Ruth Ellis was hanged at Holloway Prison on 13 July 1955. She was the last woman executed in Britain.

Ellis had been convicted of murdering her partner, racing driver David Blakely. On 10 April 1955, she waited outside the Magdala public house in Hampstead and shot him several times. She did not deny the killing.

Ellis was tried at the Old Bailey on 20 June. When the prosecuting barrister asked what she had intended when she fired at Blakely at close range, she replied that she had intended to kill him.

The jury convicted her of murder. Under the law then in force, the judge had no choice over the sentence. Anyone convicted of murder had to be sentenced to death.

The relationship between Ellis and Blakely had been violent. The later application for a pardon presented evidence of domestic abuse, coercive control and trauma that had not been properly recognised at her trial. These circumstances did not provide her with a defence under the law applied in 1955.

No appeal was lodged before her execution. The Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd George, declined to recommend a reprieve. A posthumous appeal was later referred by the Criminal Cases Review Commission; however, the Court of Appeal upheld the conviction in 2003.

The case became closely associated with opposition to capital punishment, though it did not end hanging in Britain. The Homicide Act 1957 restricted the types of murder punishable by death. The final executions in Britain took place in 1964, and the death penalty for murder was suspended the following year.

On 8 July 2026, Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary David Lammy announced in Parliament that King Charles III had granted Ellis a conditional pardon on his advice.

The decision recognised that a jury hearing the case under modern law might have been asked to consider the partial defences of loss of control or diminished responsibility. If accepted, either could have reduced the conviction from murder to manslaughter.

The pardon did not overturn the murder conviction. It replaced the death sentence with life imprisonment.