The Man They Could Not Hang: John Babbacombe Lee

The Glen at Babbacombe Beach

Emma Ann Whitehead Keyse was born in 1816 in Edmonton, Middlesex – now part of the London Borough of Enfield. She was the daughter of Thomas Keyse, a coach builder, and his wife Elizabeth. When Emma was just four years old, her father died. Not long after, her mother remarried a wealthy gentleman named George Whitehead. The household, which included Emma, five other girls, one boy, and several servants, relocated to the fishing village of Babbacome, Torquay on the south coast of Devon. There, they settled in a sizeable property consisting of two separate cottages and a stables. The estate was known as The Glen and was located in an idyllic spot at the foot of a cliff, overlooking Babbacome Beach and the sea. Surrounded by woodland, their nearest neighbour, 50 yards away, was a pub called The Cary Arms, run by a Mr Gaskin. By the time Emma was 18, her stepfather had died and her siblings had all married and moved away.

Emma was said to have served for a time as a Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria. Her mother, too, had connections to the royal household, having once helped care for the young Victoria as an infant. On occasion, Prince Albert and his son, Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, would visit Babbacombe Beach aboard the Royal Yacht, stopping at The Glen to pay their respects. These visits were a source of great excitement for the household, and the Prince of Wales would give the servants half a sovereign. It was said that a relative of the family had once acted as his tutor, and by local standards, the Keyse family was very well connected.

In 1871, Elizabeth died at the age of 87. Emma, now 55, took charge of the household and was generally liked and respected in the area. The lady’s maid and parlour maid were sisters, Eliza and Jane Neck, who had served the family for decades and were of a similar age to Emma. Later, the Neck sisters were joined by 21-year-old Emelia Mary Lee, the daughter of an agricultural labourer from nearby Abbotskerswell. Emelia had a younger brother, John Henry George Lee, and a half-sister, Elizabeth Harris. Elizabeth Harris soon secured a position as cook at The Glen.

John Lee

When John Lee left school, he too found work there, looking after Emma Keyse’s pony. His afternoons were often free, and he spent them on the beach, watching the boats as the gulls called overhead and listening to fishermen and sailors recounting tales of life at sea. Those stories stirred something in him, and in October 1879, with his parents’ reluctant consent, John joined the Royal Navy.

At the time of his enlistment, he was recorded as 5’4”, with brown hair, blue eyes, a fair complexion, and a good character. Over the next three years, he served on four Royal Navy ships but was invalided out with pneumonia in January 1882. By then, he had grown considerably and was now six feet tall.

John Lee’s First Conviction

After leaving the Navy, John worked for a time at the Yacht Club, then as a railway porter at Kingswear Station. Later, he secured a prestigious position as butler to Colonel Brownlow at Ridgehill in Torquay; a role obtained for him through Emma Keyse’s connections. She still employed his sisters and was keen, whenever possible, to support the families of her staff. But John was restless and stole some of his master’s silver plate, for which he served 6 months in prison.

Return to The Glen

Emma had not entirely given up on him. She wrote to the prison governor, promising that she would try to find the young man work upon his release. When John came out in 1884, it seemed he had mended his ways, as he told a friend, ‘I’ll take good care I don’t get into such a mess again.’

Despite Emma’s best intentions, no-one in the area would employ an ex-convict, so she offered him a position back at The Glen as a butler and odd-job man for a token wage of 2s 6d per week, in addition to his keep, worth around £20 today. By now, his sister Emelia had moved on, but his half-sister Elizabeth Harris still worked there as the cook. Around this time, John began seeing a local dressmaker, Kate Farmer. He wanted to marry her, but his income was too low to make it possible. In desperation, he stole a guitar belonging to the Keyse family and sold it to a dealer in Torquay. When Emma discovered the theft, she did not dismiss him but reduced his wages to just 2s per week. John confided in Kate about his financial difficulties and suggested breaking off their engagement, but Kate refused, insisting they would find a way to marry.

John’s frustration continued to build, particularly when Emma criticised his work. He once told his half-sister Elizabeth, the cook at The Glen, that he had imagined throwing his employer off the cliff, adding that if she did not provide a good character reference, he would ‘reduce the house to ashes’. Elizabeth, likely treating his words as idle threats, replied half-jokingly that he should at least give her warning so she wouldn’t be burnt along with the house.

