In 1955, at the age of 28, Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be hanged for murder in the UK.
Her death, coming after she shot her lover outside a Hampstead pub two months before, sparked a wave of public opprobrium and likely contributed to the outlawing of the death penalty a decade later in 1965.
Almost seventy years after she died, Ruth is not a well-known figure, but now her story is being turned into an ITV drama, starring Lucy Boynton as Ruth. Due to air later this year, details on the drama are scarce, but it promises to tell “the hidden story of Ruth Ellis and exposes the timeless British obsessions of class, sex and death.”
But who was she really, and what led her to commit murder on April 10, 1955?
Early life
Ruth Ellis was born Ruth Neilson in Rhyl – a town in Wales – on October 9, 1926. She was the fifth of six children: her mother Bertha was a Belgian refugee, while her father, Arthur Hornby (he later changed his surname to Neilson), was a cellist from Manchester.
The family moved often, and changed surnames often too. Nobody is entirely sure why; biographers have speculated it was to stop neighbours or schools becoming aware of Arthur’s abuse. Perhaps it was for Arthur’s work, but the fact remains that Ruth’s upbringing was blighted by sexual abuse at the hands of her father, beginning when Arthur’s twin brother Charles was killed in a bicycle accident in 1928.
Her father preyed upon her elder sister, Muriel. By the time she was 14, she had conceived a child, who was brought up alongside the rest of the family as a ‘brother’ to Ruth and her siblings. Arthur also abused Ruth, starting from when she was 11, though she often tried to fight back.
By 1940, Arthur had moved to London after being offered the job of a live-in caretaker for a lift manufacturer. Then living in Reading and aged 14, Ruth went onto befriend the girlfriend of her older brother, Julian, who was on leave from the army.
This girlfriend was called Edna and she introduced Ruth to a racy life of alcohol and men. The pair moved in with Arthur, and Arthur soon ended up sleeping with Edna while abusing Ruth (this odd living arrangement ended swiftly when Bertha, visiting from Reading, caught Edna and Arthur in bed together. Shortly afterwards, she moved to London too).
A few years later, Ruth found herself pregnant at the age of 17. The father was a married Canadian soldier, Clare Andrea McCallum – and while she kept the baby (whom she called Clare Andria, or Andy) – the relationship didn’t survive and Ruth found herself working factory jobs to support herself and her son.
Romantic entanglements
By the end of the 1940s, the family were all living in London, and Ruth had moved on from factory work to sex work. Starting with nude modelling (her manager Morris Conley was infamous for blackmailing his employees into sleeping with him), she moved onto being a nightclub hostess in Hampstead; by 1950, she was working as an escort.
This period of her life was punctuated by several unhappy relationships, often with clients. The main one was George Johnston Ellis, a 41-year-old divorced dentist, who also happened to be an alcoholic. The pair married on November 8 at a registry office in Kent, but the marriage quickly became violent.
George was convinced that Ruth was cheating on him; when their daughter Georgina was born in 1951, he refused to acknowledge her as his own.
The pair split up shortly after, forcing Ellis to return to sex work and to move back into the family home with her children. Despite these inauspicious circumstances, by 1953 she had started working at the Little Club, a Knightsbridge hotspot. A driven Ruth took elocution and etiquette classes, and soon found herself promoted to manager – making her one of the youngest women to do so at 27.
The job came with money, celebrity friends and status, and this was where Ellis met David Blakely, the man she would ultimately kill. Privately educated at Shrewsbury School and then Sandhurst, he was an alcoholic who made his living as a racing driver.
The pair met through the club and became serious very quickly: after a few weeks, Blakely (who was already engaged to another woman) had moved into Ruth’s flat.
Ruth also began seeing another man: Desmond Cussen, a former RAF pilot turned accountant. Sacked from the Little Club after her behaviour went downhill, Ruth left her flat and moved into Cussen’s house near Oxford Street, but continued to see Blakely. However the pair struggled to reconcile their own relationship with seeing other people (Blakely was still engaged at the time, but continued to have affairs with both men and women) and the relationship became violent.
This culminated in an incident in January, 1955, where he punched Ruth in the stomach so hard that she miscarried. In a serialised, ghostwritten life story published in the Woman’s Sunday Mirror, Ruth wrote that she often gave Blakely money for cigarettes, food and drink, and that he would attack her after he had been drinking.
