Robert Maudsley, regarded as Britain's most dangerous man, has spent more than four decades in solitary confinement in a purpose-built glass cell beneath Wakefield Prison. He will never be released.
Born in Toxteth, Liverpool, Maudsley was one of 12 children and was taken into care as a baby, spending his early years at Nazareth House, a Catholic orphanage in Merseyside. At the age of eight, he was returned to his parents and subjected to years of violent abuse. His father regularly beat the children, and Maudsley often took extra beatings to protect his siblings. On one occasion he was locked in a room for six months, with only violence for contact. He fled home at 16, but soon fell into drug abuse, funding the habit by working as a rent boy.
His first murder came in 1974, when he killed John Farrell, a client who showed him photographs of children he had sexually abused. Maudsley garrotted Farrell, and the violence was such that police nicknamed the victim "blue" because of the colour of his face. Maudsley was jailed for life and sent to Broadmoor Hospital.
In 1977, he and fellow prisoner David Cheeseman barricaded themselves in a cell with convicted child molester David Francis. They tortured Francis for nine hours, with Maudsley ramming a spoon through his ear and into his brain, earning him the nickname "Hannibal the Cannibal". After being moved to Wakefield Prison, he killed two more men in 1978: Salney Darwood, a wife killer, and Bill Roberts, jailed for sexually assaulting a seven-year-old girl. He stabbed Roberts and hacked at his skull with a makeshift dagger before telling a guard there would be two fewer for dinner that night.
Now deemed too dangerous for the general prison population, work began on a special cell in the bowels of Wakefield Prison. Completed in 1983, the glass cage resembles the cell of Hannibal Lecter. Measuring just 5.5 metres by 4.5 metres, it has bullet-proof windows through which officers watch Maudsley. The only furniture is a table and chair made of compressed cardboard, while the toilet and sink are bolted to the floor.
