SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
For this next story, we're going to take you back in time to a 1950s true crime story. It's about murder, execution by hanging and legal mistakes that led Britain to abolish its death penalty. NPR's London correspondent Lauren Frayer begins the story in a surprising place, her local pub.
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LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: One day over a pint with friends, I notice a black-and-white photo on the wall of my local, the Magdala pub in North London. The photo looks like Marilyn Monroe, but the caption says, Ruth Ellis. I Google and go down a rabbit hole.
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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Class, sex and death - the perfect story.
FRAYER: Ellis was a model, a night club manager and occasional sex worker, a working-class, single mother of two, and a murderer.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: On June the 21, Ruth Ellis was found guilty of murder at the Old Bailey.
FRAYER: In 1955, she became the last woman ever executed in Britain...
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: On July the 13, she was executed...
FRAYER: ...Hanged three weeks after being convicted of a murder that occurred right here at this pub.
ALEX HUNT: These are the old bullet holes.
FRAYER: So this is the outer wall of the pub, and it looks like a bullet hole here.
HUNT: Yeah.
FRAYER: One, two, three.
Pub manager Alex Hunt shows me exactly where, on Easter Sunday, 1955, Ellis shot dead her aristocrat race car driver boyfriend, David Blakely.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) We've just seen the body of David Blakely at Hamstead Mortuary.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) David.
FRAYER: The crime has been immortalized in TV shows and movies. But in the 70 years since Ellis was put to death, this country has changed the way it sees her.
CAROL ANN LEE: It's a completely different story to the one that I think, you know, we'd been led to believe.
FRAYER: Carol Ann Lee wrote a book called "A Fine Day For A Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story."
LEE: There are very detailed notes that have been left behind by the prison service, which shed a completely different light on who she was.
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FRAYER: I went to see those notes at Britain's National Archives.
JESSAMY CARLSON: These are the working court files.
FRAYER: The Crown against Ellis, comma, Ruth...
CARLSON: Yeah.
FRAYER: ...Twenty-eight. She was 28.
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FRAYER: Curator-historian Jessamy Carlson wheels in a trolley piled high with yellowing documents - detectives' notes, court transcripts and crime scene photos.
Oh, there's a warning contents may cause distress.
CARLSON: Yeah, from the coroner.
FRAYER: Photos of the victim, Blakely, outside the pub in a pool of blood.
Bullet, revolver.
CARLSON: Yeah, all prosecution evidence. Her confession is included in these files, that she was very clear in her own mind that this was something she has done.
FRAYER: Ellis admitted it from the start.
LEE: She did take responsibility for the fact that she had shot David.
FRAYER: Author Carol Ann Lee again.
LEE: She wrote to his mother and said, you know, I will die, and you should feel that his death has been, you know, reciprocated in that sense.
FRAYER: So it was an easy case for prosecutors, who portrayed Ellis as a hysterical, jealous, jilted woman who shot her lover after he tried to break up with her.
LEE: Someone shouted, blonde tart, as Ruth walked into the courtroom.
FRAYER: A jury convicted her after deliberating just 20 minutes. But there is other information in these files which never came out at trial, Lee says.
LEE: There was this horrific abuse going on in the relationship. In those last few weeks, he beat her so badly that she lost her baby, the baby that she was carrying to him, and he knew she was pregnant.
FRAYER: Ellis may have been suffering from postpartum depression, even psychosis. On the stand, she had bruises all over her body. Nowadays, killing your abuser can sometimes be seen legally as a form of self-defense. But Carlson, the archivist, says that in 1955...
CARLSON: People were aware that domestic violence went on, but it's not legislated for in the same way. There is no recognition really of the impact that those experiences might have on an individual.
FRAYER: Lee, the author says there's even more evidence that the jury never heard, about an alleged accomplice named Desmond Cussen.
LEE: Desmond is really kind of the black hole where this whole story is concerned.
FRAYER: Like Blakely, Desmond Cussen was also a patron of the nightclub where Ellis worked and a rival suitor.
LEE: He was very well to-do, wanted to marry her, wanted to look after Andre, Ruth's son, who was 10 in 1955, at the time of the murder. She did have a relationship with him, but she didn't love him. The attraction just wasn't what it was with David.
FRAYER: If there is any jealous jilted lover in this story, it's Cussen. He allegedly coached Ellis to kill Blakely, his rival for her affection.
LEE: He gave Ruth the gun. He taught her how to shoot it. He took her to the Magdala that night to kill David.
FRAYER: Now, Ellis told her lawyers this but swore them to secrecy. She didn't want to implicate Cussen because he'd promised to take care of her son. So when Cussen was called to testify...
LEE: He was literally in the witness box for - I think it was - certainly was no more than 20 minutes. And he was asked virtually nothing.
FRAYER: And so Ellis, silent, was sentenced to die. One of her lawyers, Victor Mishcon, recalled in a TV interview how steely Ellis was when he visited her on death row.
