Britain's longest serving prisoner kept in glass box is 'slowly dying'

Daily Mirror

21-05-2025

Nicknamed Hannibal the Cannibal due to his crimes, Robert Maudsley is struggling after being moved to a new prison as he is 'especially vulnerable' to infection
A new jail regime is slowly killing Britain's longest serving prisoner, according to his new love.
Robert Maudsley is about to turn 72 and twice suffered Covid during the pandemic. He has been left especially vulnerable to infection as a result of his extraordinary time in solitary confinement. A quadruple killer, nicknamed 'Hannibal the Cannibal' by fellow prisoners, he has been kept apart from the rest of the prison population for 47 years. It now equates to more than 17,000 consecutive days alone in his cell. But he was moved from Wakefield jail, known as Monster Mansion, in April after a row over the 'privileges' there.
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He had been on hunger strike, refusing food over several weeks, though he has started eating again. He was taken to Whitemoor jail, Cambridgeshire, where he is being held on a specialist wing. His brothers Paul and Kevin have found it hard to visit him from their native Merseyside.
The Mirror told how he found love with Loveinia Grace Mackenney, 69, who writes to him regularly. Londoner Loveinia told us: "He had Covid 19 twice and almost died.
"This new regime is slowly killing him. I believe they knew that was a risk when they moved him. He is totally different now, he cannot write the way he did before because he thinks his letters are being checked, he has not had his TV or radio, it is barbaric."
Loveinia is concerned that the hunger strike and new regime are combining to slowly kill Maudsley. In his letters to her, he told of his miserable childhood, taken into care due to neglect and beatings at home.
He was first locked up for manslaughter when he was 21 in 1974. On July 28, 1978, already serving life, Maudsley killed two fellow prisoners in Wakefield jail.
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He was said to have told a prison guard: 'There'll be two short on the roll call.'
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 Maudsley's nicknames, first 'Spoons', then Hannibal the Cannibal, amid claims that he had eaten his brain.
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The post mortem made clear that was not the case.
Special provision was made for him inside Wakefield, and his cell was 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'.
The Prison Service declined to comment on individual prisoners.
But a source stressed that no prisoners are kept in solitary confinement in the UK penal system.