Ruth Ellis (née Neilson; 9 October 1926 – 13 July 1955) was a Welsh nightclub hostess and convicted murderer who became the last woman to be executed in the United Kingdom following the fatal shooting of her lover, David Blakely.

In her teens, Ellis had entered the world of nightclub hostessing, which led to a chaotic life that included various relationships with men.

On Easter Sunday, 10 April 1955, Ellis shot Blakely dead outside The Magdala public house in Hampstead, London.

At her trial in June 1955, Ellis was found guilty of premeditated murder and was sentenced to death; on 13 July she was hanged at Holloway Prison.

Her mother, Elisaberta (Bertha) Goethals, was a Belgian war refugee; her father, Arthur Hornby, was a cellist from Manchester who played on Atlantic liners.

[citation needed] Arthur's twin brother Charles was killed in 1928, when Ruth was 2 years old, after his bicycle collided with a steam wagon.

Arthur moved to London on his own shortly after, accepting a job offer for the live-in position of caretaker-chauffeur for Porn & Dunwoody Ltd., a lift manufacturer.

In 1941, Ruth befriended Edna Turvey, the girlfriend of her older brother Julian, who was on leave from service in the Royal Navy.

[10] By the end of the 1940s, Ruth had become a nightclub hostess in Hampstead through nude-modelling work, which paid significantly more than her previous jobs.

[10] On 8 November 1950, Ruth married 41-year-old George Johnston Ellis, a divorced dentist with two sons, at the register office in Tonbridge, Kent.

In 1951, while she had been four months pregnant, Ruth appeared, uncredited, as a beauty queen in the Rank film Lady Godiva Rides Again.

Ruth became pregnant for a fourth time but had her second abortion, feeling she could not reciprocate the level of commitment Blakely showed towards their relationship.

[10] Ruth then began seeing Desmond Cussen, a former Royal Air Force pilot who had flown Lancaster bombers during the Second World War, and who had taken up accountancy after leaving the service.

He was appointed a director of the family business Cussen & Co., a wholesale and retail tobacconist with outlets in London and South Wales.

Ruth pursued Blakely as he started to run around the car, firing a second shot which caused him to collapse onto the pavement.

While on remand, Ruth was examined by psychiatrist Duncan Whittaker for the defence and by Alexander Dalzell on behalf of the Home Office.

The only question put to Ruth by prosecutor Christmas Humphreys was, "When you fired the revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do?

However, at her relatives' urging her solicitor, John Bickford, wrote a seven-page letter to Home Secretary Gwilym Lloyd George setting out the grounds for reprieve.

Ruth dismissed Bickford (who had been chosen by Cussen) and asked to see Leon Simmons, the clerk to solicitor Victor Mishcon (whose law firm had previously represented her in her divorce proceedings).

Following a two-hour interview, Mishcon and Simmons went to the Home Office; the Permanent Secretary, Sir Frank Newsam, was summoned back to London and ordered the head of Criminal Investigation Department (CID) to check the story.

"[30][better source needed] Ruth's case caused widespread controversy at the time, evoking exceptionally intense press and public interest to the point that it was discussed by the Cabinet.

[35] On the day of Ruth's execution, columnist Cassandra of the Daily Mirror attacked her sentence, writing: "The one thing that brings stature and dignity to mankind and raises us above the beasts will have been denied her — pity and the hope of ultimate redemption".

[36] The novelist Raymond Chandler, then living in Britain, wrote a scathing letter to the Evening Standard referring to what he described as "the medieval savagery of the law".

[39] In 1969, Ellis's mother, Bertha Neilson, was found unconscious in a gas-filled room in her flat in Hemel Hempstead; she never fully recovered and did not speak coherently again.

Ruth's son Andy, who was aged 10 at the time of his mother's execution, took his own life, in a bedsit in 1982, shortly after desecrating her grave.

The Court firmly rejected the appeal, although it made clear that it could rule only on the conviction based on the law as it stood in 1955, and not on whether she should have been executed.

A wrong on that scale, if it had occurred, might even today be a matter of general public concern, but in this case, there was no question that Mrs Ellis was other than the killer and the only issue was the precise crime of which she was guilty.

The Ruth Ellis story was dramatized in the Murder Maps series of documentaries on the Yesterday Channel on 2 November 2017.

[50] The case was re-examined by film-maker Gillian Pachter in the 2018 BBC Four documentary series The Ruth Ellis Files: A Very British Crime Story.

[30][51] In the season 1 finale of Deadly Women, Ruth Ellis is portrayed by Carissa Singleton while murder victim David Blakely is played by Jimmy Aschner.