29

‘You’ll stand it because you love me’

London, 1955

Ruth Hornby was born in Rhyl, North Wales in 1926, although her birth was registered under the surname Neilson, which was a stage name later adopted by her musician father. A shy, quiet and reserved little girl, she was the third of six children born to Arthur Hornby and his wife Elisaberta, who was a Belgian refugee from the First World War.

The family moved to Basingstoke in 1933 after her father found a job with a band. However, the job didn’t last long and Arthur moved his family to Reading and then to Southwark, where fifteen-year-old Ruth found work as a machine minder. In 1942 she fell ill with rheumatic fever and after spending almost two months in hospital, she was encouraged to take dancing lessons to improve her fitness. At seventeen, she took a job as a photographer’s assistant in the Lyceum Ballroom in the West End of London.

By now, little remained of the introverted child from North Wales, who had grown up to be an ambitious, exuberant, confident, peroxide blonde, whose main aim in life seemed to be enjoying herself. At the Lyceum, she met and fell in love with a French-Canadian soldier named Clare and soon found that she was expecting his baby. Unfortunately, Clare neglected to tell Ruth that he was already married, with a wife and three children back in Canada. When Ruth gave birth to a son, Clare Andrea Neilson, in September 1944, the baby’s father was out of the picture and Andy, as he came to be known, was cared for by Ruth’s mother and older sister, Muriel. Needing a well-paid job to support her son, Ruth spotted an advertisement offering £1 an hour for nude models at a camera club and it was here that she met Morris ‘Morrie’ Conley in 1944.

Conley, who was later to be described by a reporter as ‘Britain’s biggest vice boss’, was a fraudster, a ponce and a con man, who owned a number of properties, which he rented out to prostitutes. He also ran a number of drinking clubs and nightclubs. In Ruth, he saw the ideal nightclub hostess and he offered her a job at Morrie’s Court Club, in Duke Street. At a time when an agricultural labourer earned an average of £6 a week, eighteen-year-old Ruth was making a weekly wage of £5, plus commission on the sale of drinks and club memberships, as well as benefitting from a generous clothing allowance and free drinks. Meanwhile, Morrie, who was unflatteringly described as ‘short, fat and toad-like’ frequently demanded sexual favours from her and was not above abusing her whenever he got drunk, as he often did.

Early in 1950, Ruth became pregnant by one of the club’s regular customers and subsequently had an abortion but by the summer of that year, another customer had caught her eye.

George Johnson Ellis was known to the club hostesses as ‘The mad dentist’. He was seventeen years older than Ruth and a married man. However, he was also an alcoholic, with a violent temper, and when his wife could no longer stand living with him she fled. George arrived home to find that his wife had stripped the house of most of the couple’s possessions and moved out, taking the couple’s two children with her. With his marriage in tatters, George took to frequenting clubs and quickly became infatuated with Ruth.

After a lot of persuasion, Ruth finally agreed to meet George at another of Morrie Conley’s clubs. However, she didn’t turn up and after he allegedly flirted with the girlfriend of an East End gang member, her boyfriend slashed George’s face with a razor and he ended up having to undergo emergency surgery. Ruth felt so guilty about breaking their date that she agreed to go out for dinner with George, ending the night in his bed.

George had a Jekyll and Hyde character. He was a warm, funny, intelligent, professional man, who was also a skilled musician and held a pilot’s licence. He lavished gifts on Ruth and she quickly realised that he could be the key to the stability and respectability she now craved for her son. However, George was also an alcoholic and became argumentative, jealous and violent when drinking. Eventually Ruth persuaded him to seek treatment for his alcohol addiction and once he had given up drinking, the couple married in November 1950, moving to a village near Southampton, where George found work in a dental practice. Sadly, he quickly fell back into his old habits and began to frequent the village pub, often drinking himself insensible.

The couple began a cycle of violent arguments, after which Ruth would leave George and return to her parents. Yet she would inevitably go back to her husband, only for the drinking, the jealousy and the violence to start again. By May 1951, George had been fired from his job and the couple went to Wales to stay with his mother until George found another job in the West Country and moved there, while Ruth once again went back to her parents.

