The Ruth Ellis Files: A Very British Crime Story

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On Easter Sunday 1955, Ruth Ellis shot her lover, David Blakely, outside a pub in Hampstead, London.
(Image credit: BBC/Wall to Wall Media Ltd/Matt)

On Easter Sunday 1955, Ruth Ellis shot her lover, David Blakely, outside a pub in Hampstead, London

On Easter Sunday 1955, Ruth Ellis shot her lover, David Blakely, outside a pub in Hampstead, London.

That murder later gained Ellis notoriety as ‘the last woman to be hanged in the UK’.

But was there more to her than the brassy peroxide blonde of newspaper reports?

Director Gillian Pachter is more used to making programmes about American killers, but here brings her exhaustive technique – part Who Do You Think You Are? archive-trawl, part reconstruction, part collage of period film clips – to build, over three separate hours, a rounded picture of the woman and her times.

Was Ellis, perhaps, more of a victim than we might think? Continues tomorrow and Thursday.

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