Lizzie Halliday was an Irish-born woman living on a poor hill farm near the hamlet of Burlingham, in Sullivan County, New York, when, in the first days of September 1893, the bodies of two women from Newburgh were found hidden in her barn and the body of her elderly husband was found under the floor of her kitchen. All three had been shot. The women, Margaret McQuillan and her daughter Sarah Jane, had come to the farm because Halliday, calling herself Mrs. Smith, had hired the mother to clean house and then fetched the daughter with a story that her mother had been hurt.
She was charged in all three deaths but tried for only one. In June 1894 a jury at Monticello rejected her plea of insanity and convicted her of the first-degree murder of Sarah Jane McQuillan, and she became the first woman sentenced to die in New York's electric chair. Within a month a commission of physicians appointed by Governor Roswell P. Flower found her insane, and the governor commuted her sentence to life in the state asylum for insane criminals at Matteawan. She lived there for the rest of her life. In 1906 an attendant who had cared for her, Nellie Wicks, was stabbed to death in a hospital lavatory, and the staff and the press attributed the killing to Halliday. She was never tried for it. She died at Matteawan in 1918.
The case was covered heavily by the New York press, and much of that coverage was speculation, rumor and invention. The firmer ground is what witnesses said under oath and what courts and officials did.
Almost nothing about Halliday's early life was established in court, and the newspapers of the 1890s disagreed with one another. A wire report printed at the opening of her trial in June 1894 said she had been born McNally. Paul Halliday's son Robert told the New-York Tribune in September 1893 that her real name was Lizzie Brown, that she came from Belfast, and that she was about 35. In jail at Monticello, told that her mother in Ireland had been sent for, she spoke briefly about coming from Belfast. When she died in 1918 the reports gave her age as in her fifty-eighth year, which would place her birth around 1860 or 1861.
The historians Leanne McCormick and Elaine Farrell, who study Irish women caught up in the American justice system for their Bad Bridget project, wrote in 2021 that she was originally from County Antrim and had emigrated to the United States as a child, around 1867. They noted that this timing ruled out two stories that followed her: that she had killed a husband in Belfast before she left, and that she had some connection to the 1888 Whitechapel murders in London. Robert Halliday reported in 1893 that she had told him she once killed a man in Belfast so cleverly that it was never discovered; no evidence of any such killing has ever been produced. Commission doctors examining her sanity in 1894 traveled to a former home of hers in Washington County, New York, to look for signs of insanity among her relatives there.
The fullest contemporary account of her earlier life is the one carried by the wire services in June and July 1894, repeated in the Scranton Tribune and in the New York Evening World. It lists five husbands before Paul Halliday. According to that account she married Charles Hopkins when she was very young, and he died about two years later. She next married Artemas Brewer, who died within a year. A third husband, Hiram Parkinson, left her within a year. While Parkinson was still alive she married George Smith, a Civil War veteran who had served with Brewer; the reports said that within a few months she tried to kill Smith with a cup of poisoned tea, and that when this failed she fled to Bellows Falls, Vermont, taking every portable item in the house. In Bellows Falls she married Charles Playstel, the only young man among her husbands, and lived with him for about two weeks.
None of these deaths or departures was ever the subject of a charge, and the reports gave no dates, places or sources for them. The deaths of Hopkins and Brewer were described as sudden, nothing more. The poisoning claim about George Smith was a newspaper allegation and was never tested in any court. These are suspicions that grew up around her after 1893, not findings.
The same account says that she burned a store in Philadelphia and served two years in the penitentiary for it. The contemporary reports give no name she used in Philadelphia, no date and no court.
Paul Halliday was, by every report, an old man when he met her. His son Robert told the Tribune in September 1893 that his father had been born in County Antrim about eighty years earlier, had married before emigrating, and had settled first in Providence, Rhode Island, where he worked for some years at The Providence Journal. He moved to Middletown, New York, worked in a match factory and a foundry, built a house at the foot of South Street, and later traded it for farms, the last of them the one near Walker Valley and Burlingham, at the foot of the Shawangunk Mountains, where he lived for about thirty years. He had enlisted in a New York volunteer regiment in August 1862, was wounded at Chancellorsville in May 1863 and in two later battles, and drew a pension of 12 dollars a month at his death. He belonged to a Grand Army of the Republic post, which buried him.
