Since 1330, the Bethlem Royal Hospital - also known as "Bedlam", and which gives its name to any place in which confusion and uproar has taken place - in London has been housing the country's lunatics, though it isn't quite as notorious nowadays as it was during its height in the 1700s. It was originally built as a priory for monks in 1247.
However, the first purpose built home for the criminally insane in Britain is Broadmoor, contructed in 1863 in the pretty Berkshire countryside.
Today, it has replaced Bedlam as the country's most notorious "loony bin" and Britain still has its fair share of loonies.
The amount of loonies in this place boggles belief. The Yorkshire Ripper, who murdered women in the Seventies and Eighties, is imprisoned there, and so are the Stockwell Strangler and the Teacup Murderer.
Jack the Ripper may have been imprisoned there - Thomas Haynes Cutbush, a lead suspect in the Ripper murders, was pronounced insane and kept in Broadmoor until his death in 1903. From the moment of his arrest, the Ripper murders ceased.
Also, the man who was the inspiration behind Hannibal Lecter was imprisoned at Broadmoor. Robert Maudsley, a loon who was imprisoned Broadmoor in the 1970s after garrotting, even kept a fellow inmate imprisoned in a room with him in 1977 and tortured him for nine hours, a process that involved sticking a spoon into his victim's brain.
Prison of the Damned: Broadmoor hospital harbours England's most famous serial killers and now the files are made public
By Christopher Hudson
24th November 2008
Daily Mail
It's been home to the real Hannibal Lecter, deranged poisoners and a barman who tried to shoot Queen Victoria. Now Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane is finally giving up its secret.
Every Monday morning at 10am, a banshee wail howls out over Broadmoor Hospital. For two minutes, the ear- splitting sound rings out like a wartime air raid siren as the alarm system is tested.
And for any escape-hungry inmate who climbs over the high-security walls enclosing the red-brick fortress there is no hiding place when it goes off for real: 13 sirens are in the neighbouring Berkshire towns of Camberley, Bracknell, Bagshot, Wokingham and the nearby village of Crowthorne, all of them connected by a telephone network.
Broadmoor hospital has been home to the real Hannibal Lecter as played by Sir Anthony Hopkins in the film
If somehow an inmate does manage to escape, the sirens sound for 20 minutes. Nearby schools, such as Wellington College, have to keep their pupils inside until it is safe for parents to collect them. A cordon is thrown around Crowthorne and all cars are checked at police road blocks. Not until the single-tone 'All Clear' sounds can normal life resume.
This is no ordinary alarm. And there are no ordinary patients imprisoned within. The system was installed after the escape of child murderer John Straffen in 1952.
While supposedly on cleaning duties, he climbed onto a shed roof and dropped down the other side. He then sauntered into the nearby village of Arborfield and strangled five-year-old Linda Bowyer, who had been out riding her bike. He was soon recaptured, after locals saw him acting strangely and called the police.
Broadmoor was the first custom-built asylum to house criminal lunatics constructed in 1863.
Straffen was the kind of deranged murderer who should have been booked into Broadmoor (once better known as Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane) when he first came to the attention of the authorities.
He had already spent half his life in institutions when, aged 21, he saw five-year- old Brenda Goddard picking flowers on Rough Hill behind her home in Bath. Told that there were plenty more flowers higher up, she walked trustingly with Straffen into a nearby wood, where he put his hands around her neck.
A few days later, he met nine-year-old Cicely Batstone at the cinema and escorted her across Bath to see another film - leaving a trail of witnesses - before taking her into a field and strangling her. He then bought some chips, slept soundly and could not understand why police woke him early the next morning.
He confessed readily, later claiming that he committed the murders to provoke the police.
Sentenced to death, Straffen was reprieved after legal wrangles over his sanity and died two years ago in Broadmoor aged 77, the longest-serving prisoner in the UK.
Since then, the only major incident has been the escape of the child rapist James Saunders.
Nicknamed the Wolfman, Saunders went on the run after sawing through a one-inch-thick steel bar and squeezing out of a shower-room on the third floor. He was recaptured two days later.
