Robert John Maudsley was born in Liverpool on June 26, 1953, one of twelve children. He spent his early childhood in a Catholic orphanage, was returned to his parents at eight, and was taken back into care after severe abuse. He was working as a rent boy in London by his late teens, using drugs, and had several suicide attempts behind him.
In 1974 he killed John Farrell, a man who had picked him up and who showed him photographs of children he had abused. Maudsley was found unfit to stand trial and sent to Broadmoor. He was known in custody as Blue and as Spoons, and the press called him Hannibal the Cannibal.
In 1977 he and another patient, John Cheeseman, took a third, David Francis, a convicted child molester, into a cell, barricaded the door and killed him over nine hours in front of staff who could not get in. Maudsley was convicted of manslaughter and transferred to Wakefield prison. In 1978 he killed two more prisoners there on the same afternoon, Salney Darwood, a convicted killer, and Bill Roberts, a child sex offender, and then walked into the wing office and told an officer that the count would be two short.
He was moved to a cell built for him in the basement at Wakefield in 1983: a two-room unit with a bulletproof acrylic wall, furniture bolted or made of compressed cardboard, and a door through which food is passed. He has been in it, alone for twenty-two or twenty-three hours a day, for over forty years. He has asked repeatedly and unsuccessfully for a budgerigar, for contact with other prisoners, and, if neither, for a cyanide capsule.
The lurid nickname the tabloids gave him rests on a claim, made at the time and never supported by any post-mortem finding, that he ate part of a victim's brain. It is not true. What is true is that all four men he killed were sex offenders or child killers, and that he has spent longer in isolation than anyone else in the British prison system.