She discovered that she was pregnant and in an attempt to reconcile with her husband for the baby’s sake, she moved to Torquay to be with him. Not surprisingly, the couple were unable to get along and George re-admitted himself to hospital to try to beat his alcoholism once and for all. Although Ruth visited him there, she became obsessed with the notion that he was sleeping with the nurses and other patients and her fury was such that the staff psychiatrist was forced to restrain and sedate her.

Ruth gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Georgina, in October 1951. Meanwhile, George was discharged from hospital and moved to Lancashire, where he got a job as a school dental officer with the Local Health Authority. When he filed for a divorce on the grounds of Ruth’s cruelty towards him, she turned to Morrie Conley, who allowed her to move into a flat owned by his wife and gave her back her job as a hostess at the Court Club, which had been refurbished and was now known as Carroll’s. Once again, she was surrounded by fun-loving and carefree men who spent their money lavishly – one customer even took Ruth on holiday and gave her a cheque for £400 for ‘services rendered’. In 1952, Ruth fell ill and was found to be suffering from an ectopic pregnancy but after an operation, she was back to work after only two weeks.

In 1953, a group of professional motor racing drivers began frequenting the club, one of whom was David Moffat Drummond Blakely. Blakely was the son of wealthy divorced parents, who spoiled and indulged him to compensate him for living in a broken home. A former public school boy, his only interest was in racing cars and, on his first visit to Carroll’s, his behaviour was so rude and boorish that Ruth asked her fellow hostesses, ‘Who is that pompous little ass?’

Yet in spite of the inauspicious beginning to their relationship, Ruth found herself inexplicably drawn to Blakely. In October 1953, Morrie offered her a new job as manageress of a club known as The Little Club. The club came with a flat and Ruth moved in with Andy and, in spite of the fact that he had recently become engaged to his long-term girlfriend, within a week or two, Blakely was sharing her bed.

The couple’s burgeoning attraction was carefully watched by Desmond Edward Cussen, a member of The Little Club and something of a hanger-on with Blakely’s motor racing set. Cussen, who was strongly attracted to Ruth, had once been described by a colleague as ‘a bit of a drip’. He was known to dislike Blakely and the feeling intensified as he watched his rival getting closer and closer to the woman he loved.

Ruth’s situation was further complicated by the reappearance of her husband, George, who came down to London to try and finalise their divorce. Ruth, however, was anxious to stay married, since George paid a generous maintenance for their daughter. However, common sense eventually prevailed and, perhaps recognising that her chaotic lifestyle was hardly compatible with the needs and demands of a three-year-old child, in May 1954 Ruth finally agreed that George should take Georgina back to Warrington and arrange for her to be adopted.

Blakely’s attachment to Ruth didn’t prevent him from associating with other women and Ruth was especially concerned about one particular relationship that he had with a couple named Carole and Anthony ‘Ant’ Findlater. The Findlaters met Blakely in 1951, after Ant came to look at a car Blakely was selling. Before long, they were firm friends, until Blakely seduced Carole and asked her to run away with him. Torn between her lover and her husband, Carole finally confessed all to Ant, who forgave both his wife and her lover. Somehow, the three managed to continue their friendship after the affair, although once Ruth had been introduced to the couple, she became convinced that the Findlaters disapproved of her and were trying to influence Blakely to end his relationship with her.

In June 1954, Blakely went to Le Mans to compete in the twenty-four-hour motor race. He had promised Ruth that he would return afterwards and, when he didn’t come home, she slept with Desmond Cussen to spite Blakely. For some months, Ruth wavered between the two men – Blakely was more exciting, yet Cussen, who was considerably older, was more capable of providing the stability that Ruth so craved. Such was Cussen’s infatuation with Ruth that he agreed to pay the fees for ten-year-old Andy to attend boarding school. Meanwhile Blakely was heavily involved in building a racing car, a project that took up a lot of his time and almost all of his available income, leading to Ruth supporting him financially.

Throughout the summer of 1954, Ruth’s life slowly spiralled out of control. She began drinking heavily and in October, she was sacked from her job, due to falling takings at The Little Club. Naturally, she also lost the tied flat that came with her employment and, to Blakely’s fury, she moved in with Cussen, where she lived for the next four months, all the while trying to satisfy the demands of both men. She assured Blakely that she wasn’t sleeping with Cussen and spent several nights at hotels with him, telling Cussen that she was visiting her daughter.

