As John Lee was being led from his cell in Exeter Prison on the morning of 23 February 1885, he had approximately two minutes left to live. He was making the condemned man's walk to the gallows having been convicted of the murder of the woman he worked for, Emma Ann Keyse, a wealthy widow who had been discovered with her throat cut and her head battered. Lee had protested his innocence but his criminal record, obvious hatred of his employer and a lack of alibi had sealed his fate. As his jailers led him to the scaffold, his arms were strapped behind his back, a white hood placed over his head and a noose secured around his neck.

His executioner asked if he had any last words or confession to make and when John Lee replied, 'No, drop away,' the Sheriff of Exeter gave the order to proceed. But when the executioner, Mr Berry, pulled the lever to the trap doors, nothing happened. They didn't open and Lee remained standing, alive if not exactly well, in the same location. Without removing the noose, the executioner's men shuffled Lee to one side and tested the doors and this time they opened smoothly. Lee was then edged back into place, directly in the middle of the trap doors, and the lever was pulled for a third time. Once again he stood on the unsecured trapdoors, just a few feet away from eternity, waiting for them to open.

But, yet again, they refused to do so. The Sheriff of Exeter then ordered the condemned man back to his cell while a full examination was made of the gallows. The hangman himself stood on the trap and held on to the rope with both hands. As soon as the lever was pulled, he fell through. John Lee was once more brought from the condemned man's cell, restrained and placed into position in the centre of the trap doors. But, once again, when the lever was pulled, the doors refused to budge. The gathered crowd of witnesses, including newspaper journalists, were by that time shivering with cold, as was the condemned man standing upon the unsupported trap doors awaiting his rather prolonged fate. John Lee was then led back to his cell while further tests were made to the trap doors, which, each time, worked perfectly.

Completely baffled, the sheriff then wrote to the Home Secretary in London for further instructions. Newspapers across the world reported the story and John Lee found fame as 'the man they cannot hang'. The Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, ordered a stay of execution, the unprecedented event was discussed in the House of Commons and John Lee's death sentence was commuted to one of life imprisonment. The official explanation given was that the damp weather had caused the trap doors to swell and become jammed, despite all the tests confirming the mechanism worked smoothly. The mystery of the man they could not hang was never solved and John Lee was eventually released from prison in 1907. He later married and lived quietly in London until his death in 1943, a full fifty-eight years longer than was expected when he made that early-morning walk at Exeter Prison all those years ago.

A few years after the failed execution of John Lee, in 1894, a young American farmer called Will Purvis was sentenced to be hanged on 7 February for the murder of a farm owner in Columbia, Mississippi. As he was secured upon the platform of the gallows, a priest read out the last rites and the lever was pulled. The trap opened with a crash and Purvis plunged through, emerging from below covered with dust but otherwise unharmed. The noose had somehow become untied and slipped from his neck. Shocked, but undeterred, deputies led him straight back up the steps and once again restrained him, carefully checking the knot was secure that time.

But the crowd gathered below, of around three thousand people, was, by then, singing and shouting that Purvis had been reprieved by the highest power of all, the Lord Himself, and threatened to become unruly if the hanging went ahead. Sheriff Irvin Magee, very wisely in the circumstances, had the murderer escorted back to his cell instead of attempting to carry on with the execution. Purvis's defence team made several appeals to have his death sentence commuted, but without success, and a new date for the execution was set, 12 December 1895. Purvis then escaped from jail and went into hiding, but when a new governor for Mississippi was elected, who was sympathetic to the young man's plight, Purvis surrendered himself and immediately had his sentence reduced to one of life imprisonment.

By then Purvis had become a state-wide hero and received thousands of letters of support demanding that he be considered for a full and complete pardon. The new governor agreed and in 1898 Will Purvis was a free man. And it was just as well because in 1917 one Joseph Beard announced on his deathbed that he was responsible for the murder of the farmer, and not Will Purvis after all. Other details were given that proved his story, and Will was finally exonerated. He had always protested his innocence and, as his death sentence had first been announced in 1893, had broken down in tears and cried out to his accusers: 'I will live to see every last one of you dies!' When he finally died, peacefully and without assistance on 13 October 1938, it was noted that the last of the jurors to have found him guilty of murder had himself passed away only three days earlier. Nobody could ever explain how, without help of a supernatural kind, the noose had managed to slip from his neck, allowing him to cheat certain death.

During the First World War, a soldier from Liverpool, Jack Traynor, was serving in the trenches when he was hit twice by enemy fire. The first bullet hit his head, smashing his skull, while the second bullet hit his right arm, severing vital nerves that even the most skilled surgeon of his day was unable to reconnect. Jack's skull injury refused to heal - indeed doctors believed he would soon succumb to the wound - and he became virtually paralysed in his damaged arm. Consequently, he was awarded a full disability pension. It is recorded that, a few years after the war, in 1923 Jack began to suffer from severe bouts of epilepsy, as a result of his head wound, and lost the ability to walk.

During that year he was taken on a religious pilgrimage to Lourdes in France where he was lowered by his family into the supposedly healing waters. After a short ceremony he was taken back to the hospice he had become confined to and placed gently back into bed. However, four days later Jack awoke and sprang from his bed, miraculously made whole again. He then washed, shaved and dressed himself, packed his bags and walked out of the hospice, never to return. When Jack arrived back home in England, he set up in business as a coal merchant, met a young lady, fell in love, was married and fathered two healthy children.

He lived a normal, happy life for the next twenty years when he sadly died, in 1943, of pneumonia. Jack's wellbeing and prosperity must have been all the greater since throughout this time the Ministry of Pensions had refused to believe he could have made such a recovery and continued to pay his disability pension in full. Nobody has ever been able to explain Jack Traynor's remarkable and mysterious recovery.

Albert Jack - 2007