List of Famous people named William

William Rees-Mogg, Baron Rees-Mogg was a British newspaper journalist who was Editor of The Times from 1967 to 1981. In the late 1970s, he served as High Sheriff of Somerset, and in the 1980s was Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain and Vice-Chairman of the BBC's Board of Governors. He was the father of the politicians Jacob and Annunziata Rees-Mogg.

William Horsley Orrick III is an American lawyer and judge. A native of San Francisco, Orrick has been a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California since 2013. He formerly had a long career as a lawyer in private practice in San Francisco, and served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division of the United States Department of Justice during the Obama administration.

William Henry Hance was an American soldier and serial killer who is believed to have murdered four women in and around military bases before his arrest in 1978. He was convicted of murdering three of them, and not brought to trial on the fourth. He was executed by the state of Georgia in the electric chair.

William McSherry, S.J. was an American Catholic priest who became the president of Georgetown College and a prominent 19th-century leader of the Jesuits in the United States. The son of Irish immigrants, McSherry was educated at Georgetown College, where he entered the Society of Jesus. As one of the first Americans to complete the traditional Jesuit course of training, he was sent to Rome to be educated for the priesthood. There, he made several discoveries of significant, forgotten holdings in the Jesuit archives, which improved historians' knowledge of the early European settling of Maryland and of the language of Indian tribes there.

William Charles Morva was an American-Hungarian criminal convicted of the two 2006 shooting deaths of Sheriff's Deputy Corporal Eric Sutphin and hospital security guard Derrick McFarland in the town of Blacksburg, Virginia. The shooting deaths occurred near the university campus of Virginia Tech while he awaited trial for attempted armed robbery. A jury sentenced him to death on June 23, 2008, but some doctors stated that he suffered from a serious mental illness, a delusional disorder that caused him to kill. Judge Ray Grubbs initially set the execution date for October 21, 2008. On June 4, 2009, an appeal for William Morva was made to the Virginia Supreme Court. However, the capital murder conviction and death sentence were confirmed on September 18, 2009.

Air Vice Marshal William Dowling Bostock, was a senior commander in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). During World War II he led RAAF Command, the Air Force's main operational formation, with responsibility for the defence of Australia and air offensives against Japanese targets in the South West Pacific Area. His achievements in the role earned him the Distinguished Service Order and the American Medal of Freedom. General Douglas MacArthur described him as "one of the world's most successful airmen".

William Lester Suff, also known as the Riverside Prostitute Killer and the Lake Elsinore Killer, is an American serial killer.

William Matthews, occasionally spelled Mathews, was an American Roman Catholic priest from the colonial Province of Maryland who became the fifth Catholic priest ordained in the United States and the first such person born in British America. He was briefly a novice in the Society of Jesus, and became influential in establishing Catholic parochial and educational institutions in Washington, D.C. He was the second pastor of St. Patrick's Church for most of his life and was the sixth president of Georgetown College, later known as Georgetown University. Matthews acted as president of the Washington Catholic Seminary, which became Gonzaga College High School, and oversaw the continuity of the school during suppression by the church and financial insecurity.

William Poole, also known as Bill the Butcher, was the leader of the Washington Street Gang, which later became known as the Bowery Boys gang. He was a local leader of the Know Nothing political movement in mid-19th-century New York City.

William Hayden English was an American politician. He served as a U.S. Representative from Indiana from 1853 to 1861 and was the Democratic Party's nominee for Vice President of the United States in 1880.