Pierrepoint (31 page)

As prisoner 9656, Ruth Ellis spent just 23 days in the condemned cell at Holloway. Her execution date was fixed for 9.00 a.m., Wednesday, 13 July, and letters were duly sent to Albert and to assistant Royston Rickard. Public sentiment about the case ran high, and thousands had signed petitions for clemency. On the Tuesday evening, as the two executioners rested in their quarters after preparing the scaffold, the Governor of Holloway was forced to call in police reinforcements as the crowd outside the prison’s gates swelled to over five hundred, some singing hymns, others shouting and protesting at the injustice of the sentence. Several broke through a police cordon and rushed the gates, but they were forced back as more police arrived.

Albert had been told that Ellis weighed 103 pounds, was 5
feet 2 inches tall, and her age was 28. He worked out a drop of 8 feet 4 inches. As they finished their supper and drank the limited supply of beer in the company of the warder assigned to keep them company in the prison, the two hangmen could hear the disturbance outside the main gates, and the noise continued long after they had both retired to bed.

The two men rose early on the morning of execution reset the trap and with the noose coiled up at head height, the chalk ‘T’ mark was re-done over the join of the two heavy hinged trapdoors. The cross that had been placed on the far wall of the execution chamber for Mrs Christofi stayed in place at Ellis’s request.

Ellis had also woken early. She penned several letters, including one to Blakely’s mother, apologising for shooting him. She was given her own clothes to wear at the execution, with the addition of a pair of canvas undergarments to wear. These had been compulsory for executed women prisoners since the 1920s. She was attended by a Catholic priest, who sat with her as the clock ticked slowly towards the fatal hour.

Five minutes before the appointed time, a telephone call was received at Holloway. Claiming to be from the Home Secretary’s office, the caller said that a stay of execution had been granted and advised the authorities to await further details. Governor Dr Taylor immediately telephoned the Home Office and was told that no such action had been taken and that the call should be treated as a hoax.

This delayed the execution slightly. Receiving the signal, Albert entered Ellis’s cell, pinioned her hands briskly behind her back and led her the five yards to the gallows room. She remained silent throughout. Reaching the trap, he placed the white cotton hood over her head and adjusted the noose round her neck. Rickard pinioned her legs and stepped back.
Albert removed the safety pin, pushed the lever, and turned to see the trap open with a thud. It had taken less than 15 seconds. Outside the prison a crowd of over a thousand stood in silence.

Pathologist Dr Keith Simpson performed the autopsy an hour later and found that she had died instantaneously. An inquest was held later that morning. Ellis’s brother made the formal identification of her body, the deep imprint of the noose covered by a scarf. She was buried in the grounds of Holloway prison shortly after lunch. The autopsy report was later published, and Simpson noted the presence of brandy in her stomach. The official inquest report read:

When Albert arrived back at the Rose and Crown that evening, he found the car park full to bursting with cars, coaches and charabancs, as scores of curious drinkers clamoured for a peek at the hangman.

On Tuesday, 26 July, Albert travelled to Birmingham’s Winson Green Gaol to hang Frederick Arthur Cross, an unemployed concrete mixer from Staffordshire. Cross’s wife had left him, taking their two children with her. He was devastated and bought some rat poison, with the intention to commit suicide. Lacking the courage to take his own life, but wishing to die, he hatched a plan to commit murder so that when convicted he would be executed. His victim was chosen at random.

On 25 February, Donald Lainton, a 28-year-old insurance salesman, happened to stop in a snowstorm to ask directions.
Cross offered to show him the way if he could give him a lift. Approaching Uttoxeter, he told Lainton to pull off the road and then stabbed him to death with a pair of scissors. Cross gave himself up and after being arrested he told the police, ‘I don’t want legal aid and I don’t want defending – I just want to hang.’

He pleaded guilty at Birmingham Assizes on 5 July and the date for execution was set for the first Tuesday after three clear Sundays had passed. He had even smiled when the judge sentenced him to death. Housed in the death cell on the following morning, fear now took over and Cross told his representatives he no longer wanted to die and announced that he wished to appeal. All appeals for a reprieve failed, and a letter written to the Queen by his wife failed to stop the execution going ahead.

Cross managed to keep calm during the days leading up to his execution, but on the morning of the execution, as Albert and assistant Harry Allen went to secure his wrists, he began to resist, kicking out and struggling as the warder took hold and restrained him. The procession to the scaffold was slow, with Cross fighting and screaming all the way until the drop silenced him forever.

Albert drove back to Much Hoole after the execution, but was home just long enough to change his shirt and meet up with Jock Stewart, before they set off together to Liverpool, where Norman Green was to be hanged on the following morning.