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VICTOR MISHCON: She stood up and, like almost a gracious hostess, said how kind it was of us to be there.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Did she think she was going to die the next day?
MISHCON: Oh, indeed, she did.
FRAYER: After Ellis died, Cussen did not take care of her son. Instead, he moved to Australia, where he gave just one interview before he died, denying any role in this murder. But someone else corroborated the account that the murder weapon came from Cussen, that he coached Ellis on how to use it and drove her to the pub that night. That someone was an eyewitness, Ellis' 10-year-old son, Andre. Police didn't interview him until after his mother was executed, and that haunted him all his life.
LAURA ENSTON: So he had real challenges with his mental health.
FRAYER: Laura Enston is Ruth Ellis' granddaughter. She describes a cycle of trauma that began with this 1955 crime and runs down through her family. Her earliest memories are of shame, trying to hide her relation to Ellis.
ENSTON: I just felt a bit terrorized by her. I constantly got, in the playground, you know, your grandmother's a murderer, you know, she's a prostitute. And, you know, girls at school - there's a game called Hangman. They'd sketch that out and push it - the paper - towards me and what have you.
FRAYER: I visited Enston at her home in northern England, where we paged through family photos.
ENSTON: A modeling photo of Ruth.
FRAYER: Oh, wow.
ENSTON: So this is a picture here of my mum, Georgina, with Ruth's mother, Bertha.
FRAYER: Oh, wow.
ENSTON: Yeah.
FRAYER: This is a real story about women, isn't it, you know?
ENSTON: A hundred percent. And I think for me, I've been really keen to break the cycle. There's sort of a tragic theme that runs through my family, and I have two girls.
FRAYER: To break the cycle, Enston has applied for a posthumous pardon for Ellis. It's not that she didn't do it.
ENSTON: No, not at all. Not at all. You know, she killed him. Fact. But it's all the circumstances around it.
FRAYER: The abuse she suffered, the baby she lost, her mental state and a possible accomplice.
ENSTON: There was so much more at play here. You know, she wasn't just on trial for murder. She was on trial for everything that she represented.
FRAYER: A working-class woman who murdered an upper-class man, a single mom with children by two different men, a nightclub entrepreneur who did sex work - she's referred to in court documents as promiscuous, the author Lee notes.
LEE: Well, you never hear a man being referred to as promiscuous in court. You would only hear that if it was somebody who was gay or a female.
FRAYER: A posthumous conditional pardon would not erase Ellis's conviction, but it would declare her execution unjust, having been influenced by social prejudice. Lawyer Grace Houghton is handling this pardon, and she reckons Ellis would have survived if she'd been tried just two years later.
GRACE HOUGHTON: The situation changed in 1957, and I think Ruth's case was integral for that change in the law.
FRAYER: The Homicide Act of 1957 introduced a distinction between capital and noncapital murder, more discretion in sentencing and something called the defense of diminished responsibility.
HOUGHTON: But essentially, it allows a defendant to argue that they shouldn't be held fully responsible for the murder because of some abnormality of the mind. The defendant is less culpable, so it often reduces the verdict from murder to manslaughter.
FRAYER: Houghton has been hired by Ellis' grandchildren, but her firm, Mishcon de Reya, has a special connection. It was founded by the late Victor Mishcon, that lawyer who visited Ellis in prison and recalled her steely grace there. Until his death, age 90, he, too, was haunted.
HOUGHTON: He said that it's one of his biggest regrets, that he wasn't able to get a reprieve and to stay the execution of Ruth Ellis.
FRAYER: On July 13, 1955, protesters gathered outside London's Holloway prison, which previously housed suffragettes.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: For the hundreds who waited at Holloway Jail on execution morning...
FRAYER: Inside the jail, when the clock struck 9 a.m., Ellis was hanged. The executioner called her the bravest prisoner he had ever put to death.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: But Britain's conscience was uneasy.
FRAYER: Afterward, the executioner himself stopped supporting the death penalty. Ellis' case not only changed homicide laws, it also led Britain to suspend its death penalty in 1965 and then abolish it altogether. The final step now, says Ellis' granddaughter, Enston, is a pardon.
ENSTON: I'm doing it for Ruth. I'm doing it for my kids. I'm doing it for every woman who's experienced misogyny, discrimination at the hands of the justice system.
FRAYER: The pardon is now on the desk of Britain's secretary of state for justice.
CARLSON: Records are moving around public spaces. They aren't locked away.
FRAYER: Back at the National Archives, historian Jessamy Carlson says, this is exactly why countries keep court records.
CARLSON: You can go back and look for these things and make decisions yourselves. In the Ruth Ellis files, you can read through and draw your own conclusions. The world has changed a great deal in the last 70 years.
FRAYER: You can find mistakes in history, she says, and possibly do something about them. Lauren Frayer, NPR News, London. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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