It is February 23rd, 1885.
The place is the the coach house of Exeter Prison, Devon, England.
The time is 8 AM.
Outside the prison, a large crowd has gathered to await the execution by hanging of convicted murderer John Lee, condemned for the brutal murder of his employer, Miss Emma Keyes, the previous year. When the execution has been successfully completed a bell will toll for fifteen minutes and the dreaded black flag will be hoisted over the prison.
At 7:55 AM the execution party, consisting of the prison warden, the chief guard, the prison doctor, the prison chaplain, several guards, the executioner and representatives of the Press, is assembled outside the condemned cell.
At precisely 8 AM, Britain's chief public executioner, James Berry, receives a signal from the prison warden and enters the condemned cell. He swiftly straps Lee's arms by his sides and places a white hood over his head. Accompanied by the rest of the execution party, Berry swiftly leads the pinioned and hooded convict on to the gallows, and then equally swiftly straps his legs together and tightens the noose around his neck.
Berry steps quickly off the trapdoors and approaches the lever. He swiftly pushes the lever over as he has done so many times before...
And nothing happens.
The doors drop approximately a quarter inch and then jam solid and will drop no further. Berry is slightly flustered by this but it has been known to happen before so he continues with his grim duty. He unstraps Lee's legs, removes the noose and takes off the hood. He leads Lee into an adjoining room and quickly returns to examine and test the trapdoors.
They are reset and the lever is thrown.
They work perfectly.
Berry goes into the adjoining room and brings Lee back on to the gallows. Again the hood and noose are applied and Berry throws the lever a second time.
The doors jam solid a second time.
This time Berry has strained the lever by throwing it too hard. Lee is again unstrapped and the noose and hood removed. He is again taken back to the adjoining room. It is suggested by a member of the execution party that the doors fit together too tightly. Two guards are dispatched to fetch a plane and an axe to whittle the doors slightly. When this has been done, Berry throws the lever and the doors jam solid again. Now a part of one door is sawed off and yet the iron catches on the trapdoors still need to be struck hard before the trapdoors will fall.
Lee is then returned to his position atop the gallows. He is strapped, hooded and noosed for a third time. Berry moves swiftly, as if to bring this sorry spectacle to as quick an end as possible. He leaps for the lever and throws it as hard as he can.
And the doors jam solid again.
The prison chaplain now lies unconscious on the scaffold, the grim spectacle having proved simply too much for him. The prison doctor sees this and immediately demands that the execution be halted on the spot and the Under-Sheriff of Devon agrees.
The prison warden, doctor and chaplain (by now partially recovered) go to the doctor's room to compose and sign a statement bearing witness to the morning's bizarre events. This statement is immediately taken to the Home Secretary in London for his consideration. The Home Secretary decides that Lee has suffered enough and proceeds to commute the death sentence, instead ordering that Lee face life imprisonment instead.
The scene of the crime was a seaside house in the pleasant Devon town of Babbacombe, near Torquay. On the night of November 14th, 1885, householder Emma Keyes confronted an intruder inside her home.
It was to be the last mistake she ever made.
She was beaten to the ground with a heavy instrument, believed to be a hatchet, her throat was cut with such force that, when examined, her vertebrae were found to have notches carved by the knife. Then her murderer soaked her body in a flammable fluid, believed to be paraffin, sprinkled more paraffin around the house and set fire to the body and the crime scene.
It was a particularly brutal and callous murder, especially as other servants were in the house at the time and could easily have been casualties as well.
John Lee, an employee of Emma Keyes, was a prime suspect from the start.
He was the first person to raise the alarm, making him the first person to be aware that anything was amiss. He also told at least one witness that Emma Keyes was dead even before the body had been found, although he later denied this in court. Changing his story probably did him no favours in court.
He did save one servant from the burning building and, in doing so, left a series of bloody prints from his right hand on the stair wall of the house and on the servant's nightgown. This seemed strange to investigators as,it was Lee's left hand that had been injured, or so he claimed.
Lee claimed to have cut his hand while breaking a window so he and the servant could safely exit the burning building. The problem with Lee's claim in this regard was two-fold. One, examination of the broken glass showed the window to have been broken from the outside while Lee claimed to be inside. Also, the servant he escorted from the building said she clearly heard the window being broken some time after Lee had saved her.
Another major discrepancy was Lee's attitude towards the body of his murdered employer. He took a great deal of persuasion before he would agree to help remove the body and, when he did help, he claimed to be entirely unaware of her very obvious injuries which, given that Emma Keyes had been beaten to death and her throat slashed in the most brutal manner, seems strange.
Especially when he told at least one witness of her death before her body had even been found. Furthermore, a search of the house revealed a virtually empty can of paraffin in the pantry, which was where Lee slept. Not only was this near-empty can regarded as the probable source of the accelerant used to start the fire, the can was found in Lee's quarters and even had blood spots all over it.
