Inside ‘Monster Mansion’ home to UK’s most notorious criminals

Some of the country’s most dangerous prisoners are housed here

One UK prison has been nicknamed “Monster Mansion” due to its history of housing the country’s most notorious criminals. All prisoners locked up in HMP Wakefield in West Yorkshire are classed as Category A, including convicted child sex offenders and Liverpool born serial killer Robert Maudsley.

Individuals who served or are serving time there include ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’ Robert Maudsley, ‘Britain’s worst rapist’ Reynhard Sinaga and ‘Dr. Death’ Dr Harold Shipman. Maudsley has been housed in a ‘glass cage’ at at the prison since 1983 after killing four men in the 1970s.

The box is said to bear an uncanny resemblance to the one which housed Hannibal Lecter in ‘Silence of the Lambs’. The Wakefield prison is also where the word ‘nonce’ – a British slang word for paedophile – actually originated, coming from an acronym used by staff there.

A Channel 5 programme shared that the acronym N.O.N.C.E was marked on the cell card of any prisoner who may have been in danger of violence from other prisoners. It meant staff would not open their doors when other prisoners were out. The acronym N.O.N.C.E stands for ‘not on normal courtyard exercise’, according to the documentary, and apparently was first coined at the jail in Yorkshire.

Other sources online back this up, suggesting ‘not on normal communal exercise’, so the prison’s claims to have started the term do ring true. The word is listed in Urban Dictionary and InsideTime, an online and monthly printed national newspaper for prisoners and detainees also support the theory that the term originated in Wakefield.

Below are some of HMP Wakefield’s current and former notorious criminals. It’s not an exhaustive list, however they are prominent prisoners.

Robert Maudsley

Nicknamed Hannibal the Cannibal, Robert Maudsley, who was born in Speke and grew up in an orphanage in Crosby, holds the record for the longest-serving British prisoner in solitary confinement.

He has spent over four decades residing in an 18ft by 15ft glass cell in which he is kept 23 hours a day. Maudsley – known as “Bob” to his relatives – was initially jailed in 1974, when he was aged 21, for the murder of child abuser John Farrell, 30.

But during his time inside, he killed three men he believed to be rapists and paedophiles, which led to him being separated and dubbed Britain’s most dangerous prisoner. He once likened his cell to “like being buried alive in a coffin.”

He became the UK’s longest-serving prisoner after the death of Moors murderer Ian Brady, who served 51 years in prison and died in 2017.

Jeremy Bamber

Currently residing at HMP Wakefield, Bamber is one of the most notorious inmates due to his role in the brutal ‘White House Farm murders’ of 1985.

The victims were Bamber’s adoptive parents, Nevill and June Bamber; his adoptive sister, Sheila Caffell; and her twin sons, aged six. The prosecution contended that after slaughtering his family to secure a hefty inheritance, Bamber staged the scene as a murder-suicide by placing the rifle in the hands of his sister who was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Kamel Bourgass

Kamel Bourgass, who has strong links to hate preacher Anjem Choudary, is serving a minimum of 22 years after being convicted of murdering Detective Constable Stephen Oake during a botched police raid in 2003.

And in 2005, the Algerian failed asylum seeker was jailed for 17 years for plotting to spread poison and ricin across the UK. He was a top al-Qaeda operative and had discussed various ways of dispersing the poison, including smearing it on car door handles in north London.

January 14 2003 was the day that officer Oake’s life would change forever, unbeknown to him. Oake and his colleagues went to a flat in Crumpsall Lane in North Manchester as part of an immigration operation.

No one was expected to be at the flat, but instead officers found three men, including Algerian illegal immigrant Kamel Bourgass. Bourgass, who had attended terrorist meetings was not immediately recognised as being wanted in London for the Wood Green ricin plot.

Believing officers had identified him in connection with the terror plot Bourgass made an attempt to escape and in the process of doing so punched one officer and picked up a kitchen knife. PC Oake, who was unarmed and not wearing protective clothing, went to restrain the suspect but was stabbed eight times in the chest and upper body.

Despite his extensive injuries he carried on trying to help his colleagues bring Bourgass under control. Three other officers were stabbed before he was eventually detained. Oake later died of his injuries.

Bourgass was convicted at the Old Bailey on June 29 2004 for the murder of police officer Stephen Oake, the attempted murder of two other officers and the wounding of another. He claimed that he killed Oake out of fear but he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 22 years plus an additional 15 years for the attempted murder charges.

