Original subtitles

ALARM BLARES

JASON FLEMYNG: Deep in the Berkshire countryside

sits one of Britain's most feared institutions...

My first impression was, "This is a prison."

..Broadmoor Hospital.

It's notorious because of who's there.

A place where dangerous men are sent...

..when there's nowhere else for them to go.

You are dealing with people who carry substantial risk of harm

to the public.

There's always that risk that violence might erupt.

This is the inside story...

..told by those who've worked behind its walls...

One patient suddenly turned on me and said,

"The trouble with you is that you won't let me be mad."

..those once detained here...

DISTORTED VOICE:

..and by the most notorious of all...

He called me Bob, and I called him Peter.

PHONE RINGS, BEEPS

..secretly recorded and speaking from beyond the grave.

This is the story of how to contain Britain's most dangerously unwell.

I think everybody that works in Broadmoor

is aware of the possibility of attack.

Broadmoor is home to some of the most difficult

and dangerous patients in Britain,

and looking after them is a difficult and dangerous job.

You were constantly alert and aware

that you could be attacked at any time.

The first time you meet a patient, there's always a wariness.

And, yes, it can be very scary.

There's a risk. There's no two ways about it.

For the 800 psychiatrists,

psychologists, nurses, and other staff at Broadmoor,

the threat of violence is part of the job.

I was attacked on the ward where a patient had got hold of a stone.

Punch in the eye, smack in the mouth,

you know, thick lip.

They flung us round like a windmill,

and I had a broken ankle.

When I was attacked, you know, there were six or seven staff in the room,

and it can just happen at a flash.

Broadmoor staff are trained to spot the warning signs

when it's about to kick off.

And that's the trigger points that you always watch out for.

Somebody walking down the corridor, and they're clicking their fingers.

That's their trigger.

Something's gonna go off, so you try and get in there quick.

And if it does go off,

every staff member knows that, in most cases,

they've got it covered.

We all have panic buttons,

and there's alarm bells on the walls just about everywhere.

And we have a whistle on the keys.

The old-fashioned whistle, yeah.

You have a big control room which coordinates every patient movement

so they know exactly what's going on,

and the control room will come through to all the wards.

So, all of a sudden, you'll see everybody running across

the hospital grounds to give them a hand.

Most of the time, staff can quickly get things back to normal,

but sometimes, it's impossible to predict

when things are about to go really wrong.

In mental health, we sometimes speak of "never events",

which are, as the name suggests,

something that should never happen.

One such never event would rock Broadmoor in 2004,

when staff received one of their most complicated

and disturbed patients, Peter Bryan.

Bryan was born and brought up in East London.

He was the youngest of seven children -

pretty much out of control from the very beginning.

In 1993,

he beat to death a young woman for no apparent reason.

After the murder of shop assistant Nisha Sheth,

Bryan was diagnosed with paranoid psychosis and schizophrenia

and sent to Rampton high-security psychiatric hospital.

He was described as a model patient,

and after eight years, was discharged into community care.

But far from being rehabilitated,

in 2004, Bryan went on to commit an even more unthinkable crime.

A friend called Brian Cherry, whom he not only killed brutally,

but also dismembered and fried his brains.

The quote that Peter Bryan gave was, "I ate his brains with butter.

"It was really nice."

It's a truly chilling remark.

Charged with murder, he ended up in HMP Belmarsh,

but after assaulting staff and setting fire to his cell,

he was sent to Broadmoor.

He was first placed on the Luton admissions ward,

where staff dealt with unknown and unpredictable new arrivals.

Former Broadmoor nursing assistant Neil Wheatcroft

was working on the ward at the time.

It was buzzing all day.

It was like you just don't know what's going to happen,

and the next minute, you're on the floor,

scrambling around with a young patient

who's ten times fitter than you.

One of the difficulties that staff at Broadmoor have to confront

is the fact that they don't really know what's driving the patient

in front of them.

So they have to be very alert, very watchful.

This is a new person who you don't know very well,

and it's a person who already has a lot of difficulties,

who is moving into a strange environment,

which they might find very distressing and provocative.

