Some of the most notorious killers and sex offenders in British history are either being held or have been held at HMP Wakefield, from Harold Shipman to Levi Bellfield and Charles Bronson
A UK jail dubbed the ‘Monster Mansion’ home to some of the most notorious criminals in the country has been hit with another death as a rapist who stalked university halls and attacked female students has died.
35-year-old Akiel Flemming raped one undergraduate student and sexually assaulted another after sneaking into her room at the University of Wolverhampton and targeted a third woman as she slept beside her boyfriend. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison after being convicted of rape, sexual assault and trespass with intent to commit a sexual offence.
He was being held at HMP Wakefield in West Yorkshire, but died on Wednesday, April 22. The Prisons and Probations Ombudsman has launched an investigation into his death, which was also confirmed by the Minsitry of Justice. His death is not the first at the jail which holds some of the most dangerous and high-profile offenders in the country.
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Flemming, from Manchester, was 25 when he was arrested on the same day as the assaults on October 1, 2016. After he was charged, he denied the allegations and claimed the sexual contact was consensual and that he had been welcomed into the halls of residence. But a jury refused to accept his version of events and convicted him on all charges. At Wolverhampton Crown Court in June 2017 he was sentenced to 16 years and forced to register on the Sex Offenders’ Register for life.
Following his death, a Prison Service spokesperson said: “As with all deaths in custody, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman is investigating. We will respond to its findings, and any recommendations by the coroner, in due course.”
Wakefield Prison earned its nickname of ‘Monster Mansion’ due to the large number of high-risk offenders, sexual predators and killers being held there. Soham double murderer Ian Huntley was held there before being moved to HMP Frankland where he was fatally assaulted at the prison’s workshop. Disgraced Lostprophets frontman Ian Watkins, who was serving 29 years for child sexual offences, also died after being attacked in his cell at HMP Wakefield in October last year.
Robert Maudsley
Known as ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’, 72-year-old Robert Maudsley is Britain’s longest serving prisoner. He was moved to HMP Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire last April, but before that he was held at HMP Wakefield. During his stay, he spend decades in a cell with a Perspex window so prison staff could monitor his movements.
He has spent 52 years behind bars, with more than 17,000 days of that in solitary confinement – setting the world record for time alone in a cell. The serial killer’s first victim was John Farrell, who Maudsley garrotted after Farrell picked him up for sex and showed him pictures of children he had sexually abused in 1974. Maudsley surrendered himself to cops saying he needed psychiatric help.
He was sent to Broadmoor Hospital after having been found unfit to stand trial. In 1977 he and another patient locked themselves in a cell with David Francis, a convicted child molester where they tortured him to death over nine hours with his cause of death determined to be strangulation with a garrote. After this, Maudsley was convicted of manslaughter and sent to Wakefield before later being sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of release.
The next year, 1978, Maudsley killed two fellow Wakefield inmates in one day, having set out to kill seven. His first victim, Salney Darwood, was serving a life sentence for the manslaughter of his wife and sexual assault. Darwood had been giving Maudsley French lessons when Maudsley invited him to his cell where he garroted and stabbed him before hiding his body under the bed. He tried to lure in more prisoners, but they refused.
Maudsley then stalked the wing for a second victim, cornering William Roberts who was serving seven years for trying to strangle a four-year-old girl in order to rape her. Maudsley stabbed him to death as Roberts lay in his bed, hacking at his skull with a makeshift dagger and striking his head against a wall several times before walking into the office in the wing, putting the dagger on the table and telling the officer that the next roll call would be two inmates short.
Charles Bronson
Believed to be Britain’s most infamous prisoner, Bronson, 73, has spent 52 years in jail – much of it in solitary confinement. In 1974 he was jailed for aggravated burglary, assault with intent to rob and possession of a firearm. He was sentenced to seven years and sent to HMP Liverpool, then known as Walton Gaol, but his sentence to extended several times due to violent attacks on staff and fellow inmates with Bronson convicted in 1975, 1978 and 1985.
He was released in 1987 where he took up a brief career in illegal bare-knuckle boxing on the advice of Reggie Kray. But 69 days later he was back behind bars as he was sentenced in 1988 to seven years from the robbery of a jeweller’s. He was released in 1992 but a few weeks later was jailed for eight years for intent to rob and has been behind bars ever since due to the violent crimes he committed while in custody.
In 1994 he was handed seven years for fale imprisonment, and in 1997 he took a deputy prison governor, staff and three inmates hostage, for which he was handed a further five years. Then in 1999 he held an art teacher hostage for three days in Hull prison. He was handed a discretionary life sentence with a minimum term of 3 years in 2000.
A special prison unit was set up for Bronson to help mitigate the risk he posed to staff and fellow prisoners. But then in 2014 he was further sentenced to three years for assaulting a prison governor. He was held at Wakefield for periods between 1975 and 1977.
He was taken back to Wakefield after his 1993 conviction for intention to rob where he spent 40 days naked in isolation. After the 1994 hostage incident at HMP Hull he was transferred to Leicester before being moved back to Wakefield where he was confined to the glass cage previously used by Maudsley.
