(13-07-2012 12:13 )skully Wrote: 1955 - Nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be hanged in Britain, she was executed at Holloway Prison for the murder of her lover David Blakely.
The Ruth Ellis saga remains one of the most controversial cases of the post-war era, but in a strict legal sense the reason why is baffling, and much of the interest in her was because a stunningly attractive woman - what we'd now call a babe - was to be hanged.
Ellis was born Ruth Hornby in North Wales but with her father often away (he was a musician on a cruise ship) the family moved to Basingstoke. She took up nude modelling at 16 and became pregnant by a Canadian soldier at 17, giving birth to a son. By the age of 23 she was working as a prostitute, at 24 became pregnant again by a client (this time having an illegal abortion) then married George Elllis, a divorced dentist 20 years older than her. The marriage produced a daughter which her husband would not acknowledge was his, and after she left her husband she became pregnant for the fourth time, this time by racing driver David Blakely, resulting in another abortion.
After this, Ellis took up with another man but continued seeing Blakely, and it was this disintegrating and increasingly violent relationship that ended up in the fatal confrontation of Easter Sunday 1955.
There was sympathy for the way life had treated her but there was never any doubt as to what happened and who was responsible. Ruth Ellis took out a gun and shot her lover dead; in fact she shot him five times, three times at point blank range as he lay on the ground. She admitted that she intended to kill him and it took a jury just 14 minutes to bring in a guilty verdict. Ellis refused to appeal against her mandatory death sentence and after the Home Secretary refused to commute the sentence she was hanged.
Like all condemned prisoners, she was examined by a panel of Home Office psychiatrists who found her to be legally "sane," i.e. not suffering from any demonstrable mental illness that could be identified at the time that would have been severe enough to diminish her responsibility for the crime.
The jury were not permitted to reach a manslaughter verdict and, in fairness, the evidence they heard simply did not justify it and thus were left only with a verdict of guilty of murder. Had they been asked merely to reach a verdict of guilty to homicide, leaving the actual sentence to be decided by others, perhaps she would have gone to prison for a few years and never been heard of again. The question of whether she deserved death or not was not one the jury were able to consider - if they had been, it is very unlikely that she would have been hanged. The American concept of degrees of murder had been discussed in Britain but always rejected.
In 1969 Ellis’s mother, Berta Neilson (the family changed their name from Hornby), was found unconscious in a gas-filled room in her flat in Hemel Hempstead. She never fully recovered and didn't speak coherently again. Ellis's husband, George Ellis, descended into alcoholism and hanged himself in 1958. Her son, Andy, who was 10 at the time of his mother's hanging, suffered irreparable psychological damage and committed suicide in a bedsit in 1982. Astonishingly, the trial judge, Sir Cecil Havers, had sent money every year for Andy's upkeep, and Christmas Humphreys, the prosecution counsel at Ellis's trial, paid for his funeral. Ellis's daughter, Georgina, who was three when her mother was executed, was adopted when her father hanged himself three years later. She died of cancer aged 50.
An urban legend grew up that disquiet at having to execute Ellis had caused hangman Albert Pierrepoint to resign the following year, but this was simply not true. The principled (and stubborn) Pierrepoint quit in a row over travel expenses when a prisoner was reprieved at the last moment. Pierrepoint himself compared the public sympathy and interest in Ellis's case to the total lack of either in the case of Mrs. Styllou Christofi, who he had hanged eight months earlier. Mrs. Christofi was an unattractive middle aged Greek Cypriot woman who had brutally murdered her daughter-in-law (and possibly another person previously) and in whom there was very little media interest. Equally the other women hanged since the end of the war, Margaret Allen and Louisa Merrifield, had very little attraction (sex appeal?) for the media and for various reasons elicited little public sympathy.
The last death sentence passed on a woman was in 1958, when 68 year old Mary Wilson was convicted of poisoning two of her husbands, but her sentence was commuted by Home Secretary Rab Butler.
In 2003 Ellis's 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.
However the court was critical of the fact that it had been obliged to consider the appeal at all:
"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."
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