The officer stares, transfixed by the horrific scene before him. His hand slowly moves to cover his mouth as a wave of nausea hits. He gags, once, then twice, barely holding it together.
In the dimly lit cell, a naked prisoner lies motionless on the floor. Around him, a gruesome mix of blood, shattered skull fragments, and, horrifyingly, a spoon. .
. lodged in a place no spoon should ever be. In a way, the officer is not surprised.
The broken lump of flesh and bones on the floor was once a child predator. A special kind of inmate who regularly suffers the worst fate imaginable in prison. This isn t a scene from a horror movie.
It s real- a true story and perhaps one of the most grisliest incidents ever recorded within prison walls. But before we dive further into this nightmare scenario, let s pull back the curtain on life inside for the predators. No two prisons are alike and experiences can differ.
In the U. S. and in most Western nations there s an unwritten rule if you re locked up for preying on children, you re not just unpopular.
. . you re marked.
Chomos, Chesters, kiddie fiddlers, tree jumpers, short eyes, rippers, skinners, rock spiders, and nonces. Whatever name you want to give to a predator, at the very least they will be treated like social pariahs. At worst, well, you ll see what happens soon when prisoners adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward these types of inmates.
Let s look at some statistics first. In the United States alone, the sheer scale of incarceration is staggering. Across state prisons, local jails, and federal facilities, nearly 1.
9 million people are behind bars in 2024. That's 583 per 100,000, a far higher rate than any other highly-developed nation. In case you didn t know, there s a lot of violence in the USA.
If we look at only state prisons, with just over one million inmates, 674,000 of them are in for violent offenses. 168,000 of those people are in for sex offenses. The report doesn t state how many of them are imprisoned for sex offenses specifically related to young people.
But a Johns Hopkins University study in 2021 said there were around 127,000 inmates in the US serving time in state prisons sex offenses involving children. What this tells us is that US prisons are crawling with sexual predators. The question is, how do this many men hide and avoid a beating?
As a former prisoner wrote online, Sex offenders, if they are stupid enough to go to a mainline yard, will get got. It almost always is never right away. They might lead the offender to a false sense of security.
When you re inducted into a US prison you ll have an interview and will be asked if there s a reason you can t be placed in the general population. Being a chomo is a hell of a good reason if you don t want to get got. That s when you can ask to be put in what s called Protective Custody, or PC.
PC is not just a world of like-minded chomos. There are still a lot of dangerous prisoners in there. It s a special part of the prison where you ll also find plenty of snitches and guys who ve left street gangs.
Let s look at the case of John Geoghan, a former Roman Catholic priest who left over 150 boys suffering from decades of trauma. He ended up in Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Massachusetts. Even though he was in PC, a fellow prisoner named Joseph Lee Drce, stomped his face in and strangled him to death.
Just like a guy we ll talk about later, Drce was a killer who went into prison and said he would make it his life s work to hunt predators. These were the men who reminded him of the people who abused him when he was a child. Drce later said he was driven to murder when he heard Geoghan share stories of his predatory past.
Still, a murder in PC is unlikely since if a prisoner is on parole, they might not want to ruin their chances of getting out. It s more likely a lifer would commit the attack, but there d be suspicion if a lifer asked for a move to PC. Being attacked is not the only reason why PC isn t a very nice place to be for a convicted Chester.
You ll likely be spending 22 or 23 hours a day in your cell. You'll get the same commissary rights, but that's about it. Everything else is restricted.
If you go out to the yard, it might just be you alone or in a small group in what they call a bullpen. When you shower, it will be you alone, taken there in chains like an animal. You also likely won t be able to work and you can forget about group educational classes.
Ok, so what if someone is a predator but doesn t like the idea of all the restrictions in PC? Can they just lie about their crime and fit right into the general population? The answer is no, not likely.
