To the living we owe our respect, to the dead we owe nothing but the truth.      Voltaire.

Like all statistics, they serve a purpose of sorts. Like most statistics, they only hint at a deeper, unseen truth, hidden from view behind the dry, formal and dialectic structure of numbers.

 She was 28 years old. Her height was five feet two inches and she weighed 103 pounds. She was well nourished and her body showed evidence of proper care and attention.

 She was also very dead with a fracture-dislocation of the spine and a two-inch gap and transverse separation of the spinal cord. Just to make sure, there was also a fracture of both wings of the hyoid and the right wing of the thyroid cartilage. The larynx was also fractured.

She had died of injuries to the central nervous system, consequent to judicial hanging. She was a healthy subject at the time of her death. So said Doctor Keith Simpson, pathologist of 146 Harley Street and Guys Hospital. He was a reader in forensic medicine at London University, so he would know all about the statistics of death, especially as he had carried out the post-mortem examination on her, just one hour after she had been executed.

He knew nothing of the menage a trios that had brought her to the pathologist table. He could not know that her death would result in two people killing themselves and one dying of a broken heart. Or of the lawyer, so despairing of his faith in the law and the way it treated her that he would give up his career. Or the man who travelled half way around the world to escape from the certainty that he was partly to blame for her being here on this cold, metal table.

The small, slight cadaver stretched out before him was all that remained of a true tragedy of British justice. She was a statistic, one that would haunt the conscience of the British judiciary system for the next forty-five years.

Ruth Ellis was the fifteenth, and the last woman hanged in England in the twentieth century. She was also the unluckiest. She did not kill for gain and, had the judge allowed her defense to be put to her jury, they may well have found her guilty only of manslaughter. She, however, never thought so. She never doubted in her own mind that she deserved to die for killing the man she loved.

Her death would be the final exclamation mark in a sad and tortured tale.

Life needs to be taken by the lapels and told:
‘I’m with you kid. Let’s go.’ Maya Angelou.

Elisaberta Nielson
(Georgie Ellis)

Ruth was born on October 9, 1926, at 74 West Parade, a house in Rhyl, a seaside resort town on the northern coast of Wales. She was the third of six children to Arthur Hornby and his wife Elisaberta, who was also known as Bertha. Arthur was a talented musician. His wife, half French and half Belgian, had been raised by nuns and had fled Liege to seek safety when the Germans invaded her country during World War One. In a small boat she was brought to England, shoeless and wrapped in a blanket. With no qualifications or money, she had gone into service, until she met and married Arthur.
Ruth’s birth certificate showed her as Ruth Neilson, which was her father’s professional name. He travelled around the country seeking work, sometimes accompanied by his wife. There was little security in his chosen profession and he was often without a job. Their other daughter, Muriel, was regularly left to care for the rest of the family.
Ruth was myopic and had to wear glasses from an early age. She was an unremarkable child, pudgy and indistinguishable from the other children she socialised with. In those early days, there were no signs of the complex woman she would become, except even as an infant, she loved clothes and was very ambitious. Elisaberta would say of her daughter in later years, “She used to say to me, ‘Mum, I’m going to make something out of my life.'”
Perhaps she would, had she not had the misfortune to spend her short life surrounded by men who either were drunks, self-absorbed charlatans, physically abusive misfits, or combinations of all three.

Arthur Neilson
(Georgie Ellis)

In 1933, Arthur Neilson found work with a band at Basingstoke in Hampshire and the family moved south. However, this position only lasted a few months and he was out of work until he found employment as a hall porter in a mental hospital. His musical career was over and his pride dented. He turned first to drink, and then to excessive drink. He became irascible and morose, taking out his failures and frustrations on his wife and daughters. Her father was the first of many drunken, desultory men who would come to haunt Ruth in the years ahead.
Eventually in 1939, Arthur’s job at the mental hospital went out of the window as visitors and hospital staff became more and more antagonised by his churlish attitude. This was the year that saw the beginning of World War Two and Arthur started another job, this time as a caretaker in Reading, west of London.
By 1941, Ruth had left school and found work as a waitress in a café. Later that year, Arthur moved on yet again, this time finding himself a better job as a chauffeur with a company based in Southwark, just over the River Thames from the City of London. The job came with a two bedroom flat, and Ruth jumped at the chance of moving in with her father. She found herself a job, first with a munitions factory and then a food processing company.

Ruth as a teenager
(George Ellis)

She was almost sixteen and had grown to her full height of five-feet-two inches. She was making the most of her face and figure, and now bleaching her dark hair with peroxide, a vane proclivity that would last for the rest of her short life. Her fixation with being a brassy blonde was at least partially responsible for the poor impression she made when giving evidence in her trial and in no small way contributed to her downfall in Number One Court at the Old Bailey.
She was also near sighted, but refused to wear glasses. And so pretty, gay and confident, she embarked on a mission to fill her leisure hours with fun and excitement. Her nights were spent at local dancehalls, cafes and drinking clubs. Even as German aircraft bombed London, she was enjoying life to the fullest during those turbulent years, taking for granted the food shortages, men in uniforms everywhere, the black-outs and the exciting uncertainty of life itself.
Whenever anyone tried to reproach her because of her behaviour, she would respond, “Why not? A short life and a gay one.” Her words were to prove ironically prophetic.
In March 1942, she became ill and was diagnosed with rheumatic fever. After two months in hospital, she was discharged, along with some medical advice that dancing would help strengthen her body and speed her recovery along. She threw herself into the dancing routine with great enthusiasm and, eventually as a result of this, found herself a job as a photographer’s assistant at the Lyceum Ballroom in the West End of London. There, at the age of seventeen, she met and fell in love with a French-Canadian soldier who was called Clare. After a brief affair, she became pregnant by him just after Christmas, 1944. Although he promised her the moon like most of the men who crossed her threshold, he delivered considerably less.
He was already married, with children back in Canada. One morning, a bunch of red roses and a letter were delivered to Ruth at 19 Farmers Road, Camberwell in South London, where she was living with her family. Clare was on his way back to Canada and she would never see him again.
Later in the year, Ruth travelled north to Gilsland, a pretty little village deep in the Northumbrian countryside. There, at a private nursing home, on September 15th, 1945, her child was born. A boy, he was christened Clare Andrea Neilson. Throughout his life he was always known as Andy.
Ruth returned to London and a mixed reception from her parents, but as usual, warmth and comfort from her elder sister, Muriel, who would act as a surrogate mother to the child in the years to come. Needing a job to support her son, Ruth applied for a position as a model at a Camera Club.
She was soon posing in the nude, while up to twenty men snapped away, expressing their artistic intellect, often through the lenses of empty cameras. After a busy day in the studio, some of these hot shot photographers would invite Ruth out for drinks, at one of the many clubs operating throughout the West End. In due course, at one of these clubs, she would meet a man who would nudge her a little closer to her final, fatal confrontation