A second trial in connection with the bioterrorism plot concluded on April 8 2005. Bourgass was convicted of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance by using poisons or explosives and handed an additional 17 years to his sentence.

Mark Bridger

Former slaughterhouse worker Mark Bridger was sentenced to life in prison for the abduction and murder of schoolgirl April Jones. April, who had cerebral palsy, vanished while playing on her bike near her home in Machynlleth, mid-Wales, on October 1, 2012.

Her body has never been found. On May 30, 2013, a jury of nine women and three men convicted Bridger, then 47, of Ceinws, of abducting and murdering April and of unlawfully disposing of and concealing her body with intent to pervert the course of justice.

Bridger hoarded hundreds of images of child pornography on his laptop.

When police searched Bridger’s cottage they found that he had been watching a brutal rape scene from the 2009 slasher film, The Last House on the Left. He had twice recorded the scene where a young teenage girl is raped by a man in front of his watching gangmates, some of whom help to hold the victim down while she is being attacked.

The child killer was slashed across the face with a makeshift blade by a fellow inmate at HMP Wakefield later in 2013.

Sidney Cooke

HMP Wakefield is also home to Cooke, a 98 year old child molester and serial killer once labelled the ‘UK’s most notorious paedophile’.

Having had his parole denied ten times, he is serving a life sentence for a series of appalling sexual assaults on two brothers. Cooke was sentenced in 1999 to a minimum of five years behind bars at Wakefield Prison, where he remains to this day.

Rumours swirl that he was a member of the infamous ‘Dirty Dozen’ gang, implicated in numerous unresolved offences. Retired detective David Bright has voiced grave worries, suggesting that there could be children interred in undisclosed graves “around the country”. He further stated: “He is an evil, evil man.”

Thomas Hughes

Thomas Hughes participated in the abuse of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and was convicted of his manslaughter. In the weeks leading up to the death of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes in 2021 – whose death was caused by a severe head injury – Hughes had engaged in an extensive campaign of physical abuse against the victim which included beatings, depriving him of food and poisoning him with salt.

Hughes carried out this abuse in collaboration with his partner Emma Tustin, 32, who was convicted of Arthur’s murder. On December 3 2021, at Birmingham Crown Court, Hughes was sentenced to 21 years’ imprisonment for manslaughter.

This was increased 24 years’ imprisonment.

Jordan Monaghan

Monaghan, 30, killed his daughter Ruby in January 2013 when she was 24 days old. In August of that year he killed his son Logan, who was 21 months old. Both of the victims were killed by restricting their airways. At the time neither of the deaths were treated as suspicious.

In 2016, Monaghan and his then-partner had a third child together. On two occasions that year he tried to murder the child by restricting her airways but was unsuccessful. In 2019, Monaghan murdered his partner Evie Adams with illegally obtained prescription drugs. After Ms Adams died Monaghan tried to pass her death off as a suicide.

Following Ms Adams’ death Monaghan was arrested and found guilty of her murder, the murders of Ruby and Logan Monaghan and two attempted murders of his third child. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 40 years at Preston Crown Court.

His sentence was increased from life imprisonment with a minimum term of 40 years to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 48 years in July 2022.

Jack Renshaw

Neo-Nazi paedophile Jack Renshaw bought a 19-inch (48cm) Gladius knife to kill Labour MP Rosie Cooper and exact revenge on a female police officer who was investigating him for child sex offences.

Renshaw became more extreme as he made his way through British far-right groups like English Democrats and the British National Party, before settling on National Action. National Action became the first far-right organisation banned in Britain since the Second World War after it celebrated the murder of Jo Cox MP by a white supremacist in 2016.

Jack Renshaw, from Skelmersdale in Lancashire, sought to repeat this attack on a West Lancashire MP, announcing his plans at Friar Penketh pub in Warrington. He Googled “how long to die after jugular cut” and researched Rosie Cooper’s schedule.

But he was brought down by a whistleblower who heard is plans at that Warrington pub. The would-be murderer was jailed for at least 20 years after he pleaded guilty to engaging in conduct in preparation for a terrorist act and threats to kill during a trial at the Old Bailey in May 2019.

He also received a three-year prison sentence two months earlier when he was found guilty of stirring up racial hatred after he called for the genocide of Jewish people. Renshaw was found guilty of four counts of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity during a trial at Preston Crown Court in 2018.

The former leader of the British National Party youth wing set up two fake Facebook profiles and contacted the boys, aged 13 and 14, between February 2016 and January 2017. He boasted that he was rich, could give the boys jobs, asked for intimate pictures and even offered £300 to one boy spend the night with him.

