to the Home Office asking for clemency was signed by 50,000 people, but was rejected. On the day of Ruth's execution, columnist Cassandra of the Daily Mirror attacked her sentence, writing: "The one thing that brings stature and dignity to mankind and raises us above the beasts will have been denied her — pity and the hope of ultimate redemption". The British Pathé newsreel reporting the execution openly questioned whether capital punishment—of a woman or of anyone—had a place in the 20th century. The novelist Raymond Chandler, then living in Britain, wrote a scathing letter to the Evening Standard referring to what he described as "the medieval savagery of the law". Though the execution was on the whole supported by the British public, it helped strengthen support for the abolition of the death penalty, which was halted in practice for murder in Britain ten years later (the last execution in the UK occurred in 1964). Reprieve was by then commonplace, according to one statistical account, between 1926 and 1954, 677 men and 60 women had been sentenced to death in England and Wales, but only 375 men and seven women had been executed. In the early 1970s, Bickford told Scotland Yard that Cussen had told him, in 1955, that Ellis lied at the trial. A police investigation followed but no further action regarding Cussen was taken. Family aftermath Ruth's former husband, George Ellis, committed suicide by hanging at a Jersey hotel on 2 August 1958. In 1969, Ellis's mother, Bertha Neilson, was found unconscious in a gas-filled room in her flat in Hemel Hempstead; she never fully recovered and did not speak coherently again. Ruth's son Andy, who was aged 10 at the time of his mother's execution, took his life in a bedsit in 1982 shortly after desecrating her grave. The trial judge, Sir Cecil Havers, had sent money every year for Andy's upkeep, and Christmas Humphreys, the prosecution counsel at Ruth's trial, paid for his funeral. Her daughter Georgina, who was aged 3 when her mother was executed, was fostered when her father killed himself three years later. She died of cancer in 2001 at age 50. Pardon campaign The Ellis case continues to have a strong grip on the British imagination and in 2003 was referred back to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). The Court firmly rejected the appeal, although it