It took just 20 minutes for a jury to determine Ruth Ellis’s guilt. She had, after all, confessed to waiting for David Blakely outside The Magdala pub in Hampstead, London, and shooting him dead. “It’s obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him,” she told prosecutor Christmas Humphreys – 11 words that sealed her fate as the last woman to be sentenced to death in Britain. She was hanged on 13 July 1955.

Now, a new ITV drama re-examines this controversial case. Starring Lucy Boynton, Toby Jones, Arthur Darvill and Mark Stanley, A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story – based on Carol Ann Lee’s bestselling biography A Fine Day For A Hanging – meticulously explores the events that led the young manager of the Little Club in Knightsbridge to pull the trigger that fateful Easter Sunday. It also focuses on the desperate but futile campaign to save the 28-year-old working-class mother of two from execution.

“There is no question that she shouldn’t have hanged for that, and people knew that at the time,” Boynton tells Forbes. “There was such a mass outrage from the general public who tried to protest this and prevent it from happening.

“You just feel inherent frustration from seeing the extent of the injustice carried out. Then hearing the court scene – that’s the first time it’s been brought to screen – it was sickening to sit through. Watching it back, you’re kind of reaching for rationality that they butchered.”

Watch the trailer for A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story below:

Boynton adds: “It’s an agonising but informative watch, and I hope it forces us to examine our own judicial system today and how it treats women.”

It’s easy to focus on the cold, hard facts of the case. Ellis fired five bullets at Blakely, pursuing him as he tried to flee, then standing over him with her gun after he collapsed. A sixth bullet ricocheted off the road, injuring a bystander. She was calm, sober and not under the influence of drugs. Doctors found no evidence of mental illness. And yet, this is also a story of prejudice, abuse and coercive control.

Blakely may have been a handsome, up-and-coming racing driver, but he was also a heavy drinker who became obsessively attached to Ellis from the moment they met. He moved into her flat above the club within weeks, despite being engaged to another woman. Their relationship was volatile; both were seeing other people while living together. When Ellis later moved in with former RAF pilot Desmond Cussen, Blakely, desperate to win her back, proposed marriage.

Despite his increasingly violent outbursts, Ellis said yes. Then, in January 1955, he hit her so hard in the stomach that she suffered a miscarriage.

Later, Ellis revealed to her lawyers that it was, in fact, Cussen – a wealthy man hailed as a war hero and seemingly protected by his establishment connections – who had been drinking with her on the day of Blakely’s murder. That he had given her the gun, trained her to fire it, and even driven her to The Magdala. 

This crucial context, alongside the abuse Ellis suffered at Blakely’s hands, should have been enough to see her charge reduced from murder to manslaughter. At the time, most women sentenced to death were granted clemency. Yet when her lawyers presented this evidence to Gwilym Lloyd George, the home secretary, he remained unmoved.

“The law should take its course,” he declared.

Privately, however, Home Office officials acknowledged concerns. Internal papers later revealed: “It might be possible to prove that Cussen and Ruth Ellis were together in Cussen’s flat in the evening, and they drove together to the neighbourhood of the crime… but on public grounds, there is a good deal to be said for not reopening the case.” Cussen’s role was never investigated.

Some 50,000 people signed a petition for clemency, which was rejected. Many gathered outside Holloway Prison in protest on the day of Ellis’s execution. But Ellis, resigned to her fate – indeed, believing she deserved it – was described by prison staff as “the calmest woman who has gone to the gallows”.

“You know how unfair and tilted the scales are. How much it’s going to be weighed by misogyny and classism,” Boynton says of the woman she portrays. “[Ellis] was very, very familiar with that. It’s the agony that so many of us know – knowing the truth and how it should be, versus how it’s going to be, and how prejudice condemns your existence, your freedom, and your fate.”

It’s little wonder that Ellis’s grandson, Stephen Beard, hopes A Cruel Love will provoke a public outcry – and perhaps even prompt a legal reassessment of her case.

“There was such a severe miscarriage of justice, which will be explained through the series, that I wonder whether there is a KC who believes there’s enough substance and weight here for Ruth’s case to be taken back to the courts,” he tells The Times.

“If handled professionally and mercifully, the conclusion would have been that this was a case of both battered woman syndrome and diminished responsibility.”

Whether that happens or not, A Cruel Love seems set to offer the most honest portrayal of Ruth Ellis yet, on the 70th anniversary of her death.

As screenwriter Kelly Jones tells the Royal Television Society: “It feels like we have a new, truer version of Ruth Ellis that isn’t in the public consciousness. The single detail I find so moving is that she refused any sedative just before execution. She just wanted to face it.

“She’s a flawed, complex, but brave and interesting person who changed our whole legal system.”

A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story begins on ITV1 and ITVX at 9pm on Wednesday 5 March.

Images: ITV