There is also the small matter of Lee's hatchet to consider. It was believed that Emma Keyes had first been severely beaten with a hatchet (or similar instrument) before having her throat slashed. When the firefighters arrived at the scene they immediately demanded a hatchet to chop out some burning timbers. Lee, who was the employee who used a hatchet most, was suspiciously quick to find them a hatchet. And that hatchet just happened to have blood spots all over it.
As a result of this, Lee was swiftly arrested, questioned, charged with murder and reckless arson and held to be tried at the next Assizes. This was significant for the Lee as, under English law, only at a court of Assizes could a capital trial be held. And this would be a capital trial where few local people doubted his guilt, and even fewer when several people claimed to have heard Lee issuing death threats against Emma Keyes.
The inquest and trial were concluded quickly. The crime occurred in mid-November and Lee was found guilty of murder and reckless arson during the first week of December. It only remained for the trial judge put on the traditional ‘Black Cap' to pass the following sentence:
‘John Henry George Lee, you have been found guilty of willful murder by a jury of your peers. The sentence of this Court is that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison, and thence to a place of execution, where you shall be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And that your body be afterwards cut down and buried within the precincts of the prison in which you were last confined before execution. And may the Lord have mercy upon your soul. Amen.'
Lee was swiftly taken away to Exeter Prison, which was known as the ‘hanging prison' for the county of Devon, and lodged in the condemned cell to await his fate. He was expecting either a hanging or a reprieve.
In the end, he got both.
So what kind of a man was John Lee?
He was born on August 15th 1864, in the quiet little village of Abbotskers well in Devon. The time and place of his eventual death is disputed. Some claim he died in a poorhouse in the town of Tavistock in Devon, about twenty miles from Plymouth. Others say he died in Australia, while still others claim he died in the USA, in Milwaukee, in 1945.
He had a moderately comfortable childhood and became a very close to his half-sister, a woman named Elizabeth Harris, a fellow-employee of Emma Keyes who would later give evidence against him at his murder trial. His elder sister, Amelia, was also employed by Emma Keyes and talked he into giving Lee a job in 1878. After briefly being in Emma Keyes employ, Lee left to join the Royal Navy, but was discharged in 1882 on medical ground and, some say, because he had disciplinary problems during his service.
After his discharge from the Royal navy, Lee held a series of low-paid and menial jobs at a number of hotels in the nearby town of Torquay until he was jailed for petty theft. When he came out of prison, Elizabeth Harris interceded with Emma Keyes to get Lee his old job back. Emma Keyes was persuaded to allow Lee back into her service, despite his record, as a groundsman and occasional butler.
Lee returned to Emma Keyes' employ in the summer of 1884, but it was only a few weeks later that he was caught attempting to sell a market trader a guitar stolen the Keyes home. Mrs Keyes, who seems to have tempered justice with no small amount of mercy under the circumstances, did not fire him. Instead, she docked a portion of his wages as a punishment, but kept him in her employ. The cutting of his wages was later alleged by the prosecutors at his murder trial to be his motive for murder.
The actual guilt or innocence of John Lee has been, unsurprisingly, somewhat overshadowed by the remarkable events that occurred at his failed execution. In favour of his innocence are the fats that all the evidence against him was entirely circumstantial. Despite there being a considerable amount of such evidence, there was nothing that gave an iron-clad indication of his guilt.
Lee also had far more to lose than to gain by murdering his employer. After all, he had previously described her as his best friend in the world and simply having his wages docked was hardly a vital and pressing reason to commit capital murder. That would be the action of somebody who was reckless, impulsive, foolish and a brute. According to Lee's letters while awaiting execution, and the testimony of some people who knew him, Lee simply wasn't that way inclined.
Finally, even after his nightmarish experience on the gallows and having served a 22 year sentence, Lee remained defiant to the end, always asserting his innocence of the murder.
There is, however, an equally strong body of evidence, albeit entirely circumstantial, to suggest that Lee was guilty.
There was a hatchet with blood spots on it, a hatchet being the weapon suspected of being used in the murder, which John Lee used regularly around the house and was suspiciously quick to give to firemen when they were hacking burning timbers out of the house. The paraffin can was equally suspicious. Paraffin was the accelerant suspected to be used to start the fire, the paraffin can was found in the pantry where John Lee slept and it also had blood spots on it.
Also, even when pressed heavily, Lee never offered any alternative versions of what happened that night. When pressed, instead of offering alternatives, he simply fell silent. He also fell silent when pressed regarding the inconsistencies in his story, such as his cut hand and having told a witness his employer was dead even before her body had been found. And it wasn't until long after the case had been closed and his death sentence commuted that he began to accuse others of being involved, and all of the people he accused had strong alibi's.
