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Again and again, Muriel Jakubait leafs through these extraordinary pictures of her sister, Ruth Ellis. 'I feel dreadful, looking at them,' she declares. 'It makes me think how she could have made something of her life.
She had a tremendous amount going for her, Ruth.' There is sisterly pride in Muriel's voice, as well as deep sadness. For soon after these intimate, oddly disturbing photographs were taken, her sister died a brutal death, the last woman to be hanged in Britain.
When Ellis shot her lover, racing driver David Blakely, on April 10, 1955, the story gripped the nation. Assorted books, films and a campaign to reduce her conviction from murder to manslaughter have kept her in the public eye.
Yet, astonishingly, these photographs have until now never been published.
They were found by chance earlier this year, in a suitcase of old photographs bought for 5 at a car boot sale in London. The name Ruth Ellis, scrawled in faded blue ink on the front of one envelope, was the only clue to the amazing discovery inside.
When I first show them to Muriel, 80, she scans them hungrily. She recognises where they were taken: in and above the Little Club in Knightsbridge, central London, where her sister worked as a 'hostess', and where she entertained Blakely. The year, Muriel says, is probably 1952.
'I can remember sitting on that settee,' she exclaims, drawn back into the past. 'Ruth had a big room above the club, a sitting room- cum-dining room.
She had a bedroom there, too, and everything in it was white. She was always a spotlessly clean girl,' she adds, with unconscious pathos.
There is an eerie familiarity about this peroxide blonde with the knowing eyes, arching brows and perfectly painted lips. An Old Bailey jury took just 23 minutes to pronounce Ellis guilty of shooting Blakely outside the Magdala Tavern in Hampstead, north-west London. A month later, on July 13, 1955, aged 28, she was hanged outside Holloway prison, while a crowd waited silently at the gates. Thirty years on, her story inspired the film Dance With a Stranger, and launched the career of actress Miranda Richardson.
In court, Ellis seems to have been judged for her morals as much...