John’s resentment could not be contained. He told the postman that he was fed up with menial tasks and that if Emma did not find him a better job, she would soon regret it. Yet he did little to inspire confidence, neglecting his duties and wandering the cliffs and the beach instead, letting the sea breeze whip around him as he brooded, dreaming of freedom and possibly revenge.

Night of the Murder

On Friday 14 November 1884, Elizabeth Harris prepared dinner for the household as usual, then retired to bed at around 6 p.m., saying she didn’t feel well. John Lee had spent the evening visiting his girlfriend Kate and returned to The Glen around 10 p.m. Elderly servant Jane Neck bolted the doors and shuttered the windows before heading upstairs with her sister Eliza. Emma Keyse sat up late in the dining room, reading and writing in her diary by lamplight. John prepared his folding bed in the pantry, where he always slept, and was in bed by 11 p.m.

Shortly after midnight, Jane went downstairs to check on her mistress and found Emma still at the table. They spoke quietly for a few minutes, then Jane made a cup of cocoa and left it in the kitchen for her, before returning to her room. Around 1 a.m., Emma collected her cocoa and finally went upstairs to bed.

Discovery of Emma Keyse’s Body

Sometime between 3 and 4 a.m., Elizabeth Harris was roused by the smell of smoke. She climbed out of bed and opened her bedroom door, seeing thick, acrid smoke curling its way up the stairs. She shouted, ‘Fire!’ to alert the other servants. Eliza Neck rushed downstairs, coughing and choking as she forced her way through the smoke. When she reached the lower floor, she heard John Lee exclaim, ‘What’s the matter?’ Eliza told him the house was on fire and thought it was strange that he seemed unaware of the smoke around him.

In the dining room, Eliza found the body of Emma Keyse. A deep gash ran across her throat, and her head had been bashed in. The sofa was on fire, flames licking their way towards a stack of papers on the floor. Eliza shouted to John Lee to fetch help from the Cary Arms, but instead, he went to assist Jane Neck, who was still struggling to get downstairs through the dense smoke. Fully dressed, John put his arm around her shoulders and guided her downstairs. Later, Jane would notice bloodstains on her nightdress where John’s hand had rested.

All the servants made it outside. According to John, he smashed the dining room window to let out the smoke before leaving the house, cutting his arm and hand in the process. He then hurried to the Cary Arms pub, calling for help and telling the landlord, Mr Gaskin, ‘Miss Keyse is burnt to death.’ As he passed through the gate, blood from his injuries dripped onto the wood. Gaskin accompanied him back to The Glen, where the fire still raged.

Parts of the woman’s body had already been burnt, along with the letters she had been writing. Gaskin urged John to help him wrap the body in a carpet and carry it to an outbuilding before it was completely destroyed. The fire brigade had been alerted, but they were two miles away in Torquay, so local fisherman and the coastguard, drawn by the flames, helped to extinguish the fire with buckets of water filled from the garden cistern. By the time the fire engines arrived, the inferno was almost out. Oddly, John walked a mile to the home of Colonel Maclean, Emma Keyse’s brother-in-law, to break the news, before notifying the police.

Evidence Against John Lee

Doctors Steele and Chilcote arrived to examine the body, while police investigated the scene. It was clear that 68-year-old Emma Keyse had been the victim of a horrific attack. Her skull was fractured, her windpipe severed, and she had been doused in paraffin. A kitchen knife stained with fresh blood was found in a pantry drawer, and in a cupboard above John’s folding bed, officers discovered an empty can of paraffin oil, which had been full the day before. When the police sergeant asked John why he was covered in blood, he claimed he had cut himself breaking the dining room window to let out the smoke. But the windows were still shuttered, and when opened, the glass fell inward, suggesting it had been broken from the outside. Smears of blood were also found on the exterior. Had John Lee broken it after leaving the house, as an afterthought to explain why his clothes were stained with blood?

In the passageway between the pantry and kitchen, just outside the dining room, a pool of blood lay next to Emma’s comb and candle. Upstairs in Emma’s bedroom, the bed curtains were burnt and the bottom two steps of the staircase smelt strongly of paraffin oil, suggesting the perpetrator had attempted to set other parts of the house alight as well.

John insisted he had been asleep when the fire broke out. He told police, ‘The servants had great difficulty waking me when they came downstairs.’ Yet Eliza and Jane Neck, along with cook Elizabeth, claimed that John had already been fully dressed and had met them as they came downstairs. The attack took place less than six feet from John’s bed, so police were puzzled that he claimed to have been unaware of what was happening. They soon found further damning evidence when they searched John. His clothing smelt of paraffin, and in his possession was a box of matches and a hatchet, bearing bloodstains and strands of hair. The wounds on Emma Keyse’s skull were consistent with having been caused by the hatchet.