So concerned were staff about Bryan's violent behaviour

in Belmarsh,

they put him straight into Luton Ward's seclusion room,

reserved for the most disruptive new patients.

Bryan would've killed anybody, and it could've been one of us,

where we might've been alone with him long enough to be attacked.

And I think he would've done.

Peter Bryan was quite unstable when he first was admitted to Broadmoor.

He was still experiencing delusions and hallucinations.

Already on Luton Ward when Bryan arrived

was Richard Loudwell,

a sex offender who had raped and killed an 82-year-old woman.

He'd been bragging about his crimes to other patients -

a taboo at Broadmoor.

Certainly, when people first come in,

they don't talk about their offences, except to staff,

and some may never talk to people other than staff.

DISTORTED VOICE:

Loudwell, according to some,

was one of the most unpleasant people in Broadmoor,

who was always making everybody miserable.

Horrible little man.

Bryan remained in the seclusion room for four days

before he was released onto the main Luton Ward.

He performs well under mental health treatment.

Easy to deal with, isn't foaming at the mouth.

Just kind of quiet, holding it in.

The psychosis is so deep within him,

which makes him that much more dangerous,

that much more extreme,

and potentially that much more violent.

Bryan's unpredictable mental state was about to prove deadly.

JASON FLEMYNG: In 2004, double murderer Peter Bryan

was on the Luton admissions ward at Broadmoor

alongside violent sex offender Richard Loudwell.

Ten days after his arrival at Broadmoor,

Bryan followed Loudwell into an empty dining room,

where he violently attacked him.

He garrotted him so that he wouldn't make a noise,

and then he banged his head on the floor.

It would be several minutes before the ward staff were alerted

to the sound of Bryan's assault. ALARM BLARES

They went rushing in to help Loudwell, but it was too late.

There were some on the corridor.

As soon as the doors opened for lunch, they were there.

Two in the office, doing notes.

Everybody was doing something else at the time.

The ward was found not to have engaged with

or observed patients sufficiently.

ALARM BLARES

Bryan had strangled Loudwell with a trouser cord

and repeatedly banged his head against the floor.

Seems to say, rather chillingly, later,

"I would've eaten him if only I hadn't been interrupted,"

and got the nickname of Peckish Pete.

ALARM CONTINUES

Loudwell died in hospital from his injuries.

Five years later, a report was published

into how a patient at Broadmoor could be brutally murdered

by another patient.

We were under the spotlight, for sure.

You know, it does send a shockwave throughout the system.

It did disturb a lot of people working there,

that such a thing could have been possible.

The inquiry was that we needed to tighten our act up,

like that door should've been closed.

So that's what happened. We tightened our act up.

The report found that the incident was a culmination of many failings

at management and staff levels over a long period of time.

In his ten days at Broadmoor,

no mental state examination or risk assessment

had been carried out on Bryan.

Broadmoor staff must observe new patients when they arrive.

Assessing changes in mood, changes in behaviour,

changes in physical presentations and to be aware of those changes.

Former Broadmoor lead clinician Professor Tony Maden

relied on frontline staff for this intelligence.

If you go on a ward as a doctor,

the first people you speak to are the nurses.

If they're particularly worried about somebody you're seeing,

they're going to tell you to be a bit cautious.

DISTORTED VOICE:

Staff can also rely on other patients

to be their eyes and ears on the wards.

Quite often, if they were worried about another patient,

they would come and tell the staff.

These are the boys that would never grass on anyone,

but if they really felt afraid, they would come and talk about it.

One of the patients who'd given me some really important information,

I said, "Thank you.

"I'm very impressed that you came to tell me this."

If you lived on a ward with 23 other young men

who've been violent, you'd have an interest in safety.

Many of Broadmoor's patients are not locked inside their rooms,

and they're free to move around the wards.

But there is a group of patients deemed so dangerous

that they need to be locked up around the clock.

They're kept in Broadmoor's most secure, intensive care ward.

For decades, it was known as Norfolk House.

Norfolk House had two functions, really.

One was to contain the most violent patients within Broadmoor.

Second objective was to act as a deterrent.

