What happened to Ruth Ellis' 'abandoned' children? Tragedy stalked her family
By Robert Leigh | Wed Mar 05 2025When Ruth Ellis was hanged, she left behind two children - a son and daughter - as well as her parents, multiple lovers and an ex-husband.
Her life and notorious death - she became the last woman to be subjected to capital punishment in the UK in 1955 after killing her abusive partner - is depicted in ITV drama A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story.
Horrifically abused as a child, Ruth went on to lead a chaotic lifestyle, which resulted in complicated upbringings for her two young children, Andre and Georgina.
As the drama's writer Kelly Jones explains: "Ruth was a young mother who'd essentially abandoned her children. She'd given one of them off to be adopted and Andre was kind of cut loose by the fact that she'd killed David Blakely."
But what was the truth about Ruth's relationship with her children? Where are they now - and what were their feelings towards their mother?
Was Ruth Ellis negligent towards her children?
A Cruel Life: The Ruth Ellis Story executive producers Kate Bartlett and Antonia Gordon have noted difficulties about applying 21st century sensibilities concerning parenthood to Ruth's circumstances in the 1940s and 1950s.
"It was a different era," says Kate. "Ruth did leave her children on their own at times and she wasn’t the perfect mother, but no one’s the perfect mother. Ruth was doing what she had to do to earn money and support her children but once David Blakely came into her life, he monopolised her focus."
Antonia adds: "Being a single mum in the 1950s was even tougher than now and would have been met with instant judgement. Ruth had the courage to leave the abusive relationships she’d been in with her children’s fathers and found a way to make a successful living in an era when the housewife and motherhood were idealised."
Is Ruth Ellis' son still alive?
Ruth had son Andre - known as Andy - when she was just 17. Andy's father was 27-year-old French-Canadian soldier Clare Andrea McCallum, who met Ruth during his posting to London during World War Two. However, he abandoned Ruth and Andy following the end of the war, returning to his wife and children. Andy never had any contact with his father.
Andy lived with his aunt Muriel and her family for a while, as Ruth worked in a series of clerical and factory jobs. He also stayed with his mother as her work as a nightclub hostess and boss provided her with a bedsit over her workplace. However, when she was courted by George Ellis, who would become her husband, Ruth did not initially mention Andy, in case it put George off. And even when Ruth and George were married in November 1950, Andy remained with Muriel.
David Blakely became frustrated with Andy's presence when he arrived on the scene. But despite having lodgings of his own, David spent a lot of time with Ruth where she lived, with Andy (and by this point, a sister too) also in the home.
By the time of her involvement with Desmond Cussen, Andy was attending boarding school - paid for by Desmond - as his mother lived with David in a flat which Desmond was also covering. There were also claims Desmond had promised to look after Andy following Ruth's sentence.
In the days following his mother's execution, 10-year-old Andy was told the truth about his mother's passing. He had thought she was abroad on a modelling assignment when she was actually awaiting the gallows.
Any vow to take care of Andy did not materialise. Ruth's family were unable to afford his boarding school fees, and Andy went to a local school near his grandparents, who took him in. Sir Cecil Havers, the judge for his mother's trial, sent money to Andy every year to help support him.
Reports claim Andy was a "loner" and sat staring into space for hours. He is also said to have told Muriel his mother regularly visited him at night.
Andy organised his mother's reburial in 1971, when her remains were moved from an unmarked grave at Holloway, to a church in Buckinghamshire.
He had hoped for his mother to be buried next to David, the man she killed, but Ruth's final proposed resting place was denied. Instead, she was reburied - at night, to avoid media attention - in a cemetery three miles away from David's grave. Ruth's headstone bore the surname she never used, reading: "Ruth Hornby 1926–1955."
Andy took his own life in 1982. He was 37, and died in his bedsit. His funeral was paid for by Christmas Humphreys, the barrister who prosecuted his mother.
What happened to Ruth Ellis' daughter?