When you re the new guy in prison, quite often someone will come to your cell and demand to see your papers. If anywhere on those papers someone sees letters Cho and Mo, you re not going to have a fun time in that prison. It's almost impossible to hide your conviction in prison, and you won't get through your sentence without anyone ever asking about it.
Prisoners have a lot of time on their hands and they will want to know what kind of man they are dealing with. If you don't have papers, it's quite easy to find out what you've done since sentencing information is usually available online. Also, prison officers might let it slip since people who hurt women or kids aren t exactly high on the popularity list.
And let's be honest, some officers just like R-Rated drama. You will almost certainly not be able to say, oops, I forgot my papers, or, the dog ate them, or you lost them. Most likely, you ll be assigned a public defender, and with their overloaded caseload, you ll be left handling much of your legal work alone.
You ll need to keep those papers close. Because if anyone demands to see your charges and you refuse, it s like painting a target on your back, practically shouting, I m a Chester please stab me. It all depends on which prison you re in, but any former prisoner will tell you that predators don t always get the crap beat out of them or killed.
A prisoner might make it through their sentence, but only if they keep their past buried- no bragging, no slip-ups. It s also quite common to extort them, making them pay their way out of beatings, like a Chomo Tax. Nonetheless, a former British prisoner who did seven years in an Arizona prison, said the gangs adhered to a KOS system, Kill on Sight for chomos.
Another term meaning the offender is fair game for a serious beating is green-lit. That same guy said guards would often ignore horrific beatings, or at least when they weren't doing the beating themselves. In 2006, Orange County Jail officers sat watching Cops on TV as a group of inmates beat a software engineer named John Derek Chamberlain to death.
The inmates said Chamberlain was chomo, which wasn t exactly true. Sure, he was guilty of having sketchy content on his computer. But, when you're handing out a death sentence, you should probably double-check the finer details.
He was murdered over what the courts ruled a misdemeanor. He'd decided not to divulge his crime, so a shot caller green-lit a beating. Seven men unleashed a savage assault, stomping him relentlessly and violating him with a pencil and a tube of toothpaste.
They're now doing sentences ranging from 15 years to life. They killed a guy for a lie and, in the process, ruined their own lives. That's prison logic for you.
Here's another fine example. In 2020, at the Larry D. Smith Correctional Facility in Banning, California, a man was beaten to death in his cell.
The guy who did it had earlier asked his mother to look online and see what this guy had done. The answer - 100% Chester. Don't get involved in it, she said.
No choice, he replied. This guy was serving time for assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer, a serious crime, but he would have gotten out with plenty of life to live. Now, he'll spend the rest of his life in prison without a chance of parole.
Some people will literally lose everything to get at predators. You'll see one of the reasons for this in a minute or two. A way to avoid a deadly confrontation is to get yourself put in administrative segregation, Ad-Seg.
Although, this does come with a number of downsides, so a lot of predators won t do it. Ad-Seg drives you up the wall due to the sheer loneliness. As a former long-term Ad-Seg prisoner once said, try locking yourself in a small bathroom and stay in there for half a day.
Now, imagine how that would feel for ten years. The intrepid Infographics Show writer who wrote this video tried it for a whole hour. Let's just say, patience and bravery aren t exactly his strong suit.
You're in a tiny cell with no radio and no TV. It's you and four bare walls, no windows, no bars on the door to look through, just you and your mind, or maybe a book to read if you're lucky. They don't even allow you to keep your mattress lying on during the day.
You might only get three or four hours out of your cell in a whole week. When you do get yard time, it's either the bullpen or a fenced-in space underneath a roof, so you might never see the sky or feel a warm breeze blow across your face. Food is delivered to you through a slot in the door.
If you go to shower, you turn around and put your hands through the slot to be handcuffed. When you sleep, it's often to the sound of screams. It is quite simply torture, but if you're a targeted Chomo and you can t immediately get placed in PC, this might be your only option.
Let's say you ignore the warnings and stay in the general population to tough it out. What's the absolute worst that can happen? In the UK, chomo-intolerance is just as strict as it is in the US.
