Robert Maudsley has now spent 51 years behind bars, 47 years in a single cell, and faces another 20 years to set a new world record for the longest time in prison.
The UK’s longest serving prisoner has endured 17,000 consecutive days in solitary confinement…..but faces the agony of more years behind bars to set a world record.
Robert Maudsley, the quadruple killer dubbed ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’, has been moved to Whitemoor, Cambs., after decades in Wakefield jail, the prison known as “Monster Mansion’ because it houses so many dangerous offenders. He has now spent 47 years in a single cell.
He just passed the grim landmark of 17,000 consecutive days alone in his cell. That is believed to be a world record, and is by far the longest served by an inmate in the UK penal system. French Australian man Charles Foussard holds the world record after serving almost 71 years from 1903 to 1974. Maudsley has been locked up for 51 years.
Maudsley turned 72 on June 26 this year amid growing concerns about his health following a hunger strike. He wants to go back to Wakefield, but his request has so far been denied.
Maudsley became the UK’s longest serving prisoner after the death of Moors murderer Ian Brady, who served 51 years, in 2017. He was first locked up for manslaughter when he was 21 in 1974. But on July 28, 1978, already serving life, he killed two fellow prisoners in Wakefield jail.
That now equates to more than 17,000 days in solitary. He had already killed a fellow patient in Broadmoor secure hospital, in 1974.
The victim there was found with a plastic spoon blade in his ear, which led to Maudsley’s nicknames, first ‘Spoons’, then Hannibal the Cannibal, amid claims that he had eaten his brain.
Post mortem examination made clear that was not the case, but the nickname stuck. Special provision was made for him inside Wakefield, and his cell was compared to one used to house the fictional character Dr Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins, in his Oscar winning role in the 1991 film ‘Silence of the Lambs’.
The Prison Service declined to comment on individual prisoners. In the past, they have stressed that no prisoners are kept in solitary confinement in the UK penal system. French Australian man Charles Foussard was confined in a mental asylum after committing a murder.
He died while still imprisoned after serving almost 71 years from 1903 to 1974. He died in the J Ward mental asylum in Victoria, Australia. That marked the longest prison sentence served with a definite end point