John 'Babbacombe' Lee
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John Henry George Lee, better known as John 'Babbacombe' Lee, (1864 - 1941?) survived three attempted judicial executions in England and is known as the man they couldn't hang.
Lee was born in Abbotskerswell, Devon, served in the Royal Navy and was a known thief. In 1885 he was convicted of the brutal murder of his employer Emma Keyse at Babbacombe Bay near Torquay. The evidence was weak and circumstantial - it amounted to little more than Lee being the only male in the house at the time of the murder, his previous criminal record and being found with an inexplicable cut on his arm. Despite this and his constant claim of innocence he was sentenced to hang.
However, on February 23 at Exeter prison, three attempts were made to carry out his execution. All ending in failure as the trap door of the scaffold failed to open. This was despite the fact it had been carefully tested by James Berry, the executioner, beforehand. As a result, Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Lee continued to petition successive Home Secretaries and was finally released from gaol in 1907. The only other known man in history to survive three hangings is Joseph Samuel.
After his release he seems to have exploited his notoriety, supporting himself through lecturing on his life, even becoming the subject of a silent film. Accounts of his whereabouts after 1916 are somewhat confused, and one researcher even speculated that in later years there was more than one man claiming to be Lee. It has been suspected that he died in the Tavistock workhouse sometime during World War II. However one recent piece of research concludes that he died in the US under the name of "James Lee" in 1945.[citation needed] According to the book titled 'The Man They Could Not Hang' by Mike Holgate and Ian David Waugh, Lee's gravestone was found at Forest Home Cemetery, Milwaukee.
In the 1970s, Dave Swarbrick (the fiddle-player in the English folk-rock band Fairport Convention), found a series of old newspaper articles about Lee and composed a rock opera entitled Babbacombe Lee which was recorded and released by Fairport Convention as an LP.
Folk song collector Gwilym Davies was given a notebook in 1971 by a Mrs Hunt, of Greywell, Hampshire, in which the words of a poem, 'The Death of John Lee' were written.[1] The words, with a composed tune, were published in 1972 by Gwilym Davies in 'A Hampshire Garland'.