By his first marriage he had several children, among them Robert, Paul Jr., James and John. John, whom the papers described as disabled and dependent, lived with his father.
Robert said his father found the woman he married through a domestic employment office run by a Mrs. Smith in Newburgh, and that she kept house for him for some time before they married at St. Paul's Methodist Episcopal Church in Middletown. The Sun, in an editorial of July 1894, put her arrival in Burlingham as the old man's housekeeper at about five years earlier, around 1889.
About a year after the marriage, Robert Halliday said, she burned the house in which his brother John died. Paul Halliday kept a small memorandum book in which, under a folded and pinned leaf that he had labeled with her name and the word crimes, he noted a burned barn and the date the house burned, which the Tribune printed as May 4, 1891. James Halliday told the Tribune in 1893 that he was satisfied his crippled brother had been killed by his stepmother before the fire, reasoning that the bedding where John's body lay was only scorched. The Sun reported in 1894 that she had been suspected by neighbors but never formally accused. No charge was ever brought for John Halliday's death.
There was also a theft. Witnesses at her trial and the Sun's 1894 editorial agreed that she ran off with a team of horses and was arrested at Newburgh, where her lawyer pleaded insanity and she was sent to asylums rather than to prison. James H. Goodale, the Orange County undersheriff and superintendent of its insane asylum, testified that she spent nearly three months in his care around 1890 and 1891, refusing food unless it was fed to her with a spoon. He took her to the Middletown State Hospital in February 1891, and its superintendent, Dr. Selden H. Talcott, confirmed she came into his care that month. Robert Halliday said she was later moved to Auburn and then to Matteawan, and was discharged in 1892. The jurors at her trial understood from the evidence that she had been certified as cured in May 1893.
Paul Halliday took her back each time. The Sun, in its July 1894 editorial on the commutation, wrote that he seemed to accept the risk of her outbursts and had heard her threats against him himself. Dr. Talcott testified in 1894 that while she was at Middletown she had said that if she ever had the chance she would kill her husband.
Margaret McQuillan was the wife of Thomas McQuillan and lived with him about a mile west of the city of Newburgh, in the town of Newburgh, Orange County. Their daughter Sarah Jane, a young woman, usually worked as a domestic servant for a family in Newburgh and was at home on a vacation in late August 1893. Thomas McQuillan was an old man by then. The Evening World reported in June 1894 that he was a veteran of the British army who had once worked as a stage extra in the actor Richard Mansfield's New York production of Richard III. Neighbors in Newburgh knew mother and daughter well enough that Caroline Wright, testifying at the trial, recognized Sarah's belt, shirtwaist and gold watch chain because, she said, she had worn them herself many times.
Neither woman had any connection to the Hallidays. Thomas McQuillan testified that he had never known the defendant before she came to his house looking for his wife.
The sequence was reconstructed in the days after the discovery and laid out again at trial. In late August 1893, a woman who called herself Mrs. Smith drove a horse and wagon to the outskirts of Newburgh looking for someone to help with house cleaning. Caroline Wright, a neighbor of the McQuillans, pointed her to Margaret McQuillan, who did such work. On the first visit, about ten days before the bodies were found, Sarah was at home but unwell and did not go. The woman came back and offered two dollars a day and board, several times the usual rate for such work, and on that visit Margaret McQuillan accepted and rode away with her toward Sullivan County. She told Mrs. Wright as she left that she was going to do some work for Mrs. Smith.
On Saturday, September 2, 1893, the woman came back alone with the same horse and wagon. She told the family that Margaret had fallen from a stepladder and been badly hurt, and asked for Sarah to come and nurse her. She gave the girl candy and lace. Thomas McQuillan told his daughter to get her things and go to her mother. He testified that he never saw her again. The Sun reported that the woman also told him she had a fine litter of pigs and would let him choose one when he came to visit his wife the following week.
On Monday, September 4, which was Labor Day, Thomas McQuillan set out to find his wife and daughter but could not, and went home.
