Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  Professor Coyle is convinced that other whole life term prisoners could benefit from the same treatment as McCulloch, but acknowledges that there will always be those who deny it.

  There is no doubt, however, that the reasons for Robert Maudsley’s solitary confinement lie in the nature of his crimes, and the legend that grew up around them. In particular, they revolve around the myth that he was alleged to have eaten part of the brain of one of his prison victims – earning him the nicknames of ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’ and ‘Spoons’. The reality is that Maudsley did no such thing, as at least one prison officer who worked with him for almost twenty years has explained repeatedly. Nevertheless, the legend lives on, repeated regularly whenever his name is mentioned. That is not for one moment to diminish the heinous nature of Maudsley’s crimes, nor to dismiss his need for the most severe of penalties. It is simply to suggest that his story is considerably more nuanced than is often told.

  Maudsley’s story began with a deeply disturbed and abused childhood, which enraged him. In 1979, during his last murder trial, his defence team argued repeatedly that when he sank into the violent rages that became commonplace, he was often thinking of his parents, and how much he wanted them dead.

  ‘When I kill I have my parents in mind,’ Maudsley has admitted himself. ‘If I had killed my parents in 1970 none of these people would have died. If I had killed them then I would be walking around as a free man without a care in the world.’

  One of twelve children, he was born in Liverpool in 1953, and spent most of his early life in an orphanage. He reportedly found the orphanage relatively pleasant compared to staying at home with his parents – but he was retrieved by them at the age of eight.

  ‘All I remember of my childhood is the beatings,’ Maudsley has said. ‘Once I was locked in a room for six months and my father only opened the door to come in and beat me, four or six times a day. He used to hit me with sticks and or rods, and once he bust a .22 air rifle over my back.’ Maudsley was eventually rescued by social services and placed in a series of foster homes, while his father told the rest of the family that he was dead.

  During the late 1960s, Maudsley became a rentboy in London, and often suffered sexual abuse at the hands of older men, which induced in him a hatred of paedophiles, as well as giving him a serious drug habit. He sold himself to men to support this drug abuse, and he made repeated suicide attempts. Maudsley also spent extended periods in psychiatric care during those years, sometimes telling his doctors that he could hear voices telling him to kill his parents.

  In 1973, Maudsley killed one of the men who picked him up for sex. John Farrell, a labourer, produced several pictures of children he had abused, which provoked Maudsley to fly into a rage and garrotte him with wire. Declared unfit to stand trial, he was sent to Broadmoor Special Hospital for the criminally insane. He remained there for four years before killing again – the murder that gave him his nickname and created his legend.

  In 1977, at the age of just twenty-four, Maudsley and another Broadmoor patient, John Cheeseman, took another patient, David Francis, a convicted paedophile, hostage and proceeded to barricade all three of them into a secure room in the hospital. Over the next nine hours Maudsley and Cheeseman tortured Francis, before finally garrotting him and holding 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.

  In reality, Maudsley did not eat any part of his victim’s brains. One prison officer who worked with him explained that Maudsley had, in fact, made a makeshift weapon by splitting a plastic spoon in half to create a rough pointed weapon. He then killed his fellow Broadmoor inmate by ramming it into his victim’s ear, penetrating the brain. Inevitably, the plastic spoon blade was covered in gore, which was alleged to be ‘his brains’.

  Ironically after this second murder – even though the crime was committed in a secure psychiatric hospital – Maudsley was declared fit to stand trial. He was convicted of manslaughter and sent to Wakefield Prison instead of Broadmoor. But within a matter of weeks of arriving there, Maudsley killed again. The rage he had felt for years exploded, and he set out to kill seven people in one day. He managed two.

  One Saturday morning in 1978 he lured fellow prisoner Salney Darwood, who had been imprisoned for killing his wife, into his cell. Maudsley proceeded to tie a garrotte around his neck and swing him round the cell, smashing his head repeatedly against the walls. He then hid Darwood’s dead body under his bed and went out in search of other victims, but none could be persuaded to go into his cell. Frustrated, Maudsley crept into the cell of fifty-six-year-old Bill Roberts who was lying face down on his bunk. He attacked his head with a serrated home-made knife as he lay there, killing him in a matter of minutes.

  His anger satiated, Maudsley calmly went to a nearby prison officers’ office, put the home-made knife on the table and announced to the officers present that they would be ‘two short when it comes to the next roll-call’. Convicted of both murders and sentenced to life imprisonment – though not, at that time, a whole life term – Maudsley was sent back to Wakefield, where he was not allowed to mix with other prisoners. It was the Home Secretary who later decreed that Maudsley should never be released, and serve a whole life term.

  Sent to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight for a time in the early 1980s, Maudsley worked with a prison psychiatrist for three years, who came to believe that his patient was making progress at controlling his anger and depression. The treatment was discontinued, however, and Maudsley was sent back to Wakefield, where the prison authorities constructed his first special cell in 1983. He was incarcerated there for more than a decade before being transferred to another specially constructed secure unit at Woodhill Prison near Milton Keynes.

