The man they couldn't hang

Agatha Christie may be Torbay’s most famous crime writer but there is another crime figure who is well known to the people of The Bay and rather than writing about crime he was actively involved in it...

High above the cliffs along the coast from Torquay is Babbacombe, famous for its cliff railway and magnificent sea-views. On Saturday 15th November 1884 it became famous for something far more unpleasant.

Miss Emma Keyse, an elderly spinster, was brutally murdered at her burnt-out villa. Nothing had been stolen from the villa and so it was thought that the motive for the murder was that someone wanted to keep Miss Keyse quiet. After piecing together the evidence the police arrested John Henry George Lee an employee of the dead woman.

In court Lee was described as “a depraved lunatic capable of smashing an old lady’s head with an axe, then slashing her throat with a knife”.The local newspapers published the facts of the case and it appeared that there was no sympathy for the murderer; he had murdered his employee in cold blood and then tried to hide his actions by setting light to the murder scene.

Monday 23rd February found a large crowd waiting outside Exeter prison to watch his execution by hanging. Lee climbed the scaffold, a bag was placed over his head and then the rope was put over his head. A silence fell over the watching crowd, the executioner pulled the lever to release the trapdoor and drop Lee to his death, but nothing happened. The executioner moved Lee away from the drop and checked the machinery:  the trapdoor opened.

Once again the condemned man was placed on the trapdoor; the lever was pulled; and for a second time nothing happened.

By now the watching crowd was growing impatient with waiting. The trapdoor was checked a third time, and worked perfectly so Lee was returned to the position to await his death.

The executioner pulled the lever and – for a third time – nothing happened.
It was decided to return the prisoner to his cell so that the scaffold could be thoroughly inspected.

News of the three failures now spread to the national newspapers and for a short time John Lee became a national figure. After an appeal to the Home Secretary it was decided that it would be unfair to expect Lee to suffer the emotional distress of being executed twice and his sentence was changed to life imprisonment. Lee was eventually freed in 1907 after just 23 years in prison.
Investigations into Lee’s life after prison have discovered that he married in 1909 and then left his pregnant wife and their other child in a workhouse in 1911. He emigrated to America with a woman who claimed that she was his wife. He died in 1945 of heart failure and was buried in Forest Home Cemetery, Milwaukee.

A final twist to the story was the discovery of the Exeter prison governor’s log book which stated that, as Lee walked to the scaffold, he told his guards that he had had a dream in which “three times the bolt was drawn, and three times the bolt failed to act”. It is also recorded that at the trial “The judge, in passing sentence of death, remarked how calm Lee’s demeanour had been throughout the trial. Lee is said to have leant forward in the dock and replied firmly, ‘The reason why I am so calm is that I trust in the Lord, and He knows I am innocent’.”