If you assault a member of staff, you will end up in Norfolk House.

Total seclusion, maximum security.

And they would go there for doing things like fighting,

smashing things up, not taking their medication.

It was a place so notorious that even hardened gangsters

like Ronnie Kray feared ending up in there.

He said he would never, ever, ever want to go there again.

It absolutely terrified him.

Even the Yorkshire Ripper assaulted Ronnie,

but he wouldn't retaliate because he was frightened

of going to this punishment block.

Norfolk House was an extremely challenging place to work.

There were only about seven side rooms.

There were two doors,

so there was an outside cell door and there was an inside door.

The rooms would be very spartan indeed -

about eight foot wide by six foot long.

So there was no natural light, other than a tiny grill at the top.

There would be a mattress on the floor with no bedding,

chamber pot, and that would be it.

All of the patients in those rooms

were only ever taken out one at a time.

So, you would have six staff to one patient at any one time,

and they would be allowed maybe 20 minutes exercise.

Some of the men here would endure this regime for so long

that they would stick in the minds of staff for years to come.

There was a patient whose name was John Silver,

but he was nicknamed Long John because he was six foot nine,

and he was something of a legend within the hospital.

He looked, actually, like Rasputin.

The main reason he had a long beard

is he couldn't be trusted with razors,

and staff couldn't get close enough to him

to give him a shave anyway without being assaulted.

We would take him, sort of frogmarch him to the exercise yard.

The problems started when, sometimes,

he would refuse to come in.

The whole of Norfolk House was on lockdown.

All the patients on the other two wards above

would be all locked in,

and then the staff of those two wards would come downstairs

and join us all in the exercise yard

to bring John Silver back to his cell.

15 staff.

It was farcical,

but none of us ever doubted that he could do us serious harm.

Today, patients are still sent to Broadmoor's intensive care wards

and secluded for safety,

with maximum security measures in place.

You'd give warning you were going in.

You then go through, like, an airlock,

but you wouldn't be allowed through

unless the main office could see you.

But the fact is, they are secluded in a locked room.

For their own and others' safety.

This can make treatment extremely difficult.

The conversation is conducted through a small hatch in the door,

which is usually about that height from the floor.

There was some concern as well that this wasn't fair.

You know, you're meant to be reviewing whether they're still

in a state that requires their continued seclusion.

You ought to really not be interviewing them

just through the door.

Broadmoor creative consultant David Neita sometimes worked

on the intensive care wards.

I would be escorted to a place of seclusion

where I could stand outside the hatch.

I just believe that we're there to reach the people

who are the hardest to reach.

Just have this communication with the person behind the wall,

behind the door.

This chat, this conversation so that they could be included.

Often, staff would invite me to recite some of my own poetry.

Sometimes, patients would maybe come closer to the door

and strike up a conversation.

The goal of rehabilitation there is to get people

off the intensive care ward, onto a slightly less intense ward.

Getting people able to tolerate being in the same room

as someone else.

It's all aimed at progress.

That therapeutic process of allowing people to feel

that there could be an opportunity.

We can't ever keep the door open,

but metaphorically, we need to keep the door open.

We're talking about people who have committed horrendous crimes,

have experienced horrendous things.

They are damaged,

and yet they need to be given opportunity to become whole again.

On Broadmoor's most relaxed wards, known as assertive rehabilitation,

staff look after patients deemed the least disruptive,

yet some still need more protection than others.

Peter Sutcliffe was one of the most hated men in Britain.

He was convicted of murdering 13 women

and attempting to murder seven more.

After first being attacked at Parkhurst Prison,

he was transferred to Broadmoor in 1984.

In a call secretly recorded by his brother Carl,

Sutcliffe voices his frustration

at the tight restrictions he faced there.

The binding would be a suicide weapon,

or a weapon... anything weapon.

I mean, patients over the years have made weapons.

I think one that really stood out for me was a tin of Spam.

Little bits of string tied together.

Towels. Even coins are a weapon.

There are lots of hazards in any building,

and even in the safest building, people are ingenious.

They can use bits of equipment.

