REPUBLICAN WATCHMAN
MONTICELLO, NEW YORK, JULY 5, 1918 [Friday]
VOLUME 92, NO. 29, WHOLE NO. 4711
Mrs. Lizzie Holiday, the Sullivan
County murderess, died In the Mattewan
State Hospital for insane on
Thursday night of last week, where
she had been confined for a quarter
of a century among the worst type of
the criminal insane.
The death of Mrs. Halliday.......
----------------
Frederick News
Maryland, U.S.A.
11 September 1893
A MURDEROUS MANIAC
The Many Crimes Charged Against Lizzie Halliday
A MANIA LIKE JACK THE RIPPER
Middletown, N.Y., Sept. 11.
The solution of the mystery surrounding Lizzie Halliday's awful crimes will be found in the history of her previous life and her relations with her husband.
Young Paul and Robert Halliday have told their stories, and when all this news and old information is put together there is produced a story of very unusual, but not unprecedented criminality.
Lizzie Halliday, herself a type of low humanity, was merely an ignorant, mean, cunning and revengeful woman, with the belief that she possessed the power to deceive everybody she chose. This appears to have been her character under ordinary circumstances, but at certain periods she appears to have become possessed of a mania. On each occasion when she was in this wild mental condition she was expecting to become a mother.
She never did, however, so far as is known, give birth to a living child. This mania, which is not without numerous precedents, assumed in Lizzie Halliday's case a phase almost unbelievably shocking.
In fact, there is excellent reason to assume that her case and that of the mysterious London assassin, known as jack the Ripper, are very similar.
In both the mania appears to have developed crimes of a similar nature, the difference being chiefly that in one it developed in a man and in this last case in a woman.
Lizzie Halliday has killed two men in her life, both of them husbands, and she mutilated both. It has just come out, through the stories told by Paul Halliday's two sons, that the woman confessed to old Paul soon after her marriage to him that she had been married before, and had killed and then hacked her husband.
Old Paul professed not to believe this story, and undoubtedly did not. But it now appears that she treated his body after she had killed him as she had that of her first husband.
Her two subsequent crimes, the killing of the McQuillan women, must have been committed in a pure thirst for blood, induced by her mania and probably whetted by her fearful crime a few days before.
She did not mutilate the bodies of the women, which shows that it must have been merely a thirst for blood which prompted her to the deed.
In a protracted interview with Robert Halliday, the eldest son of the murdered man, he made the following statement: "This woman came from the same county in Ireland as my father. He told me this himself. He first met her in an intelligence office in Newburg, where he secured her services as a housekeeper. Some time after he married her. None of the family liked the woman. Her appearance was against her. She did not conduct herself as a wife should. My father, however, was infatuated with her. She held a peculiar influence over him which nothing could shake. Soon after his marriage to the woman, who gave her name as Lizzie Brown, there began the peculiar succession of crimes which finally led to her being committed to the insane asylum.
"First there was the burning of the house. Then the burning of the barn, and finally the burning of the old mill where my father, his wife and my brother, John, lived, in which fire my brother lost his life.
"Following this at a stated period came her theft of the team of a Newburg liveryman. She hired a horse and buggy in Newburg on the statement that she was a poor Irish servant who wanted to visit her sick mother. The man let her have a horse and buggy. She drove out of town, got an old man to go with her as she did not know the country and within twenty four hours had sold the rig and horse to some gypsies.
"She was arrested, tried and found not guilty on the ground of insanity.
"Two fires in my father's place occurred in quick succession. After a longer period came the conflagration in which my young brother perished. For this crime she was arrested, but on the ground of insanity was remanded to the insane asylum at Middletown. She remained there awhile, was then sent to another asylum, and finally was released as cured at my father's request.
"My father told me subsequently to these affairs that his wife, at the time of their commission, was in a condition peculiar to women. That when in that condition she was subject to spells of insanity. With the disappearance of the physical condition there was a disappearance of the criminal tendencies. I begged my father to leave the woman, but he would not listen to me."
