‘I’ve had tea with cannibals inside Broadmoor – Monster Mansion sickos are next’

For more than 150 years, Broadmoor has accommodated the most aggressive, hazardous, and mentally disturbed offenders in Britain.

Daring to discover what life is really like in the high security hospital, Jonathan Levi and Emma French bravely ventured beyond its Victorian walls to speak to those locked up.

As the TV journalist and cultural historian link up once more to meet the men inside Wakefield’s ‘Monster Mansion’, Jonathan and Emma have told the Daily Star what it’s like entering such notoriously scary institutions.

READ MORE: Prisoner sucked into MRI machine thought she was ‘being ripped in half’

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Jonathan said: “We’re very used to these very – in a way – dangerous environments. With Broadmoor we were sitting having cups of tea with cannibals and serial killers, and psychopaths, and arsonists that sort of thing. So if we go into Wakefield and do visits as research for the book I expect we’ll do something similar.”

For all the men who could potentially size Jonathan and Emma up as their next victims within the flick of a switch, the authors said security measures inside Broadmoor had them feeling oddly at ease.

One of Britain’s longest-serving lags and notoriously most violent, Charles Bronson has spent time in both Broadmoor and Wakefield, the former due to psychiatric concerns. He was first convicted of robbery, aggravated burglary, assault with intent to rob and possession of a firearm, aged 21 in 1974. A series of violent attacks behind bars has kept him there ever since.

Former Broadmoor patient, Peter Sutcliffe was one of the UK’s most notorious serial killers, having murdered at least 13 women in the late 1970s. Known as the Yorkshire Ripper, he was sentenced to 20 concurrent life sentences. He died from coronavirus on Friday, November 13.

Wakefield Prison was forced to build Robert Maudsley a special 18ft by 15ft cell with a concrete slab for a bed. He now spends all of his time alone, entombed in a glass box deep in the bowels of the prison. Having killed four people including two in prison, Maudsley will never be freed.

Emma said: “Now Broadmoor is 200 of Britain’s most dangerous men, you have to have done something pretty special to get in there, you don’t get in there for stealing smarties but nor do you necessarily stay in there for that long, there’s an emphasis on rehabilitation.”

She added: “It’s a conundrum about Broadmoor because in many ways you feel very safe when you’re in there because as Jonathan says the staff are so extraordinary, there’s so on it.

“The security is so tight given the level of danger presented by these patients especially in intensive care and HDU, actually there is always a present danger but it’s all sort of run with such efficiency and the people who work there are so extraordinary.”

Looking ahead to their next project writing about HMP Wakefield, West Yorkshire, the duo expect there to be a few differences to say the least. One thing the two do share, however, is an an “instant recognition” with ideas flooding to the mind at the thought of either institution.

Jonathan said: “That phrase ‘Monster Mansion’… just the roll call of infamous prisoners that have come through that. The fact that Robert Maudsley, the world’s longest solitary confinement prisoner remains there in the basement and isn’t allowed to die, isn’t allowed to move or any more freedom. It just has something about it, like Broadmoor there’s a fascination in it.

“I mean in Broadmoor they’re mad and bad, they are the criminally insane and Wakefield they’re just bad. They’ve done terrible things but they’re not deemed to be criminally insane. Although the exception to that is probably Robert Maudsley because he was at Broadmoor and deemed too dangerous.”

He continued: “We’re excited to find out how different it is and in which way it is different, an awful lot of time and resource goes into Broadmoor. You know there’s very, very educated professionals that devoted their lives to studying the human mind that go into Broadmoor. You know the cost of keeping a patient in Broadmoor at the time of writing our book was over £300,000 a year. Whereas, you know the cost of keeping someone in prison is around £60,000.

“So the amount of resource and expertise and intelligence that goes into taking care of and treating Broadmoor patients is something else on another scale,” Jonathan added. “We’re fully expecting the prison service to be more scaled back, less intellectual environment. As far as I can tell there’s not much resource for rehabilitation in the prison service.”

Emma concluded: “I think we’re expecting Wakefield to be a bit more rough and tumble but that’s not to question the professionalism of the people who work there.”

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