Even a pencil can be used as a weapon.

So, we had to, in the end,

give the patients a little pen, a few inches.

CDs were banned.

If you could tape broken pieces of CD together,

it's a very sharp weapon.

Sutcliffe should've been especially grateful

for the staff's efforts to keep weapons from patients.

He had a target on his back from the first moment he arrived.

PROTESTORS CHANT

Sutcliffe was so notorious,

more famous than Broadmoor, certainly,

so Broadmoor had a duty to protect him, knowing that.

It's difficult to see what more they could've done.

You couldn't make him anonymous, really.

It's sort of like a badge of honour.

And their real motive for it, they haven't got one,

other than to big themselves up.

So I think he was a bit of a victim of that,

but if you're going to murder women,

that's the price you pay.

In 1997, Sutcliffe was alone in his room when Ian Kay,

a convicted murderer,

mercilessly attacked him,

pinning him to the floor and stabbing him in both eyes.

Kay had been scheming.

He'd asked a patient to turn on loud music just before the assault,

but he wasn't scheming alone.

Kay had been in prison with Reggie Kray, the brother of Ronnie,

who Sutcliffe had already been in a fight with at Broadmoor.

But the guy was definitely linked to Reggie,

and he got moved to Broadmoor,

but they all swore that that was Reggie who'd got him

to do Sutcliffe for doing his brother.

The Krays were claiming that was them, you know.

Kay's 15-minute attack on Sutcliffe left him blind in one eye.

REPORTER: 'It was late last night that he was put aboard an ambulance

'and driven under police escort from Frimley Park Hospital,

'where he'd been treated for eye injuries.'

This wasn't the first attack on Sutcliffe at Broadmoor.

He'd been attacked once before, and then again

when moved to Dorchester Ward for men needing protection,

and where Neil Wheatcroft was working as a nursing assistant.

It was for the more vulnerable -

those that were picked on daily by...

Bullied, if you like.

So they were protected by this ward.

Really pink and fluffy.

At night, you had to queue up at the main gate

until everybody was accounted for.

We'd walk down to the rest, and they'd go,

"Oh, here we go. There's the marigolds."

We all put up the question saying, "Why are we getting Sutcliffe?"

Because there was nowhere else in the hospital

where he was deemed to be safe.

End of.

But despite being in a protected ward,

staff couldn't stop Sutcliffe being attacked for a third time.

It doesn't matter where or when.

If somebody's going to do something, they will do it.

And sometimes, staff are in the firing line, too.

When the member of staff's asked him to turn the music down

on his television set,

he attacked him.

JASON FLEMYNG: Working at Broadmoor,

home to some of Britain's most dangerous and mentally ill men,

staff are trained to expect the worst.

I think everybody that works in Broadmoor

is aware of the possibility of attack.

One of the therapy sessions,

had one huge, huge lad stood in front of me and said,

"If I had my way, Vicar, I'd burn you.

"And then I'll piss all over you and put the fire out.

"And then I'd burn you again,

"and then I'd piss on you and put the fire out."

One patient suddenly turned on me and said,

"The trouble with you is that you won't let me be mad."

But another man said, "I think I'm going to kill you now,"

and I could see that he meant it at that particular moment.

One patient posed a real threat to staff

when he arrived at Broadmoor in 2014.

Michael Adebowale,

diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

One year earlier, he had committed a crime that shocked the nation.

REPORTER: This footage shows the pair pacing around the body

they've pulled into the middle of the road.

An eyewitness said they were posing and smirking.

They ran him down with their car and then proceeded to butcher him

with a machete, threatening passers by with a gun.

Fusilier Lee Rigby was brutally murdered by Adebowale

and accomplice Michael Adebolajo.

At their trial, the judge concluded both men had become radicalised

after converting to Islam.

They wanted the police to arrive

and they wanted them to shoot them, making them martyrs.

They were both shot, but neither of them killed.

Adebolajo was given a whole life sentence,

but Adebowale's lesser term of 45 years,

was due to his fragile mental state.

Adebowale, on the video link to the court, was glassy eyed,

found it very difficult to concentrate on anything.

