In the TV series and novels bearing his name, Dexter Morgan is a successful forensic analyst who moonlights as a vigilante serial killer. His targets are other killers who’ve evaded justice. Robert Maudsley was neither successful, nor did he, like Dexter, long evade jail himself. In fact, Maudsley has spent almost his entire adult life – 50 years – in jail.
But, like Dexter, he’s made quite a career out of murdering other criminals: paedophiles, rapists and sex-killers. Almost all of them from within those walls. Dubbed ‘Britain’s most dangerous prisoner’, he was held for over 40 years: Hannibal Lecter-like, in a specially designed ‘glass cage’ cell. He has only recently been moved to a different prison, where he’s held in a wing with dozens of other inmates with personality disorders.
So, who is Robert Maudsley, and what made him a relentless killer of some of the most depraved criminals in Britain’s prison system?
Robert John Maudsley was born on June 26, 1953, in Liverpool, England. He was the fourth of 12 children and spent his early years at the Nazareth House, a Roman Catholic orphanage in Liverpool, with his older siblings.
Contrary to what you’re probably thinking, the Catholic orphanage was one of the happier periods of his grim life. His brother Paul says that, “At the orphanage we had all got on really well… the nuns were our family and we all used to stick together.” It was only when their parents, who were virtual strangers to the children, decided to take them home that the horror began.
“We were subjected to physical abuse. It was something we’d never experienced before. They just picked on us one by one, gave us a beating and sent us off to our room.”
Robert got the worst of it. He later said, “All I remember of my childhood is the beatings. 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.”
Robert also alleges sexual abuse by his father. His mother did nothing to stop it and may even have encouraged it.
Small wonder, then, that by his late teens he was a drug-addicted drifter, eking a living as a London rent boy. He attempted suicide multiple times and told doctors that voices in his head were telling him to kill his parents.
Instead, fate intervened in 1974. John Farrell, who’d hired Maudsley for sex, showed him his homemade child pornography collection. Justifiably enraged, Maudsley strangled Farrell and then surrendered himself to police, saying he needed psychiatric help. Declared unfit for trial, he was packed off to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, where his pedo-killing career continued in earnest.
Maudsley and an accomplice, David Cheeseman, barricaded themselves in the cell of convicted paedophile David Francis.
Then, over a period of nine hours, the duo tortured Francis before strangling him. According to a guard who saw the body, the dead man had his head “cracked open like a boiled egg,” his skull had a spoon sticking out of it, and part of his brain was missing – leading to rumors that Maudsley ate it.
Maudsley denied the cannibalism allegations, which were later proven false.
Convicted of manslaughter, Maudsley was moved to the infamous Wakefield Prison, aka ‘Monster Mansion’ due to the high number of dangerous criminals. One such was serial killer doctor, Harold Shipman. Plenty of fresh targets for Maudsley’s righteous rage, then.
In fact, he soon determined to kill seven of his fellow prisoners in a single day. As it happened, he managed just two: William Roberts, who’d tried to rape and strangle a young girl, and Salney Darwood, imprisoned for raping and murdering his wife.
For the double murder, Maudsley was returned to Wakefield, and a life in solitary confinement: in an 18-foot-by-15-foot glass cage.
For more than four decades, Robert Maudsley experienced extreme isolation in solitary confinement. He was forced to stay in his cell for 23 hours per day, allowed outside only for an hour to exercise while being escorted by six prison officers. Over time, he was eventually allowed small pleasures in his glass cage like books, a music system, and even a PlayStation.
Unsurprisingly, Maudsley was bitter about such extreme confinement.
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.
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.
In April this year, after going on a hunger strike in response to the removal of his PlayStation and television, Maudsley was relocated to a new prison.
In his new prison, he is held in a wing with 70 other prisoners, most of whom have personality disorders.
If that sounds like a recipe for mayhem, Maudsley’s supporters agree. “It is a disaster waiting to happen,” says penfriend Loveinia Grace MacKenney. “He does not want to be alongside other men because of the abuse he suffered as a child.” His nephew, Gavin, is especially concerned that his uncle will likely be housed with paedophiles and rapists.
Perhaps his jailers are hoping he’ll do them a favour or two.