“He would smack my face and punch me,” she wrote, and once “lost all control. His fist struck me between the eyes and I fell to the floor. Savagely he beat me as I lay there.”
The murder
Nobody knows what Ruth’s tipping point was, but on Easter Sunday (April 10), 1955, she left Cussen’s house and arrived at The Magdala, a Hampstead pub, where Blakely was with friends.
At 9.30pm, Blakely and his friend Clive Gunnell left the pub, and as he arrived at his car, Ruth took a revolver from her handbag (this is now in the Metropolitan Police Crime Museum) and fired at him five times: the last three into his back as he lay on the floor. According to the pathologist, Blakely was left with powder burns on his skin from the proximity of the gun.
The sixth shot, which Ruth tried to fire at Blakely, ricocheted off the road and took off the thumb of bystander Gladys Yule.
After the attack, Ruth appeared to be in shock. "I am guilty, I'm a little confused,” she was heard saying, adding to Blakely’s friend, “Will you call the police, Clive?” Immediately arrested by an off-duty policeman, she was taken to Hampstead Police Station and appeared calm; she later gave a full confession.
This calm was a source of consternation for the authorities: Ruth was examined by doctors and psychiatrists, neither of whom found any evidence of mental illness; she even underwent an electroencephalograph, which monitors electric signals from the brain.
Ruth appeared at the Old Bailey for her trial in June 1955, where she was asked by the prosecutor, Christmas Humphreys, what her motive for shooting Blakely was. This led to her infamous response: “it's obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him."
From there, her fate was sealed: the jury took less than twenty minutes to return a guilty verdict for a charge of murder, sentencing her to death.
Death
When the murder verdict was passed and Ruth sentenced, there was a public outcry and almost immediately, calls for a reprieve began.
Ruth never engaged with the petition to free her (which managed to reach 50,000 signatures), but her lawyers wrote a 14-page letter to the then-Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd George, setting out the argument for a reprieve, or at least a stay of execution, which he refused.
In conversations that happened the day before her death, Ruth told solicitor Victor Mishcon that her lover Cussen had given her the gun she used to kill Blakely, taught her how to use it and even driven her to the pub after the pair had been drinking together. "I didn't say anything about it up to now because it seemed traitorous, absolutely traitorous,” she told him.
Despite renewed calls for an eleventh-hour reprieve, Lloyd George and those at the Home Office remained firm (now, this, combined with the abuse Ruth suffered at the hands of Blakely, would likelly have mitigated her sentence to one of manslaughter rather than murder). "It would be a bad day for this country if we adopted the doctrine of crime passionelle,” the permanent secretary, Sir Frank Newsam, allegedly advised Lloyd George. “This was a deliberately planned and cold-bloodedly executed murder."
Ruth was hanged in Holloway Prison on July 13 by Albert Pierrepoint and buried in an unmarked grave on the grounds of the prison (though she was later reburied in Amersham). In her last letter to Blakely’s parents, she told them that "I have always loved your son, and I shall die still loving him.”
In an interview with the Guardian, her sister Muriel said that “she was very calm. My mum said, 'Don't ask any questions and let Ruth do the talking.' I'd just had a new baby and she said what was he like, and she said she liked the dress I had on.
“I believe she thought that at the last minute they'd say, 'You'll go to prison instead.'"
Aftermath
Ruth’s death had a profound effect on the way the British public, and the rest of the world, saw the death penalty. The decision to execute her was attacked by newspapers and columnists – including the novelist Raymond Chandler, who wrote a letter to the Evening Standard condemning "the medieval savagery of the law".
The death penalty itself was halted in 1965, while the last execution occurred in 1964. By that point, however, reprieves were common: around half of those sentenced to death had their sentences commuted. And despite potentially providing Ruth with the means and motive to kill, no action was ever taken regarding Desmond Cussen. He continuously denied giving Ruth the gun, and later emigrated to Australia.
Ruth’s family suffered terribly as a result of her death. Her ex-husband George took his own life, hanging himself in a hotel in 1958; Ruth’s mother Bertha was discovered trying to gas herself in her flat in Hemel Hempstead; though her life was saved, she never spoke properly again.
Ruth’s own children also met unhappy ends. Andy, who was 10 when Ruth died, took his own life in 1982 after destroying the headstone on his mother’s grave, which has still never been replaced. Her daughter Georgina was fostered at 6, after her father died. She died of cancer in 2001, at 50 years old.
