UK’s ‘most dangerous prisoner’ on hunger strike after PlayStation confiscated

Locked in a glass cage under Wakefield Prison, quadruple killer Robert Maudsley has been condemned as Britain’s most dangerous inmate.

The 71-year-old has languished in solitary confinement since 1983 – longer than any other prisoner in modern history.

Aside from an hour each day he’s allowed outside, under a six-officer escort, he’s never expected to get out.

With no cell mates to offer companionship, Maudsley spends his days playing PlayStation, watching TV, reading books and listening to music.

At least he did, until they were confiscated in an ‘operational exercise’ last month. Now Maudsley is on hunger strike.

His brother Paul, 74, told the Mirror: ‘He’s been refusing food since last Friday so we are very worried about him.

‘He called me from prison that day and he sounded angry and anxious. He told me, “I’m going on hunger strike so don’t be surprised if this is the last time I call you.”

‘He used to have access to a phone inside his cell, but he’s stopped calling us back so we think they must have taken it away.

‘Bob is 71 now so we don’t know how long he will be able to survive without food.’

The confiscated items had been given to Maudsley after he sent letters to the press begging for better conditions.

‘I am left to stagnate, vegetate, and to regress’, he wrote in one.

Asking for a pet budgie, he said: ‘If [the Prison Service] says no then I ask for a simple cyanide capsule which I shall willingly take and the problem of Robert John Maudsley can easily and swiftly be resolved.’

When Maudsley was first locked up in 1974, it was in Broadmoor Hospital, not solitary confinement in a hospital.

Originally from Speke, in Liverpool, Maudsley had moved to London at 16, developed a drug addiction and turned to sex work to sustain himself.

After a client – 30-year-old John Farrell – showed him pictures of children he had sexually abused, Maudsley, then 21, snapped.

Having been sexually abused by his father as a child, Maudsley flew into a rage and strangled Farrell to death.

It was his first victim, and the start of a pattern of killing rapists and child molesters.

Locked up at the psychiatric hospital, Maudsley and a fellow inmate barricaded themselves inside a room with child molester David Francis.

They tied him up, tortured him to death and dangled his body for prison guards to see.

It would eventually earn him his nicknames. First ‘Blue’, for the colour his victims were found in.

Then ‘Spoons’, for the utensil found in Francis’ ear. And finally, the one that stuck – ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’ – based on the lie spread by newspaper reports that he had eaten his victim’s brains.

Already declared unfit either to stand trial or ever be released after the first murder, Maudsley was now deemed so dangerous he was sent to ‘Monster Mansion’, officially called Wakefield Prison.

There his killings continued. In 1978, he lured wife killer Salney Darwood to his cell, slashed his throat and hid his body under the bed.

Maudsley had his eyes on another six inmates to kill in similar ways, but he only succeeded in slaying 56-year-old Bill Roberts, who he stabbed in the skull before bashing his head against a wall.

He then walked into the prison guards’ office, placed the weapon on a desk and told staff the next roll call would be two short.

Convicted of murder, he has been locked in an 18ft-by-15ft cell ever since.

His nephew, Gavin, once said: ‘[If you] put him with rapists and paedophiles, I know because he told us, he is going to kill as many paedophiles as he can.

‘I’m not condoning what he did, but…the people he killed were really bad people.’

Maudsley has described the situation as ‘like being buried alive in a coffin’. By 2000, his mental state was so bad, he begged the courts to allow him to die.

That changed after he was granted some luxuries in his cell, but his brother fears the progress has now been reversed.

Paul said: ‘He’s back to how he was 10 years ago when he didn’t have anything to stimulate him and he would just sit there and vegetate and was in danger of going mad.

‘He loves playing war games and chess on his PlayStation and he’s always watching old films on TV and reading factual books.

‘They’re so important to him, it’s not fair to take them away without a good reason.

‘We can’t get through to anyone to find out what’s going on and we are very concerned.’

Could Maudsley ever be released? It seems unlikely, but even former prison officer Neil Samworth said it ‘is not fair’, claiming: ‘He represents no real danger to others… Yes, he has had lots of fights in the past but he is an old man now.’

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