Inside police investigation that brought down Eleanor Williams

Doug Marshall acted as the senior investigator in the case against Williams, whose false claims of being raped and trafficked by a grooming gang led to her being convicted of perverting the course of justice.

He described how years of painstaking investigations proved the stories she had told police were in fact fictitious.

And he revealed how Boris Johnson and the UK government indirectly helped Cumbria  Police make huge strides to unlock the case.

Experienced in investigating child abuse cases, Mr Marshall became involved in mid-2019 when police were concerned Williams had been the victim of human trafficking.

He set about investigating her claims starting with her report that she had been trafficked to four 'sex parties' in Blackpool. 

"She told the police an awful lot of information that she said dated back to when she was 12 years old," he said.

"I had to try and make some early sense of all that so I decided to focus on the most recent events first rather than interview her on what had happened since she was 12.

"We focused on Blackpool and got an account of what happened.

"We put our whole focus on that because obviously there was going to going to be a chance if we were able to evidence that of doing warrants and finding out where these events have taken place and arresting people.

"We started doing a massive CCTV trawl of the area, which started to throw up anomalies in her account.

"Once we started looking at her phone it became apparent she had been looking at hotels in the Blackpool area.

"So we sent detectives down to the hotel district. I think we went to at least 50 hotels checking and something like the 51st hotel we went to was the one."

As the probe found, Williams had actually booked herself into a hotel on the nights she claimed she was being sold for sex.

Eleanor Williams leaving The Savoy in Blackpool (Image: CPS)

Eleanor Williams arriving at Preston's bus station having left Blackpool (Image: CPS)

It sparked fears all was not as it seemed in another case Williams was involved with - her claims that she had been raped three times by Barrow man Jordan Trengove.

Mr Marshall said: "My concern at the time was she was already purporting to be the victim in another serious case.

"In light of that I had to review all the evidence in that case.

"There was already an investigation and it heightened the need to hurry that investigation up."

The case against Mr Trengove, who spent months on remand in prison after being charged with rape, was later discontinued.

Doubts also crept in about an incident in 2017 in which Williams said she had been sexually assaulted by Cameron Bibby at his home on Walney.

"When I started looking into the history of this young woman there had obviously been a report in 2017 and I wasn't overly happy with that one either," Mr Marshall said.

A Snapchat account screenshotted by Eleanor Williams. The court heard the account was created by her (Image: CPS)

The investigator also revealed how a government agreement with social media app Snapchat helped unlock key evidence in the case.

He said: "As an example with the 'Jordan Trengove' messages, at the time we started the investigation, Snapchat weren't complying with UK law enforcement apart from on very serious cases and this was not deemed as one where they needed to comply with the police.

"But in 2019 Boris Johnson signed an agreement with Snapchat that they would start cooperating with law enforcement.

"So we were then able to do more work on the IP address from where that account was set up and of course we found it had been set up at her own house."  

Police had been investigating Williams for around a year when she took to Facebook to share a 1,300 word post claiming she had been trafficked by an Asian grooming gang.

He described how he felt seeing the post outrage the community and travel around the world.

He said: "We've seen lately with [Nicola Bulley] in Lancashire how quick people are to jump on to onto stories and instead making their own stories up.

"It quickly got to 100,000 views and we suddenly had experts from all corners of the globe.

"It was very, very challenging."

The investigation led to Williams being convicted of nine counts of preventing the course of justice, with jurors reaching a verdict in a matter of hours.

Reflecting on the investigation nearly four years since it started, Mr Marshall said: "It's a culmination of a lot of hard work. Because although it's easy to say 'that story's ridiculous' every point had to be proved, every statement taken, every document looked at, every piece of CCTV, piece of data looked at, it's taken a very long time.

"It's had many twists and turns along the way but the victims and the general public of Barrow have had to suffer the consequences."