Pure Evil by Geoffrey Wansell

Author:Geoffrey Wansell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405936163
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

11

What ‘Life Means Life’ Feels Like

Robert Maudsley, Sidney Cooke and Charles Bronson

One man who knows exactly what it means to be sentenced to spend the rest of your life behind bars – and the ‘invisible licence’ it gives to kill in prison – is sixty-two-year-old Robert John Maudsley, a wild-eyed, long-haired Liverpudlian, who killed one man before he was imprisoned and three more once in custody.

Now living in a specially constructed cell, Maudsley has spent a large part of the past thirty-two years in solitary confinement in what is effectively a two-roomed cage, with bulletproof windows and a team of six prison officers dedicated to looking after him. He is allowed just one hour of exercise outside a day, and never in the company of other prisoners – both for his protection and theirs.

Maudsley’s two-cell unit bears an uncanny resemblance to the one featured in the film version of Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs, but it was created more than seven years before the film itself was released. A visitor has to pass through no fewer than seventeen locked steel doors to reach the unit, which is approximately five and a half metres by four and a half metres. The only furniture is a table and chair, both made from compressed cardboard, and the lavatory and sink are bolted to the floor. The bed is a concrete slab with a mattress.

A solid steel door opens into a small cage within the cell, encased in thick Perspex, with a slot at the bottom through which prison officers pass food and other items. During his daily hour of exercise, he is escorted to the yard by at least three officers. As the Observer writer Tony Thompson noted in 2003, ‘It is a level of intense isolation to which no other prisoner, not even Myra Hindley, has been subjected.’

The effect on Maudsley has been to drive him into a severe depression. ‘My life in solitary is one long period of unbroken depression,’ he has said. It also illuminates the dilemma that lies behind the ‘lock them up and throw away the key’ approach to the incarceration of those who have committed the most heinous crimes – for it reveals the effect it can have on those who receive a whole life sentence.

Maudsley has made no secret of his views, even to the extent of writing to The Times newspaper several times about his treatment. ‘It does not matter to them whether I am mad or bad,’ he has said. ‘They do not know the answer and they do not care just so long as I am kept out of sight and out of mind.’ Now with a pale prison pallor and wispy, thinning hair, Maudsley also said, ‘I am left to stagnate; vegetate; and to regress; left to confront my solitary head-on with people who have eyes but don’t see and who have ears but don’t hear, who have mouths but don’t speak.’

‘Why can’t I have amazing pictures on my walls in solitary rather than the dirty damp patches I currently have?’ Maudsley wrote.

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