Britain’s longest serving prisoner has ended his hunger strike after his family expressed concerns about his health.
Robert Maudsley, 71, a quadruple killer once regarded as the most dangerous inmate in the penal system, was refusing food after guards took away his PlayStation and TV. He had both confiscated along with his hi-fi and books, his family said last month. His brother Paul, 74, of Liverpool, said of his decision to stop eating: “We are very worried. Bob called me and sounded angry and anxious.
“He said, ‘I’m going on hunger strike so don’t be surprised if this is the last time I call you’. Bob complained, he’s normally polite, but prison officers accused him of being abusive. When he finally got back in his cell, they had taken his TV, PlayStation, books and radio. He’s back to how he was 10 years ago when he had nothing to stimulate him. He loves playing war games and chess on his PlayStation. He had a phone in his cell, but he’s stopped calling us. We can’t get through to anyone to find out what’s going on.”
Maudsley has now ended the hunger strike and started eating again. Dubbed ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’ by fellow inmates, in December the Mirror told how he had been locked up alone in his cell for almost 17,000 consecutive days. He holds the world record for solitary confinement, and has been kept apart from the rest of the prison population for almost 46 years.
Last Christmas was his 51st in jail. Prison authorities insist that he is not alone all day, and he has exercise time out of his cell like other inmates. But he has written of his desire to end his own life because of the misery of his daily existence.
Maudsley was jailed in 1974 for killing child abuser John Farrell, 30. While behind bars he has killed three men he believed to be rapists and paedophiles. Since 1983 he has spent 23 hours a day in a glass cell 18ft by 15ft wide, likening it to “being buried alive in a coffin”. He became the UK’s longest serving prisoner after the death of Moors murderer Ian Brady, who served 51 years and died in 2017.
The Ministry of Justice declined to comment on his hunger strike, but stressed that he was not in solitary conditions as they ‘do not exist in the UK prison estate’.
In 1983, after prison staff, including barbers, declined to see him alone, a special cell was built for him at Wakefield. He had already killed a fellow patient in Broadmoor secure hospital, in 1974. The victim was found with a plastic spoon blade in his ear, which led to the Maudsley’s nicknames, first ‘Spoons’, then Hannibal the Cannibal, amid claims that he had eaten his brain.
The post mortem made clear that was not the case but the nickname stuck. Special provision was made for him at Wakefield prison after he killed two fellow inmates there. His cell has been compared to one used to house Dr Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins, in his Oscar winning role in the 1991 film ‘Silence of the Lambs’.
Maudsley once wrote: “The prison authorities see me as a problem, and their solution has been to put me into solitary confinement and throw away the key, to bury me alive in a concrete coffin.
“It does not matter to them whether I am mad or bad. They do not know the answer and they do not care just so long as I am kept out of sight and out of mind.”
He made an appeal to be moved out of solitary in 2000, and, in a series of letters to The Times newspaper, requested a cyanide pill to take his own life.
He is said to have a high IQ, love classical music, poetry and art. Those who have visited him inside describe him as gentle, kind and highly intelligent.
A Prison Service spokesperson said: “Some offenders will be segregated if they pose a risk to others. They are allowed time in the open air every day, visits, phone calls, and access to legal advice and medical care like everyone else.” The placement of offenders in segregation is ‘reviewed regularly’.
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