The London Monster: The True Story Behind an 18th Century Panic

Okay, for two years, from 1788 to 1790, London was terrorized by a man who would just... walk up to women in the street, say something awful, and then stab them. He wasn't trying to kill them. He was using a knife or a spike to cut through their dresses and slice into their thighs or buttocks. They called him the London Monster. It sounds like another one of those historical things that feels too weird to be real, like when we talked about Strasbourg's dancing plague. But this was very real, and for two years, it created a full-blown moral panic. The attacks were relentless. Over fifty women came forward. On one single night, January eighteenth, 1790, he attacked six different women.

The press went absolutely wild. They described him as this phantom, this gentleman-turned-fiend. Some reports claimed he had knives fixed to his knees, or blades hidden in a bouquet of flowers. The city was terrified. A wealthy philanthropist, John Julius Angerstein, put up a reward of one hundred guineas for the Monster's capture. That’s about thirteen thousand pounds today. And that reward... well, it turned the fear into a city-wide witch hunt. Suddenly, dozens of men were being accused, dragged to court, and then released for lack of evidence. The public needed a villain. They were desperate for one. And in June 1790, they thought they got him.

A young woman named Anne Porter, one of the victims, was out walking with her fiancé when she spotted a man and screamed, "That's him! That's the Monster!" The man was Renwick Williams, a twenty-three-year-old Welshman who worked in a factory making artificial flowers. He was arrested, put on trial, and the city breathed a sigh of relief. He was convicted — twice, actually — and sentenced to six years in the notorious Newgate Prison. Case closed, right? The Monster is caught. Except... this is where the story gets truly unbelievable. Because the more you look at the case against Renwick Williams, the more you realize he was almost certainly INNOCENT.

Here’s what nobody seemed to care about at the time. First, his alibi. For the attack on Anne Porter — the one that got him arrested — Williams's boss and multiple coworkers all testified under oath that he was at work. They swore he was there until midnight and didn't leave until twelve-thirty. The attack happened before that. It was physically impossible for him to have done it. Second, the description. Anne Porter described her attacker as thin, about thirty, with light brown hair and a large nose. Renwick Williams? He was twenty-two, stout, with black hair and what a contemporary writer called a "Grecian nose." A poet named Theophilus Swift actually published a whole pamphlet defending Williams, basically fact-checking the victims and the court in public.

And it gets even crazier. The police brought in several other women who had been attacked by the Monster... and one by one, they looked at Renwick Williams and said, "Nope. That's not the guy." So you have an ironclad alibi, a totally wrong physical description, and other victims clearing his name. So why was he convicted? Because the city was in a panic. The hundred-guinea reward had whipped everyone into a frenzy. The newspapers had built a monster, and the public demanded that monster have a face. Renwick Williams was just the unlucky guy who happened to walk past the right person on the wrong day. Historians now look back and call him what he was: an "unfortunate scapegoat." The real "monster" was probably several different men, maybe even small groups, taking advantage of the panic.

Some were copycats. But it was easier to believe in one supervillain than in a more complicated, messy truth. This whole thing feels so... modern. It's the 18th-century version of a social media pile-on. You get a viral story, a rush to judgment, and a total loss of nuance. Someone gets branded the villain, and all the evidence that doesn't fit the narrative just gets ignored. The pattern is the same: fear creates a story, and the story becomes more important than the facts. Renwick Williams served his six years. He even wrote his own pamphlet from prison, called An Appeal to the Public, where he just relentlessly, heartbreakingly, insisted on his innocence.

He was released in 1796, got married a year later, and tried to disappear. But for two hundred years, his name was synonymous with this terrifying phantom. The real story, the one that got buried, wasn't about a monster. It was about how easily a city can decide to create one.