Right up until the last moment, even as he mounted the steps to the gallows, he insisted his innocence. Someone else had murdered his employer, an elderly spinster, and his conviction was a nightmare mistake. But now it was all too late. Within a few minutes John Lee’s protestations would be cut off by death.
The Rev. John Pitkin, the prison chaplain, intoned the ritual prayers for Lee’s eternal soul. Lee’s arms were strapped to his side and a white hood was pulled down over his head and face. The hangman secured the noose around his neck, moved him to the centre of the trap, and pulled the lethal lever. Nothing happened. The executioner jerked the lever again and again. Still Lee stood waiting for death.
That was the first stage of the “miracle in triplicate” which was witnessed at Exeter, England, on February 23, 1885, a miracle which was to win Lee a very special place in the ranks of those who have escaped the gallows.
Lee, aged 19, had been condemned for the killing of Ellen Keyse, once a maid of honour to Queen Victoria, who had employed him as a footman. She was an austere and wealthy woman who insisted that her servants attended daily prayer sessions. During the night of November 14-15, 1884, she went down to the pantry, where she was found dead early next morning by one of the maids. Her head had been battered and her throat cut with a knife Lee had been using. Lee slept in a ground floor room adjoining the pantry.
The maid said she had been awakened by the smell of smoke and had found the body saturated in oil and surrounded by burning papers. All the evidence on which Lee was arrested, and eventually found guilty, was purely circumstantial. The prosecution suggested that his motive was anger over Miss Keyse’s meanness. His wage was four shillings a week, but she had reduced it as punishment for some trivial offence.
There was fierce controversy in Britain over his death sentence. But that did not save him from mounting the newly constructed scaffold on that February morning. There was Berry, the executioner, slamming the lever back and forth. Two warders started crashing their heavy boots down on the yard-square trap, but it still did not budge. The chaplain said afterwards: “During all those terrible moments John Lee stood firm, erect and unmoved, save for the jerks he felt from the violent stamping of the feet, to push down the trap door.”
After six minutes of feverish suspense, the prison governor signalled for Lee to be removed. The bolts were examined by a carpenter and found to be working perfectly. The carpenter then shaved away the edges of the trap to ensure that it could not stick. A weight corresponding to that of Lee’s body was placed on the trap, which opened immediately the lever was pulled.
Lee, whose legs were also secured, was lifted back into position. Once again the Rev. Pitkin recited the last words. Berry pulled the lever. Lee still stood there. Berry tried frantically, but the trap would not budge. Once more, Lee was lifted clear. Twenty minutes passed while carpenters planed away more wood, and while a different engineer oiled the hinges, greased the bolts, and checked the lever. More tests were made; each time the flap fell with a crash.
Chaplain’s horror
Lee was lifted back a third time. The chaplain, distraught with horror, was shaking as he hurried through the words of prayer. Later the chaplain said: “The lever was pulled again and again. A great noise was heard, which sounded like the falling of the drop. But to my horror, when I turned my eyes to the scaffold, I saw the poor convict standing upon the drop as I had seen him twice before. I refused to stay any longer.”
Lee was taken back to his cell, and within hours he was reprieved. At his trial he had said: “The Lord will never permit me to be executed.” After his triple escape he wrote: “It was the Lord’s hand which would not let the law take away my life . . .” He spent 22 years in prison. After he was set free he married and emigrated to America, where he died in 1933.
Other people have escaped the gallows in even more remarkable ways. Miss Jessie Dobson, when she was Recorder of Britain’s Royal College of Surgeons in 1951, stated in the respected medical journal The Lancet that “the procedure employed in judicial hanging has been, and maybe still is, an uncertain means of causing instantaneous death”. She described how the bodies of 36 criminals were dissected after hanging, and how pathologists found that in 10 of them the heart was still beating. In two cases the heart-beats continued for five hours; in one case they continued for more than seven hours.
She cited examples of complete recovery after “execution”. One of them involved a woman who, in 1650, hanged for half an hour at Oxford gaol. After she had been cut down, Sir William Petty, Professor of Anatomy at the university, and other doctors arranged to start a dissection. “Perceiving signs of life, they administered cordials, and the woman lived for a further nine years, during which time she married and had three children.”
In 1728 a woman was hanged in Edinburgh, and her body was taken away in a cart by relatives. “The jolting of the vehicle over the rough roads was apparently sufficient stimulus to restore her, and by the time it had gone six miles she was ‘almost well’. She was still living in 1753.”
These escapes, like that of Lee, were regarded by many as evidence of Divine intervention, as proof that the people concerned were innocent in the eyes of God. And that led criminologists to the heart of one of the central arguments which, through the generations, has been put forward by opponents of capital punishment. If it is subsequently discovered that a man has wrongly been committed to prison, he can be released and compensated with cash. But there is no reprieve from the grave. So how many innocent people have paid that final terrible price because of some failing in the legal system? How many men and women who, after being locked in the death-cell, have been exonerated?
Thomas Harris, landlord of the Rising Sun Inn on the York-Newcastle road, was executed for murder in 1819. Later it was established that the killer had been a barman at the inn, the chief witness for the prosecution. Harris’s posthumous pardon did him little good.
One of the most controversial cases in modern times involved the mass murderer John Christie, the monster of London’s Rillington Place. In March, 1950, a young man called Timothy Evans went to the gallows for the murder of his young daughter. A second charge of murdering his wife had not been heard by the court. Evans, a simple soul, had protested that his wife had been murdered by the “other man” living in the house.
Years later the bodies of six women were found in the house, and the "other man’’, Christie, confessed that he had killed them. This led, in February, 1955, to an amazing statement in the House of Commons from Mr. Chuter Ede who, as Home Secretary, had refused a reprieve for Evans. He said:
“I was the Home Secretary who wrote on Evans's papers, ‘The law must take its course.’ I think that the Evans case shows, in spite of all that has been done since, that a mistake was possible, and in the form of which a verdict was given in a particular case a mistake was made. I hope no future Home Secretary, in office or after he has left office, will ever have to feel that, although he did his best, although none would wish to accuse him of being either careless or inefficient, in fact, he sent a man who was not guilty, as charged, to the gallows.”
The arguments about the execution of Evans continue until this day. What about the innocent people who have survived the death cell? William Habron, 18, was just one of many. In 1876 he was sentenced to death for the murder of a London policeman. However, purely because of his youth, he was reprieved. Three years later, while Habron was serving his life sentence, the notorious criminal Charles Peace, by then convicted of another murder, confessed to the crime of which Habron had been found guilty. The young man received a pardon and £800 compensation.
If Habron had been just a few months older, as old as 19-year-old Derek William Bentley, whose execution raised uproar in 1953, another irrevocable mistake would have been made. The circumstances of the Bentley case were extraordinary. He and 16-year-old Christopher Craig had been found guilty of murdering a policeman in Croydon, although Craig had actually fired the lethal gun. The law said that no murderer under the age of 18 could be hanged, so Craig was given a prison term and is now free. Bentley was sentenced to death by Lord Goddard, the Lord Chief Justice, although his had been a very secondary role.
