UK's 'most dangerous prisoner’ transferred to new jail after 42 years in a glass box underground
A man dubbed Britain's 'most dangerous prisoner' who has spent more than four decades in a solitary underground cell has reportedly been sent to another jail.
Robert Maudsley, now 71, is the UK's longest-serving inmate who also holds the unenviable world record for the most consecutive days spent in solitary confinement.
He has spent the majority of his life sentence imprisoned in the bowels of HMP Wakefield in a custom-built glass box underground, measuring 18ft by 14ft.
The cell he has called home since 1983 features bulletproof windows, a toilet and sink bolted to the floor, and a table and chair made from compressed cardboard.
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Maudsley previously described it as a 'concrete coffin' in a letter to prison authorities, who he claimed wanted to keep him 'out of sight and out of mind'.
After years of pleading to be moved into better conditions, the killer - who has murdered four people in total, three of which occurred in prison - has now been transferred to another facility.
Last month, it was revealed that Maudsley was on hunger strike in protest of his possessions, including a Playstation, non-fiction books and a music system, being confiscated from him.
He has since ended his period of abstinence and has now been moved from HMP Wakefield, a Category A prison known as 'Monster Mansion' due to the large number of high-profile and high-risk offenders held there.
Maudsley has been transferred 125 miles away from the jail in West Yorkshire to HMP Whitemoor in March, Cambridgeshire, which is another Category A facility, according to reports.
He is said to have been place on F wing, which is reportedly a therapeutic unit specifically designed for prisoners with personality disorders.
However, those close to Maudsley have claimed that he is being 'persecuted' since being moved out of solitary confinement and shipped off to HMP Whitemoor.
Loveinia Grace MacKenney, 69, has written to Maudsley for around five years and told the Mirror that the pensioner has been put with '70 other prisoners' on F wing.
"It is a disaster waiting to happen," she said. "He does not want to be alongside other men because of the abuse he suffered as a child.
"You can tell from his letter to me what a terrible state he is in, his handwriting is shaky. He no longer has his TV, he has no radio. He was a model prisoner on his own, but I think they have targeted him.
"They are victimising him for no reason."
Maudsley had a traumatic childhood growing up in Liverpool, which saw him and his siblings being taken into care due to 'parental neglect', before they were later returned to the family home.
He claimed that his father routinely subjected him to physical and sexual abuse, and even stated that he imagined his victims were his mum and dad during his last murder trial in 1979.
Maudsley committed his first killing while working as a sex worker in London, murdering John Farrell in 1974 after he allegedly showed Maudsley evidence of child abuse he had committed.
He killed Farrell before surrendering himself to police, saying he needed psychiatric care and was later sent to Broadmoor Hospital after being found unfit to stand trial.
Three years later, Maudsley and another prisoner tortured and killed child molester, David Francis, in Broadmoor.
He then killed two inmates at HMP Wakefield - Salney Darwood, who was locked up for killing his wife, and William Roberts, who tried to strangle and rape a four-year-old girl - when he was sent there.
Maudsley has since been serving life imprisonment, with the recommendation that he never be released.
He is now reportedly being held at HMP Whitemoor, which has been dubbed 'Britain's Alcatraz' and is home to some of the nation's most notorious criminals.
The jail, which was opened in 1991, was designed to be an 'impregnable' concrete fortress and even boasts a secondary prison inside its escape-proof razor wire fences.
Notorious offenders from the British criminal underworld - such as Manchester’s Mr Big, Paul Massey, M25 killer Kenneth Noye, as well as London Bridge terrorist, Usman Khan - have all served time there.
The Ministry of Justice declined to comment.
Olivia Burke