The executioner pulled the lever. The hangman’s trapdoor, tested and oiled just hours earlier, refused to open, its iron bolts frozen as if held by an unseen hand. John Lee, the man accused of the brutal hatchet murder of Emma Keys Ann Whitehead Keys, stood on the scaffold at Exeter Prison, the white cap already over his head, the noose tight around his neck, waiting for the drop that would end his life.
The lever was pulled again, and again, but the wooden doors beneath his feet remained sealed, their silence sending a ripple of shock through the execution chamber. On the morning of 23 February 1885, in front of officials, physicians, and a jury of witnesses, the state attempted three times to execute the young man, and three times the mechanism catastrophically failed for no apparent reason.
The story began months earlier, in the serene, and seemingly idyllic, seaside village of Babbacombe, nestled near Torquay on the South Devon coast. There, at a property known as The Glen, a 68-year-old woman named Emma Ann Whitehead Keys lived a quiet, respectable life, employing a staff worthy of her family’s distinguished connections. On the night of 14 November 1884, that peace was shattered by an act of savage violence.
Shortly after Emma Keys was heard final sounds of her cocoa, a fire broke out in her dining room. When the flames were displaced and the smoke cleared, she was found dead, her skull fractured by a hatchet-like weapon, her throat severed by a knife, and her body doused in paraffin oil in a desperate but failed attempt to destroy evidence.
The initial scene discovered by the elderly servants, Eliza and Jane Neck, and the cook, Elizabeth Harris, painted a chaotic picture of fear and confusion. The sisters found their way to the bottom of the stairwell where they were met by John Lee, the 20-year-old butler and odd-job man who had recently resigned himself to a life of poverty. He claimed he had been woken by the commotion and had been startled to find himself covered in blood, sustaining several gashes across his arms and hands.
Yet, as the authorities evidence began to unfold, the contradictions emerged. The windows the young man claimed to have shattered to confront the smoke were still intact from the inside, suggesting the break was a staged, desperate aftermath rather than the act of a rescuer. His clothes, his socks, and his hair reeked of paraffin, and a bloodied hatchet was found nearby, alongside traces of Emma Keys’ own hair.
The local police quickly concluded that John Lee was the only plausible suspect. As the only male in the house, and with signs of a violent struggle that seemed to exceed the capability of the two elderly maids, the motive was deduced as resentment. Lee, an ex-convict who had previously stolen silver plate from a former employer, was furious over his low wages of just two shillings a week and had made threats to Emma’s face.
He had even confided to the cook a disturbing fantasy for negotiating her death, mentioning “I will reduce the house to ashes” if she didn’t give him a better reference. Despite his initial jovial demeanor during the inquest, the forensic evidence, the blood soaked socks and the treacherous inconsistencies in his story, sealed his fate. The jury at Exeter Assizes took just minutes to find him guilty of murder, and the judge, Lord Coleridge, in a peculiar callback to Lee’s own claim to divine providence, condemned him to death.
The case was unique and the public was outraged, but not for the reason they would soon be. The prisoner’s inordinate calmness, carrying himself in his cell with a forgivable smile, was broken by the extraordinary ordeal of the gallows that fateful Monday dawn. Hangman James Berry, a seasoned veteran of many executions, arrived on the 22nd of Feb and went through the standard rigors of inspecting the apparatus.
Nothing was deemed wrong. However, upon the pulling of the lever, the trapdoors creaked but would not release. Lee was taken to the scaffold, his ankles bound, but the world seemed to hold its breath.
Berry had to physically push and shove the floor, his hands turning white, but the mechanism seized. The assembled authorities, including the prison governor and the prison surgeon, Mr. Keard, watched as a witness in sheer, unnerving silence.
After the third attempt, the surgeon, deeply affected, called a halt, declaring that the execution would be an act of singular cruelty if they were to try to push through such a mighty messenger of fate. John Lee, having spent half an hour inside the gallows’ trap, was returned to his cell, and was quoted as saying, “Well, it’s the work of an invisible power.” The resulting official investigation determined he hadn’t been saved by divine intervention, but absolute mechanical failure.
The scaffold, moved and reassembled recently, had a misaligned hinge. When tested with heavy weights prior to the execution, it operated perfectly. Yet under the pressure of his body, a bolt slipped.
The case was sent to the Home Secretary, William Harcourt. With the swift confirmation of the throne, the government decided not to risk trying the wreck again, and later the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The public slowly turned from wanting his blood to saving.
They clamored on the stories of witchcraft and the bulletproof. John Lee, it they claimed, could not be hanged. Madame Tussaud had instant sought to immortalize him.
Yet as the public glorified their hero, the murdered woman’s memory faded, born of the hint that a brutal crime was put aside in this annals of curiosity.
Lee served 22 years of hard labor, ultimately released in 1907. He was estranged from any form of repentance, leaving his wife and infant son for America, who had married her, posing with a new identity with a paramour he met in the pubs. He settled in a foreign land, living out the rest of his days, and in 1945, he passed away peacefully in bed from cardiac failure, sixty years after the state tried to execute him.
His story, inspired folk punk bands and film. The debate around his guilt simmered with his innuendo, with authors rasing questions about the circularity of the evidence, and the few details of the crime scene. Yet the weight of the forensic and circumstantial pointed to him.
The investigators had no doubt the man murdered the woman. The court finding stood.
The question remains how the wrongness of that installation, and the eerie sound of a scaffold floor, failed to work. Two individuals, a hangman and a doomed man, stood in unison before a large wooden interface, pulling the resistor that should have opened the floor. Some called Providence; others called it Mechanics.
John Lee went down in history not as the clear cut, the sadistic slayer of Emma Keys, but as the infamous Babbacombe Lee, The Man They Could Not Hang. The haunting echo of the trap doors that remained shut that morning felt like a rupture in the very fabric of the law, a vivid reminder that even within the circle of justice, humans must bow to the impossible, and that some dangling threads of our history will forever be left to snap or not. The foundations of the old Glen remained standing for decades, victim to a new fire in the 1920s, eventually to be cleared for a public park, leaving a final, unexplained twist of fate that continues to raise a shiver along the Babbacombe shore.
