John Lee the Butler is now sent for trial, committed for murder there is no denial,
Whether he done it, it is hard to say, it will be proved on some future day.
Broadsheet ballad (1884)
Distinguished actor Christopher Lee (b. 1922) was awarded a knighthood in 2009 in recognition of a long screen career, which included roles in the James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun and the acclaimed adaptation of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. During the 1990s, Lee narrated a number of audiobooks from the works of Agatha Christie – Hound of Death, Witness For the Prosecution and The Call of Wings – and was also heard, but not seen, as the uncredited voice of the mysterious host, Mr U.N. Owen, who records a message accusing his guests and servants of past crimes when they assemble on a remote island in the film Ten Little Indians (1965).
As an RAF pilot during the Second World War, Christopher Lee spent some time on the English Riviera stationed at an Initial Training Wing in Paignton. The recruits frequented the pubs in the nearby Babbacombe area of Torquay and learnt about ‘The Man They Could Not Hang’, the story of a local villain called John Lee who notoriously survived three attempts to execute him for murder. Predictably, the future star of Hammer horror films soon had to endure being called ‘Lee of Babbacombe’ by his colleagues. He later recalled in his autobiography, ‘It became a constant joke among my mates that I wasn’t to be provoked or trifled with, because I was one of the undead who cheat the gallows’.
His infamous namesake, John ‘Babbacombe’ Lee, had been arrested on purely circumstantial evidence in November 1884, charged with the gruesome murder of his elderly employer, Emma Keyse, at her home The Glen on Babbacombe Beach. Robbery had not been a committed and there was no sign of a forced entry, so therefore suspicion fell upon the only male among the four servants present in the house – John Lee.
Tried at Exeter Castle in February 1885, he was sentenced to hang. However, he incredibly escaped execution when the trapdoors of the scaffold mysteriously failed to open on three occasions when the prisoner stepped onto the platform, fuelling the legend of ‘The Man They Could Not Hang’. Mortified officials abandoned the execution and the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment following the intervention of Queen Victoria, who sent the following telegram to the Home Secretary: ‘I am horrified at the disgraceful scenes at Exeter at Lee’s execution. Surely Lee cannot be executed. It would be too cruel. Imprisonment for life seems the only alternative’. The Home Secretary concurred and told a packed House of Commons: ‘It would shock the feelings of everyone if a man twice had to pay the pangs of imminent death’.
Although an official report concluded that the scaffold had failed due to a simple mechanical fault, the findings were not made public and many people believed God had acted to save an innocent man. In stark contrast to the prosecution’s portrayal of a depraved lunatic capable of smashing an old lady’s head with an axe, then slashing her throat with a knife before setting fire to the lifeless body, in passing the sentence of death the judge remarked how calm the demeanour of the accused had been throughout the trial. The prisoner leaned forward in the dock and replied firmly, ‘The reason why I am so calm is that I trust in the Lord, and He knows I am innocent’. In the days leading up to the date of execution, Lee read the Bible prodigiously and intimated to the prison chaplain that the real culprit was the lover of his half-sister, Elizabeth Harris, who was cook at The Glen and expecting a child, which was later delivered in the workhouse. Following his reprieve, Lee announced his belief that he had been saved by divine intervention and on the morning of the execution told two prison guards that he had dreamt that ‘Three times the bolt was drawn, and three times the bolt failed to act’.
John Lee fully expected to be released after serving twenty years imprisonment, which was the usual period served by reprieved murderers. He was not informed that as a bungle on the scaffold had brought about his survival, not the merits of his case, the Home Secretary had recommended that the prisoner should remain in confinement for the remainder of his natural life. When press rumours of Lee’s imminent release did not materialise early in 1905, the prisoner’s mother engaged the services of Newton Abbot solicitor Herbert Rowse Armstrong to gain justice for her son. Acting on her behalf, Armstrong wrote to enlist the support of local MP Harry Eve: ‘I am quite aware that there is no statutory definition or power to diminish a life sentence, but the Home Office regulations do constantly allow of its reduction to 20 years and often less e.g. Mrs. Maybrick, as to almost nullify the effect’.
The writer of this letter little realised that fifteen years later, he, like the aforementioned Florence Maybrick, would deny charges of poisoning a spouse and be condemned to stand on the scaffold. The difference was that there would be no reprieve for Armstrong, who would go down in the annals of British criminal history as the only solicitor ever to be hanged for murder.
A year after representing John Lee, Armstrong married and set up a law practice in the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye. After serving as a major in the Territorial Army during the First World War, he was demobbed in 1919 and his neglected business soon ran into financial difficulties. As his law practice floundered, he purchased arsenic, ostensibly to treat a patch of dandelions on his lawn, but administered it to his wife Katherine. She passed away in 1921 shortly after changing her will, leaving everything to her husband. Natural causes were accepted as the cause of death, but suspicions were aroused when the major attempted to poison a business rival and the exhumation of his wife’s body revealed that deadly levels of arsenic had caused her demise. The Armstrong case is recalled by characters in the Christie novels After the Funeral and Sleeping Murder, whilst in Murder Is Easy (1939) Major Horton, whose wife dies of ‘gastritis’, is clearly based on the real-life murderer dubbed ‘The Dandelion Killer’.
During Agatha’s childhood, she enjoyed family picnics at the infamous crime scene on Babbacombe Beach. She cannot have failed to learn more about the sensational story when John Lee gained his release in 1907 and published his autobiography serialised in a national newspaper – proclaiming that it was not the butler ‘whodunnit’.