There was no sign of forced entry, and nothing had been stolen. John was the only man in the house, and police concluded that the ferocity of the attack would have required a strength none of the female servants, two of them elderly, could have wielded. He was arrested on suspicion of murder and taken to Torquay station. There, his clothes were examined more closely, and officers discovered that his socks reeked of paraffin too and had some of Emma Keyse’s hairs attached to them.

Inquest

The inquest was held a few days later at St Mary Church Town Hall, and the jury was taken to view the crime scene at The Glen. Dr Stevenson, a Home Office pathologist, testified that the blood on the hatchet and knife was human, although no reliable method then existed to distinguish human blood from that of animals. Nor, at the time, was there any way to determine blood groupings. The chain of events seemed to be that after Emma had gone to bed and changed into her nightdress, she decided to go downstairs again for some reason, carrying her candle to light the way. In the passageway between the pantry and the kitchen, she was struck on the head with the hatchet and fell to the ground, dropping her candle. The assailant then cut her throat, dragged her body into the dining room, and set it on fire in an attempt to cover up the crime.

The jury returned a unanimous verdict of murder. John remained calm and jovial throughout the proceedings, smiling at his girlfriend and reportedly laughing as he was formally committed for trial.

Trial at Exeter Assizes

The trial at Exeter Assizes began on Monday 2 February 1885 and John Lee pled Not Guilty. By coincidence, his defence counsel, Walter Molesworth St. Aubyn, had prosecuted him the year before, in the theft case that led to his first prison sentence. St. Aubyn proposed an alternative suspect – Elizabeth Harris’s boyfriend, but evidence was lacking. There was also some mention of a legal dispute Emma Keyse had with local fishermen, who had been mooring their boats on her section of Babbacome Beach. She had put up a ‘Private Property’ sign, which they ignored, forcing her to hire a solicitor to threaten legal action. One defendant claimed she had damaged his boat while having it removed, but the court had ruled in her favour, though it was possible someone still held a grudge.

Despite these theories, it was hard to believe anyone from outside could have committed the murder. The court found it implausible that John Lee could have slept through such a violent attack or not heard the opening of the cupboard above his bed when the paraffin oil was taken. Bloodstains on Jane Neck’s nightdress, from when Lee had helped her down the stairs, and the inconsistent story about the dining room window, further strengthened the circumstantial case.

Conviction, Death Sentence and Failed Execution

On Thursday 5 February 1885, the jury returned a guilty verdict. The judge commented on Lee’s surprising calmness, to which he answered, ‘The reason why I am so calm is that I trust in the Lord, and He knows I am innocent.’ 20-year-old John Lee was sentenced to death by hanging.

The execution was set for 8 a.m. on Monday 23 February at Exeter Prison. The day before, hangman James Berry arrived to check the scaffold and found everything in working order. On the morning of the hanging, John Lee’s arms were pinioned behind his back, the white cap was placed over his head and the noose tightened around his neck. He was ready to meet his fate, when fate itself intervened. When the lever was pulled, nothing happened. Berry tried again, but the trap refused to open. Eventually, he had to remove the rope and cap and move Lee aside to inspect the wooden planks. The preparations were repeated, but still, the trap failed a second and then a third time. Berry even jumped on the boards himself, trying to force them to release. Outside, the crowd began to murmur, confused. The black flag had not been raised to indicate that the execution had taken place. Normally, the process took a matter of seconds, but now 30 minutes had passed. The attending surgeon, Mr Caird, and the Reverend Pitkin insisted the farcical attempts must stop, and John Lee was returned to the condemned cell, which earlier that morning, he had thought he was leaving for the final time.

Calmly, he told the warders, ‘I dreamt it all.’ He wrote a letter to his sister describing a prophetic dream he had the night before, in which he had been led to the gallows, and the drop had failed to open three times – exactly as it happened in reality.