Yet, the most brutal stories we found come from England- the land of good manners, beans on toast, and, apparently, some shockingly vicious attacks on nonces. In 2012, a 33-year-old male prisoner in Durham prison was described by a psychiatrist as a remorseless, callous psychopath who "harbors cannibalistic urges. He and another prisoner, 24, lured a 23-year-old guy into a cell.
This young man had been sentenced in 2011 for predatory actions involving a 13-year-old girl. Once he was in the cell, the two men proceeded to hold him down and, among other things, slice him up with a razor blade. They took a pen and pushed it into one of his eyeballs.
Once he was dead, they disemboweled him. When asked later why they chose this particular man when they had scores of predators to choose from, one of them said they just fancied doing it. As is often the case with extreme prison violence, the perpetrators are not usually heroes intent to clean up society, but maniacs who just want an excuse to keep hurting people.
The older guy in this attack was serving 24 years for sneaking through a window in a nursing home for vulnerable women. He attacked two women, one in her 50s and one in her 70s, who were sharing a room. He suffocated one and brutally assaulted the other.
This was certainly no hero with a profound sense of ethics. Many of the men who hurt predators in prison are doing it because someone hurt them when they were young. Statistics show us that the rates of childhood abuse, both physical and sexual, are higher among prisoners than on the outside.
This brings us to Robert Maudsley, a man often called Britain's scariest prisoner. In 1974, he murdered a man who d shown him photos of children he d hurt, and was sent to the infamous psychiatric hospital, Broadmoor. In 1977, he tortured a fellow patient for nine hours, intermittently sticking the man s bloodied head to the window to show the staff what he was doing.
This victim, like Maudley's first victim, had hurt children. When staff finally opened the door, an officer said the victim s head had been cracked open like a boiled egg. A spoon had been pushed through the man s ear and deep into his head.
The rumor soon spread that Maudsley had eaten the man's brain, which wasn't true, but the tabloids went ahead anyway and nicknamed him the cannibal and the brain-eater. Too dangerous for the hospital, Maudsley was sent to Wakefield Prison, aka, Monster Mansion, a place infamous for sexual predators. Suffice it to say, given his reputation as a cannibal, he didn't get much grief from the other prisoners.
In 1978, he took his French teacher, a convicted predator, to his cell where he strangled him and stabbed him to death. Maudsley hid the body under his bed. He then called out to the landing and asked if anyone wanted to join him in the cell.
Unsurprisingly, no one took him up on the offer, so he went hunting. He planned to murder seven men, all predators. You've probably already guessed that Maudsley himself was abused as a child.
This was revenge! He walked into a guy s cell, locked the door, and proceeded to hack at him with a knife. Unable to convince anyone to have a chat with him, he calmly walked down the hallway as prisoners parted like the Red Sea.
He then went to the staff office and informed the guards that they should expect two fewer men at roll call tonight. Too dangerous even for prison, he was later moved to the basement where he s still rotting away to this day in a specially-made transparent perspex cage. The authorities have refused his request for a bird as a companion.
The rules state not even the officers can speak to him. He once wrote in a letter, I am left to stagnate, vegetate and to regress; left to confront my solitary head-on with people who have eyes but don't see and who have ears but don't hear, who have mouths but don't speak. He s requested cyanide, but the British authorities are too kind to let him die.
He s described as gentle and kind, with a genius-level IQ. He loves classical music, poetry, and art. So now you know where the Hannibal Lecter idea comes from.
He blames his parents for the murders he committed, once saying, 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. So, if a predator ever finds himself in prison, he should know there are Robert Maudsleys around who can t wait to meet him.
Prison has its own brutal justice, but does it go too far? Drp your thoughts below! Now you need to hear the full story in Most Evil Prisoner Kept in Glass Box.
Or, have a look at Most Evil Kids in the History of Mankind.