Georgina, Ruth's daughter with George, was rejected by her father when she was born in 1951. He wished for her to be adopted. But as Ruth and George's marriage crumbled, Georgina returned to London with her mother, living with her parents as she went back to escort work.
Just three years old when her mother was executed, Georgina's father sought to fetch her from the care of Muriel's family within days of Ruth's death. George insisted Ruth had agreed to friends of his caring for Georgina. However, she was fostered and eventually adopted, growing up thinking her adoptive carers were her biological parents.
It is believed Georgina discovered the truth about her mother from a press clipping she found in a drawer. She would go on to become a hostess herself, and run an escort agency.
She also cultivated a media profile through her liaisons with film star Richard Harris, football legend George Best, and train robber Charlie Wilson. Georgina also made appearances on TV in the 1990s on chat shows After Dark and Barrymore.
In her book, Ruth Ellis My Mother, Georgina wrote heartrendingly about her connection to the late mother she barely knew.
She said: "Central to us both was a desire to avoid falling into any rut that was the lot of so many of our contemporaries. From our earliest teens my mother and I were patent non-conformists. Both blessed with a pretty face and an attractive body, we were equally determined to employ our assets for personal benefit."
Georgina added: "Obviously I was very fond of her, although I was looked after by my grandmother and my mother's sister. I remember her - the closeness we all had. I've never had that since. Never. And I've always craved it. It's all I've ever wanted."
Georgina'a account of her final meeting with her mother, on the day she was executed, contradicted that of Muriel's, which insisted Ruth 'looked well'.
"Gone was all the glamour of her court appearance," Georgina recalled. "Her hair had yellowed and was tied in a pony-tail. She wore no make-up and was attired in the blue regulation-issue prison overalls."
Georgina, who married twice and had six children, died of cancer in 2001. She was 50.
Grandson still has hopes of a pardon for hanging for murder
Two of Ruth's grandchildren have insisted the grandmother they never met should not have been executed for her crime.
Laura Enston-Jones and Stephen Beard, whose mother was Georgina, believe Ruth was let down by her defence in court.
“The whole trial was a shambles. Her defence was pitiful," Laura said.
The siblings believe Desmond Cussen should have been identified as giving Ruth a gun, and that more consideration should have been given to Ruth suffering a miscarriage after being struck by David in the stomach in the weeks before the shooting.
Stephen highlighted how the petition that collected 50,000 signatures during the campaign for Ruth to be given clemency evidenced an appetite for a change in the law when his grandmother was executed. He said: “People had realised that this young woman with two young children, who was just trying to make her way in the world, had been let down by so many men. I think there was a sense of everyone realising that it was slightly inhumane. She is a murderer. But she didn’t deserve to be taken from the world in the way that she was.”
'Diminished responsibility' became a defence to murder in 1957, and capital punishment was abolished in the UK in 1964. Laura added: “Ruth was a trailblazer in life and a trailblazer in death. Ultimately, this case triggered major judicial reform in the UK. She didn’t die in vain and I take some comfort from that.”
Stephen also hopes a pardon may yet be possible for Ruth. "There was such a severe miscarriage of justice," he told The Times. "If handled professionally and mercifully, the conclusion would have been that this was a case of both battered woman syndrome and diminished responsibility."
What happened to Ruth Ellis' ex-husband George and lover Desmond Cussen?
Three years after Ruth was executed, her ex-husband George took his own life in a Jersey hotel in August 1958.
Desmond Cussen emigrated to Australia in 1964 and opened a florist’s in Perth. Questioned by a reporter in 1977, he branded Ruth a "terrible liar" as he denied claims he provided her with a gun and drove her to the murder scene. He died in 1991, aged 68, of pneumonia.
Ruth's father Arthur, meanwhile, died of lung cancer in 1967. Her mother, Bertha, survived being found unconscious in her gas-filled home in 1969, but never spoke coherently again.
