Ruth Ellis

For the lesbian activist, see Ruth Ellis (American).

Ruth Ellis (October 9 1926 — July 13 1955) was a British murderess who was the last woman to receive the death penalty in the UK. She was convicted of the murder of her paramour, David Blakely, and hanged at Holloway Prison, London.

Biography

Ellis was born Ruth Neilson in the North Wales seaside town of Rhyl. Her mother, Bertha, was a Jewish Belgian refugee, and her father was Arthur Hornby, a cellist from Manchester who had spent much of his time playing on Atlantic cruise liners, though he had long since given this up by the time Ruth was born. Arthur changed his surname to Neilson after the birth of Muriel, Ruth's elder sister. Ruth was one of five children. At the age of fourteen she left school to work as a waitress. In 1941, at the height of The Blitz, the Neilsons moved to London.

At 17, Ruth was made pregnant by a married Canadian soldier, and gave birth to a son, Andre Clare ("Andy"), in 1944. The father visited and paid support for the child until he returned to Canada. Via low-level modelling work, Ellis became a nightclub hostess, which paid significantly more than the various factory and clerical jobs she had had since leaving school.

In 1950 she married 41-year-old George Ellis, a divorced dentist with two sons at the registry office in Tonbridge, Kent , who had been a customer at the Court Club in Duke St, London. Unfortunately, George was an alcoholic who became violent when drunk, and Ruth was jealous and possessive. She became convinced he was having an affair and the marriage deteriorated rapidly. Ruth gave birth to a girl, Georgina, in 1951 but George refused to acknowledge paternity, and they separated shortly afterwards. Ellis moved in with her parents, and went back to hostessing to make ends meet. That same year she appeared in the film Lady Godiva Rides Again,which starred her friend Diana Dors, but was uncredited.

David Blakely

In 1953, she became manager of a nightclub, and met David Blakely, three years her junior. He was a well-mannered former public school boy, but also a hard-drinking racing driver with expensive tastes. Within weeks he moved into her flat above the club, despite already being engaged to another girl. According to documents stored at the National Archives, Blakely was actually a known homosexual: what is more, Ruth knew this. She eventually accepted Blakely's proposal of marriage, although she was still married to George Ellis. Blakely became progressively more jealous of the attention she gave male customers, and spent more and more time in the club to keep his eye on her. Her earnings fell as a result, and he blew his inheritance on a playboy lifestyle and the development of a racing car called The Emperor. Rows about money, fuelled by alcohol, became violent — on both sides. He also maintained another mistress, and each was extremely jealous of the other's affairs and activities. Ruth also had another older lover, Desmond Cussen, who strongly disliked Blakely.

In March, Ruth discovered that she was pregnant. David seemed happy about it; however, at the end of the month, he happened to hit her in the stomach during a quarrel. A few days later, Ruth miscarried. She later said that she was unsure if this was due to the blow. In spite of the miscarriage, she came to watch David race on the 1st of April. His car blew up before the race and he blamed her. After that, she fell ill for a week following the miscarriage and David "was kind and appeared devoted". They were planning to spend the Easter weekend together. On Friday, David left the house and promised to return in the evening to take her out for a drink with his friends, the Findlaters. However, he never returned and although his car was in front of the Findlaters' house, her attempts to contact him through them failed, as they either denied that he was there or simply hung up the phone. Ellis spent the weekend, increasingly "obsessed by his absence and the unexplained change in his behaviour", and by Sunday evening she had developed, in her own words, "a peculiar idea" that she would kill him.

On the night of Easter Sunday, April 10 1955, Ellis took a .38 calibre revolver from her handbag and fired six shots at Blakely outside The Magdala, a public house in Hampstead. Blakely was taken to hospital with multiple wounds and was subsequently pronounced dead. Gladys Kensington Yule, a passer-by, also sustained a slight wound when a bullet fired by Ellis ricocheted off the pavement and hit her in the hand. Ellis made no attempt to leave the scene, asking a witness to call the police. She was arrested and charged with Blakely's murder.