As if there were some monster in his thought. Othello.    William Shakespeare.

Morris Conley, known as Maury and sometimes as Morrie was a crook, plain and simple. When Ruth crossed his path for the first time, he was 44 years old and had already established himself a reputation as a fraud, a con man and a ponce. In 1936, he declared a business interest he owned, bankrupt, and as a result, made himself a profit of ten thousand pounds out of its failure, a considerable fortune in those days, when a new family home could be bought for five hundred pounds. Tried at the Old Bailey, in connection with this, he was found guilty of fraud and went off to prison for two years. He was also later arrested in connection with rigged slot machines he sold and operated. Inspector Bye of the Metropolitan Police said these slot machines were so crooked, the jackpot could never be won if played for a hundred years. 

Through astute property deals, Conley came to own many houses and apartments, which were rented out to prostitutes. He also owned a number of nightclubs and drinking clubs in Londons West End. In 1956, Duncan Webb, a crusading crime reporter, named Conley as: Britains Biggest Vice Boss.

Conley was short, fat and ugly with tyre lips and heavy jowls. Some one once described him as being ugly as a toad. He was however, affable, shrewd and very rich. While he came across as a smooth, jolly, middle-aged nightclub king, and something of a social butterfly, Webb has also described him as, a monster with the Mayfair touch.

Ruth Ellis

Sometime in 1944, Ruth and Conley came together. She met him at one of his enterprises, the Court Club at 58 Duke Street, just off Grosvenor Square. They sat drinking through the early evening and talking quietly across a table at the back of the club. Ruth remembered that she was flattered and impressed by this wealthy and successful club owner. He, in turn, recognized in Ruth, the perfect formula for a good club hostess — attractive with a vibrant personality and a core of disenchantment that would allow her to operate above her emotions.

Ruth joined the other six hostesses who supplied the feminine charms at the club in return for a weekly wage far in excess of the average at that time, plus perks such as a clothing allowance, free drinks and, above all for Ruth, the chance to mix with a good class of people.

She and Conley formed an alliance that would last for nine years. She would become one of his best managers, operating a number of his clubs across the West End. In return, he would use her for sexual favors and, in addition, abuse her when he was drunk. It was a scenario that would be replicated with boring repetition through her life, as over and over again, she chose the wrong man for the wrong reason.

Along with Conley, Ruth would also make herself available to some of the clubs clients, and was soon establishing a reputation with men of substance and high social standing, the two attributes that Ruth had yearned for all her short life. The money she earned seemed to evaporate on living the good life, but she also helped support her parents and made sure her son was well cared for. More and more, her sister Muriel was mothering Andy, with Ruth struggling to find time on Sundays to share with the child.

Early in 1950, Ruth became pregnant by one of her regular customers. She had an abortion by the third month and returned to work almost immediately. Under the stress of maintaining a bright and bubbly image for her clients, she was drinking heavily and punishing herself physically to remain the ever-gay companion her customers expected. It was during this time, the summer of 1950, she met up with the next man who was to have a major influence on her life. In keeping with the pattern she was establishing, he would turn out to be less than perfect.

There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, and turn them into literature.
Stephen Stills.
Of all the characters that populate this story, Desmond Cussen is perhaps the most enigmatic.
He was referred to at the trial of Ruth Ellis as “her alternative lover,” but he operated at a deeper level than just as a sexual or romantic foil for this woman who was using him as leverage in her passionate play for David Blakely.
Some people get lost in thought because it is unfamiliar territory; Ruth Ellis wandered through a hinterland of emotional confusion, torn between her desire for a young, vibrant Lothario, and the comfort and security of an older man who would ultimately fulfil the role of her paternal guardian.
Ruth claimed that she started an affair with Cussen on Thursday June 17th, 1954. It was to her, an act of spite against David, who had not returned to her from racing at Le Mans in France.