Notorious child killer John Straffen, the UK's longest-serving prisoner who has died in jail, 55 years after being convicted of murdering a schoolgirl
Now Broadmoor has experienced a different kind of breakout: the release of files dating back a century and more, which are being made available to the public for the first time.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, only records more than 100 years old can be accessed.
They include a particularly interesting file on a Broadmoor resident named Thomas Hayne Cutbush.
A Leading suspect in the Jack the Ripper case - and a notorious murderer of women - Cutbush was pronounced insane and died in Broadmoor in 1903. From the day of his arrest, the Ripper murders ceased.
Did Broadmoor harbour England's most famous serial killer? Certainly, no other prison hospital has lodged such a collection of killers and dreamers; the sad, the mad and the bad.
Was Jack the Ripper, who terrorised London's prostitutes in the dark, gaslit streets of 1888, imprisoned at Broadmoor
Designed by a military engineer, Broadmoor was the first custom-built asylum to house criminal lunatics when it was constructed in 1863. The idea was triggered by the case of James Hadfield, an ex-soldier who, in 1800, while watching a play at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, levelled his pistol at King George III and fired at him.
He missed; but his subsequent acquittal by reason of insanity caused such public uproar that Parliament speedily passed the Criminal Lunatics Act to provide for the indefinite detention of the insane, and a new institution was born, 'intended for the reception, safe custody and treatment of persons who had committed crimes while actually insane or who became insane while undergoing sentences of punishment'.
The possible causes of insanity were listed as 'anxiety, epilepsy, intemperance, vice, poverty, religious excitement, fright and exposure to hot climates'. The 53-acre site, which now holds 260 men, initially had room for 400 men and 100 women, but not until 1948 did it cease to be a prison and officially become a hospital.
Broadmoor's most violent murders have bonded together such as Kenneth Erskine, the Stockwell Strangler, and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.
Among the first inmates were two would-be assassins of Queen Victoria. Edward Oxford was 18 and serving beer in a pub when in 1840 something told him to shoot the Queen and Prince Albert as they rode out on Constitution Hill. Both bullets missed, and they were later found to be blanks.
Oxford was acquitted by reason of insanity and after serving time in an asylum was moved to Broadmoor. He was later offered a discharge in 1867 if he left the country. He emigrated to Australia and made a living as a house painter, dying in 1900.
Roderick McLean, an unemployed London clerk, was also judged insane after he tried to assassinate the Queen in 1882 as she left Windsor train station. Firing a revolver at her point-blank he missed, and before he could fire again two Eton schoolboys knocked him off balance with their umbrellas. McLean died in Broadmoor 40 years later.
Many women were imprisoned in Broadmoor for murdering their own children while suffering post-natal depression.
In 1899, Susannah Bradley jumped into a canal with her eight-month-old baby, leaving a suicide note for her husband that 'she was not fit to be a mother'. She was rescued, with the baby dead in her arms. After heartfelt pleas from her husband she was released into his care, though dying of pleurisy three years later.
Infanticide was common in Victorian England, and most judges and Home Secretaries reacted compassionately, waiving death sentences and releasing women back from asylums into the community.
Mass poisoner Graham Young was sentenced to 15 years in Broadmoor which he spent in its well stocked library to research and use inmates as guinea pigs
Broadmoor is one of three maximum security psychiatric hospitals in the UK (the others being Ashworth and Rampton), but it has always received the most interesting cases - meaning that psychiatrists and doctors compete to work there. Take the particularly fascinating case of Graham Young, a serial killer who poisoned his stepmother and two work colleagues.
Born in Neasden in 1947, he developed a fascination with poisons and their effect on the human body - and started testing them out on his family from the age of 14. He escaped suspicion because he frequently poisoned himself, forgetting which food he had laced.
Young went to see a psychiatrist who contacted the police. He was sentenced to 15 years in Broadmoor, which he spent in its well-stocked library, continuing his researches and using fellow inmates as guinea pigs.
On his release, Young joined a photographic supply store in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, offering to make the tea. He poisoned about 70 people over the next few months - none of them fatally at first - while taking meticulous notes on the doses and their effects, and on which of his workmates he was eventually going to kill.