In Burlingham, meanwhile, Paul Halliday had not been seen for some time. His son Paul Jr. testified at the trial that he called to see his father in late August and was told that the old man had bought property in Bloomingburg and had gone there on foot to do some mason work. Unsatisfied, he joined a constable named Canfield and other neighbors who were keeping watch on the house. The Sun reported that a neighbor, Mrs. Cornelius Canfield, remembered being asked by Lizzie Halliday whether she knew of anything that would take bloodstains out of a carpet. A tax collector also came by asking for Paul Halliday, and the prosecutor later argued that she went and paid her husband's school tax so that his absence would draw no attention.
A warrant was obtained and the house searched. The searchers found a bloodstained carpet and a rope. When Lewis Canfield asked her how the blood came to be there, he testified, she told him it was none of his business. According to Paul Jr., she struck the constable's hand with a board and threatened him.
On Monday, September 4, 1893, the searchers found the bodies of two women in the old barn on the Halliday place, hidden under hay and stable refuse. Dr. Charles W. Piper of Wurtsboro, who arrived soon after, testified that the bodies had been bound with linen at the knees and ankles. Both had been shot. Dr. George M. Beakes of Bloomingburg, who performed the autopsy on Sarah, found three bullet wounds through the heart.
The women were not identified at once. For a day the papers reported that they might be Paul Halliday's own daughter and granddaughter from Providence; Halliday's sons denied it, and a relative said she recognized the younger woman. On September 6 the Newburgh reports settled the question: the dead women were Margaret McQuillan and her daughter Sarah, and Lizzie Halliday had made three visits to the McQuillan house in the preceding days. The identification showed how far she had gone for her household help: Newburgh was a long day's drive from the farm and back.
She was arrested at the farm the day the bodies were found. Constable Scott's wife, Carrie Scott, searched her and found money pinned to her underclothing and hidden in each stocking, about 20 dollars in all by the Evening World's count. Witnesses said that on the Sunday after Sarah arrived she had spent the day at a neighbor's house wearing rings and a watch that had belonged to Sarah, saying her husband had given them to her, and The Sun reported that she threw away the rings, the watch and her revolver when she was arrested.
The search for Paul Halliday went on for several days and was then abandoned. A neighbor, a New Yorker who owned the adjoining farm and spent summers there, was not satisfied. On the morning of September 7, 1893, he went into the empty house, lifted part of the floor, found a place where the earth had recently been disturbed, and struck something with a crowbar. He went for the local justice at Burlingham, and with a few others they dug down and found the old man's body under the kitchen floor. The physicians who examined it said it had been buried for about two weeks. He had a severe head injury and had been shot. Working back from the autopsy, The Sun put his death at about August 23 or 24, 1893, though some neighbors thought they had seen him a few days later.
Sarah Jane McQuillan was buried on September 8, 1893, in the cemetery near Bloomingburg. Her father, aged and too shaken to travel, asked the undertaker to wait until Saturday so that he could come, but the burial went ahead without him. He paid for the burials of his wife and daughter and said he would have them moved to Newburgh. Paul Halliday was buried at Walker Valley by his Grand Army of the Republic post.
On September 11, 1893, after his body had been exhumed so that a properly constituted coroner's jury could view it, the jury returned a verdict charging Lizzie Halliday with his murder and finding that it was premeditated.
On September 8, 1893, constables drove her twenty miles over the mountains to the Sullivan County jail at Monticello. From the evening after the bodies were found she behaved in ways that observers described as insane. Justice of the Peace Abram Thayer testified that she was rational until the evening of the day after the discovery, when she began to complain that potato bugs were crawling over her. Dr. Beakes, testifying for the prosecution, said that she raved about the bugs until the bloodstained carpet was brought in, then fell silent, and that when the revolver and cartridges were brought in she stopped asking for the bugs to be brushed off for an hour. He took this as evidence she was pretending.
In jail she refused food, and the sheriff, Harrison Beecher, had her fed by force. She gave nonsense answers to questions, once handing the sheriff a watch and calling it a turnip to be boiled. According to a summary the Associated Press published in July 1894, she tried in November 1893 to strangle the sheriff's wife, who had come to visit her, and a day later set fire to her bedclothes; in December she tried to hang herself, and on December 15 she badly cut her arm with glass broken from her cell window. She was chained in her cell for long periods.