Desmond Cussen
(Syndication International)

Desmond Edward Cussen was thirty-two when he first met up with Ruth. He was born in 1921 in Surrey and had been an RAF pilot, trained in South Africa, and flying Lancaster bombers during  World War Two. After he came out of the service in 1946, he studied for and became an accountant.
In due course, he was appointed a director of the family business — Cussens & Co., a wholesale and retail tobacconists with outlets in London and South Wales. He was based at the company’s head office at 93 Peckham High Street in south London. He lived in a self-contained flat at 20 Goodward Court, Devonshire Street in the fashionable Marylebone district, north of Oxford Street. 
A car enthusiast, although he never raced professionally, he drove around town as though he was qualifying for a grand-prix event. He was apparently a shy man, dominated by his mother, a trait he shared with Blakely, and outside of work, had found entertainment and companionship at the Steering Wheel Club. He was described as; “‘a solitary man, always polite, who never used foul language and did not belong in the circles in which he moved.” Cliff Davis had little time for him, saying, “The real villain of the piece was Desmond Cussen. He was a sneaky bastard.”
Cussen had met Ruth at Carroll’s before David Blakely came into her life and was connected to David through their shared fondness for motor racing and the Steering Wheel Club. There seems little doubt that he and David disliked each other, even before Ruth came between them.
Cussen, it appears, fell desperately in love with Ruth. He adored her energy, her style, her wit and her self-possession. The way she handled the guests at the club and traded profanities with them; her ability to keep up with their raunchy and profane bawdiness. As Cussen loved her and watched her, the more she became attracted to another man, one he disliked. The miasma of jealousy was fuelled by David’s laid back, casual and supremely confident “in-your-face” approach.
Desmond Cussen must have realised how ill prepared he was to compete with a man who was not only almost ten years younger, slim, handsome, with a relaxed, buccaneer attitude to life, but was also so obviously the complete antithesis of what he himself was, a man once described by a former colleague as “a bit of a drip.”
By the spring of 1954, events were starting to develop their own momentum. George, Ruth’s husband, had reappeared on the scene and was stopping in at the Little Club from time to time. He and Ruth were trying to manoeuvre themselves around a number of their problems. He wanted their divorce to become final; she was fighting it off, in order to hang on to the maintenance he was paying. More pressing was the problem of their young daughter Georgina, who was now three. Ruth’s life style and living quarters were not an ideal environment for a small child. It was finally agreed that George would take her back to Warrington and arrange for the child to be adopted. This happened in May 1954.

Carol, Ant, Ruth and David
(Syndication International)

Earlier, in April, Ruth had met up with Carole Findlater for the first time. She and David had attended the thirty-third birthday party of Carole’s husband, Anthony. Anthony “Ant” Findlater was the third and final man, who along with his wife, would help connect up the dots that would disclose the shape of the matrix spawning the events of the next twelve months.

True friends stab you in the front.

Oscar Wilde.

Anthony and Carole Findlater lived at number 29 Tanza Road, Hampstead. They had a second floor flat in this tree-lined street that backed onto the southern edge of Parliament Hill, next to the famous Hampstead Heath. Today, Hampstead is one of the most prestigious and expensive suburbs in London. Forty-five years ago it was a modest outpost of suburbia, where strangely enough, the second last woman to hang in England, Mrs. Styllous Christofi, had committed murder — killing Hella, her daughter-in-law in 1954.

Anthony, always known as Ant, was from a wealthy Dublin family. His father, a prosperous businessman, was one of the better pre-war racing car drivers and a successful motorcar engine designer. Ant went to Hurstpierpoint Public School and then studied automobile engineering until the outbreak of the war in 1939. He met his wife Carole Sonin, the daughter of a relatively comfortable Jewish manufacturers agent, when they were both serving in the Royal Air Force.

After the war ended, they married. Carole worked as a journalist and Ant found a number of poorly paid jobs with engineering companies. They were living in a flat at Number 52, Colet Gardens in Hammersmith, west London, when Ant and Blakely first crossed paths. Ant was trying to sell off an old Alfa-Romeo sports car. David and a friend had come along to look it over. This was early in 1951.

Soon, David, Carole and Ant were an item. Davids pride and joy at this time was an HRG sports car, named after the designer H.R. Godfrey, the one his stepfather had bought him for his twenty-first birthday. The two men agreed to share the cost of racing the car. David also had an ulterior motive for keeping the relationship on the boil. He already had the hots for Carole.

David and Carole would meet some evenings at the Trevor Arms, a pub in Knightsbridge; Carole explaining her late nights to Ant, as part of her duties attending the National Union of Journalists. By the autumn, David was pleading with Carole to elope with him. Just what the attraction was is hard to fathom. Perhaps it was the age difference; she was twenty-seven, he was twenty-one. He seemed to have always favoured women older than himself, particularly in serious relationship situations. She was certainly out of his league, being described by a fellow journalist as a powerhouse of ambition and energy.

One day, after work, Carole went home to pack her bags and leave.  But when Ant pleaded with her to stay, her fine sense of Jewish home won her over, and she agreed to stay on. The marriage, however, was doomed to failure, and eighteen months after Ruth gunned down David Blakely, the couple divorced.

When Carole told David she was not leaving her husband, he asked if she had told Ant who her lover was. Carole said, Yes, but that doesnt make any difference, does it? To which the romantic Blakely responded in muted rage, You stupid bitch, now look what youve done. Who the bloody hell will tune my car now?

Blakely may have been a drunk; he may have been a woman beater; he may have been an arrogant up-himself mellifluous womanising narcissist, but he was quite clearly a realist in the things that he considered important. Somehow, his association with the Findlaters survived and three years later they appeared to be the best of friends.

Ruth always suspected the Findlaters and, in particular Carole, of exerting a domineering influence over David and of turning him against her towards the last few days of their relationship. She became certain that Carole and Ant conspired to persuade David to desert her in that fateful and final week leading up to Easter, 1955.

By the April of 1954, Ruth had already met Ant Findlater when David brought him into the Little Club for a drink. When Carole organised a birthday party for her husband, she personally telephoned Ruth and invited her along. Carole was no doubt curious about Davids latest mistress and wanted to check her out for herself. She wasnt that impressed and recalled later, She was wearing a black dress with a plunging neckline; she had a small bust, small wrists and ankles, the effect was shrimp like. Ruth said Hello to Carole and then ignored her for the rest of the evening.

