FRAMED AND JAILED ‘LONDON MONSTER’
habit of stalking them in the streets, making use of the most horrid and insulting language. Several other Monster victims could not pick Williams out, however; others declared themselves certain he was not the man who had cut them.”
While being held in jail, judges were deciding what crime Williams should be punished for. They found an ancient statute from the time of George I, intended to prevent weavers from destroying imported foreign clothes.
Williams was tried at the Old Bailey and convicted for destroying the clothes of Anne Porter on January 19, in spite of having an alibi.
The case was referred to a higher court, where Williams was handed a six-year sentence in Newgate.
Mr Bondeson said: “The trials served as a ceremony of exorcism; there were no more attacks, and London had been cleansed of its Monster.
“At the time, many people saw it as an anomaly that Williams was not hanged, flogged within inches of his life, or at least transported to Australia.
“After all, it was punishable by death to steal a sheep or to pickpocket more than a shilling.”
He added that Williams was a “scapegoat” and that many victims gave a description that did not match.
He said: “There is also evidence that the police deliberately coached at least one Monster victim to pick out Williams as the man who had attacked them.
“It is thus quite possible that the Welshman was just a scapegoat, unlucky enough to fall in the hands of the authorities when they needed someone to pay for the Monster’s crimes.”
The historian even questions if a Monster even existed at all.
He states that no woman was ever seriously injured and some alleged victims were proven to have faked their injuries.
There were also several other copycat attackers at the time, and the case is the first known example of copycat crime.
Mr Bondeson said: “Rhynwick Williams might have been one of the roughs habitually insulting women in the London streets, but he was hardly the Monster, as judged from disparity of the descriptions of the prowling miscreant.”
Jan Bondeson is a retired senior lecturer and consultant physician at Cardiff University. His book The London Monster: Terror on the Streets in 1790, is available from the History Press.