He didn't really know what on earth was going on.

Adebowale's attack on Lee Rigby

seemed to be motivated by religious extremism.

But inside Broadmoor, violence is often sparked by mundane things.

You do get those times where, no triggers, bang.

In July 2018, Michael Adebowale was in the day room

listening to music through the TV.

When a member of staff asked him to turn the music down

on his television set, he attacked him.

Adebowale had complied and turned the volume down,

but a short while later, he found the nurse in his office

and he punched him in the jaw,

leaving him with injuries that took six weeks to recover from.

He'd been hearing voices

which told him to attack this particular nurse.

Adebowale pleaded guilty to actual bodily harm

and was given an extra eight months on his sentence.

But given the fact that he's unlikely to be released before 2048,

I don't think it's going to make an awful lot of difference.

If you're already in Broadmoor

for what is effectively the rest of your life,

what is there to prevent you attacking a member of staff?

"What have I got to lose?"

Broadmoor staff must continue to treat their patients

despite a constant threat of being attacked.

One of our patients, who was, like, six foot five,

was going to have a jab, and he didn't like jabs.

And he flung us around like a windmill,

and I had a broken ankle.

Another one had a knee smashed.

I was attacked on the ward where a patient had got hold of a stone.

He started running up and down the corridors,

and he caught me on my forehead.

So these things do come out from nowhere.

As well as happening when staff least expect it,

violence can happen where staff least expect it.

Sunday morning worship should be somewhere where people can relax.

One of the patients who came in had been collecting flowers,

and he gave them to me.

He said, "I'd like to read the gospel message today.

"I've got a message from the mothership."

And I said, "I think it's probably best if you don't today."

And he's a bit agitated by it.

And I said, "We're going to sing Kumbaya, OK?"

The lads all started to laugh.

The person who had chosen it tried to hide around the corner,

backed up against the security alarm,

and the security alarm went off really, really loud in the room,

which frightened the life out of the guy

who was trying to give me the message from the mothership.

He launched himself at me.

He hit me in the face,

with a big black eye, and nose all over here and whatever.

When patients become violent, some of Broadmoor's front line staff

are trained to follow a strict protocol of restraint.

Well, it's called

therapeutic management of aggression and violence.

And it used to be called control and restraint.

Different holds, if that wasn't done properly,

will break bones.

And they introduced it because lots of people died in restraint.

And when faced with armed patients, more specific training is needed.

Shield work.

So, if somebody had a weapon

where you had somebody leading the shields,

and the idea is to prevent that person from being injured.

So you go in with a shield

and the person would be up against the wall,

and then other staff can come in on each side

and take away the weapon.

Every Broadmoor staff member

is taught what's known as breakaway training.

Stuff like what to do if someone grabs hold of your hair,

wrist, and things.

How to break away if somebody comes for your throat.

First thing to do when you walk into a room

is know where the alarm is and always sit nearest to the door.

It's about using those skills to de-escalate the whole situation.

Your posture when you're talking to somebody, keep calm.

Let them do the talking or shouting

and come in when you feel the time is right.

The best advice is just to get out as fast as you can.

The doors in the rooms open outwards just by pushing.

The therapy rooms have also been designed

to ensure staff are safe in their one-to-ones.

In the particular unit where I worked in Broadmoor,

all the doors were glass.

The staff could see us at all times if there was any problem.

Now, that creates a different kind of problem

because these were young men beginning to deal with

their difficulties, and sometimes they'd break down and cry.

And that's not something that one young man

wants another young man to see.

Sometimes, in group sessions,

we'd actually paste paper across the top part of the glass

so that faces couldn't be seen,

but the staff could see all the bodies sitting in the room.

And if suddenly the pair of legs was missing or something,

they could come in and check that everything was OK.

Former patient Joshua

remembers how staff used humour to deal with him.

One of the most serious incidents that can occur

is a hostage situation.

The alarm bells went.

In the dining room, two patients were having a good dust up,

and I was in the second team.

We took a patient to a seclusion room.

Number three's always the head person

who gives the directions,

and I said to number one, "Leave the room."

