Ruth Ellis: The platinum bombshell who was hell-bent on going to the gallows

From where I’m standing, seemingly in a sunlit gallery overlooking a court room in the Old Bailey, there’s no mistaking the blonde woman in the dock. Dressed in a beautiful black suit, her platinum hair immaculately set, 28-year-old Ruth Ellis looks every bit as glamorous as the journalists reporting her case had led us to expect. Only the white-knuckle grip of her hands on the wooden dock betrays her inner turmoil, as she contemplates the final question put to her by the prosecution: what had she intended to do when she shot her lover, David Blakely, on April 10, 1955?

She answers, in a voice clear with candour: “It is obvious that when I shot him, I intended to kill him.” A frisson of shock ripples around the court. In just 13 words, Ruth Ellis has ensured her name will soon be entered into hangman Albert Pierrepoint’s accounts book. “That’s it, everyone!” The voice of director Lee Haven Jones brings filming to a close. Like a stage hypnotist bringing a volunteer back to reality, his call returns everyone to the present.

We’re 70 years too late to anticipate that Ruth Ellis’s trial might realistically have a better outcome. But such is the overwhelming power of this adaptation of my book, A Fine Day for a Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story (now entitled A Cruel Love), that while filming those scenes, I felt eerily optimistic she would somehow avoid fulfilling her fate as the last woman to hang in Britain. There’s a flurry of movement as everyone takes advantage of the break to check their phones, use the loo, grab a coffee or something to eat.

This vast space, the hall of University College School Hampstead in north London has been transformed with astonishing accuracy into the Old Bailey, from the wood-panelled walls behind the judge’s bench to the careful placement of the clock ticking down the hours. At the centre of it all is actress Lucy Boynton, whose portrayal of Ruth is brilliantly nuanced, depicting her more accurately than any previous incarnation. Such is her performance, it’s difficult to imagine anyone else ever taking on the role again.

The idea of writing about Ruth came to me 15 years ago. I had almost completed my research for One of Your Own: The Life and Death of Myra Hindley. The female half of the couple known as the Moors Murderers had been imprisoned for several years in HMP Holloway, where Ruth spent the last few weeks of her life. I interviewed several former inmates who mentioned Hindley’s shuddering fascination with the old execution chamber at Holloway.

Ruth was among five women hanged there between 1903 and 1955 before capital punishment was eventually abolished. It was this last, unexplored period of Ruth’s life that interested me most, once I started to examine the vast archive of papers relating to it. Her case was superficially well-known, with the murder she committed arising from a perfect storm of what were then society’s quintessential obsessions: class, politics and gender. Through sheer grit, Ruth had escaped an impoverished background and single motherhood as a teenager to become the youngest manager of any London nightclub.

Then divorced with a second child, she had a close circle of female friends, a good income, and a swanky flat above The Little Club in Knightsbridge, whose members included actors, politicians and royals. Ruth was never short of admirers, but she fell catastrophically in love with playboy racing driver David Blakely, three years her junior. Despite his own inability to be “satisfied with one woman”, as Ruth phrased it, Blakely was fanatically jealous of her. They could be as bad as each other. Ruth slept with her most ardent admirer, Desmond Cussen, in retaliation for David breaking his promise to take her to Paris one weekend.

Their love triangle lasted many months, with more than a touch of Shakespearean tragedy to it. But at its dark, twisted heart lay David’s physical and emotional abuse of Ruth, which culminated in her losing everything: her home, her job and, most devastating of all, the child she would have borne him. Cussen’s full role in what played out next remains open to debate, but certainly he gave Ruth his old service revolver and taught her how to use it.

He also drove her to leafy Hampstead on Easter Sunday 1955 in search of Blakely, who had been partying with friends. They trailed him to the Magdala Tavern, where Cussen sped off, leaving Ruth pacing the road. When Blakely emerged from the pub with a friend, she shot him at point-blank range, watched by several horrified bystanders, one of whom was injured by a stray bullet.

“You’ll both die now,” shouted Blakely’s distraught pal as an off-duty policeman removed the gun from Ruth’s unresisting hand. He was right: David Blakely died in the ambulance on the way to hospital, while Ruth was executed three months later, after a trial lasting just two days, on July 13, 1955. Studies of the case have always focused on the tortured relationship between Ruth, Blakely and Cussen. Much of it was speculation, as the files regarding Ruth’s arrest and imprisonment stayed largely unread and were never fully brought to light. Yet the papers nestled between cardboard covers secured by string held the key to it all.

Everyone thought they knew Ruth. The press painted a lurid picture of a brassy, hard-faced blonde straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel. Hers was a crime of passion, fuelled by booze, jealousy and a thwarted desire to shamelessly climb the social ladder – that’s what we were told. But the image bore no reality to the woman behind the headlines. Prison warden Evelyn Galilee, who spent more time than anyone else with Ruth during the end of her life, had believed the hype.

She was shocked when “in came this fragile girl, a Dresden doll. She was my age and tiny – no more than 5ft – and so very slim. Her skin was like porcelain. Ruth had this acceptance of what she’d done and felt the punishment fitted the crime. Her eyes were bewitching, the most beautiful violet blue”.

She spent three weeks in the condemned cell. Fifteen by 14ft, the room was decorated in muted pink and brown, sparsely furnished, with a single window. The light – a bare, overhead bulb – remained on day and night. Along the length of one wall was a screen similar to the sort you might find in a doctor’s surgery.

Evelyn could never bring herself to answer honestly when Ruth asked her what lay behind it: the door to the execution chamber. Adjacent to the cell was a bathroom and a room where Ruth could receive visitors. Her friends from the club scene remained loyal, as did her family. Ruth’s solicitor, John Bickford, was another frequent caller.

In A Cruel Love, Bickford is played by the always excellent Toby Jones, who perfectly captures the bewilderment at his client’s determination to go to the gallows. People campaigned on Ruth’s behalf, nonetheless. The turbulent fight to end capital punishment was gaining traction and the prospect of a young, vivacious single mother being hanged for shooting her abusive boyfriend caused worldwide outrage.

In her cell, Ruth tried to drown out the voices of the protesters at the prison gates. She would play cards, tend to a pair of goldfish in a bowl, or take out her powder compact with its tinkly tune: La Vie en Rose. These previously undocumented events provide some of the most emotional scenes in A Cruel Love.

Some viewers old enough to remember Dance with a Stranger, the 1985 film starring Miranda Richardson as Ruth and Rupert Everett as Blakely, have questioned why we need this new adaptation.

But it’s 40 years since the film was released, and while Dance with a Stranger ends with the Magdala shooting, A Cruel Love tells the full, fateful story. I’m delighted that it banishes the film’s harmful fiction that Ruth was a “typically” hysterical woman, screaming and wailing at everyone. That’s simply not true: Ruth was never hysterical, even in her darkest hours. Hers was always a cold, quiet fury. It is remarkable to think that it has taken so long – 70 years – for her story to be accurately told.

And with Britain currently experiencing an epidemic of domestic violence, it is equally and frighteningly remarkable just how many viewers may be able to relate to the real Ruth Ellis.

• A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story, airs on ITV and ITV X on Wednesday at 9pm. A Cruel Love by Carol Ann Lee (Mainstream, £10.99) is out now