‘Hannibal the Cannibal’ serial killer Robert Maudsley has been given other spine chilling nicknames for his shocking crimes
Robert Maudsley is Britain’s most dangerous prisoner.
The serial killer, who has spent 46 years in solitary confinement, is know more widely by his terrifying nickname “Hannibal the Cannibal”
He has been held alone in a locked glass cell in Wakefield prison, West Yorkshire, since 1983 after going on a killing rampage behind bars.
Now 70 Maudsley was initially jailed in 1974, when he was aged 21, for the murder of child abuser John Farrell, 30.
Recently his brother Paul revealed to the Mirror, the killer has gone on hunger strike after prison guards took away his PlayStation and TV – which had access to inside his cell.
During his time inside, he killed three men he believed to be rapists and paedophiles, which led to him being separated and dubbed Britain’s most dangerous prisoner.
During his last murder trial in 1079. it emerged that Maudsley believed his victims were his parents during his violent rages.
“When I kill, I think I have my parents in mind,” Maudsley confessed.
“If I had killed my parents in 1970, none of these people need have died. If I had killed them, then I would be walking around as a free man without a care in the world.”
Born in June 1953, Maudsley was the fourth child of a Liverpool lorry driver. Before his second birthday, he and his siblings Paul, Kevin, and Brenda were taken into care due to ‘parental neglect’.
His first victim’s face turned blue as he was slowly strangled, earning him the nickname ‘Blue’.
Robert spent most of his early years at Nazareth House, a Roman Catholic orphanage in Liverpool run by nuns. He formed a close bond with his brothers but barely knew his parents, who visited sporadically.
Years later, after having eight more children, they brought the first four back home.
The beginning of a terrifying cycle of physical abuse was marked by this event. His brother Paul recalls: ‘At the orphanage we had all got on really well…Then our parents took us home and we were subjected to physical abuse. It was something we’d never experienced before. Once I was locked in a room for six months and my father only opened the door to come in to beat me, four or six times a day.”
Paul says Robert bore the worst of the treatment
Social services eventually intervened and placed him in a series of foster homes. At 16, Robert moved to London, developed a severe drug addiction and spent the next few years in and out of psychiatric hospitals following multiple suicide attempts.
Working as a male prostitute to fund his escalating drug addiction, Maudsley committed his first murder in 1973 after being picked up by labourer John Farrell for sex. When Farrell revealed photos of several children he had molested, Maudsley flew into a rage and strangled him.
Deemed unfit to stand trial, Maudsley was sent to Broadmoor Hospital for the criminally insane where he stayed for three years. According to a Guardian report in 2003, he earned the nickname Blue as it was said his victim’s face turned blue as he was slowly strangled.
Then, the report says, with his second victim came a second nickname.
In 1977, he and another psychopath took a third patient, a paedophile, hostage and barricaded themselves in a cell. They tortured their victim for nine hours before strangling him and holding his body aloft so that guards could see him through the spy hatch.
A guard revealed the man was discovered with his head ‘cracked open like a boiled egg’ with a spoon hanging out of it and part of the brain missing. It led to his new grim moniker, ‘Spoons’.
Ironically, despite killing a patient in Broadmoor, Maudsley was found fit to stand trial. Convicted of manslaughter, he was sent not to hospital but to Wakefield Prison, otherwise known as the Monster Mansion.
At Wakefield, he became the ‘cannibal; and ‘brain-eater’ before going on another killing spree
He lured Salney Darwood, imprisoned for killing his wife into his cell and cut his throat, then hid his body under his bed. Maudsley then spent the rest of the morning trying to find other people to lure back, but no one would go with him. ‘They could all see the madness in his eyes,’ said one inmate.
Eventually, he sneaked into the cell of 56-year-old Bill Roberts and attacked him as he lay on his bunk, hacking at his skull with a makeshift knife and then repeatedly dashing his head against the wall
He then calmly walked into the wing office, placed a serrated homemade knife on the desk, and informed the guards that they would be two short when it came to the next roll call.
Convicted of double murder, Maudsley was inexplicably sent back to Wakefield Prison. Unable to mix with others for his and their safety, he was moved into solitary confinement and has remained there ever since.
