King Issues Conditional Pardon to Ruth Ellis, Last Woman Hanged in Britain

The King issued a conditional pardon to Ruth Ellis yesterday, changing her 1955 death sentence to life imprisonment. Ellis, born in Wales, worked as a Soho nightclub hostess and was in a relationship with David Blakely. On April 10 1955 she shot Blakely dead outside The Magdala public house in Hampstead, London.

She was arrested, tried for premeditated murder two months later, convicted, and hanged at Holloway Prison on July 13.

Ellis's grandson Stephen Beard spoke to GB News about the decision. "It was a monumental day yesterday. In essence, it's the removal of a negative blotch in our family history," he said. He added that the family had effectively rewritten history because the truth had not been known for more than 70 years.

Beard described the abuse his grandmother endured at age 28 and noted that courts in the 1950s had no mechanism to consider evidence of that abuse.

Horton said the pardon addressed a fundamental misunderstanding of abuse. "We say that she shouldn't have been executed. And that's exactly the application that we applied for," she stated. Horton explained that women convicted of murder were routinely found to have acted with premeditation because they used a weapon.

She said the conditional pardon commuted the sentence and acknowledged that the punishment did not fit the crime. Beard said he felt passionately against the death penalty and viewed it as overly harsh when the full truth might not emerge. The family had campaigned for years for the pardon.