The letter written by Daniel Gonzalez asking for medical help for his schizophrenia. He wanted to be the real Freddy Krueger
After two men, Bob Engle and Fred Biggs, died in agony, an investigation began into the so-called Bovingdon Bug. Young helpfully confided in the police his interest in poisons - and had they by chance thought of thallium?
His flat was searched: quantities of thallium, antimonium and aconitine were found, together with the incriminating notebook. The Teacup Murderer, as he was called, was sentenced to life and died aged 42, in his prison cell, of a heart attack.
Unusually, several of Broadmoor's most violent murderers have bonded together - perhaps for protection or merely to escape their solitary existence. The serial killer Kenneth Erskine came to the rescue of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, when a fellow inmate tried to throttle Sutcliffe with the cable from a pair of stereo headphones.
Erskine, a sexual psychopath known as the Stockwell Strangler, has been in Broadmoor since 1988, convicted of seven murders and believed to be guilty of four more. Abandoned by his parents at a young age, he went through care homes and special schools before embarking on a successful career as a house burglar.
In 1987 he began killing his victims, kneeling on their chests then placing his left hand over their mouths while using his right hand to grip their throats and strangle them. Four of them were sexually assaulted before or after death. He was caught after a victim he was throttling managed to press an alarm button, and was given a minimum jail term of 40 years.
Later, he was judged to have a mental age of seven and to be sufficiently insane to be transferred to Broadmoor where he will stay - despite incidents like the one in 1998 when he was attacked by another inmate wielding a home-made flamethrower during the hospital's New Year celebrations.
The Kray twins are amongst the list of famous inmates including Ian Brady and the Yorkshire Ripper
Despite Broadmoor's exceptional precautions, madmen still find ways of hurting themselves or others. Daniel Gonzales, 26, who arrived at Broadmoor after a homicidal spree over three days in 2004 - in which he stabbed to death four people and tried to kill two others with a carving knife - will not quickly be forgotten.
Regarded as one of Broadmoor's most dangerous patients, Gonzales told the police he wanted to be like the character Freddy Krueger from the horror film Nightmare On Elm Street and kill as many people as possible. A psychiatric consultant described him as a schizophrenic capable of 'extreme, unprovoked and unpremeditated violence'.
Gonzales was placed on 24-hour observation by nursing staff, with a minimum of two people sitting within arm's length of him. Unable to kill others, he turned his rage upon himself. On three occasions, in a clear attempt at suicide, he bit himself with a ferocity none of them had witnessed before.
Finally, last year, he succeeded. He was found by Broadmoor staff lying dead in a pool of blood, having used a broken CD to cut his wrists.
Despite the many famous inmates held at the hospital in recent times - the Krays, Ian Brady and the Yorkshire Ripper - perhaps the most notorious is one who few of Broadmoor's residents ever saw, the original Hannibal Lecter.
Robert Maudsley was in Broadmoor for three years in the Seventies. Born in 1953, he was the son of a Liverpool lorry-driver who beat him mercilessly whenever he came home from the orphanage which had taken him into its care.
Britain's Hannibal Lecter, Robert Maudsley, killed four people, one of whom he ate.
He drifted through foster homes and psychiatric hospitals. By 1973 he was a rent boy. Picked up by a labourer who showed him pictures of abused boys, Maudsley garrotted him and was sent to Broadmoor with a new nickname - Blue, the colour of the labourer's face as he was slowly choked to death.
His next and most lasting nickname was Spoons. In 1977, Maudsley and another psychopath took a third patient, a paedophile, and barricaded themselves into a cell with him. The paedophile was tortured for nine hours before Maudsley garrotted him and held up his body so that the guard could see him through the spy hatch.
<p>When the guards were let in, they found that the man's skull had been cracked open like a boiled egg, with part of the brain missing and a spoon hanging out of the cranium.
Strangely, Maudsley was deemed fit to stand trial after this crime. Despite his pleas to be sent back to Broadmoor, he was committed to Wakefield prison.
After several more killings, Maudsley now lives in solitary confinement in a two-cell glass cage, very like the one pictured in The Silence Of The Lambs. His furniture is made of compressed cardboard; on his one daily hour of exercise, six prison officers escort him.
