As long as people have been sentenced to death, there has been the chance of a dramatic and
often bloody disaster.
Here are some of the most notorious botched executions of all time.
In the early days, the most common method of execution was beheading in the most low-tech
manner - a person swinging an axe at the unfortunate victim’s neck.
That was the fate that awaited Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury.
A noblewoman in the 1500s, she committed a crime for which there was no pardon - falling
out of favor with the notorious King Henry VIII.
Despite no trial, she was sentenced to death and taken to the execution block.
But to her horror, her executioner wasn’t a hulking man who had swung many an axe.
It was a young, uncoordinated man who had to take eleven swings to kill her - repeatedly
striking her head and shoulders before finally hitting the mark.
In Medieval England, no one was safe from a bloody execution - even the most powerful.
Mary, Queen of Scotts was Queen of Scotland for twenty-five years, and engaged in a bloody
power struggle with her cousin Elizabeth I. Mary was considered the rightful Queen by
many of England’s Catholics, and when Mary was deposed and forced to seek refuge in England,
she found herself imprisoned.
After eight years in custody, she was accused of attempting to assassinate Elizabeth and
sentenced to death by beheading.
The first blow only glanced the back of her head, and the second killed her - but left
her half-severed head hanging off the neck to the horror of onlookers.
But these weren’t the worst executioners the world had ever seen.
Jack Ketch was an executioner under the reign of King Charles II, and he was so bad at taking
heads that his name eventually became a synonym for death and the devil.
During the chaotic 1680s, filled with multiple coup attempts, Ketch botched the executions
of several noblemen for treason.
When William Russell came before his axe, Ketch repeatedly struck him and seemed distracted
as the crowd watched the gory display.
Two years later, the execution of James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth took a shocking five
to eight strokes.
The execution was so badly botched that the crowd revolted, nearly attacking Ketch and
forcing the guards to spirit him away before he became the second execution of the day.
The science of executions advanced - but they didn’t become foolproof.
The invention of the guillotine put headsmen like Jack Ketch out of work, replacing the
axe with a mechanical device that would neatly slice heads off with a falling blade.
It became synonymous with the French revolution and the Reign of Terror, when countless nobles
and political enemies were beheaded - most famously Queen Marie Antoinette.
But when it came time for her husband, Louis XVI, to meet his end, things went horribly
wrong.
Louis XVI was a large man, and eyewitnesses said that the blade got stuck midway through
his neck, only partially severing his head.
The bloody blade had to be raised and dropped again, finishing the job and bringing the
King’s life to an undignified end.
Beheading is by far the bloodiest execution method - but far from the only one prone to
errors.
In the old West, there was one popular execution method - hanging.
And in 1852, a Canadian soldier named “Yankee” Jim Robinson found that out the hard way.
The young man tried to steal a boat, and was shocked when he was charged with not theft,
but piracy on the high seas - a death penalty crime.
He was quickly convicted and taken to the gallows, and the tall man quickly realized
the scaffold wasn’t nearly high enough.
Instead of his neck neatly snapping at the end of the drop, he spent half an hour slowly
strangling while hanging.
It’s no surprise locals in modern-day San Diego claim his ghost still haunts the site.
But it wasn’t the only botched hanging in the United States.
What execution was so bad it brought an end to capital punishment in Minnesota?
That would be the death of William Williams.
A miner, he carried on a secret relationship with local teenager John Keller.
When Keller refused to answer Williams’ letters at his parents’ insistence, Williams
came to the Keller home and murdered John Keller and his mother.
Sentenced to death by hanging, Williams was taken to the gallows in 1906 - but the rope
was too long.
He hit the floor and was injured.
But the local sheriff wanted the execution completed, so he ordered his men to pull the
rope back up until Williams strangled to death.
The horror led to the abolition of the death penalty in the state five years later, and
it has never been reinstated.
At least firing squad - execution by a hail of bullets - should be pretty foolproof, right?
Not exactly, as Wallace Wilkerson found out.
