The Story of Ruth Ellis: The Last Woman Hanged in the United Kingdom

Name: Ruth Ellis (nee Hornby / Neilson)

Born: October 9, 1926 in Rhyl, Flintshire, Wales

Died: July 13, 1955 in Holloway Prison, London, England

Cause of Death: Execution by hanging

Resting place: Holloway prison; later reburied in St Mary's Church, Old Amersham, Buckinghamshire.

Occupation: Model, nightclub hostess

Best known for: Being the last woman executed in the UK

Spouse: George Johnston Ellis (1950–1955)

Children: 2

Ruth Ellis was a British model and nightclub hostess. She was the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom, after being convicted of the murder of her lover, David Blakely.

Ruth was born in Rhyl in North Wales. She was the fifth of six children. During her childhood, the family moved to Basingstoke in Hampshire. Her mother, Elisaberta "Bertha" Goethals, was a Belgian refugee. Her father, Arthur Hornby, was a cellist from Manchester. The Register of Marriages gives Arthur Hornby as marrying Eliza B. Goethals, at Chorlton, in 1920. Arthur would change his surname to Neilson after the birth of Ruth's older sister Muriel in 1925.

Ruth attended Fairfields Senior Girls' School in Basingstoke. She left school when she was 14 to work as a waitress. In 1941, the Neilsons would move to London. In 1944, a 17-year-old Ruth would become pregnant by a Canadian soldier named Clare and gave birth to a son whom she named Clare "Andy" Andria Neilson. The father sent money for about a year, then stopped. After a time, Ruth discovered that her husband was actually married with three children who were awaiting his return in Quebec. "Andy" eventually went to live with Ruth's mother, Bertha.

Ruth became a nightclub hostess through nude modelling work, which paid much better than the various factory and clerical jobs she had held since leaving school. Morris Conley was the manager of the Court Club on Duke Street - where she worked. Morris blackmailed his hostess employees into having sexual relations with him. Early in 1950 she became pregnant by one of her regular customers at the club, having taken up prostitution. She had this pregnancy terminated (illegally) in the third month and returned to work as soon as she could.

On November 8, 1950 Ruth married 41-year-old George Johnston Ellis, a divorced dentist with two sons, at the register office in Tonbridge, Kent. He had been a customer of hers at the Court Club. He was a violent alcoholic. He was jealous and possessive, so the marriage deteriorated quickly because he had convinced himself that she was having an extra marital affair. Ruth left him several times but always returned.

In 1951, while she was four months pregnant, Ruth appeared - un-credited - as a beauty queen in the Rank film Lady Godiva Rides Again. She subsequently gave birth to her daughter Georgina, but George refused to acknowledge paternity. They separated shortly afterwards and were later divorced. Ruth and her son moved in with her parents and she went back to prostitution to make ends meet.

In 1953, Ruth became the manager of the Little Club - a nightclub located in Knightsbridge. At this time, she was lavished with expensive gifts by admirers, and had a number of celebrity friends. This is when she met David Blakely, who was three years younger than her, through race car driver Mike Hawthorn.

Blakely presented as a well-mannered former public school boy who attended Shrewsbury School and Sandhurst. He was also a hard-drinking racer. Within a few weeks he moved into flat she occupied above the club, despite being engaged to another woman named Mary Dawson. Ruth became pregnant for the fourth time but had an abortion, feeling she could not reciprocate the level of commitment shown by Blakely towards their relationship.

She then began seeing Desmond Cussen. Born in 1922 in Surrey, he had been an RAF pilot, flying Lancaster bombers during the Second World War. He left the RAF in 1946 and then he became an accountant. He was appointed a director of the family business Cussen & Co., a wholesale and retail tobacconists with outlets in London and South Wales. When Ruth was fired from her job as the manager of the Little Club, she moved in with Cussen at 20 Goodward Court, Devonshire Street, north of Oxford Street.

The relationship with Blakely continued, however, and became increasingly violent and embittered as Ruth and Blakely continued to see other people. Blakely offered to marry Ellis, to which she consented, but she lost another child in January 1955. Blakely punched Ruth in the stomach during an argument which induced the miscarriage. Ruth became extremely ill and was bedridden for a time after miscarrying the baby.

On Easter Sunday, 10 April 1955, Ruth took a taxi from Cussen's home to a second floor flat at 29 Tanza Road, Hampstead, the home of Anthony and Carole Findlater, where she suspected Blakely might be. Anthony and Carole strongly disliked Ruth and used this opportunity to keep Ruth and Blakely appart. They had told Blakely on many occasions that he should break things off with Ruth. Blakely had also had an affair with Carole, but Anthony quickly forgave him. As she arrived, Blakely's car drove off, so she paid off the taxi and walked the quarter mile to the Magdala, a four-story public house in South Hill Park, Hampstead, where she found Blakely's car parked outside.

