But for all of his faults, David Blakely remained Ruth’s one true love. The two continued to see one another, meeting up for trysts in hotel rooms and at friends’ homes. Blakely however, was jealous of her relationship with Cussens and Ruth was equally embittered by the stories she heard of his many conquests. If the relationship had been volatile before, it reached a whole new level now, with confrontations often becoming violent.
In late 1955, Blakely proposed that the only way for them to resolve their problems was for both of them to end their philandering and to settle down to married life together. Ruth gleefully accepted but a month later another fight broke out when Ruth told Blakely that she was pregnant. He, unsurprisingly, raised questions about the child’s paternity. Ruth reacted furiously and in the ensuing scuffle, Blakely punched her in the stomach, causing her to miscarry. Thereafter he refused to see her, leading to her becoming increasingly frantic. She thought that she might have lost him this time for good. And that was a scenario that Ruth Ellis was not prepared to countenance.
Matters eventually came to a head on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955. Blakely had been staying at the home of friends, Anthony and Carole Findlater, and word had reached Ruth that he was having an affair with the family’s newly employed nanny. Intent on confronting him about the allegations, Ruth hailed a taxi in Oxford Street at around 9 a.m. that morning, directing the cabbie to the Findlater’s home at 29 Tanza Road, Hampstead. In her coat pocket, she was carrying a .38 revolver, the property of her live-in lover Desmond Cussens.
Ruth had just arrived at Tanza Road, when she saw Blakely get into his car and drive off. She instructed the cabbie to follow, which he did, tracking Blakely to the Magdala public house in South Hill Park, Hampstead. After exiting the cab, Ruth waited in the doorway of Henshaw’s news agents, determined to confront Blakely the minute he emerged. She did not have long to wait.
Just after 9:30, David Blakely walked out of the pub with his friend, Clive Gunnell. As he passed, Ruth stepped into his path and said, “Hello, David.” Blakely, however, paid her no heed, instead skirting around her and walking to his car. “David!” Ruth shouted after him, but still he ignored her. He was digging in his pocket for his car keys when Ruth drew the revolver and fired.
The first shot was wild and it missed. The second, fired as Blakely turned and ran, did not. It struck him in the back and he collapsed to the pavement, mortally wounded. That, however, was not enough for Ellis. She stood over the helpless man and pumped three more bullets into him, the last fired at such close range that it left powder burns on his skin. A final shot missed its target but ricocheted up and hit a passerby, Gladys Yule, in the hand. Ellis, in an apparent state of shock, now turned to Clive Gunnell, cowering behind a car, “Will you call the police, Clive?” she said.
That request, as it turned out, was unnecessary. An off-duty police officer, Alan Thompson, had heard the shots and come running. He immediately disarmed the dazed Ruth, shoving the still-smoking revolver into his coat pocket. “I am guilty. I'm a little confused,” Ruth said as he disarmed her.
Ruth Ellis was taken to Hampstead police station where she gave a detailed confession and was charged with murder. Blakely's body meanwhile had been taken to a nearby hospital where he was declared dead on arrival. He’d suffered multiple bullet wounds which had perforated his intestines, liver, lung, aorta, and windpipe.
The murder trial of Ruth Ellis began at Court Number One of the Old Bailey on Monday, June 20, 1955, before Mr. Justice Havers. Ruth’s solicitor had asked her to tone down her appearance but she had ignored him. She seemed determined to look her best for her big moment. Her hair was freshly coiffured and bleached to its customary platinum blonde, and she was dressed stylishly in a black suit and white silk blouse.
Whether or not this made an impression on the jury, one way or the other, we will never know. In the end, it was Ruth’s own testimony that would lead to her conviction. Asked by the prosecutor, Mr. Christmas Humphreys, what her intention was when she fired at Blakely, Ruth replied truthfully: “It's obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.”