But thuggish serial killers make up a small proportion of Broadmoor's residents. I discovered the high intelligence of many of the inmates when lecturing there - one of those present was a gentle academic man, his room stacked to the ceiling with classical CDs. I found out later that he had committed horrendous crimes.
One of the most famous academic inmates was Dr William Chester Minor, an American surgeon immortalised by Simon Winchester in his book The Surgeon Of Crowthorne.
Broadmoor has recently had to upgrade its security as it continues to provide the finest psychiatric care
Having emigrated to Britain, one day in 1871, after suffering paranoid delusions brought on by his terrible experiences in the American Civil War, Minor produced a revolver and shot dead a boiler stoker from the Red Lion Brewery in London.
He remained in Broadmoor for 38 years, building up a library from which he volunteered thousands of citations for words appearing in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Broadmoor, with its dark red brick, its towers, heavily barred windows, gaunt cell-blocks and long corridors, was an intimidating place. But Minor, engaged on his great enterprise, seemed hardly to notice. So industrious was he that the editor of the OED, James Murray, arrived in person to visit him and became a firm friend.
Murray was not present when Minor, demented by sexual longings, sawed off his penis with a pen-knife, tied a ligature of string over the stump and threw the rest of the offending organ into the fire. In a steady voice he called for the Medical Officer, and survived.
Every inmate in Broadmoor has a story. From Chalk Pit Murderer Thomas Ley - who tortured and murdered the man he suspected to be his wife's lover - to Antony Baekeland, great-grandson of the founder of Bakelite, who murdered his mother before ordering a Chinese takeaway.
She was alleged to have coerced her homosexual son into sexual intercourse after a succession of prostitutes had failed to inspire him. He was released after eight years at Broadmoor, only to stab his grandmother in New York City. He was institutionalised again, before, in 1981, being found suffocated with a plastic bag.
Broadmoor Special Hospital is no longer called an asylum for the criminally insane, although that description remains true.
The hospital, very well run and providing the finest psychiatric care, has nevertheless recently had to upgrade its security. Razor wire has been strung around the perimeter. Healthcare may improve, but human nature, in the last resort, remains as ungovernable as ever.
dailymail.co.uk
However, the first purpose built home for the criminally insane in Britain is Broadmoor, contructed in 1863 in the pretty Berkshire countryside.
Today, it has replaced Bedlam as the country's most notorious "loony bin" and Britain still has its fair share of loonies.
The amount of loonies in this place boggles belief. The Yorkshire Ripper, who murdered women in the Seventies and Eighties, is imprisoned there, and so are the Stockwell Strangler and the Teacup Murderer.
Jack the Ripper may have been imprisoned there - Thomas Haynes Cutbush, a lead suspect in the Ripper murders, was pronounced insane and kept in Broadmoor until his death in 1903. From the moment of his arrest, the Ripper murders ceased.
Also, the man who was the inspiration behind Hannibal Lecter was imprisoned at Broadmoor. Robert Maudsley, a loon who was imprisoned Broadmoor in the 1970s after garrotting, even kept a fellow inmate imprisoned in a room with him in 1977 and tortured him for nine hours, a process that involved sticking a spoon into his victim's brain.
Prison of the Damned: Broadmoor hospital harbours England's most famous serial killers and now the files are made public
By Christopher Hudson
24th November 2008
Daily Mail
It's been home to the real Hannibal Lecter, deranged poisoners and a barman who tried to shoot Queen Victoria. Now Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane is finally giving up its secret.
Every Monday morning at 10am, a banshee wail howls out over Broadmoor Hospital. For two minutes, the ear- splitting sound rings out like a wartime air raid siren as the alarm system is tested.
And for any escape-hungry inmate who climbs over the high-security walls enclosing the red-brick fortress there is no hiding place when it goes off for real: 13 sirens are in the neighbouring Berkshire towns of Camberley, Bracknell, Bagshot, Wokingham and the nearby village of Crowthorne, all of them connected by a telephone network.
