Informant38

the hard-faced bitch with the peroxide hair. The last woman to be hanged in Britain.
...she took a shotgun and pumped four bullets into her lover, the racing driver David Blakely, outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead on Easter Sunday, 1955.
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Ruth Ellis was born on 9 October 1926, the fourth child of a failed musician, Arthur Neilson, and his Belgian wife Elisaberta. Frustrated in his career, Neilson drank heavily and abused his wife and children. Both Ruth Ellis and her sister Muriel were raped by their father.
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She became pregnant by Blakely twice; the first time, she had an abortion, and on the second occasion, Blakely, who followed in her father and husband's footsteps with his violence, punched her in the stomach, causing her to miscarry.
Ellis shot him just a few days after the miscarriage, and following several days of arguments, tears and remonstrations. The last bullet was fired into him from just three inches away.
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A few miles from Holloway, a headmaster later recalled, a pupil with a watch in his hand told friends: "Only four more minutes and she is going to swing. One, two, three, four, she has had it, boys."

�Catherine Pepinster/Independent (UK) 09.19.03