Lee marked himself out as a prime suspect by being the first to raise the alarm. He was also accused by at least one witness of telling them that Emma Keyes was dead even before her body had been found, although he later denied having done this. He had injured his left hand, yet had left a series of right-handed blood prints on the stair wall and the nightgown of the servant he apparently saved from the burning building.
He also claimed that the cut on his left hand came from when he broke a window to help the servant escape the fire. The condition of the window indicates, however, that it was smashed from the outside in, while Lee was supposedly inside the house. The female servant Lee so generously saved also reported hearing the sound of the window breaking some time after she was rescued, not before.
When Lee was finally persuaded to help move the victim's body, and he only did so after much protest on his aprt, he claimed to be unaware of the extensive, and very obvious, injuries that she had suffered. Couple that with the witness claiming that Lee told them she was dead, even before her body had been found, and you have a major discrepancy Lee did little to answer. Put simply, if Lee was unaware of the injuries on the victim's body, then how could he possibly know that she was dead before the body was discovered and removed?
So, what happened on the gallows that fateful day? What went wrong and put a potentially innocent man through such agony? Lee himself always claimed it was God's work and that it was a case of divine intervention. He also claimed to have had a dream while in the condemned cell, in which the gallows malfunctioned and failed to do its deadly work.
The other versions are somewhat more scientific than that. James Berry, who was the chief British hangman assigned to execute Lee, admitted to having had a dream early in his career of the gallows failing to work. However, he put the failed execution purely down to technical problems.
There had been heavy rain in the two day leading up to the execution and, a gallows being made of wood, he felt that the rain had caused the trapdoors to warp and then jam solid whenever weight was placed upon them. He also felt that the gallows were poorly constructed. He describes the trapdoors as being too thin and the ironwork as being too light for the job in hand, so that the iron catches on the trapdoors became locked. He also describe the doors themselves as fiting together too tightly.
Mr. A.B. Hardy, a Home Office representative, mentions having ordered the Clerks of Works to thoroughly inspect the gallows. It was their opinion, and his, that a long hinge rested on the drawing bolt that held the doors closed and thus held them closed even after Berry had pulled the lever to open them.
Officer Edwards was the Artisan Warder at Exeter Prison at the time. He blames the iron bearing bars of the gallows as being too light and thus tending to lengthen when significant weight was put upon them. This would explain why the doors jammed solid when weight was placed upon them, but worked perfectly when that weight was removed.
Mr Harris, the Chief Constable for the county of Devon and a witness to the failed execution, remembers the gallows as being cold, wet and damp. He advances the idea that the gallows had simply become too wet for too long and that, while drying out, the wood had warped and consequently the trapdoors simply jammed under the weight of the condemned prisoner.
The aftermath of the hanging affected different people in different ways. Lee's death sentence was immediately commuted to one of life imprisonment. He served 22 years, mainly at Portland Prison in the county of Dorset and was released in 1907. He then left for the USA, where he lived illegally, never becoming a US citizen, until he is said to have dies in Milwaukee in 1945, although the precise date and location of his death has never been fully confirmed.
The official reaction to the failed hanging, at least from those who were there, was to simultaneously deny their own responsibility while preferably passing the buck on to someone else. In the official correspondence between various officials and witnesses to the debacle, there is plenty of blame offered around, but very little accepted.
To be fair to the officials of the time, they did at least begin the long-overdue process of modernizing and standardizing the execution methods used in British prisons. A new standard type of gallows and execution suite were designed, meaning that future executions would never again end in such farcical circumstances. This new system was gradually introduced at ‘hanging prisons' all over the country.
It proved quicker and safe for all concerned (except the condemned, of course), especially when a new breed of executioners such as John Ellis and Albert Pierrepoint began working their own ideas into the execution procedure. The combination of decent and purpose-built equipment and professional and skill executioners did much to make the British method of execution the fastest and cleanest method available, and this method was exported to a large number of countries, some of which still use it today.
There is one final, and equally grim, postscript to the case of ‘The Man They Couldn't Hang.' You couldn't possibly make it up, and it is this:
John Lee's mother was desperate to secure her son's release and, to do so, engaged the services of a lawyer from Plymouth who felt as strongly as she did and was prepared to try and force his case to be taken up in Parliament.
That lawyer was a certain Herbert Rowse Armstrong.
Armstrong left Devon in 1905 and moved to Hay-On-Wye in the the county of Herefordshire, opening his own law practice as he did so. In 1921, he deliberately administered a fatal dose of arsenic to his wife Katherine, whose continued presence was clearly surplus to requirements, Armstrong was convicted of murder and hanged at Gloucester Prison on May 31st, 1922 by John Ellis, the chief executioner from Rochdale. His final words as the doors fell are said to have been ‘I am coming, Kate!'
This time, the gallows worked perfectly.