Ruth was as equally unimpressed with Carole, remembering, Carole behaved like the Mother Superior herself, but I took no notice.

In June, David went to France to drive in the famous Le Mans 24-hour race, not returning until the middle of July. Although he sent Ruth two postcards, expressing his love, Ruth became jealous and, in a fit of temper or perhaps just a mood of alcoholic abandonment, entered into a sexual affair with Cussen. She claimed at her trial that she had hoped Cussen would tell Blakely and that this would finish Davids longing for her. If that was the truth, it didnt work.

After David returned from Europe, Ruth had yet again changed directions, tacking from a wind of rejection back into one of acceptance. She decided to throw him a belated birthday party — he had been abroad on 17th June, his twenty-fifth birthday. David arrived late for his own birthday bash, explaining to Ruth that he had been across the road at the Hyde Park Hotel, breaking off his engagement with Linda Dawson. He asked Ruth to marry him and as a result, Ruth decided to no longer fight the divorce proceedings with her husband George.

In August, David raced in Holland at Zandvoort an MG car owned by one of his friends, and invited Ruth along. In one of her rare moments of disciplined responsibility, Ruth turned down the invitation. She had, among other things, to make a decision about Andy and his education. In due course, her son, now ten years of age, went off to boarding school in September, his fees and school uniform paid for by Desmond Cussen.

David had been occupying his spare time for many months trying to build a racing car, which he had called The Emperor, using Ant Findlater as his chief mechanic. It was a time consuming and costly exercise and was eating away at Davids rapidly dwindling legacy. He was drinking heavily and Ruth was supporting him financially; his income from his job at the piston factory and the money his mother allowed him each week was hardly covering his expenses.

Pleading poverty, he persuaded Ruth to allow him to move in with her; also, she started allowing him to run up a slate at the Little Club. They were both drinking heavily by this time. Ruth, who was basically a gin and tonic and champagne type, started using Pernod, a potent French aperitif made from the wormwood plant, which was being stocked so that customers could buy it for the French barmaid, Jackie Dyer. Often known as lunatic soup for its strength and power of intoxication, Pernod may well have contributed to her unstable condition the night she went after David with a .38 Smith and Wesson.

In October, Ruth hosted herself a birthday party at the club. She was twenty-eight. David sent her a greetings telegraph from Penn, and a cheap, flowery birthday card on which he had scrawled in his childish handwriting: Happy birthday Darling, BE GOOD. He promised her a trip to Paris, but lied his way out of this. They were both becoming jealous of each other. Ruth had found out about his earlier affair with Carole Findlater and warned him off visiting her at Tanza Road, and David was becoming increasingly suspicious and resentful of Ruths socialising in the club. More frequently their arguments were climaxing in violence and he was beating Ruth on a regular basis.

Ruth later said in evidence, He was violent on occasions…always because of jealousy in the barhe only used to hit me with his fists and hands, but I bruise easily, and I was full of bruises on many occasions.

As the year drew to a close, Ruth was faced with some serious decision-making. The takings at the club were dropping and Conley was pressuring her to do something about it. She had allowed David to run up an enormous bar tab, which he could never meet, and she had also been spending a lot of time away from the business, catering to Davids whims. He loved trawling through the clubs and pubs of the West End. One of his favourite drinking places being Esmeraldas Barn, which would become notorious a few years later, when it was taken over by the infamous Kray twins. By the end of the year, takings at the club had fallen from over two hundred pounds a week to under eighty. In December, Ruth quit the Little Club. She either resigned or Conley sacked her; either way, she was out of work.

She needed somewhere to live and also to care for Andy when he returned from his boarding school for the Christmas break. The faithful Desmond was her solution and she moved into his spacious flat at Goodwood Court.

Christmas was approaching and events would start to unfold with increased velocity.

Its a late day for regrets.

Eugene ONeil

Although David was livid at the thought of Ruth moving in with Desmond, she placated him by pointing out that at least she was breaking away from club life, the first step to a level of respectability — something David had wanted her to do for months. She assured him that she would not sleep with Cussen, and between the 17th of December and February 5th, 1955, she and David stayed off and on at the Rodney Hotel in Kensington, registering as Mr and Mrs Blakely. To Desmond, she explained her nights away by saying she was visiting either girl friends or her daughter, Georgina, up north.

That Christmas, Ruth gave Desmond and David identical silver cigarette cases as presents. On December 25th, Ruth hosted a party at Cussens flat. Cussen was at a business party and did not arrive back at his flat until later in the evening. By then, David had turned up and he and Ruth had another furious row over Ruth leaving her son asleep in the flat while she and her guests had gone out clubbing. David railed at Ruth for being a tart and sleeping with Cussen; she in turn accused him of still having an affair with Carole Findlater.

Later that night, drunk as coots, they both made their way to Tanza Road, where in fact they found the Findlaters had gone off for the Christmas break to stay with friends at Brighton, and eventually Ruth and David collapsed drunk and exhausted in bed to sleep off their hangovers. Cussen, worried about Davids level of inebriation, had followed them across London. However, the patron saint of drunks had watched over them and David had somehow negotiated the journey without mishap. Cussen sat in his car, watching the house until it was almost nine in the evening. Then with a heavy heart he returned to Goodwood Court to look after Andy and the guests who were waiting for their hostess to return.

The next day, December 26th, Ruth returned to Desmond, explaining her night away by saying David had threatened to commit suicide and that was why she had been forced to spend the night with him.

