Serial killer Robert Mawdsley has just spent his 50th consecutive Christmas behind bars.
The criminal, dubbed Hannibal the Cannibal, has become the longest serving inmate in the UK penal system. Mawdsley, 70, has also been in solitary confinement for 45 years, which is thought to be a world record.
Locked up for murder in 1974 when he was 21, Mawdsley was set apart in 1978 after killing three other inmates. Special provision was made for him at Wakefield prison in West Yorkshire. His cell, including bulletproof windows and a concrete slab for a bed, has been called a glass cage in the cellar.
In 2018, ex-detective Paul Harrison, who specialised in interviewing mass murderers, said of speaking with Mawdsley: “You’ve got the image of a monster... an evil man. I’d got all these preconceived ideas. If you didn’t know him and what he’d done, and you saw him in the bar... he’s a really intelligent guy, who made you smile.
“He’d talk about everyday things. A lot of serial killers are intense and narcissistic and talk about themselves. I didn’t find him like that at all. I thought, ‘Wow, this is something different to any serial killer’.”
After a horrific childhood in Liverpool, Mawdsley fled to London and became a prostitute. After killing a child sex offender in 1974, Mawdsley was ruled unfit for trial.
He was sent to Broadmoor. At the high-security hospital in Berkshire in 1977, he took a fellow inmate hostage, tortured him and stabbed him to death with a cut-down plastic spoon.
It was said the victim was found with the spoon blade in his ear, which led to false rumours that some of his brain had been eaten.
The claim is one of the reasons why Mawdsley was later called Hannibal the Cannibal, referring to the killer played by Sir Anthony Hopkins in 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs. Mawdsley was convicted of manslaughter for the killing in Broadmoor and was sent to Wakefield prison where in 1978 he murdered two inmates.
His nephew Gavin Mawdsley told Channel 5 show Evil Behind Bars: “[If you] put him with rapists and paedophiles, I know because he told us, he is going to kill as many paedophiles as he can. I’m not condoning what he did, but... the people he killed were really bad people.” The Ministry of Justice insisted there is “no such thing as solitary confinement in our prison system”.
A spokesman said: “Some offenders will be segregated if they pose a risk to others. They are allowed time in the open air every day, visits, phone calls, and access to legal advice and medical care like everyone else.”
The MoJ declined to comment on which jail is holding Mawdsley.