And they shot back out of the room.

"Number two, leave the room."

And that person made an exit.

And the door closed.

And I'm still in there.

And I heard somebody shouting out, "Paul's still in there!"

And the door was opened.

All the staff went back in and had to restrain the patient again

because he was up on the bed then ready to attack me.

I just sat for an hour with my charge nurse.

Just... "What happened there?"

The person didn't realise I hadn't come out, and the door shutting,

that automatically makes you a hostage.

And I still have my moments with that

at 3:00 in the morning.

I feel like I've had 50-odd years of what I would call,

in the layperson's terms, of drip feeding trauma.

And some people survive that and some don't.

Because you come across things that you wouldn't dream of observing.

It's a Pandora's box, isn't it?

What you don't deal with, will come back. It'll come back.

Broadmoor staff have to tread a careful line

between control and care.

But in the past, control has turned into abuse.

Colm Byrne remembers an example of this

when he was a student nurse at Broadmoor in the late 1970s.

The black aspirin referred to a practice

of deliberately beating a patient up by kicking them

so they'd be knocked to the floor.

The staff wore black shoes or boots, which were often highly polished,

so when the patient was rendered unconscious

or in a state of complete subjugation,

you could often see on their naked bodies black marks all over them.

That's why it was called the black aspirin.

Colm observed other mistreatments of patients at Broadmoor.

The wet towel treatment was a way of rendering the patient

completely submissive,

without leaving any marks at all on them.

A bath towel, completely soaked in water...

and then it would be wrapped around the patient's neck.

So as you twist the towel,

you slowly restrict the oxygen flow to the patient's brain

until the patient became less and less conscious.

And then it could be released at any point,

and therefore the blood flow would return

and the patient would come back.

It was used as a way of controlling them,

and the added advantage of having the wet towel

was that it left no marks.

There was no bruising, nothing to show.

At their most extreme,

staff's attempts to subdue out of control patients

have proven fatal.

Over a period of seven years in the '80s and '90s,

three patients at Broadmoor died

after staff injected them with sedatives.

The first was Michael Martin, in 1984, at the age of just 22.

REPORTER: The smiling young chap of early family photographs

was diagnosed schizophrenic when he was only 15.

By the time he was 18,

he was in Broadmoor high security psychiatric hospital.

He died there last summer, alone in a locked room,

after being forcibly restrained by five staff

and injected with high doses of a barbiturate and another sedative

following an argument with another patient.

He'd choked on his own vomit.

Just four years later, in similar circumstances,

Joseph Watts died, followed by Orville Blackwood, in 1991.

REPORTER: Orville Blackwood died in an isolation room

at Broadmoor top security hospital

soon after being injected with drugs intended to sedate him.

Hospital staff injected him

with three times the maximum dose of tranquilliser

and twice the recommended dose of an anti-psychosis drug.

There was far less of an ethnic mix amongst staff group at that time.

I think there are some tensions, inevitably,

between staff and patients arising, just from that simple fact.

I'd known Orville Blackwood

in one of his previous treatment episodes

before he ever got into Broadmoor,

and he was big, so he could do a lot of harm

if he really decided to.

But he was also a lovely person...

and so it was absolutely tragic. Yeah.

Two years after Blackwood's death, a report was released,

which included in its title the question,

"Big, Black and Dangerous?"

It found that hospital staff had regularly used this phrase

to describe Black patients,

and that organisational racism contributed to all three deaths.

It also detailed how Black people

were more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia

and more likely to be given higher doses of medication.

Changes have been made.

A recent report found that in 2021, the hospital promoted equality

and diversity in its work with patients.

And I'm so pleased that judges and researchers all over the nation

are beginning to sort of admit that and come to terms with it,

and then to do something about it.

A lot of publicity.

Like anything else at Broadmoor, it really hits the headlines.

Throughout mental health services,

it's still a major priority

to minimise the effects of discrimination.

Staff face a huge amount of challenges

caring for the most dangerous and unwell...

especially when patients turn the violence on themselves.

Gonzalez bites his arm in an effort to sever the artery.

It's a very extreme act.

