Ruth Ellis, right, with Derek Blakely, whose murder she was hanged for in 1955. Photograph: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy View image in fullscreen Ruth Ellis, right, with Derek Blakely, whose murder she was hanged for in 1955. Photograph: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Opinion UK criminal justice Ruth Ellis’s pardon will comfort her family, but the system still lets down abused women like her Joan Smith When Ellis was condemned to death in 1955, the horrific violence she had suffered was ignored. Today, vulnerable women are still fighting to be heard
I t has taken more than seven decades, but the grievous wrong done to Ruth Ellis has finally been recognised. Ellis was the last woman to be hanged for murder in the UK, the victim of a pitiless justice system that was uninterested in her history of horrific domestic abuse. The announcement of a posthumous conditional pardon is a tribute to the tireless campaigning of her family, including her granddaughter, Laura Enston. But it also highlights continuing shortcomings in how the criminal justice system deals with women who commit crimes after being treated horrendously by their partners.
In April 1955, Ellis shot and killed her lover, David Blakely, outside a pub in north London. The shock of a woman using a gun was so immense that she was portrayed as a cold-blooded killer, even though she had suffered a miscarriage – caused by a punch in the stomach from Blakely – only three months earlier. Her appearance worked against her, with her own lawyer worrying that her dyed blond hair and heavy makeup would prejudice the jury.
Even at the time, the death sentence caused misgivings. The novelist Raymond Chandler condemned the “ medieval savagery of the law ”, for instance. Over the following years, the case became symbolic of the way the law approached women who were themselves victims of serious and sustained violence. It never faded from public consciousness, becoming a cause célèbre for campaigners against capital punishment (which was effectively abolished in 1965) and feminists. In 1985, Miranda Richardson played Ellis in Dance With a Stranger; next month sees the publication of a novel based on the case, A Fatal Love by Louisa Treger.
View image in fullscreen Ruth Ellis’s grandchildren, Stephen Beard and Laura Enston, outside the Houses of Parliament after King Charles accepted the government’s advice to grant Ellis a conditional pardon, 8 July 2026. Photograph: Annabel Lee-Ellis/PA The catalogue of crimes committed against Ellis – for which no one was ever prosecuted – included incest, child sexual abuse, rape and physical assaults. Ellis’s father began abusing her when she was 11. Her elder sister was impregnated by him and had a baby when she was 14. When Ellis got a job as a nightclub hostess in Soho, the manager of the establishment coerced her into sleeping with him. Ellis married a dentist she met at the club, a violent alcoholic with whom she had a daughter. There is very obviously a pattern here.
In 1953, while managing a club in Knightsbridge, she met Blakely, who was a racing driver, and became pregnant again. She had an abortion, which was illegal and dangerous at the time, but continued to see Blakely and another man, Desmond Cussen, who allegedly gave her the gun she used to kill his rival. The class difference between Ellis and Blakely, who had been to public school, was striking at a time when boundaries were entrenched.
From a modern standpoint, Ellis is a classic ex…