On Easter Monday, ten-year-old Norman Yates had left his home in Wigan to run an errand. A short time later he was found stabbed to death. It was the second murder of a young boy in the town in the last year. Witnesses had seen a blond-haired man in the area and investigations led to Norman Green, a corn grinder. He denied the accusations but later
confessed to both murders, taking police to his workplace, where the murder weapon was located. It was shown at his trial that Green was epileptic and there was a history of insanity in his family. Following his arrest he told detectives he kept getting the urge to kill, and that he might kill again. He made no appeal after sentence of death was passed. Albert saw Green exercising in the prison yard and worked out a drop of 7 feet 7 inches. On the following morning the execution passed off quickly without incident and by lunchtime the two executioners were enjoying a drink in the Rose and Crown.

There were just three more executions in 1955, two in the same week at Birmingham, and the final one at Leeds on 12 August. Steve Wade officiated at them all. The furore raised by the execution of Ruth Ellis, the controversial execution of Derek Bentley, and the feeling that a miscarriage of justice had taken place following the execution of Timothy Evans, led to mounting press and public campaigns for the abolition of the death penalty. Coming as quickly as it did following the four-year Royal Commission Report, there was little chance that a total abolition would find favour with the Law Lords, but it was decided that in light of recent events, a major overhaul of the types of murder warranting the death penalty would be debated. This led to an extraordinary amount of reprieves being granted – having a detrimental financial impact on the hangman’s income. For Albert, though, these fees would not make too much of a dent in his pocket. He was already in discussions with a major newspaper about a series of articles on his life and cases that would bring in a very healthy cheque – and the end of the long Pierrepoint dynasty.

I
mmediately after the execution of Ruth Ellis, the press had bombarded Albert as he hurried to catch his train, asking how it felt to hang a woman. He could have told them that Ruth Ellis was the sixteenth woman he had hanged, and that only the week before he had travelled to Holloway to hang the glamorous nightclub hostess, there had been another date in his diary to hang Leeds housewife Sarah Lloyd at Manchester’s Strangeways Gaol. With just 48 hours left to live, Mrs Lloyd, who had battered to death a cantankerous elderly neighbour following a quarrel, received word that her sentence had been commuted. Albert was angered at the attitude of the press. Just because one convict an attractive club hostess while the other a plain suburban housewife, he believed that both should have been worthy of the same treatment.

Jamaican, Albert Lumelino, became another date in Albert’s diary that summer. Lumelino was awaiting execution in the condemned cell at Wandsworth, having committed murder during the course of a robbery at Folkestone. His execution
was scheduled for 30 August, but, like Mrs Lloyd, a reprieve was issued two days before he was to die. Later that year Annie Drinkall, housed in the death cell at Manchester, heard notice of her reprieve four days before the execution, set to take place on 6 December. She had been convicted of the murder of her one-year-old daughter in Sheffield.

There were three final engagements added to Albert’s diary in early December. The first was scheduled to be a double execution at Manchester; the other, received a fortnight later, was to carry out the execution of Leslie Grinstead at Wandsworth. At Manchester, Adam Nuttall was to hang for the murder of his wife at Bury, and sharing the drop with him was Thomas Bancroft of Middleton, who had been convicted at the same assizes for the murder of a baby boy.

Grinstead was soon reprieved and the execution cancelled. Meanwhile a new date had been fixed for the double execution at Manchester to take place on Tuesday, 3 January 1956. On Saturday, 31 December, Nuttall received word that his life had been spared, but in the case of Thomas Bancroft the Home Office wrote that there were insufficient grounds for interfering with the due course of the law.

Heavy snow covered the north of England as Albert made the short car journey to Manchester on the afternoon of Monday, 2 January 1956. It was now to be a single execution, which obviously meant a smaller fee than he would have got for the double. The Rose and Crown had been doing a roaring trade over Christmas and New Year, and with Albert having to be away for the Monday night, he had employed extra staff to cover his duties.

Albert reached the prison in good time and met up with assistant Harry Allen. They viewed the prisoner in the cell,
worked out a drop, tested the equipment and returned to their quarters. No sooner had they started their evening meal than word reached the prison that Bancroft had been spared. It had been a close call. With just 12 hours before he was due to die, no man had come closer to the gallows in the last century. It was the first time Albert had been in the prison in readiness for an execution when a reprieve had been granted, but unlike his father almost half a century earlier, he did not go with the governor to break the news to the condemned man. With their duties now at an end, Albert packed away the ropes and left the prison at 8.30 p.m. The weather hadn’t relented and with a thick layer of snow still on the ground, Albert decided against making the potentially hazardous car journey back to Hoole. He booked into a Manchester hotel for the evening, returning home on the following morning.

What had started off as a potentially profitable day when the original date had been entered into his diary, with a full fee of £25 (approximately £400 in today’s money), had now come to nothing. The ruling still held in England and Wales that hangmen were ‘paid by the neck’: no job meant no fee. On 25 January, after mulling over this for several days, Albert wrote to the prison commissioners:

The authorities wasted little time in reminding Albert of the rules he had agreed to many years before. They were fully aware, of course, that Albert had never been paid the full fee in the event of a last-minute reprieve in England or Wales. Scotland may have had that ruling, but that involved a different authority, with their own rules. The English commissioners wrote to Albert, outlining the terms and conditions he had agreed to in 1932. Two weeks later he penned a reply.