0:00 Okay, for two years, from 1788 to 1790, London was terrorized by a man who would just...0:06 walk up to women in the street, say something awful, and then stab them.0:11 He wasn't trying to kill them.0:14 He was using a knife or a spike to cut through their dresses and slice into their thighs or buttocks.0:21 They called him the London Monster.0:24 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.0:34 But this was very real, and for two years, it created a full-blown moral panic.0:40 The attacks were relentless.0:42 Over fifty women came forward.0:44 On one single night, January eighteenth, 1790, he attacked six different women.0:50 The press went absolutely wild.0:52 They described him as this phantom, this gentleman-turned-fiend.0:57 Some reports claimed he had knives fixed to his knees, or blades hidden in a bouquet of flowers.1:04 The city was terrified.1:06 A wealthy philanthropist, John Julius Angerstein, put up a reward of one hundred guineas for the Monster's capture.1:14 That’s about thirteen thousand pounds today.1:18 And that reward...1:19 well, it turned the fear into a city-wide witch hunt.1:23 Suddenly, dozens of men were being accused, dragged to court, and then released for lack of evidence.1:30 The public needed a villain.1:32 They were desperate for one.1:35 And in June 1790, they thought they got him.1:38 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!1:48 That's the Monster!" The man was Renwick Williams, a twenty-three-year-old Welshman who worked in a factory making artificial flowers.1:58 He was arrested, put on trial, and the city breathed a sigh of relief.2:03 He was convicted — twice, actually — and sentenced to six years in the notorious Newgate Prison.2:10 Case closed, right?2:11 The Monster is caught.2:13 Except...2:14 this is where the story gets truly unbelievable.2:17 Because the more you look at the case against Renwick Williams, the more you realize he was almost certainly INNOCENT.2:26 Here’s what nobody seemed to care about at the time.2:30 First, his alibi.2:31 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.2:42 They swore he was there until midnight and didn't leave until twelve-thirty.2:48 The attack happened before that.2:50 It was physically impossible for him to have done it.2:54 Second, the description.2:56 Anne Porter described her attacker as thin, about thirty, with light brown hair and a large nose.3:03 Renwick Williams?3:04 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.3:22 And it gets even crazier.3:24 The police brought in several other women who had been attacked by the Monster...3:30 and one by one, they looked at Renwick Williams and said, "Nope.3:35 That's not the guy." So you have an ironclad alibi, a totally wrong physical description, and other victims clearing his name.3:44 So why was he convicted?3:46 Because the city was in a panic.3:48 The hundred-guinea reward had whipped everyone into a frenzy.3:53 The newspapers had built a monster, and the public demanded that monster have a face.3:59 Renwick Williams was just the unlucky guy who happened to walk past the right person on the wrong day.4:07 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.4:21 Some were copycats.4:22 But it was easier to believe in one supervillain than in a more complicated, messy truth.4:29 This whole thing feels so...4:31 modern.4:31 It's the 18th-century version of a social media pile-on.4:35 You get a viral story, a rush to judgment, and a total loss of nuance.4:41 Someone gets branded the villain, and all the evidence that doesn't fit the narrative just gets ignored.4:48 The pattern is the same: fear creates a story, and the story becomes more important than the facts.4:56 Renwick Williams served his six years.4:58 He even wrote his own pamphlet from prison, called An Appeal to the Public, where he just relentlessly, heartbreakingly, insisted on his innocence.5:09 He was released in 1796, got married a year later, and tried to disappear.5:15 But for two hundred years, his name was synonymous with this terrifying phantom.5:21 The real story, the one that got buried, wasn't about a monster.5:25 It was about how easily a city can decide to create one.