The Sun's correspondent wrote in mid-September 1893 that many people in the district believed she was feigning insanity, and that some suspected she had an accomplice in at least her husband's death, on the reasoning that a single woman could not have moved and buried a heavy man under a joist alone. That theory was never pursued in court, and no one else was ever charged.
Judge Fursman assigned George H. Carpenter, a lawyer from Liberty, to defend her, and Carpenter announced that his defense would be insanity. The trial opened on Monday, June 18, 1894, at a special term of the Court of Oyer and Terminer at Monticello, with Justice Edwards presiding. An extra panel had been drawn to make 160 potential jurors; the jury was completed after 51 or 53 had been examined. The District Attorney, David S. Hill, prosecuted.
Halliday had been charged in all three deaths, but the people chose to try her for the murder of Sarah Jane McQuillan alone. Hill told the jury of farmers that his case rested on a chain of circumstantial evidence, since there were no eyewitnesses.
The prosecution witnesses traced the hiring and the trip from Newburgh. Caroline Wright described the woman calling herself Mrs. Smith, identified Sarah's belongings and broke down on the stand. Joseph Osborn described seeing the defendant with Margaret McQuillan in the buckboard on the road. A woman who had given her lodging testified that she came twice late at night in late August, saying once that her wagon had broken down. Paul Halliday Jr. told of his visit and the search. Thomas McQuillan, described by the Tribune as a large old man, told the jury how his wife had been hired for a month at two dollars a day and how he had sent his daughter off to nurse her. He identified his daughter's clothing and jewelry and broke down in tears. The defense did not cross-examine him.
Justice Thayer identified the revolver. John Bennett of Bloomingburg testified that it was old Paul Halliday's own gun. Dr. Beakes described the autopsy, and the coroner described the inquest. Carrie Scott described the money she had found on the prisoner, and Caroline Wright and Thomas McQuillan testified that both women had carried money when they left home. The prosecution's aim, the Evening World observed, was to show a motive.
Through all of it Halliday sat with her head down, picking at her sleeves and moving her lips, and did not appear to follow the proceedings. She did not testify.
The defense case was entirely about her mind. James Goodale described her condition in 1890 and 1891 and said he believed she had been insane then and was insane still. Sheriff Beecher described her talk to imaginary people in his jail. Dr. Selden Talcott said she had never been sane since she left his hospital and lacked the intelligence to feign insanity. Dr. H. E. Allison, superintendent of the Matteawan asylum, believed she was insane at the time of trial, though he did not agree with Talcott that she had never recovered.
The prosecution answered with physicians who thought she was shamming. Dr. Beakes, Dr. William H. Woodruff of Pine Bush and Dr. James A. Cauthers of Monticello said they had seen signs of pretense in the days after her arrest. Dr. Edward C. Mann, a New York physician who said he had testified as an expert in forty trials, examined her in her cell. She kicked him and spat at him. He told the jury her answers to his questions, such as giving her age as "nineteen skunks," came too quickly and were unlike anything he had heard from a real patient, and that she had concealed the evidence of the crimes afterward, which he considered uncommon in the insane. On cross-examination Carpenter read to him passages from his own book on insanity. Dr. Sol Van Etten of Port Jervis also called her sane, but under cross-examination conceded he was not expert enough to draw fine distinctions.
In closing, Hill argued that a woman who paid her husband's school tax to keep his absence quiet, and who had planned to burn the house and barn and leave, could not be insane. He also pointed out that the defense had not called the jail physician. Justice Edwards's charge, which the reporters present praised as clear and fair, told the jurors that the defendant stood clothed in the presumption of innocence, that the prosecution had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt both that she killed Sarah McQuillan with intent and that she was sane, and that if they acquitted on the ground of insanity they must say so.
The jury went out at about 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 21, 1894, and returned about three hours later. The Sun reported that the first ballot stood eleven for murder in the first degree and one for the second degree, and that the twelfth juror came round after discussion. Two jurors told the Sun that the evidence that she had been certified cured in May 1893 had weighed with them. The foreman, George H. Decker, announced a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree, and every juror confirmed it when polled. Sarah's watch and rings were handed back to her father.
Carpenter told reporters he would do nothing for the moment, but said he did not believe she would ever be electrocuted, because a commission would be appointed and would find her insane.
