(no subject)

[ewx]

Since most people seem to answered "who?"...

John Lee - "the man they could not hang" - was a real person, convicted in 1885 on circumstantial evidence of the murder of one Emma Keyse, his elderly employer. He maintained his innocence. When they attempted to hang him, the trapdoor failed to open three times in a row, despite apparently being in working order. Apparently this caused quite a stir, up to and including a debate in the Houses of Parliament, and eventually rather than have another go at killing him his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

Crazy Man Michael, on the other hand, is for all I know entirely fictitious.

The connection between the two is that they are both the subject of Fairport Convention tracks (three of them in the case of John Lee).