Christmas came and went in a haze of alcohol-fuelled fights and arguments, particularly after Ruth suspected Blakely of engaging in an affair. She asked Cussen to drive her to Penn, where the other woman lived and caught Blakely at the woman’s flat, while her husband was away on a business trip. There was a furious row that night, which culminated in Blakely walking out. On 10 January 1955, Ruth sent him a telegram reading: ‘Haven’t you got the guts to say goodbye to my face Ruth?’ [sic], which seemed to send Blakely into a panic, thinking not only that Ruth might create a scandal but also fearing that she would get some of her gangster acquaintances to pay him a visit. He confided in Ant Findlater that he just wanted to get away from Ruth and never see her again yet, on 14 January, he went back to her.

It was on that day that the decree nisi came through for Ruth’s divorce, meaning that she would be free to marry in six weeks’ time. The couple continued their volatile love/hate relationship, aided and abetted by Cussen, who Ruth persuaded to drive her round London so that she could check on Blakely’s every move. When Cussen went away on a business trip, a violent row between Ruth and Blakely took place in his flat, which led to Blakely telephoning Ant and another friend, Clive Gunnell, begging them to rescue him. When Ant and Clive arrived at the flat, Blakely claimed that Ruth had tried to stab him. Both he and Ruth were limping and both had black eyes and numerous other bruises. Ruth, who had taken Blakely’s car keys, refused to let him leave and lay down in front of Gunnell’s car to try and stop him driving away. Eventually, the three men made their escape.

When Cussen returned, Ruth made him drive her around London searching for Blakely, who was eventually located in a pub in Gerrards Cross and fled when he saw Ruth and Cussen approaching. However, that afternoon he sent Ruth a big bunch of red roses, with a card reading ‘Sorry darling, I love you, David.’ The couple met and Blakely convinced Ruth that their problems were all down to the fact that she was still sharing a flat with Cussen. Ruth agreed and suggested that she and Blakely got a place together – cheekily, she borrowed the money for the deposit on a flat from Cussen.

Even after ‘Mr and Mrs Ellis’ moved into their flat in Egerton Gardens in Kensington on 9 February, their quarrelling continued unabated. Ruth believed that Blakely was infatuated with his married lover and on 22 February, she and Blakely had a violent argument that left her with bruising and a black eye. At the same time, Ruth was still seeing Cussen and in early March, she started a modelling course, which he paid for. At that time, she discovered that she was pregnant and had no idea who had fathered her unborn child. However, the question of paternity became immaterial when Ruth miscarried after a physical fight with Blakely.

Matters came to a head between the couple on 2 April. Blakely was racing his car ‘The Emperor’ at Brand’s Hatch but the vehicle blew its engine during the practice. Blakely blamed Ruth, saying that she was a jinx.

‘I’ll stand so much from you David; you cannot go on walking over me forever,’ Ruth responded dejectedly and Blakely replied, ‘You’ll stand it because you love me.’

When Ruth got home from the disastrous weekend, she took to her bed with a bad cold, coupled with the after effects of her miscarriage. Cussen went to visit her and found her with a temperature of 104°. He told her to stay in bed and drove to Andy’s boarding school to pick the boy up for the Easter holidays.

The long Easter weekend began on 8 April with Blakely visiting the Findlaters to discuss their next steps with ‘The Emperor’. Blakely had promised to return early and spend the weekend with Ruth and Andy so when he was still not home by 9.30 p.m., Ruth rang the Findlaters, speaking to their nanny, who told her that there was nobody at home. When Ruth finally spoke to Ant, he told her that Blakely was not there. However, Ruth believed that she could hear him talking and laughing in the background and continued to telephone the Findlaters at regular intervals until midnight, when they finally took the phone off the hook. Ruth immediately telephoned Cussen, who agreed to drive her to the Findlaters’ home, where she found Blakely’s car and began smashing the windows. The police were called and, as Blakely cowered indoors, Ant stood on the doorstep in his pyjamas while the police tried to defuse the situation.

