UK’s most harmful killer locked in glass ‘dungeon’ behind 17 metal doorways

A brutal killer who’s spent 50 consecutive years in jail has to be kept in a cell so isolated that you have to pass through 17 steel doors to gain access.

Robert Maudsley, 70, has spent the last 45 years in solitary confinement for the murder of three prisoners, having initially been jailed for another murder. He’s currently locked underground in the notorious HMP Wakefield or the “Monster Mansion”.

In a new book, Inside Wakefield Prison: Life Behind Bars in the Monster Mansion, authors Jonathan Levi and Emma French have provided fresh insight into Maudsley’s cell.

They wrote: “Today, in Wakefield Prison, Maudsley is kept in confinement for twenty-three hours of the day. Everything in his cell is made of cardboard, and you have to go through 17 steel doors to get to it.”

With accommodation that draws similarities with the cell used to house Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, it’s no wonder that he earned the nickname “Hannibal the Cannibal”.

Levi and French later spoke to a prison insider named Pete, who was “very familiar” with Robert Maudsley and referred to his solitary confinement cell as “the strongbox”.

He said: “The sad thing is, if he were living with someone else, he’d kill somebody else. It’d have been more humane to just put him down.”

He provided “lots of fascinating information” about the notorious killer, also known as “The Brain Eater”, and was “very much of the opinion” that Maudsley would “kill again” if released.

In an effort to settle the mystery once and for all, the authors set out the various iterations of the “perspex cell” tale and admitted that “every contributor tells a different story”.

They wrote: “Pete, for example, described the box in the following terms: ‘Metal with thick Perspex around them that looked out into the middle, and there was a metal door with thick Perspex on it and then an outer cell door.

“They were boxes. As he described it to us, it was all completely see-through, except from the front of the cell: ‘You could lift the flap up and look in.

“But you could walk in between the two (there were two of these box-like cells), and there were thick Perspex and metal framing as well. They were secure units; they couldn’t get out’.”

Summing up, a source told the authors that the strongbox was a cell with a “concrete plinth”, an “industrial blanket” and an “industrial dress” in which prison staff would place him.

If Maudsley “kicked off and assaulted somebody”, they would place him in the strongbox “until he’d calmed down”. He would sometimes also “ask the SO to go in” if he “felt his head were going”.

In other versions of the story, Maudsley’s cell or “dungeon” has been reported as “bulletproof”, 18ft by 15ft and with a “concrete slab for a bed”. It is also said to be decked out with bulletproof windows and a cardboard table and chair.

In Inside Wakefield Prison, the authors shared a clipping from an older article about the killer, which described a “specially-constructed glass cell”, where Maudsley has spent “40 years in total isolation”.

Maudsley, from Liverpool, was jailed for strangling child molester John Farrell in Wood Green, London, after the paedophile showed Maudsley pictures of children he had sexually abused.

In 1977, Maudsley and inmate David Cheeseman locked themselves in a cell with another child molester, David Francis, and tortured him for nine hours. This led to Maudsley’s conviction for manslaughter and his transfer to HMP Wakefield.

His crimes escalated even further in 1978 when he strangled and stabbed Salney Darwood, 46, and then stabbed paedophile Bill Roberts, 56, before striking his skull with a dagger and smashing his head into a wall.