Harold Shipman
Dubbed ‘Dr Death’, Harold Shipman is one of the most prolific serial killers in British history. It is believed he murdered around 250 of his patients while working as a GP in Hyde, Greater Manchester. Concerns were raised over several years about the number of his elderly patients who seemed to be dying since hs started in 1977. In 1998 police closed an investigation after several months claiming there was not enough evidence.
But later that year, an 81-year-old patient was found dead in her home after a visit from Shipman. Her family were concerned about her sudden death, the fact her will had been changed to give Shipman her entire estate worth around £400,000, and his insistence there was no need for a post mortem. The following investigation uncovered 14 other suspicious deaths and found that all the patients had been given lethal doses of diamorphine before Shipman listed the cause of death as natural causes on the certificate.
In 2000 he was convicted of 15 counts of murder and one count of forgery and sentenced to life in prison. He hanged himself in his cell at Wakefield on January 13, 2004, the day before his 58th birthday. After his death, his cell is said to be ‘haunted’. Child killer Roy Whiting told wardens he was too scared to sleep in Shipman’s old bed in Wakefield due to ‘Dr Death’s’ ghost.
Ian Watkins
Welsh singer and frontman of the rock band Lostprophets Ian Watkins was sentenced in 2013 to 29 years’ imprisonment for multiple sexual offences having pleaded guilty to attempted rape and sexual assault of a child under 13, but not guilty to rape.
His victims included a baby boy with the judge saying the case “plunged into new depths of depravity”. He was sent to Wakefield to begin serving his sentence before being transferred to HMP Prison Long Lartin in January 2014 to be closer to his mum after she had a kidney transplant. He was sent back to Wakefield in 2018.
Five years later, in August 2023, Watkins was taken hostage by fellow inmates and stabbed, with officers freeing him six hours later, though his injuries were not life-threatening. Then in October last year, Watkins died aged 48 after being stabbed in the neck.
Jeremy Bamber
White House Farm killer Bamber, 65, is currently being held at Wakefield as he serves his sentence of life imprisonment with a whole life tariff for the murders of his adoptive parents, Nevill and June Bamber, his adoptive sister, Sheila Caffell, and his sister’s six-year-old twin sons, Daniel and Nicholas. The shocking murders took place near the village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex in August 1985.
The family were found shot dead inside their farmhouse with police initially believing Sheila, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, had shot her family before turning the gun on herself. But weeks after the murders, Jeremy’s ex-girlfriend told police he had slipped up on his alibi that he had been at home a few miles away when the shooting happened. It was argued Bamber, motivated by inheritence, had shot the family with his dad’s semiautomatic rifle before putting the gun in Sheila’s hands to stage a murder-suicide.
In October 1986 he was convicted of five counts of murder by a 10-2 majority verdict. He was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years before being told in 1994 that he would never be released, a decision upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2002. At Wakefield, he has worked as a peer partner, helping other prisoners read and write, and has won awards for transcribing books in the braille workshop.
This month, Bamber was banned from communicating with journalists from behind bars after years of relying on telephone interviews and letters to draw attention to his case. The prison did not give a specific explanation for this decision but cited “the need to protect victims from serious distress and maintain confidence in the justice system” as the basis for such restrictions.
Levi Bellfield
Bellfield is currently behind bars for the murders of Marsha McDonnell, 19, in 2003 and Amélie Delagrange, 22, in 2004 as well as the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, 18, in 2004. He was found guilty of the murders and attempted murder in 2008, more than three years after the last of the three attacks and sentenced to a whole life order. But he was not in court to hear his sentence after he refused to attend saying he had faced “unfair press coverage” after his conviction.
Then in March 2010, he was charged with the abduction and murder of schoolgirl Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old who vanished after leaving Walton-on-Thames railway station before being found dead in Yateley Heath Woods six months later. In June 2011, almost nine years after her body was found, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order.
At the time of the conviction, detectives said they believed he may have been responsible for around 20 attacks on women which were never solved. While being held at Wakefield in 2009, he was attacked by another inmate with a makeshift weapon. He claimed to have suffered minor injuries in the attack, saying prison staff should have protexted him. In 2014, he was awarded a £4,500 payout after Ministry of Justice lawyers admitted liability.
Reynhard Sinaga
One of the most prolific rapists ever seen in the UK, Reynhard Sinaga was convicted of 159 sex offences, including 136 rapes of young men, which he carried ou in Manchester between 2015 and 2017 while living there as a student. Sinaga, 41, was jailed in January 2020 for the hundreds of offences against young men after he tricked them into taking a date rape drug.
He is currently serving a minimum of 40 years behind bars for his heinous crimes and was moved to HMP Wakefield in April 2020, months after his final trial. While behind bars at Wakefield, he was attacked by fellow inmates in an alleged planned hit, with a source saying he is a “clear target” for fellow inmates due to his depraved crimes. After the assault, Sinaga has been moved to HMP Frankland in Durham.
