Just as Christa Pike may one day earn the sobriquet ‘The woman they could not kill’, John ‘Babbacombe’ Lee became known in the 1880s as ‘The man they could not hang’.
Lee was convicted on circumstantial, if flimsy, evidence of killing an elderly spinster, Emily Keyse, for whom he worked in Babbacombe, Torquay. She was found with her throat cut, and there were signs a fire was started to cover the murder.
Lee, 20, was a known thief. Keyse had threatened to cut his wages and he had an unexplained cut on his arm. Lee maintained his innocence but had no alibi and was poorly defended. It is now thought Lee may have been a scapegoat for his stepsister, who also worked for Keyse, and her lover, a lawyer who initially was to defend Lee.
In 1885 Lee stood on the trapdoor three times, but it refused to open and the medical officer halted the execution. Later, he said he had dreamed he would survive. A story circulated that a fellow prisoner had managed to wedge the trapdoor, but a Home Office inquiry found the gallows were misaligned when moved for the execution.
Lee was released in 1907 and went to live with his mother. Two years later he married a local nurse. They had two children and moved to Lambeth, where he worked as a barman before deserting his family and sailing to America with his mistress. He worked as a clerk in a shipping company and died in Milwaukee, aged 80, after a heart attack in 1945. In 2000, the rope used by James Berry, the failed executioner, was sold to a museum owner for £3,000.
The only other man known to have survived three attempts to hang him was Joseph Samuels, transported to Sydney for robbery. In 1803, Samuels, convicted of a policeman’s murder, survived after three efforts failed. The first time the rope snapped; the second rope unravelled; and the third broke. The crowd, suspecting divine intervention, called for the execution to be stopped and Samuels was reprieved.
It did him little good. He drowned shortly afterwards, trying to escape.
James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor
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