There is a man who has been living as a prisoner, in isolation, in an armored glass cage in the belly of the infamous British prison of Wakefield for forty-one years. They call him ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’ and his story has some points in common with the one imagined by Thomas Harris. The man, Robert Maudsley, is seventy years old and has killed in a very cruel way four times: three when he was already detained, convicted for a first murder committed in 1974. The thread of blood that connects Maudsley’s crimes is ‘irrepressible hatred for pedophiles.
His story resurfaces from time to time in the news and now the Daily Mail is proposing it again: the occasion is that a recently retired prison guard, Neil Samworth, protests for the conditions of that prison and for Maudsley not to end his days in the underground glass box, which measures 5 and a half meters by just over four and where he is confined for 23 hours a day. During his free time he is escorted by four prison officers. Samworth told the Daily Mail: “I think it’s the wrong treatment. He is in total isolation and this is unfair. I believe that his crimes are now part of history and that he now poses no real danger to others.”
Maudsley himself pleaded several times for an end to his isolation. Already more than twenty years ago, in a letter, he wrote: «The prison authorities see me as a problem and their solution was to put me in solitary confinement and throw away the key, to bury me alive in a concrete coffin… They don’t care if I’m crazy or evil, they don’t want to know the answer and only care that I’m kept out of their sight and mind. I am left to stagnate, vegetate and regress; Left to compare my lonely head with people who have eyes but don’t see, have ears but don’t hear, and mouths but don’t speak. My life in solitude is a long uninterrupted period of depression.”
Maudsley was given the nickname ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’ based on suspicions that he had eaten the brains of one of his victims. In a 2022 TV documentary, one of his nephews claimed that he had assured him that he would kill again if he were freed.
Maudsley was born near Liverpool in 1953, the fourth child of a lorry driver, and lived an unhappy childhood without parental care, suffering beatings and abuse, so much so that during the trial against him in 1979 Maudsley confessed how he saw parents in his victims: « When I kill, I think I have my parents in mind. If I had killed them in 1970, none of these people would have needed to die.”
He committed his first murder at the age of 21, in 1974; Since he was 16 he had been a prostitute. He killed pedophile John Farrell in Wood Green after he showed him photographs of the children he had abused. After the crime, Maudsley immediately handed himself over to the police and was sent to Broadmoor Hospital, a criminal asylum, having been deemed incapable of understanding. At Broadmoor his conduct was exemplary until 1977, when together with another inmate, David Cheeseman, he barricaded himself in a cell and took child molester David Francis hostage. After torturing him for nine hours, the two showed the man’s body to the prison guards: his head was “open like a boiled egg”, with a spoon sticking out of it and a piece of brain missing, one of the officers testified.
It was then that it was decided to transfer Maudsley, after his conviction, to Wakefield prison where he stabbed and strangled the inmate Salney Darwood, 46, who was serving his sentence for uxoricide. Maudsley hid Darwood’s body under the cot before breaking into the cell of pedophile Bill Roberts, 56, who had abused a seven-year-old girl. He stabbed him, broke his skull with some sort of homemade ax and finished him off by slamming his head against the wall. After this double murder and related convictions, ‘Hannibal’ was isolated from everything and everyone in the armored glass cell. In 2000 he unsuccessfully wrote to the court that he should be allowed to die.
In the letter he summarized the prison treatment he had undergone, his isolation and asked that he at least be given a budgie for company, promising that he would not eat it, or a television to “see the world” or even a bit of music. Wakefield Prison, located in Yorkshire, is known as the House of Monsters and the most brutal criminals in the United Kingdom are held there. “There are no isolation wards in Wakefield,” Samworth said, “so many wings are full of child abusers, rapists and murderers. They’re all together.”