  Maudsley’s elder brother Paul has said repeatedly, ‘As far as I can tell, the prison authorities are trying to break him. Every time they see him making a little progress they throw a spanner in the works.’ At one point at Woodhill, for example, he was again reported to have made progress, even to the extent of playing chess with his special group of prison officers, and being granted access to books and music. Nevertheless, Maudsley was eventually returned to the glass cage at Wakefield – before being moved to another specially constructed secure unit.

  ‘All I have to look forward to is further mental breakdown and possible suicide,’ was how Maudsley put it not long after his return to Wakefield. That certainly seems to have proved the case. In the thirty-two years he has spent in almost constant solitary confinement, Maudsley’s health is reported to have declined, while his mental condition also appears to have deteriorated. There are even suggestions that he has grown his hair and fingernails to excessive lengths, much as the billionaire American Howard Hughes did in the last years of his life.

  In 2012 the Daily Mirror reported that Maudsley was in poor health and required two visits from a doctor every day due to the severe weight loss he was suffering as a result of the medication he was taking to control his violent mood swings.

  One of his fellow inmates at Wakefield, Charles Bronson, a former professional fighter with a reputation for extreme violence himself, even wrote about Maudsley in his 2007 book Loonyology. Bronson declared, ‘I know about Bob. I’ve seen him go mad, I know what’s happened to him.’ Bronson also alleged that during his one-hour period of exercise each day, which he takes individually as he is not allowed to come into contact with fellow prisoners, Maudsley paces around his separate prison y
ard – twenty feet long by twelve feet wide – a stooped figure with his eyes fixed on the ground and sporting a long grey beard. ‘Maybe the untold solitary years have made him madder,’ Bronson concluded.

  Whatever the exact truth, it is a frightening portrait of the damage that extremely prolonged periods of solitary confinement can inflict on a prisoner. One woman who befriended him in letters during his time at Wakefield, and then visited him on a number of occasions, found him friendly, and reported, ‘Everyone concentrated on the crimes he committed twenty-five years ago. It’s as if they are living in a time loop and no one is prepared to look at him as he is now.’ Those views were expressed more than a decade ago.

  The probable truth now is that Robert Maudsley’s health and mental condition have deteriorated so severely that he is left as little more than a husk of a human being with no realistic chance that he will do anything other than die in prison. The question Maudsley raises, however, is whether his fate is what a civilised and humane society actually desires for those who are deemed the ‘worst of the worst offenders’ for their heinous crimes.

  Another inhabitant of Wakefield Prison, who helped to bring the jail its nickname of the ‘monster mansion’, received treatment not appreciably different from Maudsley’s and for distinctly similar reasons.

  Convicted paedophile Sidney Cooke is now eighty-eight years old, and was born in April 1927 in Stroud, Gloucestershire. He has been in prison with only a nine-month break since his initial remand in custody for the gang rape and manslaughter of fourteen-year-old Jason Swift in November 1985, a period of thirty years, and he too is in exceptionally frail health having suffered a series of strokes. Cooke is mostly confined to bed in Wakefield, although he can sometimes be seen being pushed around in a wheelchair.

  Cooke has been called ‘Britain’s most notorious paedophile’, and known by the nickname ‘Hissing Sid’ as a result of his unusual speech pattern, but he was not convicted until he was in his late fifties. As a result he has spent all his later years in prison after a period of at least twenty years committing crimes against children and teenagers without being detected.

  Starting out as a farm labourer, Cooke found a job working in a fairground in the 1960s, a career that allowed him to travel the country in pursuit of boys. To help him do so, he set up a children’s version of a ‘Test Your Strength’ machine, which formed a familiar part of many travelling fairs. There seems little doubt that throughout this period he sexually attacked many boys.

  By the 1970s Cooke, and a group of paedophiles later described in the media as the ‘Dirty Dozen’, began taking young boys off the streets and drugging them, before raping and abusing them in group orgies. By the mid-1980s, the group had acquired a flat on the run-down Kingsmead estate in Hackney, east London, where they took their young male victims, and sometimes tortured them.

  In November 1985, a group led by Cooke each paid £5 to gang-rape fourteen-year-old Jason Swift at one of their orgies. After his body was found in a shallow grave by a dog-walker, an investigation led to the arrest of Cooke, along with three accomplices – Leslie Bailey, Robert Oliver and Steven Barrell. Cooke was sentenced to nineteen years at the Central Criminal Court in Old Bailey for the manslaughter of Swift.

  Jason Swift’s half-brother, Steve, said after the verdict that he was disgusted that Cooke had only received a similar sentence to somebody who kills someone else in a pub fight. He felt it was far too short. ‘At the very least, part of the sentence for men who attack children should be castration,’ he said. ‘Their pleasure is boys. Take away that pleasure and they have nothing left to live for … But as far as I’m concerned he can never pay his debt to society. The debt of Jason’s life was too great.’

