John 'Babbacombe' Lee
|
|
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. He was sentenced to hang though he consistently maintained that he was innocent. However, on February 23 at Exeter prison, three attempts were made to carry out his execution, all ending in failure. 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.
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 the died in the US under the name of "James Lee" in 1945.
In the 1970s, Dave Swarbrick (the fiddle-player in the English folk-rock band Fairport Convention), found a series of old newspaper aticles about Lee and composed a rock opera entitled Babbacombe Lee which was recorded and released by Fairport Convention as an LP.
External links
- Detailed history (http://www.murderresearch.com/johnlee/default.htm)