In the novel Dragão Vermelho (1986), when he told the story of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, writer Thomas Harris, managed to create a character so believable that even today many still believe he actually existed. Such was the case with Jack Dawson and Rose DeWitt in Titanic, fictional characters born of the imagination of Oscarwinning screenwriterdirector James Cameron.
In the 1988 book The Silence of the Lambs, published by Harris, it is possible to better appreciate the danger that Lecter a highly dangerous and disturbing cannibal and serial killer, as well as a renowned and brilliant psychiatrist poses to society and everyone around him. . So much so that since Lecter assaulted a nurse a year into his incarceration, he’s been moved to an underground maximumsecurity ward at Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
(Source: Armchair Nerd/Reproduction)
In his cell, which was only for him, all the furniture was welded to the floor. Two walls were erected and a nylon net stretched between them and the cell bars to prevent the criminal from reaching them. The cell was searched and cleaned three times a week under the watchful eye of prison guards. During this time, Lecter was muzzled and clad in heavy clothing that prevented him from moving.
Outside of fiction, among so many highly dangerous and prolific serial killers like Samuel Little, who murdered 90 women between 1970 and 2005, none faced such confinement Robert Maudsleywho became the senior criminal committed to solitary confinement.
fragmentation of a mind
(Source: My London/Reproduction)
There is something typical and abnormal about the way Robert Maudsley became what society calls a “monster.” After spending the first 8 years of his life in a Catholic orphanage in Crosby, Maudsley, born June 26, 1953 in Speke, England, was rescued by his parents only to be physically and sexually abused after being raped his father regularly.
These psychological traumas were enough to shape the structure of a borderline mind, as with Edmund Kemper and his violent and abusive relationship with his mother, and they persisted even after he was rescued by the welfare system.
In the late 1960s, while still a teenager, Maudsley turned to prostitution on the streets of London, using what she earned to support her drug addiction, which became an emotional outlet. Meanwhile, he attempted suicide several times and was forced to seek psychiatric help.
(Source: The Sun / Reproduction)
However, that didn’t stop him from making John Farrell his first victim on March 14, 1974. Maudsley turned himself in to police as soon as he committed the crime, claiming he needed psychiatric treatment. He was found unfit to stand trial and taken to Broadmoor Hospital. Three years later, with the help of a hospital resident, he locked himself in a cell with David Francis, a convicted child molester, and tortured him for nine hours before killing him.
With that, Maudsley was convicted of manslaughter and sent to Wakefield Prison. In 1978 he killed two other inmates in one day. The man was sentenced to life imprisonment on a recommendation that he should never be paroled.
16,000 days
(Credit: The US Sun/Reproduction)
Since then, Maudsley has been locked in a glass cage in the basement of Wakefield Prison. He is currently considered Britain’s longestserving prisoner, having spent 49 years behind bars, of which 16,000 consecutive days were spent in solitary confinement. He surpasses the world record for the time he spends in solitary confinement by spending 23 hours of his day alone.
“My life in solitary confinement has been a long period of uninterrupted depression,” the criminal wrote in a letter published by the Chron more than a decade ago.
Maudsley also described how he only remembers the beatings from his childhood. “Once I was locked in a room for six months and my father would only open the door to come in and hit me four or six times a day,” he wrote.
Not ironically, all four times Maudsley murdered someone was motivated by a trigger related to the abuse he suffered as a child. All the victims he made abused minors.
No wonder Maudsley, in regular conversations with psychiatrists, made it clear that if he had killed his parents in 1970, none of these people would have died.