West Country Murders by Nicola Sly

Author:Nicola Sly [Sly, Nicola]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752484075
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-02-17T11:00:00+00:00

16

THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG

Torquay, 1884

British murderers have achieved notoriety for various reasons. One Victorian villain has done so for one of the strangest reasons of all: he was ‘the man they could not hang’. Three times the executioner tried to carry out his duty, and three times he failed before his ‘client’s’ sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. After serving twenty-two years in prison, the villain of the piece emigrated and lived to a serene old age, dying thirty-eight years after release and exactly sixty years after he had gone to the gallows. As he wrote and published his memoirs shortly after release in 1908, the story and his thoughts on subsequent events are uniquely well documented.

John Henry George Lee was born at Abbotskerswell in August 1864, the son of a farmer. His parents, John and Mary, had already had a daughter, Amelia, and Mary also had an illegitimate daughter from a previous relationship. This girl, Elizabeth Harris, was raised by her grandparents in Kingsteignton. At the age of fifteen John became a junior servant at The Glen, a seaside house at Babbacombe, Torquay, which belonged to Emma Keyse, an elderly spinster. During boyhood he had always been fascinated by the sea, and despite parental opposition he joined the Royal Navy in October 1879. He proved a promising cadet, and just over a year later he was awarded an Admiralty Prize for good progress. However, any hopes of promotion and foreign travel were dashed when he was stricken with pneumonia at the age of eighteen, and after a spell at the Royal Naval Hospital in Plymouth, where his illness was at one stage thought to be life-threatening, he was invalided out of the service. He found it hard to settle down to civilian life, and within a year he had had three jobs, none of which he really enjoyed.

By the end of 1882, thanks partly to a reference from Miss Keyse, he was employed as a servant by Colonel Edward Brownlow in Torquay. Six months into this post, he took advantage of the colonel’s absence on holiday by stealing some of the family silver and trying to sell it to a pawnbroker in Devonport. He was arrested, found guilty and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in Exeter Gaol. Before his release the chaplain received a letter from Miss Keyse, explaining that she had always found the prisoner honest, truthful and obedient. If Lee was prepared to give her an undertaking as to his future good conduct, she would gladly employ him again as her gardener.

He accepted the position and returned to work for her in the spring of 1884. Meanwhile, she assured him she would do what she could to find him a more remunerative position elsewhere. As he now had a criminal record, Lee would find it difficult to obtain employment with anyone else, but Miss Keyse planned to put The Glen on the market and hoped to place her small number of devoted servants with other households as soon as she reasonably could.

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