The Home Secretary’s Decision

The case was referred to Home Secretary William Harcourt, and with the approval of Queen Victoria, the sentence was commuted on the grounds that it would be cruel to execute Lee after the ordeal he had endured. John, now dubbed ‘Babbacombe Lee’ by the press, had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. The public, who had previously seen him as a cold-blooded murderer, now began to view him as an anti-hero – the man who could not be hanged. Rumours of sabotage circulated, and the Home Secretary promised an investigation, but the truth was more mundane. A misaligned hinge or warped wood under the gallows platform had jammed the trap. The structure had recently been moved and reassembled incorrectly, and when tested without weight, the doors operated perfectly. But with a prisoner’s weight, the release mechanism twisted and failed. It was a mechanical error, not the work of hangman James Berry.

What Became of The Glen and Babbacombe Lee?

The contents of the burnt-out house were sold at auction, drawing hundreds of collectors of grim curiosities, as the Victorian era was full of macabre fascination with souvenirs from crime scenes. What remained of The Glen was sold in 1890 and demolished in 1904. Part of the cellar and foundations became the Babbacombe Beach Café, but it seemed the building was destined to end its life in flames one way or another, as the café burnt down in 1928. A new café was built on the same spot, which stood until 1974, when the site was turned into a car park.

John Lee’s notoriety grew. Madame Tussauds added his likeness to their Chamber of Horrors, and in 1912, the silent film, The Man They Could Not Hang, brought his story to the screen in the early days of cinema.

Lee served 22 years in prison at Pentonville and Wormwood Scrubs, maintaining good behaviour during his sentence. He was released in December 1907 at the age of 43 and lived with his mother in Abbotskerswell for a time. He worked in public houses where customers saw him as a novelty, attracted many female admirers, and sold his story to the Lloyds Weekly News, later released as a sensational pamphlet, also titled The Man They Could Not Hang. Two years later, Lee married 33-year-old nurse, Jessie Bulled, who worked on the female mental health wards of Newton Abbot Workhouse, but unknown to Jessie, he was also seeing 34-year-old barmaid Adeline Gibbs.

In 1911, John and Adeline sailed from Southampton to New York, with Adeline posing as his wife. They settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, leaving his real wife, who was pregnant, and their son, to face destitution. John found work as a shipping clerk, and in 1914, when Adeline was 39 and Lee was 50, they had a daughter, Evelyn. Tragically, Evelyn died at the age of 19 after inhaling naphtha fumes, though the exact circumstances are unknown. John Lee himself lived to see 1945, eventually dying of heart failure, having survived his close encounter with the gallows by 60 years. Adeline lived on until 1969, dying in her 90s.

How History Remembers John Lee

Later, John Lee’s aborted trip to the gallows would inspire the name of the British folk-punk group The Men They Couldn’t Hang, as well as the 1971 album ‘Babbacombe Lee’ by Fairport Convention.

Though Lee escaped with his life in a bizarre twist of fate, few at the time doubted he had committed murder. In the words of crime writer Guy Logan in 1928, ‘He protested his innocence, but not very convincingly, and no ordinarily intelligent person could possibly entertain any doubt as to his guilt.’

Some modern authors later began to question whether the case against John Lee was as strong as it first appeared. The evidence was circumstantial, and no witness had seen or heard the murder take place. Key parts of the prosecution’s case, such as the bloodstains, the paraffin on his clothing, and the hairs on his socks, could be innocently explained, though not convincingly. Concerns were also raised about the handling of the crime scene and Lee’s poorly organised defence. The movements of other household members that night were never fully examined. Could someone else have been in the house? Some have speculated that Lee was protecting someone close to him, perhaps his half-sister Elizabeth Harris, who was later found to be pregnant at the time of the murder. There is no firm evidence to support this and the case against Lee appears damning. Even so…could there be room for doubt?

Researched and written by Prash Ganendran
© 2026 Prash Ganendran. All Rights Reserved.

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Related Cases

If you’d like to read about another Victorian murder case involving executioner James Berry and a botched execution, you may also enjoy my article, The Walsoken Murder and the Botched Execution of Robert Goodale.

Sources

Ancestry.co.uk
Home Office Records, HO 144/148//A38492: Criminal Cases: Lee, John
Exeter and Plymouth Gazette Daily Telegrams – Monday 19 September 1881
Express and Echo – Monday 17 November 1884
Wigan Observer and District Advertiser – Friday 21 November 1884
Herald of Wales – Saturday 06 December 1884
North London News – Saturday 07 February 1885
North Devon Journal – Thursday 28 January 1909
Rope, Knife and Chair by Guy Logan, 1928
The Man They Could Not Hang: The True Story of John Lee by Michael Holgate, 200