Vintage Crime and the Posthumous Pardon

Great Britain abandoned the death penalty in the mid-1960s, but the seeds were planted by hangings carried out the previous decade.

This month we look at four pardons issued long after the prisoners — three men and one woman — went to the gallows.

Aside from the unjust sentences, the cases share one other common thread: all four were hanged by Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s most prolific executioner. He’s the subject of this month’s reader quiz. Winner gets a $5 Amazon gift card.

Condemned by a Serial Killer

In March 1953, a new tenant at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, London, peeled back wallpaper in a pantry and made a gruesome discovery—one that sent serial killer John Christie to the gallows but also exposed one of Britain’s worst miscarriages of justice.

The wallpaper concealed an alcove containing three women's bodies. Two more were buried in the garden, and Christie’s wife, Ethel, lay beneath the apartment’s floorboards.

Christie paid with his life for the killings, but his testimony three years earlier had already condemned an innocent neighbor.

That man was Timothy Evans, 25, accused of strangling his wife, Beryl, and infant daughter, Geraldine.

Their bodies had been found in a washhouse on the property in late 1949.

At trial, it was Christie’s word against Evans’s.

Christie was 50, well-spoken, and a former special constable; Evans could barely read or write, was easily manipulated, and gave conflicting statements under police interrogation.

Tried specifically for his daughter's death, Evans was convicted and hanged on March 9, 1950.

Even though it was undeniably clear in 1953 that Christie was the true killer, it took 13 years of campaigning before Evans received a posthumous Royal Pardon in 1966.

Racism and a 46-year Fight for Justice

Mahmood Mattan didn’t have a chance.

When 42-year-old shopkeeper Lily Volpert was murdered in Cardiff’s dockland area on March 6, 1952, police rushed to find a suspect.

They settled on Mattan, a 29-year-old Somali merchant seaman.

The prosecution’s star witness testified he saw Mattan leave the shop.

In reality, the witness had seen a completely different man — a fact investigators knew and concealed.

The witness was even rewarded with £200 for fingering Mattan.

A top detective also buried a report that four other witnesses failed to identify Mattan in a lineup.

Worse still, Mattan’s own defense counsel undermined him in court, describing him as "this half-child of nature, a semi-civilized savage."

An all-white jury took just 45 minutes to find Mattan guilty. On September 3, 1952, he became the last person hanged in Wales.

Mattan’s wife, Laura, and their three sons spent 46 years fighting to clear his name.

In 1998, the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction, and the family received £725,000 in compensation.

Laura said, “I feel angry that it only took an hour to clear his name. That just shows how ridiculous the conviction was.”

In 2022, on the 70th anniversary of the wrongful hanging, South Wales Police finally issued an apology, admitting the investigation was flawed and racially biased.

Neither Laura nor her sons lived to see that day.

Killer, 16, Escapes Gallows; Pal, 19, Hangs

The Barlow and Parker warehouse on Tamworth Road in Croydon where two teens were arrested in November 1952. The warehouse has since been demolished.

A candy warehouse in Croydon south of London proved too alluring for teenagers Derek Bentley and Chris Craig on November 2, 1952.

They climbed to the roof planning a break-in but were surprised by police.

Officer Frederick Fairfax grabbed Bentley, who police claimed yelled, “Let him have it, Chris!”

Craig fired, grazing Fairfax's shoulder, but the officer held on to Bentley and called for help.

Minutes later, Constable Sidney Miles stepped onto the roof.

Craig shot him between the eyes, then jumped to the ground, fracturing his sternum and a wrist and injuring his spine.

Bentley was already under arrest when the fatal shot was fired, but the law of "joint enterprise" made him equally responsible.

At age 19, he was convicted of murder and sent to the gallows on January 28, 1953.

He hanged despite a jury's plea for mercy and evidence that he was epileptic, illiterate, and had a mental age of 11.

Craig was 16 — too young to hang.

He served 10 years, became a plumber, and decades later expressed remorse for the crime while insisting Bentley never uttered the famous phrase, which became the title of a movie about the case.

Bentley’s family fought for 45 years to clear his name.

He received a partial royal pardon in 1993, and in 1998 the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction entirely, ruling that the judge had pressured jurors to find him guilty.

On Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955, Ruth Ellis armed herself with a revolver and took a taxi to the Magdala Tavern in Hampstead, London — famous today for its Sunday roasts.

When her lover, racecar driver David Blakely, emerged from the pub, she fired six shots, killing him in the street (and ensuring her story would be retold in books and on the screen).

At trial, evidence showed Blakely was severely abusive.

Just three days before the shooting, he had punched Ellis in the stomach, causing a miscarriage.

Yet the judge instructed the jury to disregard his treatment of her as a defense.

Under 1955 law, murder carried an automatic death sentence, leaving no room to consider domestic abuse or coercion.

Jurors took less than half an hour to convict Ellis. On July 13, 1955, the 28-year-old mother of two was hanged at Holloway Prison.

Police on horseback maintained order as one thousand people crowded outside the prison gate.

Public outrage over the execution helped fuel the movement that ultimately abolished capital punishment in the United Kingdom.

Ellis was the last woman hanged in the country.

On July 8, 2026, following a petition by her grandchildren, King Charles granted Ellis a posthumous conditional pardon, officially commuting her death sentence to life imprisonment.

The government acknowledged her hanging was a "profound injustice" and said that under modern law, her history of severe domestic abuse would have prevented her from ever facing the gallows.

Meet Britain’s Most Prolific Hangman

Albert Pierrepoint retired shortly after dispatching Ruth Ellis but denied she was the reason.

Though he never confirmed this, it was more likely a dispute with a sheriff who refused to pay Pierrepoint’s fee after a condemned prisoner was reprieved.

Nobody knows precisely how many people Pierrepoint executed, but estimates range from 435 to 600.

Among them were 200 Nazi war criminals in Germany and Austria, including sadistic camp guard Irma Grese.

Pierrepoint had a routine.

He would arrive at the prison the day before the hanging and unobtrusively observe the condemned before calculating the “drop” – the distance needed to cleanly break the prisoner’s neck and cause instant death.

Too short and the person would strangle, too long and the fall could decapitate.

At the appointed time, Pierrepoint entered the condemned cell, bound the prisoner’s hands, walked them next door and positioned them on a trapdoor, placed a white hood over their head and the noose around their neck, then pressed the lever.

He could do all of that in 12 seconds.

Late in life, Pierrepoint had a change of heart about the death penalty. In his 1974 autobiography, he wrote that it was no deterrent for murder and achieved “nothing but revenge.”

Quiz time: Hanging was irregular work, so Pierrepoint had another job to help make ends meet. Hit reply and guess what it was! A winner picked at random from the correct responses gets a $5 Amazon gift card. Deadline is August 15.

Dan Williams and M. J. Van Deventer are the authors of the historical true crime book Madeline Gets Life, to be released by Level Best Books in May 2027.

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