I interviewed UK’s most dangerous killer locked in glass cage underground & he ‘made me smile’… it was terrifying
A DETECTIVE who interviewed one of the UK’s most dangerous killers said he “made him smile” as it was terrifying.
Dubbed Hannibal the Cannibal, serial killer Robert Maudsley was jailed for murdering a person in in 1974, and then killing three more prison inmates four years later.
Maudsley was given the grisly nickname of Hannibal the Cannibal because he was wrongly accused of eating the brain of one of his murder victims.
In 2018, The Mirror reported ex-detective Paul Harrison had interviewed the dangerous killer.
He said about Maudsley: “You’ve got the image of a monster… an evil man. I’d got all these preconceived ideas.
“If you didn’t know him and what he’d done, and you saw him in the bar… he’s a really intelligent guy, who made you smile.
“He’d talk about everyday things. A lot of serial killers are intense and narcissistic and talk about themselves.
“I didn’t find him like that at all. I thought, ‘Wow, this is something different to any serial killer’.”
In January 2023, Maudsley broke the world record for solitary confinement – in a perspex box thought to have inspired Hannibal Lecter’s glass case in Silence of the Lambs.
He has been stuck in an underground box, measuring 18ft by 14ft, for 23 hours a day for more than 16,400 consecutive days.
Maudsley, from Toxeth in Liverpool, carried out his first murder in 1974 when a builder called John Farrell picked him up and took him back to his flat in North London for sex while the killer was working as a rent boy.
When Farrell showed him photos of a young girl he had abused, Maudsley, then 20, flew into a rage and slowly garrotted him, turning the builder’s face blue.
He handed himself into police and was sent to Broadmoor hospital — where he soon earned his first nickname, “Blue”, after the colour of his victim’s face.
But soon after in 1977, Maudsley was given the new moniker of “Spoons” after his first gruesome prison murder.
He and another psychopath took an inmate hostage in his cell and tortured him to death for nine hours.
The man was discovered with his head “cracked open like a boiled egg” with a spoon hanging out.
It is unknown in which jail Maudsley has been imprisoned.