  Shortly afterwards, his accomplice in the ‘Dirty Dozen’, Leslie Bailey, confessed to the prison authorities that Cooke was among those who had murdered seven-year-old Mark Tildesley in Wokingham, Berkshire, on 1 June 1984. The boy had disappeared while visiting a funfair in Wokingham that evening, having been lured away with the promise of a fifty-pence bag of sweets. His bicycle was found chained to railings near by.

  Cooke contradicted Bailey’s story completely, insisting that in fact it was Bailey who had been the ringleader of the gang that killed Tildesley, and who were believed to have killed at least nine other victims. Bailey himself was murdered in prison in 1993.

  In 1991, the Crown Prosecution Service declined to prosecute Cooke for Tildesley’s murder as he was already in prison for the manslaughter of Jason Swift. Cooke’s sentence was reduced to sixteen years on appeal in 1989, and he was paroled nine years later in April 1998. Cooke’s parole caused huge public outrage, and even he admitted that he might reoffend. During his time in prison, he had refused to take part in any rehabilitation scheme.

  As a result of the public controversy over his release and police fear for his safety, Cooke was forced to live in a suite of cells at Yeovil police station in Somerset during his period of freedom. The Home Office provided him with a TV, washing machine, microwave and small cooker. But on 26 January 1999, he was arrested again and charged with committing eighteen sex offences between 1972 and 1981. They included the repeated abuse of two brothers and the rape of a young woman.

  At his trial on 5 October 1999, Cooke pleaded guilty to sexually abusing the two brothers on ten occasions in 1972 and 1973. He also admitted five counts of indecent assault and five counts of buggery, but he firmly denied the remaining eight charges, which were four counts of rape, three further counts of indecent assault, and one of buggery, all in 1981. The judge ordered them to lie on file. In defence of his actions, Cooke claimed that he was sexually abused as a child, and that when he abused the two boys he thought he had ‘behaved naturally’.

  On 17 December 1999, Cooke received two life sentences and the judge told him that he would only be considered for release after he had served at least a five-year jail sentence. That would have come at the end of 2004, but Cooke is still behind bars today. At the time, the director of the National Society for the Protection and Care of Children insisted, ‘He should never have been freed after serving his last sentence. We certainly hope he will never be given the opportunity to hurt a child again. The children who were abused by Sidney Cooke suffered some of the vilest and cruellest sex offences imaginable.’

  Aware of his reputation as a ‘loathsome paedophile’, Cooke retired to the security of Wakefield with some relief. In the words of a senior police officer who dealt with him, ‘He certainly does not want to face the public. He is well aware of their reaction to him – and is in some fear of that. He spends a lot of his time watching television. He reads the papers. He cleans his accommodation, he sends out for food, he has his own money. He generally busies himself living under supervision.’

  Within a matter of years, however, Cooke suffered the first of a series of strokes, and his health began to deteriorate rapidly.

  Sidney Cooke was never sentenced to a whole life term of imprisonment, nevertheless it seems highly likely that he will end his life in jail as he will never be fit enough to be released – in spite of the fact it is difficult to see how he can now present a risk to society, given his physical condition. But there is no sign whatever that Cooke is being considered for parole. In that respect he represents one of the conundrums of the current sentencing regime – a prisoner who probably would be eligible for parole, if there were somewhere that he could go which could provide security and care.

  Yet Cooke also epitomises an increasing trend among prisoners subject to long periods of imprisonment, which raises t
he question: do the Prison Service and prison officers within it have the necessary skills and training to cope with older inmates whose medical, physical and emotional needs present quite different challenges to prison staff who are used to dealing with younger prisoners? The ageing population that is affecting the National Health Service also affects the Prison Service and the small group of prisoners who have been sentenced to a whole life term – or are effectively serving one as a result of the heinous nature of their crimes.

  A third prisoner apparently destined to spend the rest of his life in Wakefield Prison is the man often described as ‘Britain’s most violent inmate’, former bare-knuckle fighter Charles Bronson, who is now known as Charles Salvador. He too has never received a whole life sentence and is still only sixty-three, but his reputation would seem to make it highly unlikely that he will ever be judged to present no risk to the general public, and therefore eligible for release on licence.

  A distinctly larger-than-life character in every sense, Bronson was born Michael Gordon Peterson in Luton, Bedfordshire, on 6 December 1952, and has spent almost his entire adult life as a prisoner. He has served forty years behind bars, and thirty-six years of those years in solitary confinement, since he was first sentenced to seven years for armed robbery in 1974 as a young man of twenty-two.

  But Bronson has used his period in jail to create a distinctive reputation for himself, both as a prisoner and to the wider public, writing a string of eleven books, including his life story, holding a series of art exhibitions of his work as a painter, which won him several awards, creating his own Appeal Fund, and even being featured in a 2008 film about his life, called simply Bronson, in which he was portrayed by the actor Tom Hardy.

  Bronson’s website states boldly: ‘40 years, not out. Not a murderer, sex offender, not a terrorist. NOT A DANGER TO THE PUBLIC. 40 years served it is time to free Charles Bronson.’ But Bronson is intelligent enough to add: ‘(This can be disputed into what life imprisonment means. Should Bronson be in prison for life on the definition of life in prison?)’