For years, I have been fascinated by the case of Ruth Ellis, the last woman executed in Britain. A former nightclub manager with platinum hair and a sultry gaze, she was often compared to Marilyn Monroe. On Easter Sunday, 1955, she shot dead her lover, racing driver David Blakely, outside a pub in Hampstead. A jury found her guilty of premeditated murder in twenty-three minutes, and she was hanged at Holloway Prison thirteen weeks later.
At the time, the press portrayed Ruth as a cold-blooded killer. I always felt something was missing from that story, and I was curious about the woman behind the tabloid headlines. For many years, I pushed her to the back of my mind because she didn't seem to belong among my usual subjects. I write about trailblazing women in history: pioneers, rebels, artists and survivors, who dared to live on their own terms. They were brave, brilliant, complex – and far too often overlooked. Ruth, I assumed, was more one-dimensional. She was certainly better known. But she refused to leave my imagination, taking up more and more space, until I could no longer resist the urge to tell her story, from her point of view.
So I began to research her life. To my surprise, I discovered a trailblazer: a single mother of two who ran a successful business and became London’s youngest nightclub manager. Ruth had everything it took to be a first-class hostess: glamour, intelligence, warmth and a core of disenchantment with life. She was a modern woman living at a time when women were expected to return to the roles of wife and mother after the freedoms they had gained during the Second World War. Ruth refused to conform.
Born in North Wales in 1926, she came from a working-class family. Her father, Arthur Hornby, earned his living as a cellist accompanying silent films. Her mother, Elisabertha Goethals, had fled Belgium as a refugee and was a domestic servant when the couple first met.
The introduction of sound films meant that Arthur lost his job. As the family’s circumstances worsened, his behaviour became increasingly violent towards his wife and children. Ruth’s sister, Muriel Jakubait, later claimed that their father had raped her and had also sexually abused Ruth. These allegations have never been independently verified. But even setting them aside, it seems clear that Ruth was a complex, troubled woman – ambitious and entrepreneurial, yet repeatedly drawn to abusive men.
In 1953, while managing a club in Knightsbridge, she began a relationship with David Blakely. Though charming and handsome, he was unreliable, unfaithful and incapable of holding down a steady job. What followed was two years of escalating cruelty. He beat her regularly and threated to kill her. Once, he punched her in the stomach so hard that she miscarried their child. Their relationship was a cycle of violence, reconciliation and jealousy, complicated further by Desmond Cussen, a former RAF pilot who was in love with Ruth and watched the whole thing unravel. On April 10, 1955, after a day of heavy drinking, it was Cussen who handed her a loaded .38 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver and drove her to the Magdala Pub, where she shot Blakely dead.
Her trial was deeply flawed. Her defence, led by Melford Stevenson, chose not to explore her history of horrific abuse. I suspect this was because of the class difference between Ruth and David, who had been to public school, at a time when such divisions were ingrained. Even her appearance worked against her: her own lawyer feared the jury would take her platinum hair and heavy makeup as evidence of a lack of remorse.
The trial focused on her transgressions, not her suffering – and in the eyes of the court, there were many. She was mother to two children by different men, married to neither. She was a working-class woman who defied the accepted boundaries of sex, class and respectability. She broke every rule. She embodied the sum of post-war fears about class and female independence, and she was executed as a warning to other women not to transgress traditional roles.
Her case became a catalyst in the campaign against capital punishment. Two years after her execution, diminished responsibility entered English law. Capital punishment was abolished in 1965, the same year Holloway’s death row, where Ruth spent her final days, was demolished. Ruth Ellis was a trailblazer in life and in death. Perhaps I had sensed this all along, and this was why I was drawn to her.
On the 8th of July of this year, King Charles granted Ruth a conditional posthumous pardon. Laura Enston, her granddaughter, said: “We hope Ruth’s story serves as a lasting reminder that the justice system must reckon with the abuse that drives women to the edge – and must never be afraid to acknowledge when it has got things wrong.”
Ruth’s pardon reflects how much our understanding of domestic abuse, coercive control and criminal responsibility has changed in the seventy-one years since her execution. But it also highlights that the criminal justice system still fails women who commit crimes in self-defence after prolonged periods of domestic abuse.
As recently as 2023, Joanne Moran was convicted of the murder of her abusive partner with a single stab wound after he threatened to have her fourteen-year-old son killed. She was jailed for life with a minimum tariff of twenty-two years. In the same year, Kamila Ahmed, twenty-four years old, was given a minimum sentence of twenty-three years for stabbing her boyfriend during a violent argument. On arrest, her face was heavily bruised and her hands were skinned from trying to hold onto the carpet as her boyfriend pulled her body along the floor during an attack. The list goes on.
This is why I write about trailblazing women: to shine a light on the past, and to ask what has changed, and what still needs to.
A Fatal Love by Louisa Treger (Bloomsbury Publishing) Published on 26 August 2026
Following Ruth Ellis’ long-awaited posthumous conditional pardon in July 2026, never has there been a more compelling moment to revisit the woman behind one of Britain's most enduring legal cases. It is Easter Sunday in 1955 and a young man lies face-down on the ground covered in blood. A woman, blonde and petite, stands over him with a gun in her hand. This is the story of Ruth Ellis as never told before... As Ruth awaits her trial in Holloway Prison, she recollects growing up in England during the Second World War and the events that led to the death of her lover, David Blakely. Meanwhile, Kitty Carrington - the assistant to Ruth's trial lawyer - tries to forge her own path through the male-dominated legal world of the 1950s and ensure that Ruth receives a fair trial. Navigating secrets, betrayal and a broken justice system, Ruth and Kitty try to take control of their own lives and narratives. But do we ever really know the full story?
