In 1955, Ruth Ellis was hanged for shooting her lover David Blakely. Her execution sparked a public conversation that would ultimately lead to the abolishment of the death penalty.
PA Images/Alamy Stock PhotoRuth Ellis, a nightclub manager and the last woman hanged in the United Kingdom.
On July 12, 1955, a notice was posted outside Holloway Prison in London which read: “The sentence of the law passed upon Ruth Ellis, found guilty of murder, will be carried into execution at 9 a.m. tomorrow.”
Ellis, a 28-year-old former nightclub manager, had been found guilty of murdering her boyfriend, David Blakely. There was no doubt about her guilt: witnesses had seen Ellis shoot Blakely, and Ellis herself admitted that she had “intended” to kill him. But her case also drew the attention of the public, many of whom felt uneasy with the idea of her being hanged.
On the night before Ellis’ execution, hundreds of people gathered outside the prison gates to support her. But there was little more they could do. Petitions on her behalf had gone nowhere, the home secretary refused any further investigations, and Ellis herself had declined to appeal her conviction. On July 13, 1955, she was hanged at Holloway Prison as planned.
But in the years since, many questions have been raised about Ruth Ellis’ case. Though she was clearly guilty of killing Blakely, she had also been abused by him — and his abuse had possibly caused her recent miscarriage. Ellis’ execution also led to a broader public debate over whether capital punishment was ethical for women — or for anyone — even if they shot someone in cold blood outside of a pub.
This is the story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman ever executed in the U.K.
An Early Life Of Sexual Abuse And Bad Relationships
Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesNight club manageress Ruth Ellis (1926 – 1955) poses for one Captain Ritchie, 1954. The setting is probably the flat above her club on the Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, London.
Ruth Ellis was born on Oct. 6, 1929 in North Wales, to parents Arthur and Bertha. Her early life was marred by abuse. Ellis’ elder sister, Muriel, became pregnant as a result of their father’s sexual abuse, and when Ellis was only 11 years old, her father attempted to assault her as well.
In her teens, Ellis befriended a girlfriend of her older brother, Edna Turvey, who introduced her to a life of alcohol, nightclubs, and men. She and Edna briefly lived with Ellis’ father Arthur who, according to The Standard, slept with Edna even as he continued to abuse Ellis, until Ellis’ mother found out.
As she approached young adulthood, Ruth Ellis’ life continued to be punctured by bad relationships. She had an affair with a married Canadian soldier when she was 17 which produced a son in 1944; afterward, she was briefly married to an older man who turned violent — and refused to acknowledge their daughter, born in 1951, as his.
PA Images/Alamy Stock PhotoEllis posing for a photo.
That said, Ellis had more success in her professional life than her personal life. She worked in night clubs and as a nude model and, after taking etiquette classes, was promoted to be the manager of Little Club in Knightsbridge when she was just 27 years old.
It seemed like things might be finally going well for Ruth Ellis. But it was at Little Club that she first met a racing driver named David Blakely — beginning a fateful relationship that would ultimately end in his murder.
The Murder Of David Blakely By Ruth Ellis
PA Images / Alamy Stock PhotoDavid Blakely, the man murdered by Ruth Ellis.
From the beginning, David Blakely’s relationship with Ruth Ellis was tumultuous. He was a race car driver, a heavy drinker, and playboy who was also engaged to another woman when they met. Throughout their tryst, they broke up, reconciled, toyed with the idea of marriage, and had affairs. Their relationship was also marked by violence — shortly before she killed Blakely, Ellis suffered a miscarriage after Blakely punched her in the stomach.
Describing her miscarriage, Ellis later stated: “A few weeks or days previously, I do not know which, David got very violent. I do not know whether that caused the miscarriage or not. He thumped me in the tummy.”
By April 1955, their relationship had hit a new low. Ellis had started an affair with another man, Desmond Cussen, but was still very much involved with Blakely. Meanwhile, according to The British Newspaper Archive, Blakely had begun to complain to his friends about Ellis. At the beginning of that year, he had suggested that he wanted to leave her, but that she wouldn’t let him.
Over Easter Weekend that April, Blakely went to stay with friends — and Ellis spent several days trying to find him. On April 10, 1955, she took a taxi to an apartment with Hampstead, where Blakely had been staying. Ellis then tracked Blakely down to a nearby pub, the Magdala, and, at around 9:30 p.m., watched as David Blakely left the pub with his friends Clive Gunnell.
Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock PhotDavid Blakely with Ruth Ellis at the Little Club.
“They came out and were getting into the car [and] there were two bangs,” newspapers reported at the time. “Gunnell heard Blakely scream ‘Clive!’…[he] went round the back of the car and saw Ellis standing there with a revolver in her hand. Blakely was lying face downwards on the pavement, and he saw Ellis fire more shots into Blakely’s back as he lay.”
Ruth Ellis had fired at Blakely five times: the first shot missed, the second shot hit him, and Ellis fired the final three shots as she stood above him. She also tried to fire a sixth time, but her gun misfired — and struck a nearby woman in the thumb.
“I am guilty, I’m a little confused,” Ruth Ellis purportedly said after killing Blakely, adding to Gunnell: “Will you call the police, Clive?”
Ruth Ellis, The Last Woman To Be Hanged In The U.K.
Chronicle / Alamy Stock PhotoRuth Ellis seemed calm after the murder, and later admitted that she’d intended to kill Blakely.
There was no need to call the police — an off-duty police officer at the scene quickly arrested Ruth Ellis. She appeared to be dazed but not under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and a mental health examination subsequently found that Ellis did not suffer from any mental illness.
Rather, Ruth Ellis’ motive to kill David Blakely seemed to be have been rooted in Blakely’s alleged abuse and infidelity. Not only had he hit her on multiple occasions — and possibly caused her miscarriage — but Ellis had also found proof of Blakely’s affairs. Ellis was, her lawyer later stated, a young woman trapped in “something of an emotional prison guarded by the young man, from which there seemed to be no escape.”
Regardless, Ruth Ellis openly admitted to murdering Blakely during her trial in June 1955. When the prosecution asked: “When you fired the revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do?” Ellis responded: “It was obvious that when I shot him, I intended to kill him.”
In less than 20 minutes, a jury found Ruth Ellis guilty of murder. Because she confessed to the crime, Ellis received the mandatory sentence of death.
Despite public uproar over the ruling and efforts to challenge her conviction, Ruth Ellis quietly accepted her fate. She refused to appeal her sentence, and her execution was carried out as planned. On July 13, 1955, Ellis was hanged in the execution room at Holloway Prison around 9:00 am.
Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock PhotoCrowds outside Holloway Prison on the day of Ellis’ execution.
Ruth Ellis was laid to rest in an unmarked grave within the walls of Holloway Prison. In the 1970s, her remains were exhumed and reburied in the churchyard of St Mary’s Church in Amersham, Buckinghamshire.
Lingering Questions About The Execution
No Swan So Fine/Wikimedia CommonsRuth Ellis’ grave.
The public reaction to Ruth Ellis’ execution was overwhelming. In the aftermath of her death, there was a broad increase in public support for the abolishment of the death penalty in the U.K. A national conversation about the types of crimes that warrant such a punishment also ensued.
Indeed, subsequent revelations about Ruth Ellis cast further doubt on the morality of her execution. Before her death, Ellis had told a lawyer that she had spent the day of Blakely’s murder drinking with Cussen, another of her lovers, who gave her the gun and drove her to the Magdala.
“I didn’t say anything about it up to now because it seemed traitorous, absolutely traitorous,” Ellis purportedly said.
Later, a friend of Cussen similarly told police that Cussen had urged Ellis to kill Blakely. “Cussen had driven her to Hampstead, provided the gun, and had goaded her into shooting Blakely to remove a love-rival from the scene,” he said, according to a 2003 article from The Guardian.
Cussen, for his part, denied giving Ellis the gun. He died in 1991.
Even without Cussen’s alleged role, however, some have argued that the evidence of Blakely’s violence toward Ellis should have been enough for Ellis to be charged with manslaughter, instead of murder. The jury was also not told that Ellis had been raped as a child by her father or that she was addicted to antidepressants.
Despite this, efforts to get Ruth Ellis pardoned have fallen short. When Ellis’ sister appealed the case in 2003, an appeals court found that Ellis had been correctly convicted of murder according to laws at the time. In 2007, a petition to get Ruth Ellis pardoned also went nowhere.
But some things did change after Ruth Ellis’ death. In 1964, the United Kingdom saw its last executions. A year later, the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act banned the death penalty across Great Britain, replacing it with a life sentence. Finally, in 1998, The Human Rights Act made the death penalty illegal in the United Kingdom — which made Ruth Ellis the last woman in the U.K. to ever be executed.
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