Unsolved mysteries of history 1

Newgate Monster.

Who was the Newgate Monster?

In the late 1780s, a violent pervert prowled the streets of London.

His strange and unique modus operandi was to stab his victims in the buttocks or thighs, all the while assailing them with a stream of filthy language. The women of the capital were understandibly terrified. These attacks occurred from May 1788 onwards. When the Monster (as he had become known) increased his attacks in the first months of 1790, the authorities became under increasing pressure to make an arrest. The problem was the huge variety of victim descriptions of the perpetrator. Short, tall, old, young, thin, stocky, vulgar, gentlemanly: there was hardly any consistency whatsoever.

In May 1788, a doctor’s wife, Maria Smyth, complained that she had been indecently assaulted by a man in Fleet Street. The attacker, she claimed, had stuck a sharp knife into her bottom and fled.

In the days and weeks that followed, many other women reported similar assaults. The culprit, soon named ‘The Monster’, became the subject of a play of the same name which attracted audiences drawn to the spectacle of seeing the hind parts of young actresses assailed by sharp instruments.

London insurance magnate John Julius Angerstein put up a reward of £100 for the capture of the Monster resulting in a spate of false citizen’s arrests which simply confused matters further.

Eventually, one of the victims, Anne Porter, identified a man she saw in the street as the Monster. His name was Rhynwick Williams, an unemployed and impecunious artificial-flower maker.

On 13 June 1790, Anne Porter claimed she had spotted her attacker in St. James's Park. Her admirer, John Coleman, began a slow pursuit of the man, who realised he was being followed. When Rhynwick Williams, a 23-year-old florist, reached his house, Coleman confronted him, accusing him of insulting a lady, and challenged him to a duel He eventually took Williams to meet Porter, who fainted when she saw him.

At the trial, held at the Old Bailey, much of the evidence against Williams was contradictory or plain false. He had solid alibis for the Anne Porter and other attacks. Williams’s employer testified to his good character. A Bow Street Runner also stated that he had seen Williams in Weymouth, some 130 miles from London, on a day on which one of the assaults took place. He was supported by a host of glowing character references and even Angerstein himself was doubtful about his guilt. Williams protested his innocence but, given the climate of panic, it was futile. He admitted that he had once approached Porter but had an alibi for another of the attacks. Despite all of this, Williams was found guilty.

But of what? The judge, Sir Francis Buller, could  not decide whether the crimes were felonies or misdemeanours, so referred the case to an appeal tribunal which decided that the crimes were misdemeanours. The upshot of this was that Williams had to be re-tried and the same farce was conducted for a second time.

In the new trial Williams' defence lawyer was Irish poet Theophilus Swift, whose tactic was to accuse Porter of a scheme to collect the reward, Porter having married Coleman, who had received the reward money. Despite the fact that a number of alleged victims gave contradictory stories and that his employer and coworkers testified that he had an alibi for the most infamous attack, Williams was found guilty of the assaults – he was convicted of “damaging garments” – and sent to Newgate prison for six years.

Williams was sentenced to six years in prison at Newgate. It would seem that his stay there was not especially unpleasant. His unsought notoriety meant that he had plenty of visitors and he picked up his trade of making artificial flowers which he was able to sell. The happy ending to this tale is that his girlfriend Elizabeth bore him a son, conceived in the prison. The boy was baptised at St Sepulchre across the road, and after his release in 1796, Williams and Elizabeth were married.

There seems little doubt that Williams was innocent of the crimes. So who was the real bottom-fixated ‘Monster’?