Episode
The Last Woman to Be Hanged in England : Ruth Ellis
- Podcast
- Mysteries and Histories
- Published
- Aug 14, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2380
- Processing state
not_requested
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Summary
On Easter Sunday in 1955, Ruth Ellis waited outside a Hampstead pub for her lover, racing driver David Blakely, then shot him dead in the street as he walked toward his car. She confessed almost immediately, but the story behind that final act was tangled with years of domestic abuse, coercion, infidelity, violence, and a legal system that gave the 28-year-old nightclub manager just one route to the gallows. Her trial lasted only days, the jury deliberated for less than half an hour, and just three months after the shooting, Ruth was hanged at Holloway Prison, becoming the last woman executed in Britain. More than 70 years later, she received a conditional posthumous pardon, not because she was declared innocent, but because her case came to represent something far darker: how the death penalty could erase a woman’s life story as easily as it ended her life.