David spent the day at the Brands Hatch racing circuit, driving The Emperor in its first race, The Kent Cup, and coming a respectable second. Early in the New Year, Ruth became suspicious that David was having another affair, this time in Penn, and had Cussen drive her across London to the dormitory suburb. There, she saw David leaving the home of a married woman, whose husband was away on a business trip. She was of course, older than David and very good-looking. It can be imagined just how this stirred up the anger and jealousy in Ruth. On the 8th of January, while staying at the Rodney Hotel, they became involved in another blazing row, brought to a head by Davids relationship with this other woman. He left for Penn, and when he had not contacted Ruth by January 10th, she sent him a telegram, which read:

Havent you got the guts to say goodbye to my face Ruth?

David got himself into a funk over this. Firstly he was concerned that the news would get around and create a local scandal. Then the fact that he was spending so much of his time courting this other woman might impact on his job. He was also terrified that Ruth might get some of her gangster friends to pay him a visit. Ruth had brought up this possibility on more than one occasion. Her job with Connelys clubs had brought her into touch with many London villains. He poured out all of his fear to Ant Findlater, telling him that he just wanted to get away from Ruth and never see her again.

However, repeating the same steps that had driven their actions throughout their relationship, by the 14th of January, they were back together in the Rodney Hotel. On the same day, Ruth got her divorce from George. It would be absolute in six weeks and there was now nothing to stop them marrying.

David must have surely felt he was being backed into a corner from which there was no escape.  However, their untenable pattern of quarrelling and passionate reconciliations continued, requiring the help of friends to help them patch up their differences. Ruth had Cussen drive her around so she could spy on David, and at the same time Cussen was checking on them. He knew by now that they were meeting at the Rodney, but seems to have been so infatuated with Ruth that he went along with their liaison.

On February 6th, there was a major bust up in Cussens flat. Desmond was away at the time. David claimed Ruth tried to stab him and called his friends, Clive Gunnell and Ant, to the rescue. When the men arrived, they found Ruth with a black eye, covered in bruises and limping. David also had a black eye and was also limping. It must have been a whopper of a scrap. She had taken Davids car keys and would not let him go, at one time sitting in his car to prevent him leaving, and then lying in the road in front of Gunnells car, to prevent them escaping that way. Eventually, when she had exhausted all of her energy, and sobered up, the three men drove off and Ruth returned to Cussens flat.

Over the next twenty-four hours, Ruth had Desmond drive her around while she tried to track down David. They went to the Findlaters flat in Hampstead and then followed him down to the Magdala pub, a favourite drinking spot for David and his friends. They drove over to an address near Euston Station, trying to trace another woman David had mentioned to Ruth in one of their drunken brawls, and then to Penn, where Desmond confronted David, whose car they saw parked outside a pub in Gerrards Cross. Faced with the strong likelihood of a beating by Desmond, David retreated, colours flying, and headed back to London.

That afternoon, Ruth received a bunch of red carnations with a card that said, Sorry darling, I love you, David. Its hard to know whether the flowers came as an emissary of love or fear.

They met up later that night. David explained his violence was because of his frustration over Ruth sharing accommodation with Desmond.  Ruth convinced David they should move into their own flat, saying she could borrow the rent money from a friend. The friend of course, turned out to be Desmond, the ever-willing sponge waiting to be squeezed yet again. In return for his financial help, Ruth agreed to keep in touch, periodically cook for him, and so she kept a spare set of keys to Goodwood Court.

On February 9th, Ruth leased a flat at 44 Egerton Gardens, a street of high, red brick buildings across from the Brompton Oratory in Kensington, and she and David moved in as Mr & Mrs Ellis. On February 22nd, David and Ruth were rowing again over his infatuation with the married woman at Penn, and yet again Ruth finished up with a black eye and severe bruising across her shoulders.

Early in March, Ruth, David and Desmond attended the British Racing Drivers Club dinner dance that was held in the Hyde Park Hotel. Ruth alternated the night, dancing with David and Desmond. In the early hours of the morning, Ruth retired to her flat in a drunken stupor and when she woke up, David was sleeping beside her. She kicked him out of the flat, and for the next week spent most of her free time with Desmond. She had started a modelling course, paid for by Desmond, who also financed a set of new clothes, and he drove her to the modelling school each morning and then picked her up, when her course was over.

Ruth had now discovered that she was pregnant. The identity of the father was hard to determine; it could easily been any of a number of men, but Blakely and Cussen must have been the prime contenders.

By the end of March, Ruth had miscarried and had an abortion. She later claims this was exacerbated by yet another fight she had with David. This time, he had smacked her in the face with a clenched fist and then struck her a severe blow in the stomach. The Findlaters, particularly Carole, did not believe that David was necessarily the father. Ruth had after all been living with Desmond Cussen as well as sleeping with David.

David had entered the Emperor in a race meeting on April 2nd at Oulton Park near Chester. On Thursday March 31st, David, Ant and Ruth drove north to Cheshire. Ruth and David booked into a hotel as Mr & Mrs Blakely. David never got to race his car, as it broke down during a practice lap, and was a write-off for the main meeting.

On the Saturday night, David and Ruth had a party at their hotel, along with Ant and his wife Carole, who had come up on the Friday evening to watch the racing. It was a pretty miserable night, and Carole Findlater later recalled that Ruth acted like the Snow Queen. David had bitched and moaned continually since his car had broken down, levering most of the blame on Ruth telling her, Its all your fault, you jinxed me. Ruth had responded by saying, Ill stand so much from you David, you cannot go on walking over me forever. He had replied, Youll stand it because you love me.

