Thoughts on things...

3: Ruth Ellis

Ruth Ellis, convicted of shooting her faithless lover David Blakeley in 1955. The thirteenth - and last - woman to be executed in the 20th century.

I do wonder with these capital crimes. How much the horror of the ending can confuse our judgment.

To begin: the brief facts. Ruth, 28, and David, 25, had been lovers, on and off, for about two years. The relationship was an extremely turbulent one. On the evening of Easter Sunday, 10 April, Ruth left her Knightsbridge service flat - where she was living with her son - and took a taxi to Hampstead. David was staying there with friends. In the early hours of Saturday, alight with frustration at his refusal to see her, she had knocked in the windows of his car.

Now, on Sunday, she followed David as he drove to the nearby Magdala pub for beer and cigarettes. When he emerged, she fired six bullets at him from a Smith and Wesson. Four hit their target.

In her short, stark police statement Ruth said: ‘I am guilty. I am rather confused’. Yet her crime was almost terrifyingly simple, so much so that the jury at her trial was out for fourteen minutes.

A detective concluded that she was ‘coldly premeditated’. Which is both true and not true at all.