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The Trial

Crime Files

The Trial

The trial took place at The Old Bailey, London on 20 June 1955. The only question put to Ellis on the stand by Christmas Humphreys for the Prosecution was, “When you fired the gun, did you mean to kill?’. Her reply was simply, “It is obvious that when I shot him, I intended to kill him”. The jury took a mere 14 minutes to reach the conclusion of guilty as charged, for the murder of David Blakely. Ellis was held at the all-female Holloway Prison in Islington, London, to await her sentence of death by hanging, less than a month away.The fact that Ellis had obtained a gun to commit the murder was not explored in the trial and it was not until the day before she was hanged, that any mention was made of it. In a statement, Ellis claimed that her other lover, Desmond Cussen, had provided the gun and had in fact also driven her to the scene of the crime. In a strange twist, the authorities chose to ignore this statement and never followed it up.