Hot off the news headlines, following the sentencing of the now convicted Eleanor Williams for perverting the course of justice, my wife and I caught up with this very recent BBC one hour documentary which brought this shocking story to the public consciousness.
This young woman, Ellie Williams from a small town, Barrow-on-Furness in the north of England, is shown to be a dangerous fantasist and as the programme makes clear, had already twice before made heinous allegations against entirely innocent people causing them irreparable harm in their personal and business lives. Thankfully she was brought to justice by the police when she was escalating her crime still further and jailed for eight and a half years, but only she will know why she went to the extremes that she did to treat her victims the way she did.
Her first victim was a young local lad she met at a party and then concocted a rape allegation against him which saw him held on remand in prison for seven months before he was freed. Then, two years later, she made further fictitious claims of sexual assault against her by a group of Asian men from a neighbouring town and then later still was inventing another scenario where she claimed she was groomed for sex when she was finally brought to book.
If this programme proved one thing, it demonstrated the usefulness of closed circuit TV on our streets which completely blew apart her baseless allegations. She took advantage of the sensitivity with which the police treat rape allegations to put in the dock completely innocent people, many of whom are still dealing with the consequences today. Very disturbingly, she also managed to waken up the never fully dormant racist fervour in some of the neighbouring community and while one must be very pleased that she is now inside, the damage she has done to these poor people, one suspects, will last for years and years.
No real explanation is offered for her behaviour. She appears to be an only child and we see her on camera telling us her original parents' marriage had broken down and that she didn't get along with her mother's new husband, leaving home early, but this doesn't go any way towards explaining the extremes to which she went to cause the havoc she did, which included actually hitting herself with a hammer to fabricate evidence against her unwitting and completely innocent targets.
Making extensive use of the CCTV footage used to convict her as well as interviews with the police detectives initially taken in by her but who eventually saw through her web of lies, this was yet another modern-day true-crime story which leaves you scratching your head at how people can be so motivated to do the terrible things that they do.