Ruth, dejected, and ill from a cold she had caught, returned with the party to London on the Sunday night. She was sick and tired, not just from the cold but also she was still suffering the effects of her abortion. On the Monday, Desmond came to see her at her flat in Egerton Gardens. She was feverish and had a temperature of 104 degrees; he insisted she stay in bed, while he went to pick up Andy from his school and bring him back to London for the Easter holidays.

Later Ruth recollected, I used to be good company and fun to be with. David had turned me into a surly, miserable woman. I was growing to loathe him, he was so conceited and said all women loved him. He was so much in love with himself.

And so began the decisive week that would bring all the loose ends together and finally resolve the end of the affair between Ruth Ellis and David Blakely.

But will my heart be broken
When the night meets the morning sun?
So tell me now, and I wont ask again
Will you still love me in the morning?

Gerry Coffin and Carole King.

For almost nineteen months Ruth and David had been feeding off each other. Like sharks, they had to keep moving all the time, trying to satisfy a hunger and quench the thirsts for their sexual and emotional appetites. They were very definitely creatures of chronic dependence. Addicted to alcohol, addicted to nicotine, they were also sexual predators, feeding of each others shortcomings and weaknesses.

Although Ruth was a woman of questionable moral standards, using both David and Desmond as it suited her moods, there seems little doubt that she craved and longed for a “proper” relationship with Blakely, but found it impossible to reconcile her deep desire for a monogamous relationship with his intransigent sexual marauding. And so they scratched and fought like alley cats, until she reached the end of her tether.

It came quickly in that second week of April 1955.

Andy was sleeping on a camp bed in the same bedroom as Ruth who, ill with the delayed effects of her operation and hung over with a heavy cold, could not have been good company when David came visiting. He was late home on the Monday and Tuesday evening, telling Ruth he had been seeing people about the Emperor. On the Wednesday, he came home early, bringing to Ruth a photograph he had just had taken. It was a promotional photo for the Bristol Motor Companys works team. David had been selected to race in the Le Mans event again, this time on June 9th. He had endorsed the photograph: “To Ruth with all my love, David.”

They had arranged to go to the theatre on Thursday night, but David was delayed and instead they visited a cinema. Ruth later claimed that all through the movie David was nuzzling her, telling her how much he loved her.

On Friday 8th April, the beginning of the Easter long weekend, David left early in the morning, about ten oclock, saying he had a meeting with Ant to discuss options that were open on the Emperor. He said he would be home early. He had promised Ruth that he would not visit Ant at his home, without telling her. Ruth distrusted both the Findlaters, but in particular Carole.  David and Ruth had planned a day out on Saturday with Andy. Everything in the world seemed fine. Twelve hours later it had all turned to dust.

By 9.30 pm that night David had not returned to Egerton Gardens. Ruth rang the Findlaters. The first time she spoke to their 19-year-old nanny (Carole had given birth to a daughter, Francesca, in May 1954). She said there was no one at home. Later Ruth rang again and this time spoke to Ant. He said David was not there. Later in evidence, Ruth stated, “I knew at once that David was there, and they were laughing behind my back.”

Ruth had been riding a roller coaster for almost two years and now she knew it had stopped, perhaps forever. If only David had come to the telephone and spoken to her, it is likely she would have exhausted her pent up feelings, berated and abused him, and then gone back to loving him, as she had done so often in the past.

She wrote before her trial, “I just could not believe, after all I had been through, that David could be such an unmitigated cad as to treat me has he had. If only I had been able to speak to him and give vent to my feelings, I do not think any of this would have happened.”

Now it all changed. Psychologists know that there is a close homogeneity between love and hate. Ruth had loved David passionately and now she switched to hating him with the same emotional excess.

Throughout the rest of that evening, Ruth kept calling the Findlaters flat. Eventually, they removed the phone from its cradle. By midnight, Ruth was in a frantic and hysterical state. She called Desmond and he agreed to drive her to Tanza Road. When they arrived, she repeatedly rang the doorbell and hammered on the front door of number 29, but no one would answer. Ruth then set about smashing in the windows of Davids dark green Vanguard, a van that had been converted into a saloon. By now, it was about two in the morning of Saturday. Someone in the house called the police and an incident car from Hampstead Station arrived.

It is interesting to try to picture the scene in the street that chill, April morning. There was Ruth, screaming and yelling, abusing David and the Findlaters; there was Ant, in pyjamas and dressing gown, his hair mussed up from his disturbed sleep, hopping about trying to calm things down; there was the police, adopting their usual conciliatory approach to domestic incidents, and hoping like hell they wouldnt catch the back-end of some sudden, violent eruption. And there was Desmond, sitting in his big, black Ford Zodiac saloon, the very image of a benign benefactor.

The police eventually left after having calmed things down, but Ruth persisted in her demands to see David who, true to form, would be cowering somewhere, anywhere away from a potential source of violence. The Findlaters recalled the police, but by the time they had arrived, Desmond had coaxed Ruth into his car and driven off.

David was indeed staying at 29 Tanza Road. He had met up with Ant and Carole at the Magdala for drinks that Friday lunchtime. He told them, “Im supposed to be calling for Ruth at eight to-night. I cant stand it any longer, I want to get away from her.”

Carole had chided David, telling him, “that any man can leave any woman.”

In an amazingly well timed and prophetic statement, David had replied, “You dont know her, you dont know what she can do.” Within 60 hours, they would find out.

Ant and Carole persuaded David to stay with them over the Easter weekend. On Saturday morning, Ruth again telephoned the Findlaters address. The phone was lifted and then clicked down on her. Seething with anger and frustration, she went by taxi back into Hampstead and hid in the doorway of a house in Tanza Road, just down the street from number 29. She saw Ant and David come out of the house about ten oclock, inspect the damage she had done to the Vanguard and then drive off. She guessed, correctly, that they were heading into Mayfair to a garage owned by another of Davids motoring friends, Clive Gunnell. She waited a while and then, using a public telephone box, rang Findlaters’ number, only to have Ant hang up on her again.

