RUTH ELLIS The killing, the Gallows and the Case That Still Haunts Britain
About
She admitted killing David Blakely. The argument over her execution lasted seventy-one years.
On Easter Sunday 1955, Ruth Ellis shot her lover outside the Magdala public house in Hampstead. Three months later, the twenty-eight-year-old mother of two was hanged at Holloway Prison, becoming the last woman executed in the United Kingdom.
Her admission was unmistakable. The history behind it was far more complicated.
Bill Stewart follows Ruth from her childhood and early motherhood into London’s nightclub world, her troubled marriage and her relationship with racing driver David Blakely. He examines the evidence of violence, the disputed origins of the revolver, the Old Bailey trial and the campaign that failed to save her life.
The account continues through the consequences for her family, the unsuccessful 2003 appeal and the conditional pardon granted in July 2026—a decision that replaced her death sentence with life imprisonment while leaving her murder conviction intact.
Across thirty chapters, a Prologue and an Epilogue, this documentary narrative distinguishes recorded evidence from later recollection and unresolved allegations. It keeps David’s death in view while asking why Ruth’s circumstances did not secure a different outcome.
How should the law judge a person who has committed a grave crime and has also suffered serious abuse? And what can an act of mercy achieve when it arrives decades too late?
A sober examination of a killing, a punishment and the long fight to have the difference between them recognised.