The unfinished story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman executed in Britain

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0:23Today on State of the World, the story of the last woman executed in Britain and the lasting impact her death had on the country's legal system.

0:38You're listening to State of the World from NPR, the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. It's Monday, January 19th. I'm Christine Arismeth. Now, we know how people love a good true crime podcast. And this next story has all the elements. A glamorous model, her lovers, a murder, an execution, and a secret eyewitness whom police interviewed too late. But this story, it's from 70 years ago. It's about a 1950s starlet who was also a single mother. Back in 1955, her story was a tabloid sensation. It was also about domestic violence, though, sexism, the British class system, and legal mistakes that ultimately led Britain to abolish its death penalty.

1:32And as NPR's London correspondent Lauren Frayer finds, this story is also unfinished. Generations today are still living in the aftermath, and some believe justice has yet to be done. Lauren begins the story in a surprising place, her local pub. One day, over a pint with friends, I notice a black and white photo on the wall of my local, the Magdala Pub in North London. The photo looks like Marilyn Monroe, but the caption says Ruth Ellis. I Google and go down a rabbit hole. Class, sex, and death. The perfect story. Ellis was a model, a nightclub manager, an occasional sex worker, a working class, single mother of two, and a murderer.

2:18On June the 21st, Ruth Ellis was found guilty of murder at the Old Bailey. In 1955, she became the last woman ever executed in Britain. On July the 13th, she was executed. Hanged three weeks after being convicted of a murder that occurred right here at this pub. These are the old bullet holes. So this is the outer wall of the pub and it looks like a bullet hole here. Yeah. One, two, three. Pub manager Alex Hunt shows me exactly where on Easter Sunday 1955, Ellis shot dead her aristocrat race car driver boyfriend, David Blakely. We've just seen the body of David Blakely at Hampstead Mortuary. David.

3:01The crime has been immortalized in TV shows and movies. The murder site draws tourists, a pub manager says. Oh, 100%. You know, it's kind of a pivotal moment in crime in the UK, I guess. But in the 70 years since Ellis was put to death, this country has changed the way it sees her. It's a completely different story to the one that I think, you know, we'd been led to believe. Carol Ann Lee wrote a book called A Fine Day for a Hanging, the real Ruth Ellis story. There are very detailed notes that have been left behind by the prison service, which shed a completely different light on who she was.

3:38I went to see those notes at Britain's National Archives. These are the working court files. The crown against Ellis, Ruth. Yeah, 28. She was 28.

3:52Curator historian Jessamy Carlson wheels in a trolley piled high with yellowing documents. Detectives' notes, court transcripts and crime scene photos. There's warning contents may cause distress. From the coroner. Photos of the victim, Blakely, outside the pub in a pool of blood. Bullet, revolver. Yeah. All prosecution evidence. Her confession is included in these files. She was very clear in her own mind that this was something she has done. Ellis admitted it from the start. She did take responsibility for the fact that she had shot David. Author Carol Ann Lee again. She wrote to his mother and said, you know, I will die.

4:33And you should feel that his death has been, you know, reciprocated in that sense. So it was an easy case for prosecutors who portrayed Ellis as a hysterical, jealous, jilted woman who shot her lover after he tried to break up with her. Someone shouted blonde tart as Ruth walked into the courtroom. A jury convicted her after deliberating just 20 minutes. But there is other information in these files which never came out at trial, Lee says. There was this horrific abuse going on in the relationship. In those last few weeks, he beat her so badly that she lost her baby, the baby that she was carrying to him.

5:13And he knew she was pregnant. Ellis may have been suffering from postpartum depression, even psychosis. On the stand, she had bruises all over her body. Nowadays, killing your abuser can sometimes be seen legally as a form of self-defense. But Carlson, the archivist, says that in 1955... People were aware that domestic violence went on, but it's not legislated for it in the same way. There is no recognition, really, of the impact that those experiences might have on an individual. Lee, the author, says there's even more evidence that the jury never heard, about an alleged accomplice named Desmond Cousin.

5:50Desmond is really kind of the black hole where this whole story is concerned. Like Blakely, Desmond Cousin was also a patron of the nightclub where Ellis worked and a rival suitor. He was very well-to-do, wanted to marry her, wanted to look after Andre, Ruth's son, who was 10 in 1955 at the time of the murder. She did have a relationship with him, but she didn't love him. The attraction just wasn't what it was with David. If there is any jealous, jilted lover in this story, it's Cousin. He allegedly coached Ellis to kill Blakely, his rival for her affection. He gave Ruth the gun. He taught her how to shoot it.