At around 9:30 pm David Blakely and his friend Clive Gunnell emerged. Blakely passed Ellis waiting on the pavement when she stepped out of Henshaws Doorway, a newsagent next to the Magdala. He ignored her when she said "Hello, David," then shouted "David!"

As Blakely searched for the keys to his car, Ruth took a .38 calibre Smith & Wesson Victory model revolver from her handbag and fired five shots at Blakely. The first shot missed and he started to run, pursued by Ruth around the car, where she fired a second, which caused him to collapse onto the pavement. She then stood over him and fired three more bullets into him. One bullet was fired less than half an inch from Blakely's back and left powder burns on his skin.

Ruth was seen to stand mesmerized over the body and witnesses reported hearing several distinct clicks as she tried to fire the revolver's sixth and final shot, before finally firing into the ground. This bullet ricocheted off the road and injured bystander Gladys Kensington Yule in the base of her thumb.

Ruth, in a state of shock, asked Gunnell, "Will you call the police, Clive?" She was arrested immediately by an off-duty policeman, Alan Thompson, who took the gun from her, put it in his coat pocket, and heard her say, "I am guilty, I'm a little confused." She was taken to Hampstead police station where she appeared to be calm and not obviously under the influence of drink or drugs. She made a detailed confession to the police and was charged with murder. Blakely's body was taken to hospital with multiple bullet wounds to the intestines, liver, lung, aorta and trachea.

The police interrogated Ruth and took her statement at Hampstead police station. She made her first appearance in the magistrates' court on April 11, 1955 and was ordered to be held on remand.

Ruth was examined twice by principal Medical Officer, M. R. Penry Williams, who failed to find evidence of mental illness and she undertook an electroencephalography examination on May 3rd that failed to find any abnormality. While on remand in Holloway, she was examined by psychiatrist Dr D. Whittaker for the defence, and by Dr A. Dalzell on behalf of the Home Office. Neither found any evidence of insanity.

On June 20, 1955 Ruth appeared in the Number One Court at the Old Bailey, London, before Mr Justice Havers. She was dressed in a black suit and white silk blouse with freshly bleached and coiffured blonde hair. Her lawyers expressed concern about her appearance (and her dyed blonde hair), but she did not alter it to appear less striking.

The only question she was asked by Christmas Humphreys - the counsel for the prosecution - was "When you fired the revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do?"

Ruth's answer was simple and clear. "It's obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him."

The defending counsel, Aubrey Melford Stevenson, supported by Sebag Shaw and Peter Rawlinson, would have advised Ellis of this possible question before the trial began, because it is standard legal practice to do so. Her reply to Humphreys's question in open court guaranteed a guilty verdict and therefore the mandatory death sentence which followed. The jury took 20 minutes to convict her. She received the sentence, and was taken to the condemned cell at Holloway.

Ruth told her mother that she did not want a petition to reprieve her from the death sentence, and took no part in the campaign. However, her relatives urged her solicitor John Bickford to petition to the Home Secretary, and he wrote a seven-page letter setting out the grounds. Gwilym Lloyd George took all the papers to the house of his sister Megan Lloyd George over the weekend, and decided that there were not sufficient grounds to recommend any interference with the due course of law.

Having been told that she would not be reprieved, Ellis dismissed her solicitor John Bickford (who had been chosen by Desmond Cussen) and asked to see Leon Simmons, the clerk to solicitor Victor Mishcon (whose law firm had previously represented her in her divorce proceedings but not in the murder trial). Simmons and Mishcon saw Bickford before going to Holloway; when Mishcon asked for a lead which might help save her, Bickford said "Ask her where she got the gun!". At 11.15 am on July 12, 1955, the day before her execution, Mishcon and Simmons saw Ruth, who wanted to make arrangements for her will. They pressed her for the full story, which Ruth was reluctant to give; she asked Mishcon to promise not to use the information to try to secure a reprieve. Mishcon refused.

Ruth then revealed that she had been drinking with Desmond Cussen for most of the weekend and that Cussen had given her the gun and some shooting practice. Cussen had also driven her to the murder scene. Following the two-hour interview in the condemned cell, Mishcon and Simmons went to the Home Office, where they spoke to a senior civil servant. The Permanent Secretary Sir Frank Newsam, who was at Ascot races, was summoned back to London, and ordered the head of CID to check the story.

Gwilym Lloyd George later said that the police were able to make considerable inquiries but that it made no difference to his decision, and in fact made Ruth's guilt greater by showing the murder was premeditated. Lloyd George also said that the injury to Gladys Yule was decisive in his decision not to reprieve Ellis: "We cannot have people shooting off firearms in the street! .. As long as I was Home Secretary I was determined to ensure that people could use the streets without fear of a bullet."

In a final letter to David Blakely's parents from her prison cell, she wrote "I have always loved your son, and I shall die still loving him."

