John Henry George "Babbacombe" Lee (15 August 1864 – 19 March 1945) was an Englishman famous for surviving three attempts to hang him for murder.

[2] In 1885, he was convicted of the murder of his employer, Emma Keyse, at her home at Babbacombe Bay near Torquay on 15 November 1884, with a knife.

[3] The evidence was weak and circumstantial, amounting to little more than Lee having been the only male in the house at the time of the murder, his previous criminal record, and being found with an unexplained cut on his arm.

The Home Office ordered an investigation into the failure of the apparatus, and it was discovered that when the gallows was moved from the old infirmary into the coach house, the draw bar was slightly misaligned.

[8] An alternative theory, raised by Ernest Bowen-Rowlands in his book In the Light of the Law,[9] suggests that the trap was blocked by a wooden wedge that was inserted by a prisoner working on the scaffold, and removed when the apparatus was tested.