It took a jury just three and a half hours to find Eleanor Williams unanimously guilty of perverting the course of justice. But one question they were never asked to consider is why she told so many lies. Why had she framed so many innocent men and what had happened in her past which might have contributed to her behaviour?
The trial offered few clues. She was the only defence witness and continues to maintain her innocence, though in an apologetic letter to the judge on Tuesday admitted having “done wrong on some of this”.
She said she “wasn’t thinking straight” when she made the Facebook post alleging abuse at the hands of an Asian grooming gang, having typed it when she had just been discharged from hospital.
She had been receiving treatment for the very injuries which prompted such a groundswell of public support when she posted photographs on Facebook – the black eye, the bruises, the severed little finger.
A forensic pathologist concluded that all of those injuries were self-inflicted, using a hammer Williams had bought from Tesco a few days earlier. But jurors may have been left wondering what on earth could cause someone to inflict such harm to themselves.
A little insight came during the first day of her sentencing hearing. Dr Lucy Bacon, a forensic psychiatrist who assessed Williams multiple times since 2019, diagnosed complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) resulting from childhood trauma. Williams displayed all of the key symptoms, said Bacon, including suicidal ideation and substance misuse.
Bacon said Williams had learned to “maintain a mask” to hide her emotions, which she said was very common in trauma. The psychiatrist said she suspected “undisclosed sexual abuse” in childhood, which she said Williams had referred to “opaquely” in their sessions.
A male psychiatrist, Dr Martin Lock, commissioned by the prosecution, was not able to diagnose Williams with any psychiatric disorder. Bacon suggested this may be because he was a man, and that Williams had refused to engage with some male healthcare professionals in prison.
Sentencing Williams to eight and a half years in jail, Mr Justice Altham agreed with Lock that there was no evidence of a conclusive diagnosis. He said there were “clear overtones” of difficulties in her childhood, but that there was “little clarity” over what those may have entailed.
Louise Blackwell, Williams’ KC, said social services were involved with the family until Williams was eight.
In Barrow, theories abound as to what motivated Williams. When she first started to tell police about being trafficked to “sex parties”, she gave officers a list of 60 other girls she said had been abused too. Around half were from Cumbria; the others were from farther afield.
One from Cumbria was Chloe (not her real name), 21. She was baffled when the police knocked on her door in 2019 asking if she had been a victim of sex trafficking: she had only been on one night out with Williams and it certainly had not ended with any sort of sexual abuse.
Chloe knew Williams a bit. They went to the same school, Walney High, though Williams was in the year above. She remembers always thinking there was something “very strange” about Williams’ behaviour.
“She wouldn’t go to school, she would always stay out of lessons,” said Chloe. “She was acting very strange in school.”
When both girls left school, Chloe saw Williams with visible injuries – “a scratch from her neck to her collarbone, and bruises around her neck and stuff like that”. She knew Williams would often fail to turn up at work and would go missing for long periods.
She wonders if Williams ended up with drug debts. “My little theory is she’s got herself into a lot of debt with drugs, because she did do drugs, and she’s got herself into this hole that she can’t get out of so she’s just thought: the only way I can get out of it is to plaster all over Facebook a complete different story.”
Williams told the jury she took drugs – cocaine and marijuana. She was frequently found by police “out of it”, alone and far from home, in Morecambe, Lancaster, Preston and other parts of the north-west of England. In 2019/20, her mother reported her missing 32 times.
Could she have been a county lines drug mule? Doug Marshall, the senior investigator on the case, gives short shrift to the idea that Williams may have been a victim of something, if not what she told police. He said she started going missing only after detectives told her they thought she was lying.
“She wasn’t going missing when she was 14, 15, 16. These missing episodes are all times when the police investigation [into her] was ongoing.”
Detectives investigated every single episode, he said: “In the course of this three-and-a-half year inquiry, there’s no evidence in anything that we’ve gathered to say that Miss Williams is a victim of any crime.”
Perhaps she is just a compulsive liar. Some of the lies she made up were ridiculously easy to disprove, such as when she told people she had a baby son called Bailey (she has never given birth) or that she had spent several weeks in a hospital in a coma after being given a backstreet abortion using knitting needles.
Sentencing her, Mr Justice Altham sounded a pessimistic note for anyone hoping for answers. There was no explanation for why the defendant made the allegations, he said: “Unless and until the defendant chooses to say why she has told these lies we will not know.”
In any case, said Mohammed Ramzan, falsely accused by Williams of being the ringleader of a grooming gang: “Would we believe the ‘truth’ if she told us?”