On the morning of June 22, 1894, Justice Edwards sentenced her to death by electricity within the week beginning Monday, August 6, 1894. She gave no sign of hearing him. The Tribune noted that she was the first woman to receive such a sentence. Carpenter said he expected to ask the governor for clemency.
As the sheriff led her from the courtroom after sentencing, she bit his hand. By late August the Tribune reported that Sheriff Beecher was still suffering from the badly swollen hand and that it was feared he might lose the arm. The contemporary reports do not bear out later claims that the arm was amputated.
On June 29, 1894, Beecher delivered her to Clinton Prison at Dannemora, near Plattsburgh, where she was the first woman ever held. She was placed in the condemned cell under the watch of two matrons brought from the state hospital at Ogdensburg.
Governor Roswell P. Flower appointed a commission of three physicians to examine her. They worked at Dannemora and finished on July 12, 1894, testing her in her cell. They also visited her former home in Washington County to look into her family history. On July 16, 1894, the Associated Press reported from Albany that the commission had found unanimously that she was insane, and that Flower had commuted her sentence to imprisonment for life in the State Asylum for Insane Criminals at Matteawan.
The Sun, which had covered the trial in detail, supported the decision in an editorial on July 22. It cited the memorandum Flower issued with the commutation, which described her violent episodes as recurring, and argued that the expert evidence showed a periodic mental disease. It also argued that the public would not accept the execution of a woman.
So the outcome was split. A jury, properly instructed, found her sane and guilty of first-degree murder, and that verdict stood. The executive branch then found her insane and spared her life. She was never retried, and the conviction was never overturned.
Matteawan, near Fishkill on the Hudson (the town later became part of the city of Beacon), was New York's hospital for people charged with or convicted of crimes and judged insane. Halliday spent about twenty-four years there. Little was published about her daily life. The 1918 reports of her death said she had tried to escape several times and had at one point tried to kill another nurse, named as Catherine Ward. McCormick and Farrell wrote in 2021 that she assaulted an attendant in 1895. Neither incident has been traced to a report from the time.
By 1906 she had become, according to the New-York Tribune, one of the most trusted patients of a young attendant named Nellie Wicks.
Nellie Wicks was 21 years old in 1906, and her family lived on Long Island. The Tribune reported that Halliday had grown deeply attached to her. A few weeks before the end of September, Wicks told Halliday that she was leaving the hospital to take up private nursing. Halliday became depressed, begged her not to go and said she would kill her before she let her leave. Because Halliday had made many idle threats, the warning was not taken seriously; Wicks humored her and went on preparing to leave.
On the morning of Thursday, September 27, 1906, at about 8:30, Wicks went into a lavatory on the ward. According to the reports from Newburgh that day, Halliday followed her in, locked the door from inside and left the key in the lock so that it could not be opened from outside, knocked her down, took a pair of scissors from her and stabbed her in the throat. Other attendants heard Wicks's cries, forced the door and overpowered Halliday after a struggle. Nellie Wicks died about two hours later.
Halliday was not prosecuted. No charge, indictment or trial for the death of Nellie Wicks was reported; she was already confined as an insane criminal under a commuted life sentence. The killing is attributed to her by the hospital staff's account as reported in the press, not by any court.
Lizzie Halliday died at Matteawan in 1918. A dispatch from Beacon, New York, reprinted in The Montgomery Advertiser on July 6, 1918, reported her death at the state hospital "today" and said she was in her fifty-eighth year. Later accounts give the exact date as June 28, 1918, and the cause as kidney disease, though neither detail has been matched to a report from the time.
That 1918 dispatch shows how the story had grown in twenty-five years. It credited her with five killings, counting her stepson and two "women friends," said she had confessed when arrested, and repeated the old claim that she had belonged to a wandering band of gypsies. None of this matches the trial record: she was convicted of one killing, she did not confess, and the McQuillans were strangers to her.
Proven by a final conviction: the first-degree murder of Sarah Jane McQuillan, by the verdict of June 21, 1894. The conviction was never reversed; only the sentence was commuted.
Charged but never tried: the deaths of Paul Halliday and Margaret McQuillan. A coroner's jury charged her with her husband's premeditated murder, and the evidence at trial (all three shot, the husband's own revolver, the bodies hidden on her farm) was presented by the prosecution as one connected crime, but no jury ever ruled on these two deaths. The Bad Bridget authors' 2021 statement that she was found guilty of murdering her husband and both women is not accurate; contemporary reports are clear that she was tried only for Sarah.