Ruth returned to her flat in Egerton Gardens, made lunch for Andy and then packed him off to spend the day on his own at London Zoo in Regents Park. At about two oclock in the afternoon, Desmond drove her back yet again into Hampstead and dropped her off in Tanza Road. She had now convinced herself that David was having an affair with the nanny. A stout, buxom young woman of only nineteen, she was definitely not the prototype Blakely femme fatale. But by now, Ruth was losing control and was prepared to believe anything.

About four-thirty in the afternoon she saw the Findlaters, David and the nanny carrying the baby, leave the flat and drive away. Desmond picked her up and they drove back to her place. She fed Andy who had returned from his lonely expedition to the zoo, packed him off to bed, and then she had Desmond come around to pick her up. Their destination was yet again the northern suburb of Hampstead.

This was the fourth time in twenty-four hours she had made this pilgrimage to the house in Tanza Road. Although she had sighted David, she had not spoken to him since he had left her on Friday morning.

The Findlaters were hosting a party and the window of their second floor flat was open, voices drifting down into the dark, shadowy street. Consumed with jealousy and hate, she paced up and down the street, chain smoking, and no doubt ruminating on what had brought her to this junction in her sad and troubled life.

Because of David, she had lost her job. Because of David, she had lost the comfort and security of Desmond Cussens comfortable and expensive home at Goodwood Court. Because of David, she was broke. When she was arrested, she had six copper pennies in her handbag and her bank account was cleared out. She was sick and tired of waking up every morning feeling sick and tired; she had not slept for forty-eight hours. She was taking drugs — tranquillisers prescribed by Doctor Rees — and drinking heavily.

Eventually, Desmond persuaded her to go home and in the early hours of Sunday morning they returned to her flat. She would spend another restless and troubled night, fuelled by drugs and alcohol. By the breaking of the dawn, she would have made up her mind and committed herself to the only course of action she felt left open.

All of us are dwarfs mounted on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see further than they.
Bernard of Chartres 12th century theologian

On Easter Sunday, at about nine oclock, Ruth rang the Findlater flat for the final time. Eventually, Ant answered the telephone. Ruth said to him, “I hope you are having an enjoyable holiday, because you have ruined mine.” Ant hung up on her without replying.

In her trial evidence, Ruth stated that she could not recall how she spent her Sunday. She made Andy go to bed at about seven-thirty in the evening and at some stage during the day she took down all of Davids photographs, replacing them with ones of herself. She later said, “I was very upset and I had a peculiar idea I wanted to kill David.” She was no doubt drinking, more and more often; it was now Pernod, the deadly French apéritif.

At Tanza Road, the occupants were up and about making breakfast, dosing themselves with aspirin to ward off their hangovers, and bracing themselves for another day of attack and abuse from Ruth. At lunchtime, Carole, Ant and David met up with Clive Gunnell at the Magdala for drinks and it was agreed Clive would spend the evening with them at the flat. That afternoon, they all went up to Hampstead Heath and visited the Easter fairground which was in full swing there. David wandered around with his godchild, Francesca, perched on his shoulders. He was happy and relaxed and seemed to be enjoying his freedom from Ruth.

She was spending the afternoon and evening with Desmond, tanking up on Pernod. It was her third straight day with little or no sleep. Her frail, tiny body was fuelled on alcohol, nicotine, drugs and an aching desire for revenge on the man who had walked over her just once too often.

Later in the day, David and his friends returned to the Findlaters’ place and spent a quiet evening listening to gramophone records, drinking and smoking the hours away. They no doubt discussed many things. Ruth, and her frenzied activities throughout the last forty-eight hours would probably have featured prominently.

At about 8.45 pm, Carole ran out of cigarettes and David agreed to pop down to the Magdala and get her a fresh supply. Clive went along to help bring back some beer to top up their dwindling stock and they drove off in Davids car. The pub was less than a mile away, a good, brisk ten-minute walk for two fit young men, but they drove there nevertheless. Had they gone on foot, it is conceivable that the rest of the nights events would have unfolded differently. Had Ruth seen the car outside the house in Tanza Road, she may well not have confronted David, but driven off with Cussen and cooled down. Then again she might have shot not just David but anyone else who appeared on the scene, particularly Carole and Ant, who she had come to loathe.

Sir Isaac Newton once said, “I do not know what I appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea-shore…whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.” 

For Ruth, the time had come to cross that great ocean and finally come face to face with her own personal demons. Thirty minutes later, David Blakely was lying dead, his body torn and ravaged by gunshot wounds. Ruth herself had only thirteen weeks and two days before she herself would pay the ultimate price then required by the law to atone for her actions.

Life being what it is, we dream of revenge.

Paul Gaugin.

There were too many loose ends. 

.38 Smith & Wesson
revolver
(Scotland Yard Black
Museum)

Where did the gun come from? How could she use it with such lethal effect? How did Ruth get to Hampstead that fateful night? What was her emotional and mental state when she fired the deadly shots into David Blakely? Did her lawyers do everything to save her?  Why did she not give thought to what would happen to Andy? Was Ruth really trying to attain what in America is called “consensual execution,” a form of institutional suicide?

Ruth had told the police that she had acquired the revolver three years earlier in payment for a drinking debt at the club. Some sources claim it came from an American soldier. The gun itself probably found its way into England during the war — the bullets had been manufactured in 1941.  Yet none of Ruths friends could recall her with the weapon, particularly her best friend Jacqueline Dryer. She had helped Ruth move a number of times, including the shift from the flat above the Little Club to Goodwood Court. She would certainly have noticed something as foreign an object as a revolver as she helped Ruth pack her belongings.