The cattle worker got into a nasty argument with bartender William Baxter over a cart
game, and the hot-tempered Wilkerson pulled out a gun and shot Baxter.
He was quickly captured and kept under guard to prevent a lynching.
Sentenced to death at trial, Wilkerson chose a firing squad, and although appeals were
filed by his lawyer, in 1879 he met his fate.
He was blindfolded and shot by a group of guards - only for every single one of them
to miss his heart.
Badly wounded and bleeding, Wilkerson lay on the ground gasping.
While officials initially talked about shooting him again, he eventually expired from blood
loss after less than half an hour.
Well, then, no one could survive poison gas - right?
The gas chamber was a twentieth-century innovation in the death penalty, using an airtight chamber
and a combination of poisonous gases to bloodlessly kill the condemned.
That was the fate that awaited Jimmy Lee Gray, a Mississippi child-murderer who was sentenced
to death for his second murder.
In 1983, he was taken to the death chamber - but there was a design flaw that the officials
hadn’t accounted for.
An iron bar behind the death chair was within reach, and Gray’s head wasn’t strapped
down.
When the gas flooded in, Gray began thrashing his head violently and slammed his head against
the bar repeatedly before losing consciousness.
The room was cleared, and it’s unclear whether the gas or the blows to the head ultimately
killed him.
But no execution method has caused more controversy than the electric chair.
A chair designed to restrain the inmate and send a fatal electric shock through their
body, the electric chair had been used to kill a horse effectively in testing.
But when it came time to execute William Kemmler in 1890, things went very differently.
The peddler and heavy drinker had been convicted of killing his common-law wife, and New York
chose to make him a test case for the new execution method.
The chair was turned on, Kemmler was hit with a thousand volts, and quickly knocked unconscious.
While he was immediately declared dead, witnesses noticed he was still breathing.
The attending physician ordered the current turned on again - and this time it definitely
worked.
2000 volts hit Kemmler, the blood vessels in his skin burst, and his body caught fire,
sending a horrible stench through the room.
It wouldn’t be the last time the electric chair shocked witnesses.
Jesse Tafero was facing the death penalty for the shooting of an officer in Florida,
despite only being a passenger in the car during the fatal traffic stop.
Many speculated the real killer was the driver, Walter Rhodes, but Rhodes testified against
him and Tafero was convicted.
His date with the electric chair was May 4th, 1990 - but things didn’t go smoothly.
One of the critical parts of an electric chair execution is using a sponge on the head to
increase the conductivity and ensure a quick death - but the team had used a synthetic
sponge, not an organic one.
This caused flames to shoot out of Tafero’s head, shocking onlookers, and it took a seven-minute
process of three jolts to kill Tafero.
Some even speculated that the chair had been sabotaged to make Tafero suffer.
To add insult to injury, Rhodes confessed to being the shooter after Tafero’s death.
The electric chair was quickly becoming notorious - and would soon fall out of favor in Florida.
The last straw was the execution of Allen Lee Davis, a notorious mass-murderer sentenced
to death for the murder of Nancy Weiler.
He would remain on death row until 1999, when he met the electric chair.
There was just one problem - he had been on blood thinner medications before his execution.
Witnesses would say his nose had begun bleeding before he was electrocuted, but the guards
didn’t hesitate - and when the shocks went through Davis’ body, he began bleeding profusely.
An autopsy revealed severe burns all over his head, legs, and groin, and while an inquiry
showed the chair had worked properly, that was enough for Florida to designate lethal
injection the primary method of execution in the future.
But that modern method isn’t foolproof either.
Lethal injection is the most bloodless modern method of execution, using a cocktail of drugs
on a restrained inmate to put them to sleep and then stop their heart.
It’s supposed to be painless - but that wasn’t the case for Arizona inmate Joseph
Rudolph Wood III.
Convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend and her father, he was taken to the death chamber
in July 2014 - and what was supposed to be a quick execution took a terrible twist.