Trial and execution

It's obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.
Ruth Ellis, in the witness box at the Old Bailey, 20 June 1955.

This was her answer to the only question put to her by Christmas Humphreys, counsel for the Prosecution, who queried "When you fired the revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do?" The importance of this question and Ruth's fatal answer are essential to understanding why she was convicted: in order to secure a guilty verdict in a British murder trial, the prosecution must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the accused intended to kill the victim, otherwise it is the lesser offence of manslaughter. The defending counsel, Aubrey Melford Stevenson supported by Sebag Shaw and Peter Rawlinson, would have advised Ruth of this before the trial began, because it is standard legal practice to do so. In the event, Ruth's reply to Humphreys' question in open court guaranteed a guilty verdict and the mandatory death sentence which followed.

The circumstances of her obtaining the gun and learning how to use it were never fully explored at the trial. Reluctantly, the day before her death, Ruth Ellis, having dismissed Mr Bickford, the solicitor chosen for her by her friend Desmond Cussen (a prosecution witness who visited Ellis daily in Holloway prison up until her trial), made a statement to her original solicitor Mr Victor Mishcon (later Lord Mishcon) and his clerk Mr Leon Simmons. She said that the gun had been provided by Cussen, and he had actually driven her to the murder scene. The authorities made no effort to follow this up and there was no reprieve.

The jury at the trial took just 23 minutes to convict her, and she received the mandatory death sentence. She went to the gallows at Holloway Prison on July 13 1955, aged 28, the last woman to be hanged in England. She was executed by Albert Pierrepoint and his assistant, Royston Rickard.

The Reverend John Williams was the Church of England chaplain at Holloway prison between 1951 and 1957 and responsible for the pastoral care of Ruth Ellis. The Bishop of Stepney (in the diocese of London) at that time was Dr Joost de Blank. He visited Ruth Ellis just prior to her death. The visit is mentioned in both published biographies of de Blank. After the visit he said that he "was horrified and aghast beyond words" when he learned "that prisoners could hear the hammering as the scaffold was being erected." Also, he could not forget Ruth Ellis's words to him: "It is quite clear to me that I was not the person who shot him. When I saw myself with the revolver I knew I was another person." These comments were made in the old London evening paper The Star.

Public reaction

The case caused widespread controversy at the time: on the day of her execution the Daily Mirror columnist Cassandra wrote a famous 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.

A published question in the House of Commons regarding the hanging was asked by Mr Hyde MP on 8th December 1955. He asked the Home Secretary if he was aware that prisoners and staff were disturbed by the noise of scaffolding being erected for Ruth Ellis's hanging. Major Lloyd George stated: "No scaffold was erected in Holloway prison before the execution of Mrs Ellis." Mr Hyde replied that what the Home Secretary had said would reassure those members of the public who were alarmed at the statement to the contrary sense made by the Bishop of Stepney, who visited Mrs Ellis shortly before her execution.

Legacy

The hanging of Ellis helped strengthen public support for the abolition of the death penalty, which was halted in practice for murder in Britain nine years later (the last execution in the UK occurred during 1964). Reprieve was by then commonplace. 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.

Factors which counted against a reprieve for Ellis included her appearance, her lifestyle, her apparent lack of remorse, plus the fact that a passer-by was slightly wounded. Blakely's murder and Ruth's arraignment also occurred during the 1955 General Election campaign, which was won by the Conservatives on a strongly pro-death-penalty platform.

In his book Anthony Eden (1986), Robert Rhodes James states that Eden, who was the British prime minister at the time, makes no reference to this matter in his memoirs and there is nothing in his papers about the case. Eden accepted that the decision was the responsibility of the Home Secretary, but James suggests there are indications that he was troubled about it.