When calm was restored, Ruth continued to demand to see Blakely and the situation escalated again. The Findlaters telephoned the police but by the time they arrived, Cussen had persuaded Ruth to leave and had driven off with her in his car.

The following morning, Ruth tried to telephone Blakely at the Findlaters’ home but the telephone was hung up as soon as she spoke. She took a taxi to the house and, hiding in a doorway, watched as Blakely and Ant came out to inspect the damage to Blakely’s car. The two men drove off to a garage owned by Clive Gunnell and Ruth went to a telephone box, where she again dialled the Findlaters’ number and was again cut off. She returned home but persuaded Cussen to drive her back to Tanza Road that afternoon. She made a fourth trip that evening and paced up and down the street chain-smoking, listening to the sounds of a party drifting through the open windows of the Findlaters flat and at around 10 p.m., she watched as Blakely came out of the flat with an attractive woman on his arm.

By that time, she was literally down to her last few pence. She had not slept for almost forty-eight hours and was still taking the tranquilisers prescribed by the staff psychiatrist at the hospital where her ex-husband had gone to dry out, as well as drinking heavily. By the time Cussen was able to persuade her to leave Tanza Road she had come to the conclusion that Blakely was at the root of all of her problems.

Ruth tried once more to telephone the Findlaters on the morning of Sunday 9 April. ‘I hope you are having an enjoyable holiday, because you have ruined mine,’ she told Ant, who immediately hung up the phone without responding. Ruth packed Andy off to the zoo and spent the day alone, drinking Pernod and brooding.

The next day, Blakely, the Findlaters and their nanny went to the fair at Hampstead Heath, while Ruth spent the afternoon drinking with Cussen. At 8.45 p.m., Blakely was back at the Findlaters’ flat and when Carole ran out of cigarettes, he agreed to go and buy some for her. Clive Gunnell decided that he would accompany him to the pub to buy more beer and the two men walked outside to Blakely’s car.

Meanwhile, Ruth went back to Tanza Road one last time by taxi. When she arrived and there was no sign of Blakely’s car, she told the driver to go to Blakely’s favourite pub, the Magdala Tavern, where she intended to confront her lover. Peering through the pub door, she realised that Blakely and Gunnell were buying beer to take away and she withdrew into a doorway to wait for them to leave the pub. As they walked outside, carrying several quart bottles of beer, she stepped out of the shadows and shouted, ‘David!’

Blakely either didn’t hear her or ignored her, since he carried on walking. When she shouted a second time, he looked up and, seeing that she was carrying a gun, he ran towards the back of the car.

Ruth aimed and pulled the trigger five times. She then raised the gun to her own head and pulled the trigger but the gun misfired. Appearing puzzled, she pointed it downwards and tried again. This time a bullet ricocheted off the pavement, hitting passer-by Gladys Kensington Yule in the thumb. (It was not the best of weekends for Mrs Yule, who was going out for a drink to help her come to terms with the fact that her son had committed suicide two days earlier.)

As Blakely lay on the ground, his blood mingling with spilled beer, Ruth turned calmly to Clive Gunnell and told him, ‘Fetch the police, Clive.’ At the same time, someone rushed into the bar at the Magdala shouting, ‘Someone’s been shot outside!’

Off-duty policeman Alan Thompson was enjoying a drink in the bar. He walked out and saw Ruth standing against a wall, the smoking gun still in her hands.

‘Will you call the police?’ she asked Thompson, as he took the gun from her.

‘I am the police,’ he replied, arresting her.

Within minutes, the area was swarming with police cars and ambulances, although the injured Mrs Yule had already gone off to hospital in a taxi. (The driver only agreed to take her if she held her hand out of the window, so as not to bleed on the interior of his cab.) David Blakely was taken to New End Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, while Ruth was charged with his wilful murder.

Ruth Ellis was eventually tried for her lover’s murder, appearing at the Old Bailey before Mr Justice Havers on 20 June 1955. The prosecution was led by Mr Christmas Humphreys, who found himself pitted against Melford Stevenson QC, who acted in Ruth Ellis’s defence along with Sebag Shaw and Peter Rawlinson. From the outset, they tried to persuade Ruth to tone down her appearance, wanting to portray her as a pathetic victim, but she ignored their advice, appearing in court immaculately and expensively dressed, with her hair newly bleached and styled.