While one dose was supposed to be enough to kill Wood, witnesses reported that the staff
injected Wood fifteen times trying to give him a fatal dose.
The execution took almost two hours - long enough for Wood’s lawyers to file one final
appeal with the Supreme Court arguing that the ongoing execution was cruel and unusual
punishment.
It was denied - a half-hour after Wood finally expired.
But there’s another kind of execution that went horribly wrong - the one where the condemned
actually survives.
Romell Broom was awaiting death in Ohio after being convicted for the kidnapping and murder
of a teenage girl.
While he had filed an appeal and obtained a DNA test, he wasn’t exonerated - and his
date with the needle was fast approaching.
In September 2009, he was strapped to the gurney and the execution began - only for
the executioners to struggle to find a vein.
The execution was called off, the Governor issued a one-week stay, and a series of appeals
began arguing that to execute him again would be cruel and unusual punishment.
Eventually, appeals were denied and Broom was scheduled to die in June 2020 - only for
it to be called off due to the pandemic.
But Broom would never meet the executioner - he died in prison in December 2020.
The next case faced death - and wound up cheating death.
Doyle Hamm was on Alabama’s death row for the killing of Patrick Cunningham in a motel
robbery.
While awaiting execution in 2014, he came down with lymphatic cancer.
The cancer and treatments damaged Hamm’s veins, making it difficult for the executioner
to find a vein - leading to almost three hours of the team poking him with needles.
The painful spectacle in 2018 led to international condemnation, and Hamm’s legal team filed
lawsuits.
Ultimately, Alabama settled with Hamm and agreed not to set a second execution date
- meaning that Hamm still sits in prison, having successfully beaten execution and so
far, cancer.
But convicts have survived far more violent methods of execution.
It was 1740 in England when William Duell was sentenced to hang.
The seventeen-year-old had been convicted as an accessory to rape, and was to be hung
along with four others.
The execution seemed to go off smoothly, as he hung for twenty minutes before being cut
down.
His body was sent to a medical training college for dissection - when the workers noticed
something strange.
Duell was still breathing.
Within two hours, he was awake and had no recollection of being hung.
He had been sick before his execution, which some say may have led to his survival.
Instead of trying to execute him again, the law changed his sentence to exile to North
America, where he lived in Boston for another sixty-five years.
But could anyone survive a firing squad?
Wenceslao Moguel Herrera did - although no one is quite sure why.
It was 1915, in the midst of the violent Mexican Revolution, when he was arrested for being
a revolutionary.
It was wartime and there was no trial - only an impromptu finding of guilt and a quick
firing squad.
Witnesses say he was shot at least eight times in the body, and then shot once in the head
to ensure he was dead.
But what comes next is up for debate.
Some say he was found unconscious in the bodies of his fellow revolutionaries.
Others say he crawled to a church for sanctuary and recovered there.
What is clear is that he lived for another sixty years after his shooting - even appearing
on the Ripley’s Believe it or Not radio show in 1937.
But no one had the sheer luck of John Babbacombe Lee.
A notorious thief and former Navy cadet in England, Lee was convicted in 1885 of murdering
his employer Emma Keyse.
While the evidence was weak, Lee’s reputation preceded him and he was sentenced to death
by hanging.
He maintained his innocence, but the gallows were waiting at Exeter Prison.
That’s where something odd happened - the trapdoor under the scaffold failed to open.
Famous executioner James Berry presided and couldn’t explain the failure in the device
- nor could he explain how it kept happening in two future attempted executions.
It seems John Babbacombe Lee was the man they couldn’t hang, and he soon became famous.
Amid public attention, Lee’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the Home
Secretary, allowing him to keep fighting to prove his innocence.
He was eventually released in 1907 and lived to eighty years old - becoming a celebrity
as the man who beat death three times.
Check out “50 Insane Death Penalty and Execution Facts That Will Shock You” for more of the
death penalty’s darkest secrets, or watch this video instead.