Robert Maudsley has spent more Christmases behind bars than he has as a free man
23:01, 20 Dec 2025Updated 00:07, 21 Dec 2025
Robert Maudsley killed three other inmates
A murderer who has killed three other inmates since being locked up is spending his 52nd Christmas behind bars. Robert Maudsley, more famously known as Hannibal the Cannibal, is the longest-serving inmate in the United Kingdom’s penal system.
Maudsley, from Liverpool, was locked up for murder in 1974, aged 21, after he killed child molester John Farrell. He gained his nickname after claims he dug a spoon into the brain of one of his victims, an allegation he always denied.
In 1977, he and another inmate murdered child molester David Francis at Broadmoor Hospital. After being transferred to HMP Wakefield in West Yorkshire, he killed two more inmates.
Since then, he has been kept apart from other prisoners. The 72-year-old had special provisions made for him at Wakefield Prison, including being kept in a glass dungeon. The killer was kept in the underground box, measuring 18ft by 14ft for 23 hours a day in the basement.
Robert Maudsley would loudly play rock music to “annoy” Charles Bronson
The violent prisoner has only been pictured once since his incarceration after being filmed for a documentary on him more than 40 years ago. When he leaves his specially-made cell, Maudsley is guarded by four officers. Maudsley has long urged the prison authorities to move him into better conditions.
On Thursday, December 25, Maudsley’s day will be no different from the others he spends in prison. His room features bulletproof windows, a table and chair made from compressed cardboard, a toilet and sink bolted to the floor and a door with a small slot at the bottom for food delivery.
In letters from more than two decades ago, he 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.
Maudsley, pictured here when he was a Liverpool schoolboy, has spent 50 consecutive years in jail(Image: Liverpool Echo WS)
“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.
“I am left to stagnate, vegetate and to regress; left to confront my solitary head-on with people who have eyes but don’t see and who have ears but don’t hear, who have mouths but don’t speak. My life in solitary is one long period of unbroken depression.”
Previous years saw Neil Samworth, who served at HMP Strangeways in Manchester for more than a decade, argue Maudsley should also be taken out of the bulletproof glass cell.
Richard Maudsley has spent over 50 years behind bars(Image: BBC)
Mr Samworth, who is now retired after a career “surrounded” by murderers, said: “I think it’s wrong the way he has been treated. He is in total isolation and it is not fair.
“I think his crimes are historic now, and he represents no real danger to others. It’s a bit like Charlie Bronson. Yes, he has had lots of fights in the past, but he is an old man now.”
In a letter to his nephew, Gavin, from Liverpool but now living in London, the serial killer said how he is happy and content in solitary confinement and warned that he will kill again if ever released.
Gavin Mawdsley – Nephew of Robert Maudsley(Image: Woodcut Media.)
Speaking on Channel 5’s Evil Behind Bars, Maudsley’s nephew, Gavin said: “He’s asking to be on his own because he knows what can happen. Put him on a wing surrounded by rapists and paedophiles – I know this because he told us – he was going to kill as many paedophiles as he could. I’m not condoning what he did.”
Gavin added: “He did very bad things. “But he didn’t kill a child or woman. An innocent person didn’t go to work that day and never returned home. The people he killed were really bad people.”