When a Gallows Refused to Do Its Duty
Category: Curious Crimes 22nd June 2026
Babbacombe, Devon felt, for a spell, like the theatre of the improbable. A lodger called John Lee was accused of murdering his employer, Emma Keyse. The evidence was circumstantial. The trial, held at Exeter, delivered a guilty verdict and a sentence that was supposed to be final. The verdict landed like a cold pudding on a warm plate and the whole county rather lost its composure.
The execution day arrived at Exeter Prison and something peculiar happened. The trapdoor refused to perform. It failed once. It failed again. It failed a third time. Men who had been paid to pull levers stood about like witnesses to a ravishing piece of stagecraft gone wrong. The mechanics of death misbehaved in a way that would have been splendid if you were writing a farce and ghastly if you were required to administer justice.
The result was a reprieve. The Home Office, moved by a mix of law and public feeling, commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. Opinion then fractured into clusters of outrage and relief. Some declared the whole affair preposterous. Others muttered superstition. A few retired to their sofas and said nothing intelligent, which was fairly the usual thing.
Lee served years in prison. He outlasted gossip and the fierce headlines that love a neat villain. Eventually he walked free and drifted away from public view after yonks during which the story was an odd sort of local legend. The man who had been sentenced to die had been spared by a piece of bungled engineering and an administration that was, under strain, rather human.
The case sits now in the archive like a scratched record. It tells us about evidence that tilts, about punishments that unravel, and about how official machinery can be abysmal at practical tasks while utterly confident in its pronouncements. For those who enjoy repartee with fate the episode remains a deliciously odd chapter. For everyone else it was a ghastly reminder that the law depends on tools that must behave. Old sport, keep your levers oiled.