The defence tried in vain to convince the jury that Ruth was so consumed by jealousy and had been so provoked by Blakely’s actions that she acted in hot blood, shooting him in a moment of passion. However, Ruth was her own worst enemy and when Humphreys asked Ruth what she had intended to do when she fired a revolver at Blakely at close range, she replied coldly, ‘It is obvious that when I shot him, I intended to kill him.’

The defence counsel had planned to claim that the offence should be reduced from murder to manslaughter on the grounds of provocation. However, Mr Justice Havers ruled that there was ‘insufficient material, even on the view of the evidence most favourable to the accused, to reduce this killing from murder to manslaughter.’ Addressing the jury, Havers told them, ‘It is my duty to direct you that the evidence in this case does not support a verdict of manslaughter on the grounds of provocation.’

With that ruling, Havers effectively disallowed all the defence counsel’s arguments. Stevenson protested, ‘In view of the ruling which your lordship has just pronounced, it is desirable that I should say in the presence and hearing of the jury that I cannot now with propriety address the jury at all because it would be impossible for me to do so without inviting the jury to disregard your lordship’s ruling.’ His entire defence negated, Stevenson told the jury, ‘The fact stands out like a beacon that this young man became an absolute necessity to this young woman. However brutally he behaved, and however much he spent of her money on various entertainments of his own, and however much he consorted with other people, he ultimately came back to her, and always she forgave him. She found herself in something like an emotional prison guarded by this young man, from which there seemed to be no escape.’ Yet, in spite of Stevenson’s eloquence, the defence team was fighting a losing battle and, after a trial lasting just a day and a half, the jury took just a few minutes to return a verdict that Ruth Ellis was guilty of wilful murder, a crime which carried a mandatory death sentence.

‘Thanks,’ responded Ruth on hearing the verdict, smiling at her family as Mr Justice Havers sentenced her to be hung by the neck until dead.

Ruth Ellis was sent to Holloway Prison to await her appointment with the executioner. She refused to appeal and those who visited her formed the impression that she was protecting someone, although she remained tight-lipped almost to the end. Almost 50,000 people signed petitions for clemency but Home Secretary Lloyd George refused to intervene. Writing under his pen name of Cassandra, one of Britain’s most influential newspaper reporters made an impassioned plea on Ruth’s behalf, arguing that, ‘In human nature where passion is involved, love and hate walk hand in hand and side by side.’ However, while some people went to great lengths to try and get her sentence commuted, there were others arguing just as fervently for her execution to go ahead, among them Mrs Yule, who quite correctly pointed out that, as an innocent bystander, she could have been killed by Ruth’s indiscriminate shooting on a public street. On Wednesday 13 July, Ruth Ellis kept her appointment with hangman Albert Pierrepoint, thus becoming the last ever woman to be judicially hanged in the United Kingdom.

It seems apparent that Desmond Cussen played a big part in Ruth’s downfall and, in a last-minute statement before her execution she implicated him in Blakely’s death. Questions had already been asked about where she obtained the revolver, and how a frail woman was able to shoot five times with almost pinpoint accuracy, seemingly unaffected by the gun’s recoil, particularly since she was known to have very tiny hands and thin wrists. It seems evident that she had practised with the gun before the shooting and it was theorised that Ruth made a pact with Cussen that she would keep his name out of the case in return for his promise that he would look after Andy while she was in prison. (Neither Cussen nor Ruth Ellis ever expected that she would actually hang.) Cussen kept his promise, funding the boy through school, although he is said never to have spoken to him after his mother’s death. Andy grew into a troubled, somewhat eccentric young man, who eventually committed suicide in 1982, while Georgina died of cancer at the age of fifty. George Ellis also committed suicide and Ruth’s mother had a nervous breakdown after her daughter’s execution and died in a mental hospital.

