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.
