At other times they were taken in a lorry to Bisley to practise with Sten guns. ", On 27th May 1955, Mr W Mackenzie, medical registrar at St Giles hospital prepared a report for Ruths solicitor Mr Bickford. My enquiries were met with assurances that nobody knew anything. A few days before the murder he had brutally beaten Ruth and she suffered a miscarriage . Reluctantly, at midday on 12 July 1955, the day before her execution, Ellis, having dismissed Bickford, the solicitor chosen for her by her friend Desmond Cussen, made a statement to the solicitor Victor Mishcon (whose law firm had previously represented her in her divorce proceedings but not in the murder trial) and his clerk, Leon Simmons. Her parents Berta and Arthur Neilson, Ruths son Andre and Desmond Cussen arrived on her doorstep unexpectedly. More than 17 books and the 1985 film Dance with a Stranger have looked at the events leading up to Ellis's execution, but answers to some of the puzzles that remained unsolved have emerged only in the past few years. Miss Gleeson went to the police twice, and a solicitor, but they disregarded her evidence. Importantly, his statement at the magistrates court "No shot was fired after I came out of the public house" was omitted at the trial. Some of the properties have been demolished but two of the original houses are still standing. When arrested in 1955, Ruth Ellis maintained that she first met David Blakely two years before, "When I was manageress of the Little Club, Knightsbridge. She went round to the flat on Good Friday and made a scene, only leaving when he phoned the police. It has also been claimed that Desmond was a party to the killing. In May 1950 he returned to England and was kept under surveillance by MI5. Is that right?" Previously, Desmond was a General Counsel at Adenza Group and al Read More Contact Desmond Cussen's Phone Number and Email Last Update 11/20/2022 4:19 PM Email d***@fandom.com Engage via Email Contact Number (***) ***-**** Engage via Phone Mobile Number (***) ***-**** This was Cussen's one and only trail left anywhere since 1955. I have evidence of their long-term friendship. All said Ruth had certain characteristics that had made a deep impression on them: she was a lovely, kind person with grace and style. WHAT HAPPENED TO DESMOND'S FLASHES OF THE FUTURE? Suspiciously he didnt mention the gun breaking during testing. Ellis had two young children but, despite huge public sympathy and newspaper campaigns for a reprieve, she was hanged on July 13 1955, only 13 weeks after she shot Blakely dead and three weeks after the trial. Its worth mentioning here that Peter Rawlinson (now Lord Rawlinson) Ruths junior defence counsel, met Ruth at the Old Bailey on 11th May one month after her arrest. With her tiny hand she couldnt have even thumbed the trigger guard back. Top people lived there in houses of substance. I could not give her an answer. But it was not. The case would be guaranteed open-and-shut. It came as something of a surprise to find a hand written document signed by Cussen in London in May 1964. According to another, recently opened, Metropolitan Police document dated 24th June 1955 (two days after Ruth was found guilty at the Old Bailey) Hampstead police handed her property to her solicitor Mr Bickford against "Receipt number 99.". Therefore she was guilty. Ruth Ellis admitted pulling the trigger of the heavy .38 Smith and Wesson British service revolver. Ruth and Rawlinson shook hands in her cell after the three-minute hearing. ", The day after the hanging, the front-page article of the Daily Sketch demanded, "What are the police doing about this man? It would appear he deliberately omitted the reference to the effort needed to fire the Smith and Wesson gun. Coincidentally, Macleans body was brought back from Russia and buried in a secret midnight service in Penn graveyard.Of real significance is the link between Westerham, Brasted, Tatsfield, Tonbridge, Warlingham and Sanderstead on the Surrey-Kent border, more than 20 miles from London; and just three miles from Fort Halstead, with its secret complex of bunkers where Britains Nuclear Weapons programme began.Ruth had connections with all these supposedly unconnected areas. By 4th June 2002, three months after beginning my research, new light had been thrown on Cussens wartime activities. She was protecting someone.The two-day murder trial was a travesty. Firstly he joined the RAF aged seventeen, trained mainly in South Africa, was a bomber pilot, throughout the war, flying Lancasters and was demobbed in 1946. He lived in 1881, at address. I can confirm that an application for a posthumous free pardon, limited to sentence, was considered and rejected earlier this year.". Secondly he was wealthy, became a director of a family-owned retail and wholesale tobacconist business called Cussen and Co. And thirdly from the early 1950s he lived in a prestigious apartment in Goodwood Court near Harley Street. She claimed at the time to have been given the gun by an American serviceman as security for a nightclub debt, and to have taken a taxi to the pub. Everything pointed to undercover operations and the British Secret Service. Fiona Mactaggart MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State replied to Sir Paul Beresfords letter: "The case of Ruth Ellis has always attracted interest over the years and more particularly in this the fiftieth anniversary of her execution. Two decades later, in the 70s, according to Bernard de Maid, the solicitor handling the appeal, Ellis's solicitor, John Bickford, a friend of Cussen, wrote to Scotland Yard admitting that he had concealed from the jury that "Cussen had driven her to Hampstead, provided the gun, and had goaded her into shooting Blakely to remove a love-rival from the scene.". She became the lover of the Maharaja