An unpleasant character, certainly; but not, by modern standards, a “monster”. Psychiatrists call such men “piqueurs” and recognize that they are suffering from sexual frustration and an inferiority complex. The piqueur is usually obsessed with some part of a girl’s anatomy – her breasts, buttocks, or thighs. He mingles with a crowd, selects an attractive victim, then gets close enough to jab her with a sharp instrument – often an ice pick. By the time the girl realizes what has happened, he has vanished.<\/p>\n
For the modern reader, the most surprising thing is that a piqueur should have caused such terror in London – a terror comparable to that caused by Jack the Ripper a century later. Prostitutes tried to keep their pimp in sight; respectable women went out only with a male escort. Many of the stories about the “Monster’s” exploits were exaggerated: but, in fact, he was a dangerous man. His knife had inflicted some deep and painful wounds, and some of the victims had badly scarred faces. London was seized with panic. Crimes springing from sexual abnormality were almost unknown; they couldn’t even begin to understand what could drive a man to attack strange girls. The age of Sex Crime lay nearly a century and half in the future.<\/p>\n
The “Monster” was eventually identified when two sisters he had attacked six months previously recognized him in St. James’s Park. A man with them tracked the “Monster” to his home where he was arrested. Crowds flocked to Old Bailey to see the infamous Ripper. The judge had to explain to the jury that this was an extremely baffling case, the first of its kind ever heard in England. There was simply no law to deal with a man who slashed ladies’ buttocks without apparent motive. On the other hand, there were plenty of laws to deal with damage to property.<\/p>\n
So Renwick Williams was charged with damaging the ladies’ clothes. The blood-stained dresses and underskirts were produced in court – with ten-inch rents to prove that the “Monster” had ruined valuable property. Williams was duly sentenced to six years in jail, and ordered to produce \u20a4400 as a surety for future good behavior. After that he disappeared from the criminal scene.<\/p>\n
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