JASON FLEMYNG: Sometimes, the biggest threat to a patient

at Broadmoor is from himself.

The more you put a person who self-harms

in a restricted environment,

the more likely they are to escalate the self-harm.

It's a very, very difficult problem to manage in a secure setting.

In 2004, Broadmoor would face

one of their most challenging patients to date.

In September of that year, over the course of three days,

24-year-old Daniel Gonzalez went on a violent rampage,

breaking into homes and stabbing people at random.

He attacks a man called Kevin Molloy.

It was extraordinary.

Unprovoked. Didn't know him.

Stabbed him ruthlessly in the face, neck, torso.

He killed our neighbours just down the road.

He just simply entered their home and slaughtered them to death.

He does it with an extraordinary brutality, ferocity.

At the end of the killing spree,

four people were dead and another two seriously injured.

Tragically, Gonzalez and his family

had been all too aware of his disturbed mental state.

He was never given help and treatment that he begged for

in a letter to a GP, and his mother continually asked for.

They had been fighting for help for him for about eight years.

In 2009, an investigation into his care and treatment

found there were many missed opportunities

leading up to the attacks.

He was very much out of touch with reality

prior to his spree killings,

and the psychosis was very acute at that point.

While in prison awaiting his trial,

Gonzalez behaved violently towards staff.

He nearly died from a serious suicide attempt,

before being sent to Broadmoor.

He's delivered to Broadmoor by prison officers in full riot gear

because he is so utterly volatile, so incredibly unpredictable.

But one of the psychiatrists who dealt with him

said he'd never seen anything like it.

He was, by that time, so violent.

When he went to Broadmoor, he had to be under strict, strict supervision.

Gonzalez was placed on one of its three high dependency wards.

REPORTER: He was described by one psychiatrist

as the most disturbed patient he'd ever seen.

He was supervised by two nurses,

who had to stay within arm's length of him at all times.

Despite being medicated for his mental illness,

Gonzalez attempted suicide once again.

Gonzalez bites his arm in an effort to sever the artery.

One of the people who treated him said, subsequently,

"I've never seen anyone bite themselves so fiercely."

It's a very... extreme act.

It is possible that, as he started to stabilise,

and as he started to go through the treatment process,

that he became more aware of the enormity of what he'd done.

There is a perception that people with mental illness

are specifically violent to other people,

but actually, also, at the same time,

there is a risk of aggression and violence

towards themselves as well.

Gonzalez was aware that he'd made people's lives a misery,

and I think he was consumed, not perhaps by remorse,

but by anger at himself.

He knows what he's done.

And then the reality cuts in, and it's devastating.

And that's when, sometimes, we do go on treating.

But we have sometimes sat down and said,

"Would it be kinder to let this man stay psychotic?

"Because it's just too painful to be without the psychosis now."

Gonzalez was eventually deemed safe enough

to move to one of Broadmoor's lower security wards, Windsor Ward.

Here, he was observed every 30 minutes.

But one morning, staff found Gonzalez dead in his room.

A makeshift blade made from a CD case was by his side.

At the coroner's inquest, a jury returned an open verdict.

When there is a suicide at Broadmoor,

it affects staff and patients immensely.

I got very lucky that we didn't actually have a suicide

while I was there,

but there had been one shortly before I got there.

It affected the staff profoundly, and in particular,

an amazingly good nurse who decided not to continue working on the unit

because it was just too traumatic.

I think it's one of the most saddest things.

I remember getting in the car thinking,

"That chap that the team and myself nursed - same age."

So it makes you, kind of, like reflect on what you've got

and what he had.

It's part of the job. It's part of the job.

A statement from West London NHS trust said:

Broadmoor staff reveal some of its darkest secrets.

There were a group of staff who tended to have very fixed views

about the patients, often saw them as animals.

The hospital is rocked

by the scandal of Britain's most infamous sex offender.

Any form of abuse that was possible, Savile took the opportunity.

And a brand-new multi-million pound service for treating psychopaths

opens at Broadmoor and causes controversy.

The biggest problem that I experienced

was incidents of sexual relationships

between staff and patients.