Broadmoor hospital has been home to the real Hannibal Lecter as played by Sir Anthony Hopkins in the film
If somehow an inmate does manage to escape, the sirens sound for 20 minutes. Nearby schools, such as Wellington College, have to keep their pupils inside until it is safe for parents to collect them. A cordon is thrown around Crowthorne and all cars are checked at police road blocks. Not until the single-tone 'All Clear' sounds can normal life resume.
This is no ordinary alarm. And there are no ordinary patients imprisoned within. The system was installed after the escape of child murderer John Straffen in 1952.
While supposedly on cleaning duties, he climbed onto a shed roof and dropped down the other side. He then sauntered into the nearby village of Arborfield and strangled five-year-old Linda Bowyer, who had been out riding her bike. He was soon recaptured, after locals saw him acting strangely and called the police.
Broadmoor was the first custom-built asylum to house criminal lunatics constructed in 1863.
Straffen was the kind of deranged murderer who should have been booked into Broadmoor (once better known as Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane) when he first came to the attention of the authorities.
He had already spent half his life in institutions when, aged 21, he saw five-year- old Brenda Goddard picking flowers on Rough Hill behind her home in Bath. Told that there were plenty more flowers higher up, she walked trustingly with Straffen into a nearby wood, where he put his hands around her neck.
A few days later, he met nine-year-old Cicely Batstone at the cinema and escorted her across Bath to see another film - leaving a trail of witnesses - before taking her into a field and strangling her. He then bought some chips, slept soundly and could not understand why police woke him early the next morning.
He confessed readily, later claiming that he committed the murders to provoke the police.
Sentenced to death, Straffen was reprieved after legal wrangles over his sanity and died two years ago in Broadmoor aged 77, the longest-serving prisoner in the UK.
Since then, the only major incident has been the escape of the child rapist James Saunders.
Nicknamed the Wolfman, Saunders went on the run after sawing through a one-inch-thick steel bar and squeezing out of a shower-room on the third floor. He was recaptured two days later.
Notorious child killer John Straffen, the UK's longest-serving prisoner who has died in jail, 55 years after being convicted of murdering a schoolgirl
Now Broadmoor has experienced a different kind of breakout: the release of files dating back a century and more, which are being made available to the public for the first time.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, only records more than 100 years old can be accessed.
They include a particularly interesting file on a Broadmoor resident named Thomas Hayne Cutbush.
A Leading suspect in the Jack the Ripper case - and a notorious murderer of women - Cutbush was pronounced insane and died in Broadmoor in 1903. From the day of his arrest, the Ripper murders ceased.
Did Broadmoor harbour England's most famous serial killer? Certainly, no other prison hospital has lodged such a collection of killers and dreamers; the sad, the mad and the bad.
Was Jack the Ripper, who terrorised London's prostitutes in the dark, gaslit streets of 1888, imprisoned at Broadmoor
Designed by a military engineer, Broadmoor was the first custom-built asylum to house criminal lunatics when it was constructed in 1863. The idea was triggered by the case of James Hadfield, an ex-soldier who, in 1800, while watching a play at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, levelled his pistol at King George III and fired at him.
He missed; but his subsequent acquittal by reason of insanity caused such public uproar that Parliament speedily passed the Criminal Lunatics Act to provide for the indefinite detention of the insane, and a new institution was born, 'intended for the reception, safe custody and treatment of persons who had committed crimes while actually insane or who became insane while undergoing sentences of punishment'.
The possible causes of insanity were listed as 'anxiety, epilepsy, intemperance, vice, poverty, religious excitement, fright and exposure to hot climates'. The 53-acre site, which now holds 260 men, initially had room for 400 men and 100 women, but not until 1948 did it cease to be a prison and officially become a hospital.
Broadmoor's most violent murders have bonded together such as Kenneth Erskine, the Stockwell Strangler, and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.
Among the first inmates were two would-be assassins of Queen Victoria. Edward Oxford was 18 and serving beer in a pub when in 1840 something told him to shoot the Queen and Prince Albert as they rode out on Constitution Hill. Both bullets missed, and they were later found to be blanks.
Oxford was acquitted by reason of insanity and after serving time in an asylum was moved to Broadmoor. He was later offered a discharge in 1867 if he left the country. He emigrated to Australia and made a living as a house painter, dying in 1900.
