One notoriously dangerous killer has been kept in solitary confinement for around 46 years after murdering four people. Robert Maudsley, 71, committed a string of horrific murders, including three while in prison, and ever since has been locked away in a specially made glass cell.

The UK's most dangerous serial killer - nicknamed “Hannibal The Cannibal” - has been held in a solitary prison cell for more than four decades. He is set to spend the rest of his life in a dungeon underneath Wakefield Prison. US prisoner Albert Woodfox previously held the world record for solitary confinement at 43 years, which has since been overtaken by Maudsley. 

Liverpool-born Maudsley committed his first horrific murder aged just 21, while serving time in prison he went on to kill another three men. Born one of 12 children, as a baby Maudsley was taken into care. He spent his early years living at Nazareth House, a Catholic orphanage in Merseyside.

When he was eight, his parents came to take him and his siblings home and he was subjected to years of violent abuse.

Once, a young Maudsley was locked in a room for six months, his only contact was violence from his father. As soon as he was 16, Maudsley fled home but soon became trapped in a spiral of drug abuse and funded his habit by working as a prostitute. 

One of his clients, John Farrell, was the first man he murdered in 1974. Maudsley garrotted him after he showed him photographs of children he had sexually abused.

Maudsley was jailed for life with the recommendation that he should never be released and sent to Broadmoor Hospital, which housed some of the country's most dangerous prisoners.

For several years, Maudsley kept himself out of trouble but in 1977 he and fellow prisoner, David Cheeseman, barricaded themselves in a cell with convicted child molester, David Francis. For nine hours they tortured Francis to death, Maudsley at one point rammed a spoon through his ear and into his brain, earning him the nickname Hannibal the Cannibal.

Maudsley was then moved to the maximum security Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire but a year after he killed Francis his murderous rage returned. On July 29 1978, he garrotted and stabbed Salney Darwood who was in prison for killing his wife, in his cell and hid the body under the bed.

By 1983, a specially made glass cell was made for Maudsley. He is locked in the cell for 23 hours a day, only being freed for an hour of exercise. He is escorted to the exercise yard by six guards and is never allowed any contact with other inmates.

In a desperate attempt for company, in 2000 Maudsley begged for the terms of his imprisonment to be relaxed. He asked for a pet budgie and then, if that was refused, for a cyanide capsule so he could end his life.

His requests were denied and Maudsley will spend the rest of his life, alone, in his glass box underneath Wakefield Prison.

Maudsey once said: “When I kill, I think I have my parents in mind. If I had killed my parents in 1970, none of these people need have died. If I had killed them, then I would be walking around as a free man without a care in the world.”