Ruth Ellis

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Ruth Ellis (born October 9, 1926 in Rhyl , Wales , † July 13, 1955 in London ) was a British murderer. She was the last woman to be executed in Britain . She died at the age of 28 in London's Holloway Prison by the train , guilty of the murder of her lover David Blakely. Ellis is often portrayed as the victim of her brutal lover, who abused her, other sources assume murder out of jealousy and hurt vanity.

origin

Ellis, whose maiden name is Neilson, was born in Rhyl, Welsh, the third of six children. Her mother, Elisaberta (Bertha) Cothals, was Belgian, and her father, Arthur Hornby, was a cellist from Manchester . She attended Fairfields Senior Girls' School in Basingstoke until she dropped out of school at the age of 14 to work as a waitress. In 1941 the family moved to London, where Ruth became pregnant by a Canadian soldier at the age of 17 and gave birth to a son. This lived with her mother.

The young woman worked in night clubs , as a nude model and as a prostitute . At the beginning of the 1950s she became pregnant again by a suitor . However, the child aborted her to continue working. On November 8, 1950, she married the divorced dentist George Ellis in Tonbridge , Kent . This had previously been a guest in a night club; Ruth ended her relationship with him several times because of violence. In 1951 she gave birth to a daughter, but her husband denied paternity.

Background indeed

Ruth Ellis was a barmaid in a nightclub in London from 1953 . It was here that she met racing driver David Drummond Moffat Blakely and began a stormy love affair with him. The relationship suffered from frequent arguments, and Blakely often hit Ellis. Ten days before the crime, Ellis suffered a miscarriage that resulted from a punch in the stomach. Ellis had another lover named Desmond Cussen, with whom she was on a rather friendly basis, while Cussen assured her of his love. However, after a while Blakely began to withdraw from Ellis.

When the circumstances and background of the crime became known, the public called for a pardon . A daily newspaper even paid her two defense lawyers. However, she readily admitted the murder: Ellis: "It is obvious that when I shot him I intended to kill him." (Translation: It is obvious that when I shot him, I intended to kill him.)

However, she did not respond to the suggestion made by the prosecutor . She had offered to drop the murder charge if she pleaded guilty of manslaughter . That would have saved her from execution . Ellis would not have had the opportunity to tell her view of the story and make it public.

Sequence of events

The crime scene, the Magdala Pub, in 2010

Ellis was waiting for Blakely outside a pub on April 10, 1955, where she had seen him through the window. When Blakely ignored her as she left the pub , she took a loaded revolver from her purse and fired a shot at him. The shot missed him and injured a passerby's hand as a ricochet. Her second shot dropped Blakely to the ground. She walked over to him and fired the remaining four bullets from close range into Blakely's body lying on the ground. Then she was arrested without resistance, still holding the murder weapon in her hand. Blakely died on the way to the hospital.

To this day it is unclear where Ellis got the murder weapon. Cussen, who was accused from many quarters of having given her the revolver, denied this until his death in 1981.

Trial and Execution

On June 20, 1955, Ruth Ellis appeared before Judge Cecil Robert Havers at the Old Bailey Central Criminal Court in London . It only took the jury 20 minutes to pronounce the guilty verdict. Ellis was taken to Holloway Prison in the Islington borough of London , where she was hanged on July 13 by the hangman Albert Pierrepoint .

Media processing of the case

The film Loved to Death (Original title: Dance with a Stranger) from 1985 deals with her life story.

literature

  • Robert Hancock: Ruth Ellis - The Last Woman to be Hanged . Arthur Barker, London 1963.
  • Muriel Jakubait, Monica Weller: Ruth Ellis: My Sister's Secret life , Robinson Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1-84529-119-0 .
  • Laurence Marks, Tony Van Den Bergh: Ruth Ellis: a Case of Diminished Responsibility? , Penguin, 1990, ISBN 0-14-012902-2 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Ellis, Ruth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British murderess
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Rhyl , Wales
DATE OF DEATH July 13, 1955
Place of death London