Attributed, never tried: the death of Nellie Wicks in 1906.
Suspected, never charged: the death of her stepson John Halliday in the 1891 fire; the sudden deaths of her first two husbands, Charles Hopkins and Artemas Brewer; and the alleged attempt to poison George Smith. These rest on newspaper accounts compiled after her arrest, with no dates or court records.
Her own unverified claims: that she had killed a man in Belfast. Historians note she left Ireland as a child.
Press inventions: the Jack the Ripper connection, raised in 1893 and dismissed by the Bad Bridget historians on the dates alone; the story that she was a gypsy, or the queen of a gypsy band, which Robert Halliday called entirely untrue in 1893 but which papers were still printing in 1906 and 1918; and the label "the worst woman on earth," which appeared in reports of her death in 1918 and has been repeated since. It was a headline phrase, not a finding.
Accomplice theory: in September 1893 the Sun's correspondent suggested that a male accomplice helped bury Paul Halliday. No evidence was produced and no one else was charged.
Sanity: the jury found her sane at the time of the killing; the governor's commission found her insane in July 1894. Expert opinion at the trial was evenly split, and the record does not settle whether she was feigning in 1893, as several prosecution doctors believed.
Details that vary between sources: her birth name (McNally in 1894 wire reports; "Lizzie Brown" according to Robert Halliday) and her age; the year she came to the Halliday farm (about 1889); the sequence and dates of the horse theft, the house fire and her asylum stays in 1890 to 1892; whether she was discharged from Matteawan in 1892 (Robert Halliday) or certified cured in May 1893 (the trial evidence as the jurors understood it); the exact day Paul Halliday died (late August 1893, about August 23 or 24 by the Sun's reckoning from the autopsy); and the date of her death in 1918.
About 1859 to 1861: born in Ireland; County Antrim according to historians, with Belfast named in her own account.
About 1867: taken to the United States as a child (Bad Bridget historians).
Before about 1889: married, by the 1894 wire account, Charles Hopkins (died), Artemas Brewer (died), Hiram Parkinson (left), George Smith (alleged poisoning attempt) and Charles Playstel (two weeks); served two years for burning a store in Philadelphia.
About 1889: becomes housekeeper to Paul Halliday near Burlingham, Sullivan County; marries him in Middletown.
1890 to 1891: steals a team of horses, is arrested at Newburgh and sent to asylums instead of prison; admitted to Middletown State Hospital, February 1891.
May 1891: the Halliday house burns and her stepson John dies; she is suspected but never charged.
1892 or May 1893: released from asylum care.
Late August 1893: Paul Halliday disappears (death put at about August 23 or 24).
Late August 1893: posing as "Mrs. Smith," she hires Margaret McQuillan of the town of Newburgh.
September 2, 1893: returns to Newburgh and takes Sarah Jane McQuillan away with a story that her mother is hurt.
September 4, 1893: the two women's bodies are found in the barn; Halliday is arrested.
September 6, 1893: the women are identified as Margaret and Sarah McQuillan.
September 7, 1893: Paul Halliday's body is found under the kitchen floor.
September 8, 1893: Sarah is buried near Bloomingburg; Halliday is taken to the Monticello jail.
September 11, 1893: coroner's jury charges her with her husband's premeditated murder.
November to December 1893: attacks on the sheriff's wife, a fire in her cell and attempts at self-harm in jail.
June 18, 1894: trial for the murder of Sarah Jane McQuillan opens at Monticello before Justice Edwards.
June 21, 1894: convicted of first-degree murder.
June 22, 1894: sentenced to death by electricity in the week of August 6; bites Sheriff Beecher's hand as she is led out.
June 29, 1894: received at Clinton Prison, Dannemora, the first woman held there.
July 12, 1894: Governor Flower's medical commission finishes its examination.
July 16, 1894: commission finds her insane; Flower commutes the sentence to life at Matteawan.
September 27, 1906: attendant Nellie Wicks, 21, is stabbed with scissors at Matteawan and dies two hours later; Halliday is blamed and never tried.
1918: dies at Matteawan, reported at the end of June and in early July 1918.