The execution brought worldwide condemnation. Foreign newspapers observed that the concept of the crime passionnel seemed foreign to the British. One French reporter wrote: "Passion in England, except for cricket and betting, is always regarded as a shameful disease."

Family aftermath

The tragedy of David Blakely and Ruth Ellis was not confined to them. Within weeks of her execution, Ruth's 18-year-old sister died suddenly, allegedly of a broken heart. Ruth's husband, George Ellis, descended into alcoholism and hanged himself in 1958. Her son, Andy, who was 11 at the time of his mother's hanging, suffered irreparable psychological damage and committed suicide in a squalid bedsit in 1982. It is said that the trial judge, Sir Cecil Havers, had sent money every year for Andy's upkeep. Christmas Humphreys, the prosecution counsel at Ruth's trial, paid for his funeral.

Pardon campaign

The case continues to have a strong grip on the British imagination and 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 ruled only on the conviction based on the law as it stood in 1955, not on whether she should have been executed.

On 15th September 2003, the night before the Appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice, The Evening Standard published a short article in which the following appeared, "Former nurse Maureen [sp] Gleeson claims she met an emotional Ellis before the shooting who told her she had a gun and was planning to use it on Blakely." Moreen Gleeson had actually stated in her official correspondence to Muriel Jakubait, and published in RUTH ELLIS MY SISTER'S SECRET LIFE, that she thought Ruth was going to kill herself. She did not state Ruth Ellis was about to shoot David Blakely.Charlton1 (talk) 10:34, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

On May 21st 2005, The Mirror newspaper published an exclusive story, No Pardon for Ellis: "Fifty years on, government turns down reprieve for hanged Ruth Ellis. - Hanged killer Ruth Ellis has been secretly denied a pardon by the government, documents reveal. The decision has been kept under wraps for fear of unleashing protests which could embarrass ministers.".

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

Burials

The body of Ruth Ellis was buried in an unmarked grave within the walls of Holloway Prison, as was customary. In the early 1970s the prison underwent an extensive programme of rebuilding, during which the bodies of all the executed women were exhumed. Ruth Ellis's body was reburied in Saint Mary Churchyard in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. The headstone in the churchyard was inscribed Ruth Hornby 1926–1955. In 1982 Ruth's son Andy (Andrea) destroyed the headstone shortly before he committed suicide. The grave is now overgrown with yew trees.

The remains of the four other women executed at Holloway, Styllou Christofi, Edith Thompson, Amelia Sach and Annie Walters were reburied in Brookwood Cemetery. Styllou Christofi, who was executed in December 1954, by coincidence lived at 11 South Hill Park in Hampstead, with her son and daughter-in-law, a few metres from The Magdala public house at number 2a, where David Blakely was shot four months later.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

Ruth's story, and the story of Albert Pierrepoint, are retold in the stage play Follow Me, written by Ross Gurney-Randall and Dave Mounfield and directed by Guy Masterson. It premièred at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh in 2007 as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Ruth's story was told in the 1985 film Dance with a Stranger (director Mike Newell), featuring Miranda Richardson as Ellis.

In the film Pierrepoint (2006), Ellis was portrayed by Mary Stockley.

The 1956 film Yield to the Night, starring Diana Dors as a doomed murderess bears a close resemblance to the Ellis case; however, the work is in fact based on a 1954 book of that name by Joan Henry. Unknown to most people until 2005, Diana Dors was a close friend of Ruth Ellis. They socialised in the London clubs in which Ruth Ellis was employed. Dors had previously written to the family of Derek Bentley - shortly before his execution in 1953 for his part in the murder of a policeman - to express her sympathy.

External links

• Ruth Ellis' story at Crime Library
• Ruth Ellis - an alternative view
• Court of Appeal decision 2003
• True Detective's alternative account of events
• Photographs of Ruth Ellis, including her grave
• Photographs of David Blakely's grave
• Scotsman report