On the afternoon of July 29, 1978, in Wakefield prison, Robert Maudsley walked into the wing office and told an officer that the roll call would be two short. He had killed two fellow prisoners that day. Salney Darwood was serving time for killing his wife; William Roberts, fifty-six, was serving seven years for trying to strangle and rape a four-year-old girl. They were Maudsley's third and fourth victims, and every one of the four had been a man who had abused children or killed.
He was born in Liverpool on June 26, 1953, one of twelve children, and spent his early childhood in Nazareth House, a Catholic orphanage. At eight he was returned to his parents, and the beatings began. "All I remember of my childhood is the beatings," he said later. Social services took him back into care. By his late teens he was in London, working as a rent boy and using drugs, and he had tried several times to kill himself.
In 1974 a man named John Farrell picked him up for sex and showed him photographs of children he had abused. Maudsley garroted him, then gave himself up and said he needed psychiatric help. He was found unfit to stand trial and sent to Broadmoor. In 1977 he and another patient, John Cheeseman, took a third, David Francis, a child molester, into a cell, barricaded the door and killed him over some nine hours while staff tried to get in. Maudsley was convicted of manslaughter and sent to Wakefield, where within weeks he killed Darwood and Roberts. He was convicted of both murders and given life. The Home Secretary Michael Howard later ruled that he should never be released.
A story went round the papers that he had eaten part of a victim's brain. It was false; newspapers were told the post-mortem showed nothing of the kind. But the name the press gave him, Hannibal the Cannibal, stuck, and other prisoners called him the Brain Eater.
In 1983 the prison built a two-cell unit for him in the basement at Wakefield. Whenever he left it, four officers went with him. He spent twenty-three hours a day in it, alone, for more than forty years. In March 2000 he asked either for his isolation to be relaxed or for a cyanide capsule to end his life. He asked for a pet budgerigar. All were refused. "My life in solitary is one long period of unbroken depression," he wrote.
When the Moors murderer Ian Brady died in 2017, Maudsley became Britain's longest-serving prisoner. In April 2025 he was moved from Wakefield to Whitemoor prison in Cambridgeshire, far from the relatives who had visited him for decades, and in 2026 it was reported that he had gone on hunger strike over his treatment there. In an interview with the Daily Mirror that year, his first in nearly half a century, he said the famous glass cell had never been fully see-through. He was seventy-three.