And with that, she all but sealed her fate. Her reply gave the jury no leeway at all. They returned a guilty verdict after just 14 minutes of deliberation. Under the law, that verdict carried a mandatory death sentence. Ellis accepted the judge’s ruling without emotion. “Thank you,” she said after the sentence was read. Then she turned and smiled at her friends seated in the public gallery before walking calmly down the stairs at the back of the dock. She was taken from there to Holloway and housed in the Condemned Unit, where she was placed on suicide watch, guarded round the clock by two female warders.
In the immediate aftermath of the trial, Ellis advised her attorneys that she did not wish to lodge an appeal. Her fate now rested in the hands of the Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd George, and he seemed disinclined to consider clemency, despite considerable pressure from the press and public and a recommendation from the trial judge that he should commute the sentence. On Monday, July 11, he announced his decision. Ruth Ellis was to hang.
Justice moved swiftly in those days. Prisoner 9656 Ruth Ellis would spend just three weeks and two days in the condemned cell before her execution date came around on July 13, 1955. On the Tuesday evening, the eve of the hanging, the Governor at Holloway had to call in police reinforcements when a raucous crowd gathered outside the prison gates and began chanting and singing Ruth’s name.
Within the wall’s meanwhile, preparations were continuing apace for the execution.
Ruth was weighed and the correct length of drop calculated; the gallows were tested using a sand bag weighing 103 pounds, the same weight as the condemned. At around 7.00 am on the morning of the execution, the trap was reset and the rope left dangling, with the noose at around chest height. A cross was placed on the far wall of the execution chamber at Ruth's request.
In the death cell meanwhile, Ruth wrote a letter to Blakely's mother begging forgiveness for causing his death and declaring that she still loved him and always would. She was visited in her cell by the Catholic Bishop of Stepney and by the prison doctor, who gave her a large brandy to steady her nerves. Finally, she was fitted with the canvas knickers which were compulsory for all female prisoners undergoing execution.
At nine o'clock precisely, the executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, entered the cell and pinioned Ruth’s hands behind her back with a leather strap. He then led her the 15 feet from the death cell to the gallows. Pierrepoint, who for years after kept up a correspondence with Ruth’s sister Muriel, later commented that she went bravely to her death and uttered not a word during the entire process. Twelve seconds after being led from her cell, Ruth Ellis plummeted through the trap door to oblivion.
But although her execution was completed with the minimum of fuss and without ruction, its aftermath would be anything but quiet. The hanging triggered widespread condemnation, with newspapers and political appointees inundated with letters from disgusted citizens. Those waves would continue to grow over the next decade, leading to the eventual abolishment of capital punishment in Great Britain in 1965.
Ruth’s death also had a profound impact on her family. In 1969, her mother, Berta Neilson, attempted suicide by gassing herself in her apartment. Although she was saved by a family member, she never fully recovered and remained an invalid for the rest of her life. Ruth’s son, Andy, who was 10 at the time of his mother's execution, also found it difficult to come to terms with her death. He endured lifelong psychological issues, eventually committing suicide in 1982. Ruth’s former husband, George Ellis, also killed himself, leaving their daughter, Georgina, an orphan. Georgina was later adopted. She died of cancer at the age of 50.
Ruth Ellis was originally buried within the walls of Holloway prison but was later disinterred and laid to rest in a churchyard in Buckinghamshire. The prosecutor at her trial, Mr. Christmas Humphreys, paid the cost of the funeral.
Black Widows of Hollywood
They made
an unlikely pair of murderers. Helen Golay was 78, her partner in crime, Olga Rutterschmidt, was 75. Both were gray-haired and grandmotherly, a couple of wealthy old women, enjoying their golden years in the California sunshine. And yet, if the prosecution was to be believed, Golay and Rutterschmidt had perpetrated one of the most audacious murder-for-profit schemes on record, a scheme that had cost the lives of two homeless men.
