He was moved to Whitemoor on April 8. In recent correspondence with Loveinia, he outlined why he went on hunger strike earlier this year. He told how his Playstation and some of his ‘perks’ were taken away. He told her: “Sometimes Loveinia we do have to fight for what is right and we believe in.”
Said to have a high IQ, Maudsley had enjoyed reading and listening to classical music in Wakefield, where his previous crimes led to him being nicknamed ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’. But his TV and radio were removed in the row with prison staff.
Maudsley became the UK’s longest serving prisoner after the death of Moors murderer Ian Brady, who served 51 years, in 2017.
He was first locked up for manslaughter when he was 21 in 1974. On July 28, 1978, already serving life, Maudsley killed two fellow prisoners in Wakefield jail. He was said to have told a prison guard: “There’ll be two short on the roll call.”
He had already killed a fellow patient in Broadmoor secure hospital, in 1974. The victim there was found with a plastic spoon blade in his ear.
That led to Maudsley’s nicknames, first ‘Spoons’, then Hannibal the Cannibal, amid claims that he had eaten his brain. Post mortem examination made clear that was not the case. But the nickname stuck.
Special provision was made for him inside Wakefield. His ‘glass cage’ was compared to one used to house the fictional character Dr Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins.
He was on screen for a matter of. minutes, but it won him an Oscar for the 1991 film ‘Silence of the Lambs’. The Prison Service declined to comment on individual prisoners.
In the past, they have stressed that no prisoners are kept in solitary confinement in the UK penal system.
