The story became indelibly etched in history when, in early 1885, the execution of the killer failed – not once, but three times. The man on the gallows, John Lee, survived death and in an instant became The Man They Could Not Hang. Lee was sentenced to life as a Victorian prisoner and released as an Edwardian personality.

These pages carry research, archive, pictures, letters, certificates and news reports. This really is as near as you will ever get to the actual events as they unfolded all those years ago. Some of this work features detailed archive painstakingly transcribed from photocopies from the originals. The language and spelling has remained exactly as it was written down (in some cases, exactly as it was spoken) more than 120 years ago. The person who uttered the words, the courtroom clerk, the lawyer, the house maid, the politician, the policeman, the dozens of ordinary Victorian folk who were witnesses and, of course, the central figure in all this, John Lee. They would never have dreamed that their words would have been immortalised yet alone placed on this powerful and incredible vehicle we call the internet.

image: Detail from an early Victorian painting of Babbacombe

I first became aware of this story when I was a boy – I’m now in my fifties. My grandfather told me about John Lee who he had seen after Lee’s release from prison in 1907. To add flavour (and fear to me as a young boy) he told me he recognised Lee by the rope marks on his neck! Despite the addition of this fiction into the story – my grandfather’s tale has stayed with me all my life.

I started investigating the Babbacombe murder case properly in the mid 1990′s and decided in 1997 that best way forward was to strip this back to basics and concentrate on the proven facts. The only way to do this was to gather and transcribe the available archive and begin to layout as accurate picture of events as possible. This can be extremely tedious and time consuming (as well as expensive!), but well worth the effort.

My work took on a somewhat controversial aspect when I decided to share the archive with the rest of the world online in the late 1990′s. After going through the “permission” process I then had to learn how to design a web site! The project development slowed down somewhat in early 2000 after I suffered two strokes and lost the use of my right arm and hand (right: Featured on the BBC ‘Inside Out, 2002).

But by mid-2000 I managed to publish a limited amount of archive amid some press reports. After more than a century of speculation, rumour and darn-right lies, the way was clear to publish the whole archive. This blatant exposure of the facts did not initially go down well in certain quarters, but as I am made of fairly tough stuff I just stubbornly carried on anyway – such is my nature in these matters, for which I make no apology.

This work is not primarily concerned with the well-documented botched hanging. With the help of witness statements, I try to unravel the truth surrounding this brutal killing. A large amount of my research (not published here) has uncovered quite a lot of rubbish, perpetrated by this generation and our naughty predecessors who should have known better than to fill our naive heads!

So what you see on these pages is as near to the truth as you’ll ever get. If you’ve heard about The Man They Could Not Hang and a little about John ‘Babbacombe’ Lee these pages might put you in the picture – if you hear stories of Lee walking the streets of Newton Abbot with rope marks around his neck, take it with a large pinch of salt!

Finally

I’ve been ‘collecting’ UK historic murder data for years and this has resulted in my index which you can view here.

Thank you for visiting my website and remember we are dealing with history here – that’s all.