Helen and Olga first met at a West Los Angeles health spa, in the early 80’s. Both were in their forties then, still fairly attractive and working out to keep the ravages of advancing age at bay. They hit it off immediately, perhaps because their earlier lives had followed similar trajectories. Golay’s father had died in a car crash when she was still a child. Rutterschmidt had lost family too, during the Allied bombing of her native Hungary in World War II. Later in life, both women had suffered through failed marriages and financial hardship.
That latter privation was perhaps the hardest to bear, since both of the women had an innate love of luxury and a yearning for the good life. Their conversations were soon fixated on how they might go about improving their lot and it wasn’t long before they were discussing potential scams. Thus was a criminal partnership established.
Initially, this involved small-time swindles, bogus lawsuits and credit card fraud. It also involved outright theft. A regular ploy was to visit the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Hollywood Roosevelt, change into swimsuits in the Ladies’ Room and then lounge around the pool area pretending to be hotel guests. With their buffed bodies and good looks, they easily lured strangers into conversation. Anyone careless enough to leave their possessions unattended while they went for a swim or to the bathroom would return to find their newfound friend gone, along with their purse or wallet. Complaints were laid but Golay and Rutterschmidt were never arrested, despite returning time and again to work the same turf.
But petty thefts and scams were never going to cut it with a duo as ambitious as Helen and Olga. They wanted a shot at the big leagues. Soon Rutterschmidt was working “pyramid schemes” involving dozens of credit cards, using one to pay the balance on another, before defaulting on the debt. Golay, meanwhile, had begun delving into the property market, a legitimate path to wealth for many investors, but one that she played to the hilt. Questionable property transfers and insurance scams all served to swell her burgeoning bank balance.
And still it wasn’t enough. It was probably around this time that Golay first considered the idea of murder for profit. We know this because she was quite open about her ambitions. On one occasion she (only half-jokingly) told her hairdresser about a scheme she had concocted. The idea was to marry a wealthy older man, and then to feed him daily doses of Viagra until he eventually had a fatal heart attack. “I am evil,” she giggled after sharing this horrific confidence. “You have no idea how evil I am.”
No one knows for certain which of the Black Widows first struck on the idea of targeting the homeless. We do know that the scheme was meticulously planned. This was the long con, the one with the big payout, and they had to be patient. First, they started volunteering at local homeless shelters, serving up meals to down and outs. This in all likelihood served two purposes. On the one hand, it established their credentials as caring old souls who were giving back to the community. On the other, it was the perfect way to trawl for a potential mark.
The man they eventually settled on was 73-year-old Paul Vados, a vagrant who’d been living on the streets for years. Vados could hardly believe his luck when Helen and Olga told him that they were putting him up in an apartment and paying all his expenses. He gladly signed the paperwork that they pushed in front of him. Little did he know that much of that admin related to policies taken out against his life with eight different insurance companies. Paul Vados, who didn’t have a dime to his name, was now worth a small fortune. All he had to do was die.
But the Black Widows were nothing if not patient. For two years they continued to act as Paul Vados’ benefactors. Then, in November 1999, tragedy. Vados was found dead in a West Hollywood alley, the victim of an apparent hit-and-run. Helen and Olga appeared devastated, even footing the bill for the funeral. Then, after a respectful period of mourning, (two weeks in this case) they began making the rounds of the insurance companies, claiming Vados variously as a business partner, a fiancée and a distant cousin. Their take from his death was just under a million dollars.
The scam had worked remarkably well. The death had been ruled an accident and no one was any the wiser. Certainly, no suspicion accrued to the two angelic old ladies who gave so much of their time and money to helping those less fortunate than themselves. It wasn’t long before Helen and Olga were plotting their next killing.
