Ruth Ellis and the new evidence that could have saved her
She was convicted for murdering in cold blood but, Gillian Pachter says, a jury today would disagree
For the past year, I’ve held the image in my mind of a small bedsit, located on Sale Place, near London’s Paddington Station. I have no idea if it’s still there. But a picture of that room started me on a journey that has taken me a year to complete: an investigation into the case of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, in 1955. The result is The Ruth Ellis Files: A Very British Crime Story, my three-part series for BBC Four.
It was outside the recently closed Magdala Pub in Hampstead, north London, at around 9pm on Easter Sunday, April 10 1955, that Ruth shot six bullets at her lover, David Blakely, four of which hit their target. The murder instantly captured the public’s imagination.
Ruth was a nightclub hostess from a working-class background, whose ambitions led her to the bright lights of London’s Soho and Mayfair, where she sought to be a blonde bombshell in the vein of Diana Dors. When that failed, she dabbled in singing and soft porn, eventually becoming a hostess, and then manageress in the post-war drinking clubs.
It was there she met the two upper-middle-class men that sealed her fate: Desmond Cussen, a besotted sugardaddy who housed her and paid for her young son, Andre, to go to boarding school, and David Blakely, a racing driver who, despite being from a wealthy family, lived off Ruth.
Class prejudice and misogyny were threaded throughout the police investigation, trial and decision not to reprieve Ruth, whose inconvenient status as a sexually available single mother sealed her fate. But Ruth was not a passive player in how she was perceived and caricatured as a femme fatale. She bleached her hair to look like Marilyn Monroe and wore heavy make-up and stilettos. And on the night of the murder, she carried a .38 Smith and Wesson.
Her case was not, as it may have appeared, just tabloid fodder: it helped usher in the defence of diminished responsibility in England in 1957, two years after Ruth’s death. This set Britain on the road to abolition, and capital punishment would come to an end in the mid-sixties.
More than 60 years since Ruth’s death, I wondered whether my investigation could really turn up anything new. That question was answered when I heard the voice of Ruth’s son, Clare Andrea Mccallum, whom Ruth called Andre.
I met a woman called Monica Weller, who had co-authored a book with Ruth’s sister Muriel, who died in 2013 after a long and ultimately unsuccessful fight to appeal against her sister’s verdict. Muriel had given Weller a cassette tape, recovered from Andre’s bedsit, after he took his own life in 1982 at the age of 37. On that tape was an extraordinary conversation. As an adult, Andre had tracked down Christmas Humphreys, the prosecuting barrister whose cross-examination of Ruth took the form of a single question: “Mrs Ellis, when you fired that revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do?” To which she had answered: “It was obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.”
Andre felt his mother’s case had been mishandled, and was dismayed by Humphreys’s dismissal of her as “cold-blooded”. That phrase inspired my investigation. As a term associated with murder, it dates to the regulation of duelling in the 16th century. If you killed your opponent in the heat of battle, that was not murder. But if you went away and prepared your weapon and came back and killed him, that was murder in cold blood.
By pointing to this phrase in that tape, Andre had gone to the heart of the issue with Ruth Ellis: was she in her right mind when she killed David Blakely? In a modern court, would we not call this manslaughter?
I was surprised to discover that the police had never spoken to Andre, despite the fact that he was living with his mother at the time of the murder. Today, he would be considered a key witness. This cassette, which contained a far-ranging and profound conversation about Ruth, the murder, the men in her life, and Andre’s experience, turned out to contain key information that, had it been known to the police at the time, might have changed the course of the investigation.
Andre asks, with regard to her mental health: “Did you not feel there was something odd about this person that should have been investigated?” And to Humphreys’s denial, says: “Well she lived on the borderline of insanity. I knew her.” This inspired me to look closely at how she may have been misunderstood in the early days of forensic psychiatry. He talks of the night that his mother left him to kill David: “Maybe she wanted to die, maybe she wanted to commit suicide. […] I never saw her. She just put me to bed and left me. She never wrote me a letter, no contact after that.”
Andre was torn between loving and hating Ruth, the way that Ruth both loved and hated her victim. Andre’s words helped me investigate whether Ruth got a fair investigation and trial in 1955, and whether she’d get a different one now. But just as importantly, he helped me discover a real, complex person – behind the femme fatale.