U.K. conditionally pardons woman under death penalty for killing abusive spouse

Platinum Blonde Model Ruth Ellis is shown in 1955 photo. (AP Photo)

LONDON (AP) — The last woman to be executed in Britain, for gunning down her abusive lover outside a London pub more than 70 years ago, has been posthumously granted a conditional pardon, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy said Wednesday.

Ruth Ellis, a 28-year-old single mother and nightclub hostess, was hanged on July 13, 1955, for the murder of race-car driver David Blakely. She shot him outside the Magdala pub in the Hampstead neighborhood on April 10, 1955.

“While the pardon does not claim she was innocent of killing David Blakely, it replaces the death penalty with a sentence of life imprisonment to recognize a profound injustice in this exceptional case,” Lammy said.

The killing and trial caused a sensation, and became a cause celebre after she was sentenced to die. When she went to the gallows, 1,000 people held a silent vigil outside Holloway Prison in north London.

Her case is believed to have changed British law. At trial, she was not allowed to argue that she acted because of the emotional impact of abuse. Two years after the hanging, Parliament passed a law allowing a diminished responsibility defense.

The pardon was sought by her grandchildren, who have long fought to reduce her conviction because the repeated sexual, emotional and physical abuse Ellis endured was not considered during the trial or afterward, when she could have been granted a reprieve from the death penalty.

“Justice has finally been done," Laura Enston, a granddaughter, said in a statement. “This pardon does not undo what happened 71 years ago. It does not restore the lives that were broken — the children left behind, the years lost. But it says, formally and finally, that Ruth should not have been executed; that the justice system failed her. That acknowledgment matters profoundly to our family."

Lawyers representing the family applied for the pardon last year by presenting evidence that Ellis likely suffered from what became known as “battered woman syndrome.”

Ellis and witnesses, including her friends and doctors, said Blakely threatened to kill her and she was covered in bruises from assaults in public and being pushed down stairs, the Mishcon de Reya law firm said. They said she was once struck so hard in the abdomen that it caused a miscarriage.

Jurors in her case, however, were told not to consider that she had been “badly treated by her lover.” The trial lasted just over a day, and the jury reached its verdict in less than half an hour.

If the law allowing a diminished responsibility defense had been in place at the time of the trial, lawyers who sought the pardon said Ellis at most would have been convicted of manslaughter and not been sentenced to death.

The U.K. suspended the death penalty in 1965 and abolished it in 1970.

Enston said her mother and uncle, Ellis' two children, never recovered after the execution.

“My uncle took his own life; my mother’s trauma left her unable to be the parent we needed," Enston said. “The shadow of Ruth’s execution has fallen across two generations. We have carried shame that was never ours to bear.”

The case continues to draw attention in popular culture and in local history.

It was the subject of a 1985 feature film, “Dance with a Stranger,” and a miniseries that aired on ITV last year called “A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story.”

Visitors to the pub where the killing took place are often pointed to two indentations on the tile wall outside that are said to be bullet holes from the shooting.

But others have questioned their authenticity.

Neil Titley, an actor who researched the history of the pub, told the Camden New Journal in 2017 that he was present in the 1990s when a former owner who wanted to capitalize on the Magdala’s notoriety had the holes drilled in the wall to draw tourists.

Brian Melley, The Associated Press