Her sentence was commuted on 7 July 1955, and there hadn’t even been a petition to save her. Lloyd was sentenced to death but she did not hang. Such optimism was, no doubt, inspired by the case of Sarah Lloyd, who had murdered her 87-year-old neighbour by hitting her with a spade and pouring boiling water over her. Among them would have been readers of the Daily Herald which rated her chance of reprieve as “good – much better than evens in cold betting terms”. When it didn’t, thousands of Britons were appalled. Blakely’s mistreatment of Ellis and her emotional distress seemed to offer good grounds for commuting her sentence, and many people assumed that this would happen. Women were rarely executed in Britain: 90 per cent of those sentenced to death in the 20th century were reprieved. What turned this case into a cause célèbre was the fact that she went to the gallows. That Ellis would receive a guilty verdict was, then, seemingly inevitable. (Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo) The law did not recognise Ellis’s experiences of physical and emotional abuse as relevant to her defence – a stark example of how far the legal system failed to accommodate women’s experiences of gendered inequality.ĭavid Blakely physically abused Ellis and may have induced a miscarriage shortly before she shot him – abuse that wasn't considered in her defence. But, crucially, during Ellis’s trial, neither of these facts was deemed sufficient to reduce the verdict from murder to manslaughter – and the mandatory sentence for murder was death.įamously, in response to prosecution counsel Christmas Humphreys’ question about what she intended to do when she fired at Blakely, Ellis replied: “It is obvious that when I shot him I intended to kill him.” Yet even without such a bald admission, it would have been extremely difficult for Ellis to secure a verdict other than murder. The prosecution did not dispute that Blakely had treated Ellis “disgracefully”, or that this had left her emotionally disturbed. Ellis had a miscarriage shortly before the murder, which she believed was caused by Blakely punching her in the stomach. A report in the Home Office file on the case explains that “Blakely sometimes struck Mrs Ellis” and that she had been to hospital after receiving “multiple bruises” from him. Police investigations into the killing soon established that Ellis and Blakely’s relationship had been violent. She asked for the police to be called and was arrested by an off-duty policeman who had also been drinking in the Magdala. Ellis proceeded to use that gun to shoot Blakely twice as he left the pub, before standing over him and shooting him twice more as he lay on the ground. She was accompanied by Desmond Cussen, a man with whom she had had a brief relationship – and who, fatefully, had given her a gun. On Easter Sunday – distraught at Blakely’s refusal to speak to her – she walked into the Magdala pub in Hampstead, where Blakely was drinking.
The “compulsive act of desperation” to which Silverman referred was the murder of her boyfriend, David Blakely.Įllis and Blakely were locked in a dysfunctional relationship and by April 1955, Ellis had reached breaking point. Under great emotional distress, Ellis “found relief in one passionate, compulsive act of desperation”, which, Silverman added, exemplified “essential human pathos”.
Labour MP Sydney Silverman, a campaigner for the abolition of the death sentence, encapsulated this sentiment when he wrote in The Star: “She seems to most people a normal human – all too human – being, weak, foolish, hyper-sensitive.” The Ellis case gave the nation a considerable emotional jolt – and that’s because a huge number of Britons could personally identify with the 28-year-old wife and mother. It dominated newspaper front pages, inspired hundreds of Britons to pen letters begging for clemency, and led to a dramatic 11th‑hour appeal for a reprieve.
By the time Ellis died, her case had already become a cause celebre.
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