The Real Life Hannibal Lecter

Robert John Maudsley is a British serial killer responsible for the killings of four people. 

He was in prison, serving a life sentence for the killing of John Farrell in Wood Green, London 1974.

Maudsley had discovered himself homeless with drug addiction and became suicidal, he tried to become a rent boy to receive some money to keep afloat. Farrell had picked him up for sex and began to show Maudsley pictures of kids he had sexually abused. Reacting to his boasting, Maudsley killed Farrell. He was sentenced to life in prison with a guide to never be discharged.

In 1977, whilst being in custody and treated at Broadmoor hospital, Maudsley and another inmate held a convicted pedophile prisoner, tortured him for 9 hours, and then murdered him. The victim has discovered with his head smashed open ‘like a boiled egg’. People declared Maudsley had removed and chewed part of his brain, which was confirmed to be false after autopsy report but earned him a lifelong nickname of ‘ the real-life Hannibal Lecter’.

Maudsley was immediately shifted to Wakefield jail and, within a year, murdering two prisoners in one day. He murdered one, Salney Darwood, a murderer convicted of the murder of his spouse, after attracting him to his prison, where he garrotted and smashed him before hiding his corpse under his bed. He arrived at the prison wing trying to capture other prisoners to his cell, but they all denied apart from prisoner Bill Roberts who he finally cornered and stabbed to death. He hacked at Roberts' head with a makeshift dagger and hit his head against the wall. Maudsley then calmly stepped into the jail officer's room, placed the dagger on the table, and said to him that the next roll call would be two short.

This killing spree suggested that he could no longer be considered a normal prisoner. A glass-fronted cell was made especially for him in the cellar of Wakefield Prison, resembling Hannibal Lecter’s prison in the movie The Silence of the Lambs. Maudsley’s taste for classical music and art have added to the Lecter-ish feeling, shining his fame.

This ‘glass and concrete coffin’ remains his forever residence.

Finally, what makes Maudsley almost different among serial killers is that he can be seen as more tragic than evil – a man drove to horrible acts (exclusively against sex offenders and other criminals) by the very actual devils of his past. A past riddled by neglect and anguish from his parents, he once told: 'When I kill, I think I have my parents in mind. If I had murdered my parents in 1970, none of these people need to have died. If I had murdered them, then I would be wandering around as a free man without a care in the country.