In 1999, the Public Records Office released papers pertaining to the case that suggest that the execution of Ruth Ellis was political and was rushed through in spite of the last-minute statement made by Ruth, in which she stated that Cussen was jealous of Blakely and had set her up to kill him, by providing her with the loaded gun and driving her to Tanza Road and the Magdala Tavern, rather than her travelling there in a taxi.

However, a memo written at the time by Lloyd George showed that he believed it absolutely vital that Ruth should hang. The murder she committed was so bloody and so brutal that it was obviously feared that, if she was reprieved, it would be difficult to find any subsequent crime severe enough to merit the death penalty. ‘If a reprieve were granted in this case we should have to seriously consider whether capital punishment be retained as a penalty’ read the memo.

Ruth’s sister, Muriel Jakubait, continued to campaign to have her sister’s murder conviction quashed and reclassified as manslaughter. In a television documentary, she revealed that she and Ruth had both been sexually abused by their father and that Arthur Neilson was the father of Muriel’s oldest son, who was brought up as her brother. Although Ruth was depicted as a ‘model’ throughout her trial, she was actually a high-class prostitute, with a long history of sexual, emotional and physical abuse, and addictions to alcohol and anti-depressant drugs. Not only that but she had suffered a miscarriage only ten days before the murder.

In 2003, Ruth’s conviction finally came before a court of appeal, during which Lord Justice Kay, Mr Justice Silber and Mr Justice Leveson were told that there was ‘a basic unfairness’ about the original trial, resulting in a miscarriage of justice.

Acting for eighty-one-year-old Muriel Jakubait, Michael Mansfield QC suggested to the appeal judges that trial judge Sir Cecil Havers had made ‘a substantial error’ in withdrawing the defence of provocation from the jury. Mansfield maintained that Havers and the barristers both prosecuting and defending the case were labouring under a misconception, believing that in order to establish provocation, it must be proved that the killing was not motivated by malice but happened ‘in the passion of the moment’, without intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm.

Ruth Ellis was suffering from battered woman syndrome, said Mansfield, and there were numerous violent encounters throughout her relationship with Blakely, including the punch in the stomach that led to her losing the couple’s baby. In the wake of Ruth’s miscarriage, Blakely had promised her that everything would be all right. He had talked about marriage and supporting her financially and had promised to spend the long Easter weekend with her and Andy. However, rather than spending time with her he went to his friends and refused to speak to her when she telephoned or went round to their house. According to Mansfield, Blakely’s disgraceful treatment of Ruth over the weekend amounted to provocation and forced her into a loss of control.

The appeal judges commented that it was highly unusual that Ruth Ellis had not appealed her own sentence and Mansfield pointed out that she had no desire to live. After shooting Blakely, she had fully intended to kill herself but the gun jammed.

In December 2003, the appeal judges ruled that Mrs Jakubait’s posthumous appeal was ‘without merit’, deciding that Ruth was rightly convicted of murder. They questioned whether an appeal on behalf of a woman who had committed a serious criminal offence and who had consciously and deliberately chosen not to appeal herself was a sensible use of the limited resources of the court of appeal. Under current law, they explained, a conviction for murder could be reduced to manslaughter either on the grounds of provocation or diminished responsibility. At the time of the original trial, diminished responsibility was not an option – it was introduced in 1957, partly as a result of Regina v Ellis.

On the matter of refusing to allow a provocation defence to be put to the jury, the appeal court ruled that, for a provocation defence to be successful, it was necessary to show that Ellis was subject to an affront immediately before killing Blakely, one that caused her to lose all self-control. Thus, under the law at the time of the trial, Havers was correct to withdraw the defence of provocation from the jury.

The appeal judges conceded that, if the trial took place today (2003), it would be likely that the jury would have been asked to decide on an issue of diminished responsibility but, so long after the original trial, there was no way of gauging what the jury’s response might have been. Although disappointed by the decision, Muriel Jakubait vowed to continue her fight to overturn her sister’s conviction for murder.

During the original trial, Mr Justice Havers instructed the jury, ‘You will approach this without any thoughts of sympathy either for the man or for the accused, who is a young woman and, you may think, may be a young woman badly treated by the deceased man.’ Arguably, the case was best summed up in a French newspaper, which wrote in 1955, ‘Passion in England, except for cricket and betting, is always regarded as a shameful disease.’