The Bishop of Stepney, Joost de Blank, visited Ellis just before the execution. Thirty seconds before 9 am on Wednesday July 13th, the hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, and his assistant, Royston Rickard, entered Ruth's cell at Holloway Prison and escorted her the 5 yards to the execution room next door. She had been weighed at 103 lbs the previous day and a drop of 8 ft 4in was set. Pierrepoint carried out the execution in 12 seconds and her body was left hanging for an hour. Her post-mortem report, by the pathologist Keith Simpson, was made public.

The case caused widespread controversy at the time, evoking exceptionally intense press and public interest to the point that it was discussed by the Cabinet.

On the day of her execution, the Daily Mirror columnist Cassandra wrote a column attacking the sentence, writing: "The one thing that brings stature and dignity to mankind and raises us above the beasts will have been denied her — pity and the hope of ultimate redemption". A petition to the Home Office asking for clemency was signed by 50,000 people, but the Conservative Home Secretary Major Gwilym Lloyd George rejected it. The British Pathé newsreel reporting Ellis's execution openly questioned whether capital punishment—of a female or of anyone—had a place in the 20th century.

The novelist Raymond Chandler, then living in Britain, wrote a scathing letter to the Evening Standard, referring to what he described as "the medieval savagery of the law".

Though the British public as a whole supported the execution of a murderer, this hanging helped strengthen public support to abolish the death penalty. This practice was halted for murder in Britain just ten years later. The last execution in the UK occurred in 1964. Reprieve was commonplace by that time. According to one statistical account, between 1926 and 1954, 677 men and 60 women had been sentenced to death in England and Wales, but only 375 men and seven women had been executed.

In the early 1970s, John Bickford, Ruth's solicitor, made a statement to Scotland Yard from his home in Malta. He confessed that Desmond Cussen told him back in 1955 that Ruth had lied at the trial. Bickford had kept the information to himself. After Bickford's admission, a police investigation followed but no further action regarding Desmond Cussen was taken.

Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister at the time, made no reference to the Ruth Ellis case in his memoirs, nor is there anything in his papers. He accepted that the decision was the responsibility of the Home Secretary, but there are indications that he was troubled by it.

Foreign newspapers observed that the concept of the "crime passionnel" seemed alien to the British.

Ruth's former husband, George Ellis, descended into alcoholism and he committed suicide by hanging, at a Jersey hotel on August 2, 1958. In 1969 Ruth's mother, Berta Neilson, was found unconscious in a gas-filled room in her flat in Hemel Hempstead. She never fully recovered and did not speak coherently again.

Her son, Andy, who was ten at the time of his mother's hanging, took his own life in rented room in 1982, shortly after desecrating his mother's grave. The trial judge, Sir Cecil Havers, had sent money every year for Andy's care. Christmas Humphreys, the prosecution counsel at Ruth's trial, paid for his funeral. Ruth's daughter, Georgina, who was three when her mother was executed, was fostered when her father killed himself three years later. She died of cancer in 2001 at the age 50.

The case to this day continues to have a strong grip on the British imagination. In 2003 this case was referred back to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission. The Court firmly rejected the appeal, although it made clear that it could rule only on the conviction based on the law as it stood in 1955, and not on whether she should have been executed.

The court was critical of the fact that it had been obliged to consider the appeal:

We would wish to make one further observation. We have to question whether this exercise of considering an appeal so long after the event when Mrs Ellis herself had consciously and deliberately chosen not to appeal at the time is a sensible use of the limited resources of the Court of Appeal. On any view, Mrs Ellis had committed a serious criminal offence. This case is, therefore, quite different from a case like Hanratty [2002] 2 Cr App R 30 where the issue was whether a wholly innocent person had been convicted of murder. A wrong on that scale, if it had occurred, might even today be a matter for general public concern, but in this case there was no question that Mrs Ellis was other than the killer and the only issue was the precise crime of which she was guilty. If we had not been obliged to consider her case we would perhaps in the time available have dealt with 8 to 12 other cases, the majority of which would have involved people who were said to be wrongly in custody.

In July 2007 a petition was published on the 10 Downing Street website asking Prime Minister Gordon Brown to reconsider the Ruth Ellis case and grant her a pardon in the light of new evidence that the Old Bailey jury in 1955 was not asked to consider. It expired on 4 July 2008.

Ruth was buried in an unmarked grave within the walls of Holloway Prison, as was customary for executed prisoners. In the early 1970s, the prison was extensively rebuilt, during which the bodies of all the executed women were exhumed for reburial elsewhere. Ruth's body was reburied in the churchyard extension of St Mary's Church in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. The headstone in the churchyard was inscribed "Ruth Hornby 1926–1955". Her son, Andy, destroyed the headstone shortly before he committed suicide in 1982.