Roderick McLean, an unemployed London clerk, was also judged insane after he tried to assassinate the Queen in 1882 as she left Windsor train station. Firing a revolver at her point-blank he missed, and before he could fire again two Eton schoolboys knocked him off balance with their umbrellas. McLean died in Broadmoor 40 years later.
Many women were imprisoned in Broadmoor for murdering their own children while suffering post-natal depression.
In 1899, Susannah Bradley jumped into a canal with her eight-month-old baby, leaving a suicide note for her husband that 'she was not fit to be a mother'. She was rescued, with the baby dead in her arms. After heartfelt pleas from her husband she was released into his care, though dying of pleurisy three years later.
Infanticide was common in Victorian England, and most judges and Home Secretaries reacted compassionately, waiving death sentences and releasing women back from asylums into the community.
Mass poisoner Graham Young was sentenced to 15 years in Broadmoor which he spent in its well stocked library to research and use inmates as guinea pigs
Broadmoor is one of three maximum security psychiatric hospitals in the UK (the others being Ashworth and Rampton), but it has always received the most interesting cases - meaning that psychiatrists and doctors compete to work there. Take the particularly fascinating case of Graham Young, a serial killer who poisoned his stepmother and two work colleagues.
Born in Neasden in 1947, he developed a fascination with poisons and their effect on the human body - and started testing them out on his family from the age of 14. He escaped suspicion because he frequently poisoned himself, forgetting which food he had laced.
Young went to see a psychiatrist who contacted the police. He was sentenced to 15 years in Broadmoor, which he spent in its well-stocked library, continuing his researches and using fellow inmates as guinea pigs.
On his release, Young joined a photographic supply store in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, offering to make the tea. He poisoned about 70 people over the next few months - none of them fatally at first - while taking meticulous notes on the doses and their effects, and on which of his workmates he was eventually going to kill.
The letter written by Daniel Gonzalez asking for medical help for his schizophrenia. He wanted to be the real Freddy Krueger
After two men, Bob Engle and Fred Biggs, died in agony, an investigation began into the so-called Bovingdon Bug. Young helpfully confided in the police his interest in poisons - and had they by chance thought of thallium?
His flat was searched: quantities of thallium, antimonium and aconitine were found, together with the incriminating notebook. The Teacup Murderer, as he was called, was sentenced to life and died aged 42, in his prison cell, of a heart attack.
Unusually, several of Broadmoor's most violent murderers have bonded together - perhaps for protection or merely to escape their solitary existence. The serial killer Kenneth Erskine came to the rescue of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, when a fellow inmate tried to throttle Sutcliffe with the cable from a pair of stereo headphones.
Erskine, a sexual psychopath known as the Stockwell Strangler, has been in Broadmoor since 1988, convicted of seven murders and believed to be guilty of four more. Abandoned by his parents at a young age, he went through care homes and special schools before embarking on a successful career as a house burglar.
In 1987 he began killing his victims, kneeling on their chests then placing his left hand over their mouths while using his right hand to grip their throats and strangle them. Four of them were sexually assaulted before or after death. He was caught after a victim he was throttling managed to press an alarm button, and was given a minimum jail term of 40 years.
Later, he was judged to have a mental age of seven and to be sufficiently insane to be transferred to Broadmoor where he will stay - despite incidents like the one in 1998 when he was attacked by another inmate wielding a home-made flamethrower during the hospital's New Year celebrations.
The Kray twins are amongst the list of famous inmates including Ian Brady and the Yorkshire Ripper
Despite Broadmoor's exceptional precautions, madmen still find ways of hurting themselves or others. Daniel Gonzales, 26, who arrived at Broadmoor after a homicidal spree over three days in 2004 - in which he stabbed to death four people and tried to kill two others with a carving knife - will not quickly be forgotten.
Regarded as one of Broadmoor's most dangerous patients, Gonzales told the police he wanted to be like the character Freddy Krueger from the horror film Nightmare On Elm Street and kill as many people as possible. A psychiatric consultant described him as a schizophrenic capable of 'extreme, unprovoked and unpremeditated violence'.
