The Strange Cases of John Babbacombe Lee and Joseph Samuel The Men Who Could Not Be Hanged

While the grim history of capital punishment is filled with clinical efficiency and tragic inevitability there are also rare and strange occasions when the apparatus of death simply refused to do its job. Two men John Babbacombe Lee of Devon England and Joseph Samuel a transported convict in colonial Australia were sentenced to death led to the gallows and strung up before a watching crowd. Yet both survived not just once but three times. Whether by mechanical fault divine intervention or sheer blind luck these men walked away from the scaffold with their lives altering the course of criminal justice in their wake.

John Babbacombe Lee The Man They Could Not Hang

Born on 15 August 1864 in Abbotskerswell Devon John Henry George Lee seemed an unremarkable figure a former Royal Navy seaman with a history of theft and petty crime. But in 1885 his life would take a turn into the history books.

Lee was convicted of murdering his employer Miss Emma Keyse at her home in Babbacombe Bay near Torquay in November 1884. She had been killed with a knife and her house set alight. The evidence against Lee was thin he was the only male present in the household he had a previous criminal record and he bore an unexplained cut on his arm. Nonetheless a jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging.

But fate or something very much like it intervened.

On 23 February 1885 at Exeter Prison the executioner James Berry prepared to do his grim duty. The trapdoor beneath Lee’s feet was tested in advance and found to be in working order. Yet when the lever was pulled the door refused to budge. The mechanism was inspected and modified. Again the trapdoor failed. A third time it was attempted with a saw and axe used to adjust the frame and once more the apparatus did not function.

With the medical officer refusing to participate any further the execution was halted.

An inquiry later discovered that when the gallows had been moved from the prison infirmary to a coach house the alignment of the drawbar had been slightly altered. This caused the hinges to jam. Some have suggested sabotage Ernest Bowen Rowlands in his legal analysis In the Light of the Law speculated that a wedge had been deliberately inserted by a prisoner and removed during testing. However Berry widely respected for his professionalism made no mention of such interference in his memoirs or official correspondence.

Lee’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt. After petitioning various Home Secretaries for years he was finally released in 1907. Lee later toured the country lecturing on his experiences even becoming the subject of a silent film. He reportedly died under the name James Lee in Milwaukee Wisconsin in 1945 though for decades his final fate remained a mystery.

Joseph Samuel The Miracle at Parramatta

Over 80 years earlier on the other side of the globe another man survived the hangman’s noose not once but three times long before the drop method of hanging was introduced to ensure a swift death

Joseph Samuel born circa 1780 in Germany had been convicted of robbery in 1795 and sentenced to transportation to Australia in 1801 aboard the convict fleet. Like many early arrivals to Sydney Cove he sought escape. Eventually he joined a gang that robbed the home of a wealthy woman in Parramatta. During the crime a constable Joseph Luker was murdered. Although the gang leader and others were acquitted for lack of evidence the woman identified Samuel as one of the culprits. He confessed to the robbery but denied the killing. Nonetheless he alone was sentenced to hang.

On 26 September 1803, Samuel and another criminal, convicted of another crime and not a member of the same gang, were driven in a cart to Parramatta, where hundreds of people had gathered to watch the execution. Nooses were fastened securely around their necks from the gallows and after they were allowed to pray with a priest, the cart was driven away. This was the common method of hanging of the day, and caused death by slow strangulation. Not until the latter half of the 19th century did the British employ the drop method, which breaks the neck.

The ropes used were made of five cords of hemp, which enabled one to hold 1,000 lb (450 kg), for up to five minutes without breaking, more than sufficient for human executions. The other criminal ultimately died by strangulation, but Samuel's rope snapped and he dropped to his feet, sprained an ankle and collapsed. The executioner hastily readied another rope, also five-hemp, and placed it around Samuel's neck, forced him onto the same cart, and drove the cart away again. The other criminal was still kicking weakly at this point.

When the cart drove out from under him, Samuel fell again, and the noose slipped off his neck, whereupon his boots touched the ground. The executioner was sure to have fastened the noose securely around his neck, and as he stood Samuel up to try again, the crowd had become boisterous, calling for Samuel to be freed. The executioner very quickly readied another five-hemp rope, ordered the cart driven back, forced Samuel onto it, fastened the noose around his neck, secured it very carefully and tightly, and then ordered the cart driven away. The rope snapped, and Samuel dropped to the ground and stumbled over, trying to avoid landing on his sprained ankle.

Now the crowd stood around in an uproar, and another policeman, watching on horseback, ordered the execution delayed momentarily, while he rode away to find the governor. The governor was summoned to the scene and upon inspection of the ropes, which showed no evidence of having been cut, and the other criminal, who had been executed with an identical rope, the governor and the entire crowd agreed that it was a sign from God that Joseph Samuel had not committed any crime deserving of execution and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment instead. Parramatta's town doctor tended to his sprained ankle. Joseph Samuel’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and the crowd cheered the man who had cheated death three times in a single day.

Though separated by oceans and decades the stories of John Lee and Joseph Samuel remain united in their defiance of the noose. Neither man was exonerated but both were granted a second chance at life when the machinery of execution failed them.

Their survival provoked debate religious awe and legal reform. In Lee’s case it exposed flaws in capital punishment infrastructure. In Samuel’s it became a literal act of divine mercy in the eyes of colonial authorities.

In a time when death sentences were final and swift these two men became living contradictions to the system itself. They were quite literally the men who could not be hanged.

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