Robert John Maudsley (born June 1953) is a serial killer who killed four people. He committed three of these murders in prison after receiving a life sentence for a single murder in the mid 1970s. He was alleged to have eaten part of the brain of one of three men he killed in prison, which earned him the nickname "Hannibal the Cannibal" among the British press. He committed his first murder by strangling labourer John Farrell after he allegedly showed him pictures of children he abused and was declared not fit to stand trial and sent to Broadmoor in 1973. In 1977 he and David Chessman took fellow patient David Francis hostage and tortured him to death and as a result was convicted of manslaughter and sent to Wakefield prison. At Wakefield in July 1978 he killed two fellow prisoners, luring Salney Darwood into his cell and slitting his throat and then smashing Bill Roberts head against a wall at a later time, this time being convicted of double murder at his trial in 1979.
He has served much of his sentence in solitary confinement to prevent him from attacking or killing any more inmates, some of it at Parkhurst prison, but mostly at Wakefield prison in a cell said to resemble Hannibal Lecter's in the film The Silence of the Lambs with cardboard furniture. He became Britain's longest-serving prisoner after the death of Ian Brady in May 2017