Ryan Green - Robert Maudsley: Hannibal the Cannibal

Robert Maudsley

Hannibal the Cannibal

by Ryan Green

Copyright Ryan Green 2016. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author. Reviewers may quote brief passages in reviews.

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At this moment, there is a man who is officially classed as Britain's most dangerous prisoner. This man is considered so dangerous that authorities have decided he may never spend another moment of his life as a free man, who poses enough of a risk to the inmates of the highest security prison of an entire continent that he must be kept isolated from them for their safety. He has spent nearly four decades almost completely isolated from human contact, and for much of that time he has been kept in a glass cage like that used to hold the serial killer Hannibal Lecter in the movie The Silence of the Lambs.

The man's name is Robert Maudsley, and his crimes earned him the nickname Hannibal the Cannibal years before his fictional namesake was conceived of in print. This book is an exploration of his story.

Keep reading to discover in full gory detail the murders that caused the authorities to take such drastic measures to contain him. Keep turning the pages to peer into the sickness of the mind that caused him to commit his gruesome acts and delve into the depths of his childhood to discover the trauma that lies at the root of what he became.

To conclude, we will tackle the question of whether the authorities that mete out justice made mistakes over the course of his incarceration, and whether there are any lessons to be learned and applied should we encounter madness of his type again, as is all but inevitable in the future.

Many believe that Robert Maudsley was a direct inspiration for Hannibal Lecter, but this is actually not so: Thomas Harris, the author who introduced the world to his nightmare vision of a perfect psychopath did not name Robert Maudsley as one of his inspirations for the character, instead naming a Mexican doctor by the name of Alfredo Ball Trevio. All the same, the parallels between them are quite striking. Our first view of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs is one of the most iconic scenes in the history of cinema, a masterpiece of the art. The tension builds slowly as several characters go out of their way to make certain our heroine, Clarice Starling, is precisely informed of the protocol she must observe when interacting with Dr. Lecter. She is presented with a photo of what happened to a nurse the last time there was a failure in adhering to the protocol. The audience hears a description of the grisly injuries inflicted on the nurse, but we never get to see the photo ourselves, which serves to heighten the intrigue and tension as we use our imaginations to fill in the blanks.

Clarice is ushered past a security enclosure filled with enough armed defence to take some of the smaller island nations and led on through a series of double-lock gates to the row of cells in which he is kept. She walks past the cells of the other inmates deemed dangerous enough to warrant this level of security, and they are all very plainly and obviously insane, muttering threats and obscenities and lunging at her. All three cells preceding Lecters are of the traditional type, with bars confinement the inmates. But when we get to Lecters cell, it is far different from the rest. His barrier is made of multiple-inch-thick Perspex, with holes along the top and bottom for air-flow and a drop-box for passing any necessary items through. The message very clear: this is an utterly, ferociously dangerous man who must be kept as isolated from the rest of us as possible.

Robert Maudsley has spent most of his life under a regime of isolation arguably harsher than this most perfect of imagined evil men. Although he has been transferred to a few other prisons over the course of his sentence, the place in which he has spent the majority of his life is Wakefield Prison, the largest and highest security facility in the UK and Western Europe combined, and famed throughout the world as one of the toughest prisons. The high number of notoriously violent and prolific criminals who are currently or have been incarcerated there including such figures as Ian Huntley, murderer of two ten-year-old girls, Charles Bronson (aka Charles Salvador or Mickey Peterson), an armed robber who has made a name for himself as the most violent prisoner in Britain, and the Isles most prolific serial killer, Harold Shipman, whom I have written about before has earned it the moniker Monster Mansion.

Maudsley is considered too dangerous to mingle freely even with this darkly illustrious fraternity of offenders and has spent the last few decades in solitary confinement. In 1983, a special underground enclosure was built for him in the basement of the prison perhaps more readily evoking the underground cell used to hold Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto) in the more recent movie The X-Men: Days of Future Past. His dwelling is a Perspex cage nested inside a larger cell, leaving him more exposed than his fictional counterpart, Dr. Lecter. The door of the cell has a slot in the bottom through which meals and other items are delivered.

Hannibal Lecters cell has more affectations than Maudsleys does. Maudsleys bed is a bare concrete platform, and the only other furnishings in the cell are a table and chair made of flame-retardant compressed cardboard. The lavatory (which is often blocked up, causing a stench to pervade the cell) and sink are bolted to the bare floor.

Maudsley spends 23 hours of the day in that cell and is only allowed out for exercise one hour per day, accompanied by no less than six guards. Whether they are watching over him in his cell or accompanying him out on exercise, his guards never initiate any exchange unless absolutely necessary and will often ignore or put down any attempts by him to engage them. His exercise period is in isolation from the other inmates and is held in a prison that is enclosed on all sides by high buildings, leaving only a small piece of sky visible overhead. The ground is concrete and tarmac, with nothing growing on it except perhaps the hardiest of weeds in the cracks.

When one hears about such a draconian regime of incarceration, the natural reaction is to wonder what manner of crimes could possibly justify it. Our fictional example has set a benchmark: untreatable insanity, multiple murders, cannibalism, and a proven tendency to persist in such behaviours the moment confinement measures are eased in the slightest. While for others there could be some argument, Robert Maudsley without doubt fulfils those criteria. To illustrate, its best at this point to just let events as they unfolded speak for themselves.

On a day in 1974, a labourer named John Farrell picked up a twenty-year-old man in his car from the streets of London. Farrell was a homosexual, and he had picked the young man up to pay for sex the young man was a rent boy, a gay prostitute, and his name was Robert John Maudsley. Maudsley had turned to his line of work to fund a drug habit, having developed that in response to a tormented childhood.

After the transaction was complete, Farrell bade Maudsley to stay a few moments he had something he wanted to show him. Farrell was one of a certain breed of people who is found across all orientations: he was a paedophile, and what he wanted to show Maudsley was a collection of photographs he had taken of some of his unfortunate young victims.

Theres no accounting for what had gone through Farrells mind to inspire him to show a relative stranger evidence of his crimes. A large number of child molesters seem to have no conception that what they do is wrong and believe that their proclivities are just another perfectly valid sexual orientation. Such may have been the case with him. It is possible that he had shown them to others before and suffered no extreme consequence perhaps he had even received some enthusiastic responses.