And yet it is still the most widely recognized mental disorder associated with serial killing. One infamous example is the fictional cannibalistic serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter, and his primary inspiration: Robert John Maudsley.
Born in Liverpool in June 1953, Maudsley is responsible for 4 murders and is now officially recognized as one of Britain’s most dangerous prisoners. Most of his early were spent in an orphanage, until his parents retrieved him at the age of 8. But it was hardly a happy reunion, and rather, the beginning of a horrific nightmare. He was subjected to extreme physical abuse for nearly 12 months, and was the worst among his siblings nonetheless, but social services were eventually able take him away. When he was 16, He fled to London, where he developed a drug addiction, and became a rentboy in order to support it. His first murder was committed in 1973, when a paedophile showed Maudsley photos of children he had abused, after picking him up for sex. He flew into a rage and garrotted the labourer. Sent to Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane, he was declared mentally unfit to stand trial. It was three years later when he took an inmate hostage, barricaded themselves into a cell and tortured the victim for 9 hours before he strangled him to death. The body was discovered with the head cracked …show more content…
He made several suicide attempts from the late 1960s to early 1970s, and was therefore forced to seek psychiatric help, it was at that time he first revealed that he heard voices telling him to kill his parents. His father claimed to have received a letter saying that he was dead in 1973, causing his brother to believe so for years, until he read about the double murder in Wakefield Prison and wrote a letter to confirm that it was Maudsley. During his last trial, he said that: '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. ' He had also claimed to “adore the sight of blood” after being secured in solitary confinement. The abuse he was subjected to by his own parents is the psychological explanation for his inability to care, and the capacity to commit murder of 4 individuals.
The second victim of Maudsley’s was a convicted paedophile, and third, a sex offender. His hatred towards these people was the result of the interactions between him and the society. It is very common for sex workers to suffer sexual abuse, and acts of homosexuality were just legalized in the UK in 1967. As a teenage rent boy, Maudsley was no