6:28He took her to the Magdala that night to kill David. Now, Ellis told her lawyers this, but swore them to secrecy. She didn't want to implicate Cousin because he'd promised to take care of her son. So when Cousin was called to testify, he was literally in the witness box for, I think it was certainly was no more than 20 minutes, and he was asked virtually nothing. And so Ellis, silent, was sentenced to die. One of her lawyers, Victor Mishkon, recalled in a TV interview how steely Ellis was when he visited her on death row. She stood up and like almost Mr. Gracious Hostess said how kindly one of us to be there.

7:09Did she think she was going to die the next day? Oh, indeed she did. After Ellis died, Cousin did not take care of her son. Instead, he moved to Australia, where he gave just one interview before he died, denying any role in this murder. But someone else corroborated the account that the murder weapon came from Cousin, that he coached Ellis on how to use it and drove her to the pub that night. That someone was an eyewitness, Ellis' 10-year-old son, Andre. Police didn't interview him until after his mother was executed. And that haunted him all his life. So he had real challenges with his mental health.

7:50Laura Enston is Ruth Ellis' granddaughter. She describes a cycle of trauma that began with this 1955 crime and runs down through her family. Her earliest memories are of shame, trying to hide her relation to Ellis. I just felt a bit terrorised by her. I constantly got in the playground, you know, your grandmother's a murderer, you know, she's a prostitute, and, you know, girls at school, there's a game called Hangman. They'd sketch that out and push it, the paper, towards me. That's great. I visited Enston at her home in Northern England, where we paged through family photos. A modelling photo of Ruth.

8:29Oh, wow. So this is a picture here of my mum Georgina with Ruth's mother, Bertha. Oh, wow. Yeah. This is a real story about women, isn't it? A hundred percent. And I think for me, I've been really keen to break the cycle. There's sort of a tragic theme that runs through my family. And I have two girls. To break the cycle, Enston has applied for a posthumous pardon for Ellis. It's not that she didn't do it. No, not at all. Not at all. You know, she killed him, in fact. But it's all the circumstances around it. The abuse she suffered, the baby she lost, her mental state, and a possible accomplice.

9:13There was so much more at play here. You know, she wasn't just on trial for murder. She was on trial for everything that she represented. A working class woman who murdered an upper class man. A single mom with children by two different men. a nightclub entrepreneur who did sex work. She's referred to in court documents as promiscuous, the author Lee notes. Well, you never hear a man being referred to as promiscuous in court. You would only hear that if it was somebody who was gay or a female. A posthumous conditional pardon would not erase Ellis's conviction, but it would declare her execution unjust, having been influenced by social prejudice.

9:54Lawyer Grace Houghton is handling this pardon, and she reckons Ellis would have survived if she'd been tried just two years later. The situation changed in 1957, and I think Ruth's case was integral for that change in the law. The Homicide Act of 1957 introduced a distinction between capital and non-capital murder, more discretion in sentencing, and something called the defense of diminished responsibility. Essentially, it allows a defendant to argue that they shouldn't be held fully responsible for the murder because of some abnormality of the mind. The defendant is less culpable, so it often reduces the verdict from murder to manslaughter.

10:37Houghton has been hired by Ellis's grandchildren, but her firm, Mishkan de Reya, has a special connection. It was founded by the late Victor Mishkan, that lawyer who visited Ellis in prison and recalled her steely grace there. Until his death aged 90, he too was haunted. He said that it's one of his biggest regrets, that he wasn't able to get a reprieve and to stay the execution of Ruth Ellis. On July 13th, 1955, protesters gathered outside London's Holloway Prison, which previously housed suffragettes. For the hundreds who waited at Holloway Jail on execution morning. Inside the jail, when the clock struck 9am, Ellis was hanged.

11:18The executioner called her the bravest prisoner he had ever put to death. But Britain's conscience was uneasy. Afterward, the executioner himself stopped supporting the death penalty. Ellis' case not only changed homicide laws, it also led Britain to suspend its death penalty in 1965 and then abolish it altogether. The final step now, says Ellis' granddaughter Enston, is a pardon. I'm doing it for Ruth. I'm doing it for my kids. I'm doing it for every woman who's experienced misogyny, discrimination at the hands of the justice system. The pardon is now on the desk of Britain's Secretary of State for Justice.

11:57They run records on moving around public spaces. They are locked away. Back at the National Archives, historian Jessamy Carlson says this is exactly why countries keep court records. You can go back and look for these things and make decisions yourselves. and the Ruth Ellis files. You can read through and draw your own conclusions. The world has changed a great deal in the last 70 years. You can find mistakes in history, she says, and possibly do something about them. Lauren Fryer, NPR News, London.

12:37That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.