Robert Maudsley has spent four decades in solitary confinement at HMP Wakefield - known for holding some of the most dangerous criminals
"All alone now." These were the only three words written by Robert Maudsley in a final letter to a psychiatrist in the 1990s.
But confined in a basement below the wings housing the majority of these dangerous and wicked inmates, Robert Maudsley spends 23 hours each day in a glass box. His specially-built cell, said to be 18ft by 15ft, is surrounded by bulletproof glass with a concrete slab for a bed. Maudsley was born in Liverpool in June 1953 - at the time the youngest of four siblings the Liverpool Echo reported in 2018. When he was six months old he – alongside his two older brothers Kevin and Paul and sister Brenda – was placed into care due to their parents not being able to cope. They spent nine years at a Roman Catholic-run centre looked after by nuns and went to school in nearby Little Crosby in the north of the city.
As a teenager he became a rent boy in the capital to help fund his drug addiction. One night, while working as a male prostitute, he was picked up by labourer John Farrell. In Geoffrey Wansell's book Pure Evil, he writes: "They held his body aloft so that the staff could see him through the spyhole in the door. According to legend, Francis's body was found with his head 'cracked open like a boiled egg' and with a spoon hanging out of it.'
Within weeks of arriving at Wakefield, he killed again - twice. One Saturday morning in 1978 he lured fellow convict Salney Darwood, who was imprisoned for killing his wife, into his cell. During his final trial in 1979, Maudsley claimed he was thinking of his parents during his vigilante violence, wishing he had killed them in 1970. Robert Maudsley's older brother Paul once said: "I've always thought 'There but for the grace of God go I . . .' I could easily have turned out like Bob. But I was lucky. I ended up with someone who loved me and showed me affection.
In 2018, Paul Harrison, a former police detective who specialised in interviewing mass murderers, spoke to the Manchester Evening News about the time he interviewed Robert Maudsley. Mr Harrison has sat down with some of the most depraved serial killers in modern history, including Jeffrey Dahmer and the 'Killer Clown' John Wayne Gacey.
"A lot of are really intense and narcissistic and talk about themselves, and I didn't find him like that at all. He's the only one where I actually thought: 'Wow – this is something different to any serial killer. Maudsley is different."
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