Eleanor Williams: Inside trial that convicted 'serial liar'

More than two years after Williams made her claims public on social media - various setbacks delayed the trial until October 2022 - she found herself in the dock at Preston Crown Court.

In court ten on the second floor of the court, the crowds who had previously attended to support her were gone and she was largely alone for the duration of the trial.

LIVE: Sentencing of Eleanor Williams begins at Preston

Over the course of several weeks prosecutors would present evidence they said would shatter the truthfulness of the claims Williams made in that Facebook post in 2020.

Opening the case for the prosecution, barrister Jonathan Sandiford KC told the jury of six men and six women that Williams was a 'serial liar', describing her accounts as 'a fabrication from first to last'.

It came out that Williams had accused Mohammed Ramzan of trafficking her since the age of 12. She said she had worked at his Indian restaurant and was later made to have sex with others for money.

The court heard she had told police that the arrangement escalated into her being trafficked across the north of England and to Ibiza and Amsterdam, where she said Mr Ramzan attempted to sell her for 25,000 euros.

She also described being taken to Blackpool, being threatened by Mr Ramzan on the seafront and taken to four different addresses to have sex with multiple men.

But on the date in question, Williams had been captured on CCTV travelling to the Savoy Hotel and visiting a nearby corner shop to buy a Pot Noodle.

Phone data showed that at the time she said she was being trafficked around Blackpool, Williams was actually in room 222 of the hotel, for which she paid £58, watching BBC iPlayer and YouTube on her phone.

She later said she had lied about that night as a test of her loyalty put forward by the traffickers.

Eleanor Williams at the Savoy hotel in Blackpool (Image: CPS)

Alongside Mr Ramzan, she said there were a host of other members of the gang, including ‘driver’ Lee Helm and 'traffickers' Rolo Kelzi and Emmanuel Salazar.

As well as being sexually abused by the human trafficking gang, Williams claimed that she had also been assaulted by other white men.

Cameron Bibby, she said, drugged her and sexually assaulted her at a house party at his home in 2017.

Williams described overhearing Bibby and a friend devising a plan to set a dog on her and dispose of her body.

In fact, as the court heard, on that night Williams had got so drunk that Bibby had needed to call for her mum to collect her.

And in 2019 she said Jordan Trengove had raped her three times, including by knife-point, at his friend’s home and her Barrow Island flat.

But it turned out Trengove could account for each night. One of the nights he had been in the back of a police van near to the time he was meant to have been assaulting Williams.

She also said Oliver Gardner had sexually assaulted her after the pair met at Preston railway station and had a 'clumsy' encounter in an alley.

Over the course of the three-month trial it would transpire that Williams had lied about having a child, about working at Mr Ramzan's restaurant, about receiving a ‘backstreet abortion’, about being in a coma in hospital and about having a heroin addiction from the abuse.

Evidence showed that 'traffickers' Rolo Kelzi and Emmanuel Salazar, or ‘Salza’, did not exist. In fact messages she claimed had been sent from them were sent by herself, on another phone provided to her by the charity Women's Community Matters.

And an Instagram account that she said was Salza was actually owned by a man in Seattle, America.

Messages Eleanor Williams claimed were from trafficker 'Salza' (Image: CPS)

Images on his account available to the public showed him completing the Seattle Half Marathon in June 2017 with a time of two hours and 16 minutes.

And then they were the dozens of girls she said had also been victims of the trafficking operation.

In court around 20 of them gave evidence either in person or by written statement saying they had never been involved in anything Williams said they were.

One, a long-standing friend of Williams, said she was ‘annoyed’ to have been named on a hand-written list the defendant passed to police.

Others from Barrow said they only knew her from the Facebook post. More women named on the list turned out to be from other parts of the UK or even from America and had no knowledge of the defendant.

Evidence showed Williams had made screenshots of the Facebook accounts of many of those named and then deleted them.

Williams also admitted that she had watched Three Girls, a BBC drama based on the Rochdale grooming scandal.

She had claimed there was a period when she was being taken every day after school to the Greater Manchester town to work in a takeaway and have sex with men, a 104-mile round trip.

A note the court heard Eleanor Williams said was posted through her door. Jurors were told it was written in Thai (Image: CPS)

The original Facebook post also described how she had received threatening letters through her door.

The court heard she had passed on the letters to a mental health practitioner who later passed them on to the police.

After examination, one of the letters was thought to have been written in Thai.

And the note had not been placed through her letterbox, the court was told. In fact it had been posted on Facebook by one of Williams' friends, who had found it left behind on the table of a Walney pub and posted it online hoping someone could clear up its meaning.

Translated, the letter said: "Hello, my name is Mark. I'm British. My girlfriend is Thai."

In a statement read in court, the translator said the note writer had probably been learning the language.

It was among a number of mistruths the prosecution and police argued could easily be proved false. In some cases Williams admitted she was lying.

But what about those shocking photos posted in 2020 that had been the reason for much of the disbelief that she may be spinning a lie?

The prosecution said the injuries were caused not by a violent grooming gang but by Williams herself wielding a hammer.

Mr Sandiford said Williams had purchased a hammer in Tesco days before the Facebook post and injured herself with it, providing the 'finale' to her story of being at the centre of an international sex trafficking ring.

The day before the post police had found her in a field on Walney. Nearby a hammer covered in her blood was also discovered.

A forensic pathologist told the court her injuries, many of which appeared to have only been sustained in reachable parts of her body, were more likely to have been self-inflicted.

But Williams denied she had ever hit herself with a hammer.

A Tesco receipt for a hammer bought by Eleanor Williams in May 2020 (Image: CPS)

Under hours of cross-examination, Williams told the court: “I wouldn’t buy a hammer to hurt myself, I’m not a psychopath.”

The prosecution and defence summed up their cases in speeches to jurors just before Christmas and the judge adjourned the conclusion of the case until the new year.

The jurors returned to court following the festive period. Then after more than two years of ructions, division, death threats, violence and a three-month trial, the 12 men and women were sent out to ponder the verdict.

It took just a few hours for them to reach a unanimous decision: guilty on all counts.

Mr Trengove attended the court to hear the verdict for himself, refusing to look at a woman he said he had ruined his life.

That night, he visited Mo Rammy’s flat to reflect on the case together and celebrate, two victims starting to rebuild their lives and plot a way to ensure the same fate would never befall anyone else.

The conclusion of the trial brings an end to a dark chapter in Barrow’s history.

The people whose worlds were torn apart by Williams will attempt to move on with their lives.

But they and everyone else will continue to ask themselves: why did she do it?