Britain's most dangerous prisoner finally addresses claims he was 'locked underground in glass box'
The United Kingdom's most dangerous prisoner has explained what his infamous 'perspex' prison cell was actually like.
Robert Maudsley, 73, is the country's longest-serving prisoner, a dubious honour he took from Moors murderer Ian Brady when he died in 2017, and has spent nearly 50 years in solitary confinement.
That's because the quadruple-murderer has been deemed too dangerous to be around fellow inmates, with three of his four murders coming behind bars.
Maudsley spent most of his life sentence at HMP Wakefield, dubbed 'Monster Mansion' for its laundry list of high profile prisoners, having been imprisoned there in 1983.
Advert
He was said to have been kept in a specialised 'concrete coffin', as he dubbed it in a letter.
It was even thought for years that he was kept in a glass box that was underground.
However, speaking in his first interview in nearly 50 years to the Daily Mirror, Maudsley has now revealed he wasn't in a completely see-through cell, but instead it just had one Perspex wall.
He told the Mirror: "I was not in a Perspex box, but it did have a Perspex wall. For a long time I just had a mattress and a pot to pee in."
He revealed the Perspex was so he could not throw anything at the guards when they entered his cell and that he had to get his toenails clipped by putting his feet through a gap in the door.
He stopped co-operating with the guards and went over a year without having a shave or a hair cut.
'My life in solitary is one long period of unbroken depression'
Speaking in 2024, retired prison officer, Neil Samworth, who worked at Strangeways and Salford's Forest Bank prison, called for Maudsley to be taken out of solitary and his specially built cell.
"I think it's wrong the way he has been treated. He is in total isolation and is not fair," he told the Daily Mail.
"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."
Maudsley himself said in a letter that he wanted to move to better conditions.
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.
"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."
Maudsley moved prisons in 2025
Maudsley was moved to HMP Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire in 2025 but it was recently reported he's not happy with conditions there, either, going on hunger strike over complaints about his treatment.
Maudsley, from Liverpool, committed his first murder by garotting John Farrell in 1974 after he was picked up for sex but was then shown images of child sexual abuse.
He handed himself in to the authorities and said that he needed psychiatric help.
Maudsley was sent to Broadmoor Hospital for manslaughter but there he killed child molester David Francis. He was then moved to Wakefield, where he killed two more men who were said to be sex offenders.
He was dubbed 'Hannibal the Cannibal' by the press when a rumour spread that he ate the brains of one of his victims, which a post-mortem found was untrue.
Maudsley admitted to the Mirror he would likely kill again if he was ever released, which is probably why his life sentence comes with a recommendation that he isn't.
He has spent 17,500 days in solitary and is locked up for 22 and a half hours a day.
Daniel Murphy