Gonzales was placed on 24-hour observation by nursing staff, with a minimum of two people sitting within arm's length of him. Unable to kill others, he turned his rage upon himself. On three occasions, in a clear attempt at suicide, he bit himself with a ferocity none of them had witnessed before.
Finally, last year, he succeeded. He was found by Broadmoor staff lying dead in a pool of blood, having used a broken CD to cut his wrists.
Despite the many famous inmates held at the hospital in recent times - the Krays, Ian Brady and the Yorkshire Ripper - perhaps the most notorious is one who few of Broadmoor's residents ever saw, the original Hannibal Lecter.
Robert Maudsley was in Broadmoor for three years in the Seventies. Born in 1953, he was the son of a Liverpool lorry-driver who beat him mercilessly whenever he came home from the orphanage which had taken him into its care.
Britain's Hannibal Lecter, Robert Maudsley, killed four people, one of whom he ate.
He drifted through foster homes and psychiatric hospitals. By 1973 he was a rent boy. Picked up by a labourer who showed him pictures of abused boys, Maudsley garrotted him and was sent to Broadmoor with a new nickname - Blue, the colour of the labourer's face as he was slowly choked to death.
His next and most lasting nickname was Spoons. In 1977, Maudsley and another psychopath took a third patient, a paedophile, and barricaded themselves into a cell with him. The paedophile was tortured for nine hours before Maudsley garrotted him and held up his body so that the guard could see him through the spy hatch.
<p>When the guards were let in, they found that the man's skull had been cracked open like a boiled egg, with part of the brain missing and a spoon hanging out of the cranium.
Strangely, Maudsley was deemed fit to stand trial after this crime. Despite his pleas to be sent back to Broadmoor, he was committed to Wakefield prison.
After several more killings, Maudsley now lives in solitary confinement in a two-cell glass cage, very like the one pictured in The Silence Of The Lambs. His furniture is made of compressed cardboard; on his one daily hour of exercise, six prison officers escort him.
But thuggish serial killers make up a small proportion of Broadmoor's residents. I discovered the high intelligence of many of the inmates when lecturing there - one of those present was a gentle academic man, his room stacked to the ceiling with classical CDs. I found out later that he had committed horrendous crimes.
One of the most famous academic inmates was Dr William Chester Minor, an American surgeon immortalised by Simon Winchester in his book The Surgeon Of Crowthorne.
Broadmoor has recently had to upgrade its security as it continues to provide the finest psychiatric care
Having emigrated to Britain, one day in 1871, after suffering paranoid delusions brought on by his terrible experiences in the American Civil War, Minor produced a revolver and shot dead a boiler stoker from the Red Lion Brewery in London.
He remained in Broadmoor for 38 years, building up a library from which he volunteered thousands of citations for words appearing in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Broadmoor, with its dark red brick, its towers, heavily barred windows, gaunt cell-blocks and long corridors, was an intimidating place. But Minor, engaged on his great enterprise, seemed hardly to notice. So industrious was he that the editor of the OED, James Murray, arrived in person to visit him and became a firm friend.
Murray was not present when Minor, demented by sexual longings, sawed off his penis with a pen-knife, tied a ligature of string over the stump and threw the rest of the offending organ into the fire. In a steady voice he called for the Medical Officer, and survived.
Every inmate in Broadmoor has a story. From Chalk Pit Murderer Thomas Ley - who tortured and murdered the man he suspected to be his wife's lover - to Antony Baekeland, great-grandson of the founder of Bakelite, who murdered his mother before ordering a Chinese takeaway.
She was alleged to have coerced her homosexual son into sexual intercourse after a succession of prostitutes had failed to inspire him. He was released after eight years at Broadmoor, only to stab his grandmother in New York City. He was institutionalised again, before, in 1981, being found suffocated with a plastic bag.
Broadmoor Special Hospital is no longer called an asylum for the criminally insane, although that description remains true.
The hospital, very well run and providing the finest psychiatric care, has nevertheless recently had to upgrade its security. Razor wire has been strung around the perimeter. Healthcare may improve, but human nature, in the last resort, remains as ungovernable as ever.
dailymail.co.uk