There is a spanish movie "Romasanta" about the case, and the film review tells the story. It's quite interesting that the man was acquited of his crimes by queen Isabel II, because she was strongly convinced that he commited his crimes as a wolf. Here it goes: QUOTE
The film is based on the true-life story of Manuel Blanco Romasanta, a traveling vendor who confessed to the murders of thirteen people: Romasanta, for fun and profit, converted the body fat of his prey into soap. Romasanta was tried in Allariz in 1852 and eluded capital punishment by professing he was a werewolf. "At that time, the Romasanta case divided Gaelic society," recounts Plaza. "While the common villagers never doubted that Romasanta was guilty, the upper-class citizens were almost religiously in favour of the nineteenth century scientific theory, seeing in Romasanta an exotic study that would cross frontiers. Queen Isabel II herself, immersed in the moderate decade of her mandate, intervened in the process, commuting Manuel Blanco Romasanta’s original sentence and converting herself into the last female victim, fooled by this mans’ magnetism". Plaza’s movie is set in 1850: wolves plague the forests of Allariz, possibly prompting the disappearance of the region’s occupants. But along with savage gashes, the human cadavers were inflicted with precise surgical cuts, a contradiction that terrorizes local villagers who, reluctant to admit themselves into the woods, yield to an urban legend that a werewolf is functioning as a surrogate serial killer. "Our intentions are that ROMASANTA is an imaginative approximation to reality," foretells the director. "The Galicia from the XIX century was the perfect setting for the legend of a half-man, half-beast. It was the land Romasanta crossed back and forth, assassinating his innocent victims, stripping them of their body fat, which he later made into luxurious soaps to be sold from his traveling vendor’s stand. We want to reflect the Galicia, from the first half of the 1800s, as a phantasmagoric place, where logic wasn’t always the norm".[...]"This man used popular beliefs, surrounding the figure of the werewolf, in order to [camouflage] his crimes and later the anthropological studies of that time period to justify what he had done, thanks to the fact he was supposedly suffering from lycanthropy. Manuel Blanco Romasanta confessed his crimes using as an excuse a supposed curse that transformed him into a werewolf, and thus proclaimed his innocence based upon these abstract facts." Paco Plaza is obviously fascinated by Romasanta’s psyche: "Who was this man in reality? An uneducated, self-taught man who learned to read and write on his own. A charming man who knew how to gain the confidence of others? A seducer? A psychopathic, manipulating hedonist with a natural born intelligence of a genius? Or merely a mentally-ill con artist?. Most likely, all of the above because Romasanta was a cold-blooded killer, who boasted at his trial of having had over one thousand lovers, although never admitting ‘how much I really hated them!’. His sensuality and power of seduction were the main weapons he used at the trial.
Or just keen to slaughter some fellow humans? 
...uh, nevermind 
. Look, Lycanthrophy be damned, if the courts in 1692 were ignorant enough to believe that witchcraft was rampamt in Salem...enough to put 19 men and women to death and allow another 80 year-old man to be stoned to death on the suspicion of withcraft....then why wasn't this "poor" slob hung for being a "werewolf"? beacuse people in high places were fascinated by him and his story....much like the story of Elizabeth Bathory(she drank and bathed in blood...must've been a Vampire!!!)...and in turn spared his life as a "novelty", no more, no less.