Renshaw had claimed that he was set up by the anti-fascist group Hope not Hate in a bid to discredit him, accusing them of hacking his mobile phone and sending the sexual messages to the teenagers, but jurors rejected this claim.

Reynhard Sinaga

Former Leeds student and Britain’s most prolific rapist, Reynhard Sinaga laced his victims’ drinks with drugs known as GHB or GBL, before filming his attacks on two mobile phones.

Sinaga committed 159 offences – 136 rapes, eight attempted rapes, two offences of assault by penetration and 13 sexual assaults. During a series of four trials over 18 months at Manchester Crown Court, he was finally convicted of raping 48 men, aged 17 to 36, over two-and-a-half years.

Many of the victims he’d found and promised to help when they were drunk and vulnerable outside Manchester city centre clubs were unaware of his crimes until police knocked on their doors. The memory-wiping effect of the drug Sinaga used to knock out his victims meant only two knew he had attacked them.

He was only caught when an 18-year old woke up while Sinaga was raping him. The victim beat the sex attacker so badly he had to be hospitalised.

Police initially arrested the victim on suspicion of grievous bodily harm and he spent several hours in a cell, with police not treating him as a rape victim.

It was days before tests were carried out on him. But as he was handcuffed, he’d handed over Sinaga’s phone, which he had grabbed in the struggle to escape his attacked.

When police finally checked its contents, they saw the truth of Sinaga’s crimes. Sinaga was jailed for life in January 2020 and must spend at least 30 years behind bars before parole. He was moved to the Category A HMP Wakefield on February 17 – just two days before his 37th birthday – after living at HMP Manchester, known as Strangeways, since his arrest in 2017.

Ian Watkins

The former Lost Prophets frontman was jailed for 29 years with an additional six on licence after admitting to 13 sex offences, including the attempted rape of a baby, which a judge said “plumbed new depths of depravity”.

Despite initially denying the charges, Watkins changed his plea in November 2013 to admit two charges of attempting to rape a baby. Among the charges the then-36-year-old had previously denied, were possessing and making child porn as well as launching the plot to rape a baby.

The charges included sexually touching a one-year-old and encouraging a groupie to abuse her own child during a sordid webcam chat. Only a day after admitting the charges, Watkins spoke with a female fan from prison and said he was going to issue a statement saying it had all been “mega lolz”.

The former star had another 10 months added onto his sentence in 2019 after being found with a phone at Wakefield Prison. In his evidence during that trial, Watkins said his fellow inmates were “murderers, mass murderers, rapists, paedophiles, serial killers – the worst of the worst”.

Peter Moore

The ‘Man in Black’ mutilated four men for ‘fun’ in a spate of killings that targeted gay men across Merseyside and North Wales.

Originally from St Helens, he spent a spell in Wakefield Prison after he was given four life sentences, with a recommendation that he never be released. While there, he befriended notorious doctor Harold Shipman.

Former Inmates

Harold Shipman

Behind the caring demeanour of a trusted family doctor lurked the man who would later be considered as the most prolific serial killer in modern history.

Responsible for at least 250 deaths, family man and pillar of the community Harold Shipman would win trust with the patience and care he showed the elderly. But he was secretly administering lethal doses of poison and making off with the cash from his victims wills.

Shipman took his own life at Wakefield Prison in January 2004. He had been on round-the-clock suicide watch at two previous prisons, but such ‘special measures’ had not been deemed necessary after his transfer to Wakefield.

Robert Black

Black murdered three young girls in the 1980s, for which he was convicted in 1994. He died in 2016 at HMP Maghaberry in Northern Ireland, but he had previously spent many years at HMP Wakefield.

Colin Ireland

Dubbed “The Gay Slayer”, serial killer Colin Ireland murdered five gay men in a three-month span in the early 1990s. He died from Pulmonary fibrosis in 2012.

Ian Huntley

Huntley murdered 10-year-old best friends Holly Marie Wells and Jessica Aimee Chapman in 2002. Their bodies were discovered in a shallow grave almost two weeks later on the same day Huntley and his girlfriend, Maxine Carr, were arrested.

Carr, the girls’ teaching assistant, knowingly lied to police to protect her partner. The killer was jailed for at least 40 years and won’t be able to apply for parole until 2042. Carr was found guilty of perverting the course of justice and jailed for 42 months.

The double child murderer was transferred from Wakefield Prison to HMP Frankland in County Durham in 2009.