Andy later said that he had seen Cussen oil and clean the gun and give it to Ruth when he was with his mother that Sunday afternoon they had visited Desmond at Goodwood Court. For some reason, the police failed to follow up on this, and another lead.

In January, Ruth had started to take French lessons, coached by a senior teacher from the French Institute, Madame Mare-Therese Harris. Ruth had wanted to surprise David with her linguistic skills, when she accompanied him to the Le Mans 24-hour race in June. On one of her visits to Goodwood Court, (Desmond Cussen was of course paying the bill,) the tutor had seen Andy open a drawer of a writing desk to reveal two handguns. When the police investigated her report on this, Cussen had showed them an air-pistol and a starting-gun that fired only blanks. Although the police showed these to Madame Harris, which she did not identify, incredibly they did not allow her to see the murder weapon. Equally incredibly, the police did not interview Andy.

How was Ruth able to fire four, possibly five shots into her target? Even at a distance of a few feet, handguns are notoriously unreliable. Here, was a small, frail, emotionally distraught woman, wielding a heavy, cumbersome, double-action revolver that needed to be cocked each time it was discharged. The recoil alone would have been enough to throw her aim off target. Remember Carole Findlaters description at their first meeting,”. small wrists, small ankles, almost shrimp like.” Ruths hands were tiny, and they had to contain a large, cumbersome, bucking weapon, recoiling each time she pulled the trigger.

She must have had prior shooting experience. Two different sources claim that Desmond Cussen had taken her for target practice and shown her how to use the gun: once to a wood near Gerrards Cross, and once into Epping Forrest. In fact Cussen had himself admitted to John Bickford, Ruths solicitor at her trial, that he had driven her to a wood and shown her how to fire the gun into a tree.

Ruth had insisted that she had taken a taxi to Hampstead the night of the shooting. The police never followed this lead up either. The trip from Knightsbridge to Hampstead is over ten miles and on a quiet Easter Sunday, a cab driver would surely have remembered someone as distinctive and as disturbed as Ruth obviously was that night.

Duncan Webb, the famous English journalist, claimed in an article in the People that Ruth had made a pact with the man who supplied the gun and the transportation to Hampstead, not to reveal his name, provided he safeguarded the future of her son.

In fact, Ruth made a last minute statement, signed and dated 12.30pm, on the afternoon of July 12th, implicating Desmond Cussen. Ruths lawyers started a feverish attempt to get a delay on the execution based on this fresh evidence, but it was to no avail. Cussen could not be tracked down for further questioning and both the police and Home Office dropped the search. 

The night that she shot Blakely, Ruth Ellis was undoubtedly in a highly unstable condition. It is obvious that she was temporarily insane with jealousy and humiliation, and the effects of alcohol destroyed her sense of responsibility. In the months leading up to that Easter week-end, she was clearly an alcoholic and even a few drinks would have induced her into a sense of self-righteous belief that she was unquestionably right in what she was doing.

Melford Stevenson QC, her leading lawyer at the trial, summed up all the agony and conflict in her tortured relationship with David. Addressing the jury, he said,

“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.”

Ruths execution made news around the world. One Paris newspaper remarked editorially, that it symbolised “a pitiless legal system which, alone in the world, refuses to recognise the human sentiments of life.” In America, there was unanimous agreement that Ruth should not have hung. In Australia, a newspaper in Melbourne carried an article “Hanging shames Britain in the eyes of the civilised world.” The Aftonbladget in Sweden thundered: “The continuance of the death sentence in England is a burden for Englands good name in the world.”

On Sunday July 17th, the London Observer in its leader said, “Consider the task of explaining to the late Ruth Ellis ten-year old son what has happened. This boy, who is fatherless, has had something done to him that is so brutal it is difficult to imagine. We should realise that it is we who have done it.”

The concept of the crime passionnel seems foreign to the British, foreign newspapers observed. One French reporter wrote: “Passion in England, except for cricket and betting, is always regarded as a shameful disease.”

With the execution, the story was now told.

To paraphrase the famous quotation from Winstone Churchill, when he was trying to describe Russia, the relationship between Ruth Ellis, David Blakely and Desmond Cussen was “A riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Then again, perhaps it was just a simple love story gone wrong.

In 1933, another lonely, disturbed and emotionally damaged woman died. She committed suicide and left the man who deserted her, a final message. She was an American poet called Sarah Teasdale, and this is what she wrote:

When I am dead, and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain drenched hair,
Tho you should lean above me broken- hearted,
I shall not care.
I shall have peace as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough.
And I shall be more silent and cold- hearted
Than you are now.

I wonder at times, maybe Ruth would have liked that as an epitaph.

If you are interested in this story of Ruth Ellis, I recommend these books for further reading:

Hancock, Robert. Ruth Ellis. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1963.

Hoggett, Renee & Barry, Paul. Daughters of Cain. Bath: Chivers Press. 1956.

Fido, Martin. Deadly Jealousy. London: Headline Book Publishing. Co. 1993.

Goodman, Jonathon & Pringle, Patrick. The Trial of Ruth Ellis. Bath: Chivers Press. 1974.

Honeycomb, Gordon. More Murders of the Black Museum. London: Hutchinson. 1993.

Marks, Laurence & Van Den Bergh, Tony. Ruth Ellis. London: McDonald & James 1977.

Crimes of Passion. London: Treasure Press. 1983.

Ellis, Georgie. Ruth Ellis, My Mother. London: Smith Gryphon. 1995.

Webb, Duncan. Line up for Crime. London: Frederick Muller. 1956.