AGI – There is a man who has lived as a prisoner for forty-one years in isolation in a bulletproof glass cage in the belly of the infamous British prison in Wakefield, a town a few kilometers from Leeds. They call him “Hannibal the Cannibal” and his story has some similarities to that of Thomas Harris. The man, Robert Maudsley, is seventy years old and has killed four times in very gruesome ways: three times when he was already in prison and convicted of a first murder in 1974. The blood thread that connects Maudsley's crimes is the unstoppable hatred of him as a pedophile. His story appears in the news from time to time and now the Chron is proposing it again: The occasion is that a recently retired prison guard, Neil Samworth, complains about the conditions in this prison and ensures that Maudsley gets his days not finished He is locked up for 23 hours a day in an underground glass box that measures five and a half by just over four meters. In his free time he is accompanied by four prison officers. Samworth told the Chron: “I think it’s mishandling. He is in complete isolation and that is unfair. I believe his crimes are now history and he poses no real danger to others.” Maudsley himself repeatedly called for an end to his isolation. More than twenty years ago he wrote in a letter: “The prison authorities see me as a problem and their solution was to put me in solitary confinement and throw away the key to bury me alive in a concrete coffin.” They don't care if I'm crazy or evil, they don't want to know the answer and only care about keeping me out of their sight and out of their minds. I will be left to stagnate and vegetate and regress; left to face my head. Lonely with people who have eyes but cannot see, ears but cannot hear, and mouths but cannot speak. My life of solitude is a long, uninterrupted period of depression.” Maudsley was nicknamed “Hannibal the Cannibal” because there was a suspicion that he had eaten the brains of one of his victims. In a 2022 television documentary, one of his nephews claimed that he had assured him that he would kill again if released.
Born near Liverpool in 1953, the fourth child of a truck driver, Maudsley spent an unhappy childhood without parental care, suffering beatings and abuse, so much so that Maudsley confessed during his trial in 1979 that he was in his victims Parents saw: “When I kill, I think of my parents. If I had killed them in 1970, none of these people would have had to die.” He committed his first murder in 1974 at the age of 21; She had been a prostitute since she was 16. He killed pedophile John Farrell in Wood Green after showing him photos of the children he had abused. After the crime, Maudsley immediately turned himself in to the police and was taken to Broadmoor Hospital, an institution for criminals, because he was considered unsympathetic. At Broadmoor his behavior was exemplary until 1977, when he barricaded himself in a cell with another inmate, David Cheeseman, and took child molester David Francis hostage. After torturing him for nine hours, the two showed prison guards the man's body: his head was “open like a boiled egg,” a spoon was sticking out and a piece of his brain was missing, one of the officers said.
It was then decided that Maudsley would be transferred to Wakefield Prison following his conviction, where he stabbed and strangled 46-year-old prisoner Salney Darwood, who was serving his sentence for uxoricide. Maudsley hid Darwood's body under the cot before breaking into the cell of pedophile Bill Roberts, 56, who had abused a seven-year-old girl. He stabbed him, broke his skull with some kind of homemade ax and finished him off by smashing his head against the wall. After this double murder and the associated convictions, “Hannibal” was isolated from everything and everyone in the reinforced glass cell. In 2000, he unsuccessfully wrote to the court asking that he be allowed to die. In the letter, he summarized the treatment he had suffered in prison, his isolation, and asked that he be granted at least a budgie for company, with the promise that he would not eat it, or a television to “see the world to see” or even some music. Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire is known as the “House of Monsters” and houses the UK’s most brutal criminals. “There are no isolation wards in Wakefield,” said Samworth, “so many wings are full of child molesters, rapists and murderers. They all hang out together.”