In 1938 Elsie May Ellington moved from Blackpool to London, where she became assistant manageress at a Camberwell Green teashop. She continued to keep in touch with Ernest Edmund Hamerton, a Blackpool hotel kitchen-worker who subsequently followed her to London, seeking employment.
He found lodgings under the same roof, but the two began to quarrel. On January 15th, 1940, 28-year-old Elsie told their landlady, I am finished with him. Another row erupted the next morning, JANUARY 16th, as she was preparing breakfast, and Hamerton went upstairs, returning with a knife. He then stabbed Elsie in the face, arms and back and she was found lying in the scullery, the knife plunged into her.
Later the same day Hamerton, 25, was arrested as he alighted from a London train on its arrival in Manchester. Convicted of murder, he was refused leave to appeal and went to the scaffold.