2 cases tagged “Old Bailey”
Convicted: Ruth Ellis (née Neilson)
"It is obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him." With those eleven words, spoken calmly before a packed courtroom at the Old Bailey, Ruth Ellis handed the jury everything they needed. They deliberated for less than twenty-five minutes. Six weeks later, at nine o'clock on the morning of 13 July 1955, she walked to the gallows at Holloway Prison and became the last woman ever executed in the United Kingdom. She was twenty-eight years old. But the story of how a Welsh-born nightclub manageress came to fire four bullets into her racing-driver lover outside a Hampstead pub on Easter Sunday is not a simple story of jealousy and rage. It is a story of sustained beatings, a miscarriage caused by a punch to the stomach, a secret weapon supplier who was never charged with a crime, and a justice system that hanged a deeply traumatized woman without once telling the jury what she had endured. Seven decades later, her grandchildren are still fighting to clear her name. The question hanging over the case has never been whether Ruth Ellis pulled the trigger. It has always been whether Britain should have pulled the lever.
Convicted: Amelia Elizabeth Dyer (née Hobley)
'You'll know all mine by the tape around their necks.' When Amelia Dyer spoke those words to Reading police in the spring of 1896, she did so with the calm of a woman who had been getting away with murder — quite literally — for two decades. On March 30, 1896, a bargeman pulled a brown paper parcel from the River Thames near Caversham. Inside was a baby girl, strangled with white dressmaker's tape. She would not be the last. By the time detectives closed in on the mild-mannered, churchgoing widow operating out of a modest terrace on Kensington Road, seven infant bodies had been recovered from the river. Experts now estimate that Amelia Dyer — the 'Ogress of Reading,' a trained nurse turned baby farmer — murdered between 200 and 400 children over twenty years, making her one of the most prolific killers in British history. The jury took four and a half minutes to convict her. The tape never lied. This is her story.