of Cooch Behar before being killed in a mysterious car crash in January 1955.By chance I discovered Ward won Ruth a walk-on part in the 1951 film Lady Godiva Rides Again a comedy about beauty contests. Desmond Cussen is the General Counsel at Fandom. She offered no resistance. It was against a womans dignity. She shot her lover, David Blakely, outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead on the night of Easter Sunday, 1955, felling him with one bullet and pumping four more into him before an off-duty policeman removed the revolver from her hand. He failed to raise any of these discrepancies.The more I read the transcript, comparing it to witness statements prior to the trial, the more I saw the skulduggery that took place. She allegedly shot Blakely at close range; which is a messy business. But there was more to the story than came out at the trial. I wrote to Prime Minister Tony Blair for a reaction about the Home Secretarys decision; and to HM the Queen. He was avoiding her and his friends denied he was there. And someone was determined to send Ruth to the gallows.Official files relating to the trial, including the transcript, have been locked away for much longer than the statutory 30 years. In Assassin's Creed III, Desmond is able to find the Isu device created to stop such an event from happening again, though its use would require Desmond to sacrifice his life. If that had succeeded, she would have been found guilty of manslaughter and spared the gallows. Desmond Napoles is a teenager who is changing the world. He gave his address as the Atlantic Hotel, Queens Gardens in London where I discovered hed lived for two years. All these aspects were left unsaid at the trial. It followed my discovery of Desmond Cussen's signature on a business document in 1964 while he was lying low at a London hotel. Phone numbers and addresses of Berta and Arthur Neilsons friends, also notable journalists of the time Peter Grisewood, Jimmy Reid and Duncan Webb and other contacts that shed scribbled in fifty years ago, became important clues. What is little know though is that Blakely was violent and controlling. At the end of the first day of the trial, Melford Stevenson, with no jury present, gained a new lease of life. Refusing any option to reduce her sentence - like pleading insanity or hig However, later when I examined the transcript of the trial, which took place on 20th June, two months after the magistrates court hearing, I found that Nickolls failed to mention this crucial piece of evidence. In what appeared to be an open-and-shut case of cold-blooded murder, where a prostitute murdered one of her lovers, it didnt matter about anyone else.But those characters should have been investigated.David Blakely had a darker side. "He explained to the judge Mr Justice Havers that the close range shot had left the usual circle of powder fouling around the bullet hole. At the Old Bailey on 20th June 1955, Christmas Humphreys assisted by Mervyn Griffith-Jones and Miss Jean Southworth, instructed by the Department of Public Prosecutions, appeared on behalf of the prosecution. I recently came across a question in parliament dated 8th December 1955. He told me on the telephone that Cussen had told him in the early 1960s [at the time of the Profumo scandal] of Ruth Elliss friendship with Dr Stephen Ward. Its clear to me he had some sort of immunity. Desmond Cussen, a potential murder suspect, was never interrogated Credit: Alamy Blakely, who had lived with her on and off for two years, had seemingly left her. Her sister Muriel gave birth to a child through incest with her father, a bully who started sexually abusing Muriel when she was six. are takis halal; derrick stafford nba referee; what does it mean when a guy sends you a picture of himself shirtless. After those discoveries I was determined to find everything I could about this very private man. The list certainly existed. As part of my research, I wanted to compare magistrates court statements with the trial transcript. In return they did the dirty work, becoming a listening service for intelligence organisations, gathering information from high-powered men, generally in their beds, during the Cold War.Both Ward and Antony Beauchamp, about whom little was known, were members of the Little Club in Knightsbridge, also shrouded in mystery, the club where Ruth Ellis would become manageress in 1953.The Press tried to portray it as some sort of low-class dive for losers.Its membership actually included King Hussein of Jordan, film stars Douglas Fairbanks Jnr and Burt Lancaster, society photographer Baron a close friend of Prince Philip, racing driver Stirling Moss and Anthony Armstrong-Jones who became Princess Margarets husband.Ruth fitted the bill for Ward and Beauchamps game. One month and thirty phone calls after beginning my detective work I traced Cussens accountant. Two days before the hanging, Ellis's lawyers had submitted evidence, including the testimony of witnesses that Blakely had inflicted repeated beatings on her and that she believed he had caused the miscarriage she suffered just 10 days before the shooting with a punch to the stomach. She said Ruth was wearing spotlessly clean, pale coloured clothing that night. He said, "No scaffold was erected in Holloway prison before the execution of Mrs Ellis. What is even more interesting is an important discovery I made in a Metropolitan Police document recently released at the Public Record Office and has never been made public: the gun broke during testing. In January 2006 I managed to make contact with Mrs Hogg. He had no idea, until our book was published three years later, that his Home Guard partner was the same man who would play an important role in Ruth Elliss life and death in 1955. 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