The Man The Gallows Refused To Kill

John “Babbacombe” Lee is one of the strangest figures in the history of British justice — a nineteen-year-old servant who stood on a gallows trapdoor three times in a single morning, and three times walked off it alive. He became known across the world as The Man They Could Not Hang, and the reason the gallows refused him has never been explained.

To understand him, you have to start with a murder. In the early hours of 15th November 1884, at a house called The Glen at Babbacombe, near Torquay in Devon, an elderly spinster named Emma Keyse — who in her younger days had served Queen Victoria — was found dead. Her throat had been cut, her head beaten, and fires had been set around her body with paraffin to burn the house down around her. The only man in the household was her footman: John Lee, nineteen years old, who had a previous conviction for theft and an unexplained cut on his arm. The evidence was entirely circumstantial. No one saw the killing. Lee insisted, from the first day to the last day of his life, that he was innocent. It took the jury less than an hour to convict him. He was sentenced to hang at Exeter Prison on 23rd February 1885.

The Horror

The night before the execution, Lee told his warders something strange. He said he had dreamed that he stood on the scaffold — and that the trapdoor would not open beneath him. The warders noted it down. The next morning, the executioner James Berry — one of the most experienced hangmen in England — tested the drop. It worked perfectly. Lee was led out, placed on the trap, the noose fitted, the white hood drawn over his head. Berry pulled the lever. Nothing. The doors shifted a fraction and jammed. Warders stamped on the trap around the hooded, pinioned man. It would not fall. Lee was moved aside; Berry tested the mechanism again. It worked. Lee was placed back on the trap. Berry pulled the lever. Nothing. He was moved off a second time. The trap was tested again — and again it worked flawlessly, the doors crashing open the moment Lee was not standing on them. A third time they stood him on the drop, a hooded man who had now waited through two failed attempts at his own death. A third time the lever was pulled. A third time the trapdoor held. The prison chaplain and medical officer refused to let it continue, and Lee — legs still strapped, hood still on — was taken back to his cell alive.

Days later, the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, reportedly on the grounds that it would shock public feeling to send a man to the scaffold a fourth time. Lee had told his warders the drop would fail. It had failed three times. And no inquiry ever conclusively established why. Theories have circulated for well over a century: that rain had swollen the wooden boards so they fouled under a man’s weight; that the mechanism was fractionally misaligned and only bound when loaded; even that a prisoner who helped build the scaffold had sabotaged it. Each theory has problems. The trap worked in every single test — and refused only when John Lee stood upon it.

The Modern Relic

Lee served twenty-two years, protesting his innocence throughout, and walked free in 1907 to find himself famous. His life story ran in the newspapers under the title that would follow him forever — The Man They Could Not Hang — and crowds paid to see him. Then he slipped out of view, and for decades even historians did not know what had become of him. Modern researchers finally traced his death to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1945 — an ocean away from the scaffold that had refused him sixty years earlier, and his grave there has since been identified. Exeter Prison still stands on New North Road, its grim Victorian gatehouse looming over the city as it did on the morning of the three failed drops. Babbacombe bay, where The Glen once stood beneath the cliffs, is still there on the Devon coast. And the two mysteries at the heart of the story remain exactly where 1885 left them: no one was ever convicted of Emma Keyse’s murder but the man the gallows would not take — and no one has ever proven why, three times in one morning, a trapdoor that worked for everyone else refused to open under John Lee.

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