'Britain's most dangerous killer' is moved to new prison after 46 years inside 'glass cage'

Britain's longest serving prisoner has been moved from his 'glass cage' cell to another for the first time in decades. The told how , 71, went on hunger strike over the removal of his and TV last month.

The quadruple killer once regarded as the most dangerous inmate in the penal system has now left jail in . He has been transferred from 'Monster Mansion' and taken 125 miles to HMP Whitemoor in March, Cambridgeshire.

He is on F wing in a unit specifically designed for inmates with personality disorders. Friends claim he is being 'persecuted' for no reason. Loveinia Grace MacKenney, 69, who has written to Maudsley for around five years, said: "They have put him with 70 other prisoners on a wing. "It is a disaster waiting to happen. He does not want to be alongside other men because of the abuse he suffered as a child.

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"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."

She added: "They are victimising him for no reason." Dubbed 'Hannibal the Cannibal' by inmates, he had been locked up alone in his cell at Wakefield for almost 17,000 consecutive days.

He holds the record for solitary confinement, and had been kept apart from the rest of the prison population for 46 years. Last was his 51st in jail. Maudsley was jailed in 1974 for killing child abuser John Farrell, 30. While behind bars he has killed three men he believed to be rapists and paedophiles.

After killing his last two victims, he was said to have told a prison guard: “There’ll be two short on the roll call." Since 1983, he had spent 23 hours a day in a glass cell 18 ft by 15 ft wide in Wakefield, which he described as "being buried alive in a coffin". He became the UK's longest serving prisoner after the death of Moors murderer Ian Brady, who served 51 years and died in 2017.

Maudsley murdered a fellow patient in Broadmoor secure hospital in 1974. The victim was found with a plastic spoon blade in his ear, which led to his prison nicknames; first 'Spoons', then Hannibal the Cannibal, amid claims that he had eaten his brain.

The post mortem made clear that was not the case but the nickname stuck. His brother Paul, 74, told of a phone call with him last month when he told him: "Don't be surprised if this is the last time I call you'. Maudsley has ended his hunger strike.

In 2018, Paul Harrison, a former police detective who specialised in interviewing mass murderers, told of his interview with Maudsley.
He said: "You've got the image of a monster. A horrible, evil man. He's got this reputation that's been perpetuated by the service. 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, clever guy, who made you smile. He'd talk about everyday things. A lot of serial killers 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. He is different. He doesn't want to get out of prison. He's been in there too long. There are people worse than him in the prison system who get away with a lot more. I came out and I wrote to the Home Secretary. I wrote to the Queen, everybody, and didn't get a single reply."

After a horrific childhood in Liverpool, Maudsley fled to London and became a prostitute. In 1974 he killed a child sex offender. Ruled unfit for trial, he was sent to Broadmoor. There, in 1977, he took a prisoner hostage, tortured him and fatally stabbed him in the ear with a cutdown plastic spoon.

Maudsley was convicted of manslaughter and sent to Wakefield where in 1978 he strangled and stabbed a convicted wife killer. He hid the body then killed another inmate. Like Dr Lecter in the hit movie, Maudsley is said to be highly intelligent and love books, poetry and art.

Nephew Gavin Maudsley, from Liverpool, recently told Channel 5's Evil Behind Bars that his uncle had accepted his fate. He said: "He's asking to be on his own because he knows what can happen. 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 he didn't kill a child or woman. The people he killed were really bad people."

A murderer who spent time in the cell next to Maudsley told the programme: "To hold someone in an underground cage for 40 years is unforgivable. What the system has done to him amounts to psychological torture."

The Prison Service declined to comment.