Their next three attempts however, fell flat, as the insurance companies declined to issue policies on the sickly old men they’d selected. It wasn’t until 2003 that they found another suitable candidate, 50-year-old Kenneth McDavid. The pattern was a familiar one. McDavid was put up in an apartment, his rent and groceries were paid for, and he was asked to sign a stack of paperwork. Two years on, in June 2005, he was found dead in a Hollywood alley – another hit-and-run. This time, the payout was closer to $2 million. Kenneth McDavid had been insured with 23 different companies.
Having now stumbled onto their personal version of a bottomless ATM, Helen and Olga ran their scheme again less than a year later. However, 48-year-old Jimmy Covington became suspicious when they started pressing him for his personal details and asked him to sign a pile of documents. He walked away, not knowing that the Black Widows had already taken out one policy on his life. After canceling that contract, they began casting around for a new victim.
Unbeknownst to the killers, the net had already begun closing in on them. Early in 2006, an LAPD detective overheard one of his colleagues discussing a perplexing hit-and-run. The details sounded familiar to him. In fact, he’d worked a very similar case six years earlier. A homeless man had been found dead in an alley with some peculiar injuries. Despite the misgivings of some officers, that death had been ruled an accident and the case closed. Now, as the two detectives compared notes, they began to suspect that it had not been an accident after all.
The first victim, Paul Vados had suffered injuries to the upper torso, although none to the legs. This was extremely rare, improbable even, in a hit-and-run case. And the second victim, Kenneth McDavid, had the same unusual injuries. Not only that but both victims had traces of a tranquilizing drug in their bloodstreams. It had begun to look like the men had been drugged, laid out on the ground, and then deliberately run over. But, the detectives wondered, to what purpose?
The answer to that question soon emerged. Both men had been heavily insured and the beneficiaries in each case were the same – Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt.
But could two wealthy septuagenarians, pillars of their respective communities, really be guilty of such atrocity? The detectives soon had further corroborating evidence. On the night that Kenneth McDavid was killed, a tow was requested from the Automobile Club on a 1999 Mercury Sable wagon. The vehicle was traced and a forensic examination found McDavid’s DNA on the undercarriage.
This then, was the murder weapon. And who did it belong to? Olga Rutterschmidt had used a false identity to purchase the vehicle but it was clearly her caught on the dealership’s surveillance footage. And who’s Automobile Club membership had been used for the tow? None other than Helen Golay.
Golay and Rutterschmidt were arrested in May 2006 and subsequently released on bail. While awaiting trial, they got together to discuss why their plans had gone awry, not realizing that they were under police surveillance. A video subsequently presented as evidence at their trial shows Rutterschmidt scolding Golay for taking out too many insurance policies on Kenneth McDavid.
“It's your fault,” she says, “You can't have that many insurers. You were greedy. That's what raised suspicion.”
Golay and Rutterschmidt went on trial in April 2008 and were both convicted of
first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Both women were sentenced to consecutive life terms, without the possibility of parole.
FOOTNOTE: It has never been firmly established who was behind the wheel of the car that killed Vados and McDavid. Golay's attorney claimed it was her daughter, Kecia Golay, although no charges have ever been brought.
The Killer in the Woods
To his neighbors, John Taylor seemed like an ordinary guy. The divorced father of two was pleasant enough to talk to, even though he kept mainly to himself, sharing his terraced house in Bramley, a suburb of Leeds, England, with several pets. He held down a regular job as a delivery driver and could often be seen at the end of the day walking his dogs around the neighborhood. That had earned him the nickname ‘Pet Man’ due to his apparent love of animals.
But scratch below the surface and a different picture emerged. Taylor was obsessed with sex and regularly spent hours online looking at pornography. He was subscribed to several adult dating sites and often drove cross-country to engage in sex with women he met through this medium. His apparent love of animals was also a front. Although he did keep several pets, he was less compassionate to the local wildlife. A regular poacher, he seemed to derive pleasure from inflicting pain on small animals. On one occasion, he was reported to the authorities for stabbing a fox to death with a hunting knife.
Murder Most Vile Volume 12: 18 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Murder Books) Page 8