HM Prison Exeter

Miraculously, they dropped the charges to aggravated burglary and threats to kill.

As I was remanded into HMP Exeter was put into my cell, which was nothing new, nothing unusual.

It was something that I'd been used to time and time before.

But for this time round, there was something different that I noticed in that prison cell, and it was the Bible.

The prison governor's records show the morning was cold and overcast.

John Lee was led to the scaffold at Exeter Prison, his hands bound, a hood prepared.

The executioner was James Berry, experienced, methodical, a man who had carried out dozens of executions without incident.

Berry had personally inspected the trapdoor mechanism the day before and certified it operational.

They get buried in consecrated ground, mourned by people who know the truth, and choose to say nothing.

except for one man at one graveside who said it in eight words and then never spoke of it again.

John Lee walked out of Exeter Prison in 1907.

22 years, served in full.

But James did have a third victim, a man he killed whilst he was being held in prison.

On the 15th of September, James Desborough was sharing a prison cell at HMP Exeter with a man called Stephen Kempster.

Stephen was a prisoner on remand and he had been asleep when James strangled him in his bed.

James then went back to sleep and raised the alarm in the morning, saying that he'd found his cellmate dead on the floor and that he must have fallen out of bed.