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Britain's longest serving prisoner wants to go back to his glass cage cell in 'Monster Mansion' because he is so unhappy after being moved. , 71, is lodging an official appeal about his transfer from Wakefield jail to Whitemoor prison in Cambridgeshire in April after a furious row with staff over his privileges. 

He is so unhappy, he wants to go back to West Yorkshire to the jail nicknamed because it holds so many dangerous inmates. "They are holding back his appeal papers which are asking why he has been transferred," said , his girlfriend. "They are making life exceptionally difficult for him, which is wrong. They have taken away his freedom, that should be his punishment. He has been on hunger strike and not in great health. I am so concerned about him."

She added: "He wants to go back to Wakefield to be closer to his family. Nothing had changed, he had been a model prisoner there. He had more freedom there, I could write to him and send cards three times a week." Once deemed the most dangerous inmate in the country after killing three prisoners while behind bars, he had to be kept apart from the rest of the prison population in Wakefield with guards using a perspex window to check on him due to his record of extreme violence.

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Maudsley was nicknamed after allegedly eating one of his victim's brains, a claim which was disproven but the nickname remained.

It now equates to more than 17,000 consecutive days that the killer has spent alone in his cell. But he was moved from Wakefield jail, known as , in April after a row over the 'privileges' there.

Maudsley had been on hunger strike, refusing food over several weeks, though he has started eating again. He was taken to Whitemoor jail, Cambridgeshire, where he is being held on a specialist wing. 

His brothers Paul and Kevin have found it hard to visit him from their native Merseyside. The told how he found love with Loveinia, 69, who writes to him regularly.

Londoner Loveinia told us: "He had Covid 19 twice and almost died. This new regime is slowly killing him. I believe they knew that was a risk when they moved him.

"He is totally different now, he cannot write the way he did before because he thinks his letters are being checked, he has not had his TV or radio, it is barbaric."

Loveinia is concerned that the hunger strike and new regime are combining to slowly kill Maudsley.

She bonded with Maudsley when, in letters to her, the killer told of his miserable childhood, taken into care due to neglect and beatings at home. He was first locked up for manslaughter when he was 21 in 1974.

On July 28, 1978, already serving life, Maudsley killed two fellow prisoners in Wakefield jail. He was said to have told a prison guard: “There’ll be two short on the roll call.”

He had already killed a fellow patient in Broadmoor secure hospital, in 1974. The victim was found with a plastic spoon blade in his ear, which led to Maudsley's nicknames.

He was first called 'Spoons', then Hannibal the Cannibal, amid claims that he had eaten his brain. The post mortem made clear that was not the case.

Special provision was made for Maudsley inside Wakefield.

His cell was compared to one used to house Dr Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins, in his Oscar winning role in the 1991 film 'Silence of the Lambs'.

The Prison Service declined to comment on individual prisoners. But a source stressed that no prisoners are kept in solitary confinement in the UK penal system.