After a great deal of deliberation the coroner's jury arrived at this verdict: "We do say upon our oath that Margaret J. McQuillan and Sarah J. McQuillan came to their deaths from bullets fired from a pistol in the hands of Lizzie Halliday. That said Margaret was killed on or about Aug. 30 and Sarah J Mcquillan on or about Sept 2."
The inquest on the body of Paul Halliday was resumed at 9 o'clock this morning, but nothing new, it is believed, will be elicited. After that the case will sink out of sight until Mrs. Halliday is called to answer at court some time next month.
More articles can be found at:
http://www.casebook.org/press_reports/frederick_news/18930911.html
-----------
The Morning Star
Glen Falls, N.Y.
Vol. XIX. No. 472
Tuesday, June 19, 1894
WEIRD LIFE OF CRIME
Mrs. Halliday's Many Marriages and Murders.
ls It a Case of Insanity or Murderous Perversity?
— Peculiar Fortune In Escaping Punishment
— Attempts at Suicide While In Jail.
MONTICELLO, N. Y., June 18.
—The trial of Mrs. Lizzie Halliday, the Burlingham, Sullivan county, murderess, was begun here before a special term of the court of oyer and termines. Judge Edwards presiding The peculiarity of her case has tended to draw a large number of people from other places to witness the trial. The actions of her counsel, George H.Carpenter, of Liberty, evince a design to rest the case on the plea of Insanity. The district attorney, however, believes that he has evidence which will controvert any such plea and prove this a case of murderous perversity. She is very taciturn, refusing absolutely to say anything to any one. The prisoner is very pale from her long confinement, but the jail physician says she is in good physical condition. All about the floor of the cell were strewn story books and magazines, in which she has seemed to take special delight when alone.
Mrs. Halliday's maiden name was Eliza Margaret McNally. She was born in the county Antrim, Ireland, thirty years ago and came to this country with her parents in 1867. But little is known concerning her early girlhood. Fifteen years ago she married Charles Hopkins, otherwise known as Ketspool Brown, by whom she had her only child, a boy who is now in a Pennsylvania Institution. Upon the death of Hopkins about two years after their marriage she married Artemas Brewer, a veteran and a pensioner, who died with in a year.
Whether these men died natural deaths or were murdered is not known. Her next venture was Hiram Parkinson who deserted her with in a year. She then married, Parkinson being stll alive, George Smith, a veteran and a comrade of her second spouse Brewer. In a few months she tried to kill Smith by giving him a cup of poisoned tea. Faillng in her design she fled to Bellows Falls, Vermont, taking
with her every portable article in the house
She fell in with and married Charles Playsel, the only one of all her husbands who could be called young. They lived together about two weeks. She was next heard of in Philadelphia in the winter of 1888. She called on the McQullans who then kept a saloon at No. 1218 North Front street and wanted to stay there on the plea of old family friendship, the McNallys and the McQullans having been neighbors in Ireland. She started a little shop in that city, which after having insured it on the ten cents a week installment plan she burned, together with the houses of her two neighbors. For this crime she served two years in the Eastern penitentiary In Philadelphia. Her next appearance was in Newburg, N. Y., where she met and married Paul Halliday, a farmer living at Burlingham, Sullivan county, about twenty miles from Newburg. Their married life does not seem to have been pleasant. She soon eloped with a neighbor, stealing a team of horses in order to accelerate their flight. In Newburgh her companion deserted her and she was arrested. Her counsel entered a plea of insanity and she was sent to an asylum, from which place she soon induced her husband, "dear old Paul," as she has called him since, to secure her release.
Shortly after her return from the asylum the Halliday house was burned and an idiotic son of Halliday's perished. Mrs. Halliday is supposed to have caused the fire. In August, 1893, Paul Halliday disappeared; the woman said he had gone away, but the neighbors one day when she was from home made a search of the premises. They did not then find Halliday, but in the barn covered up with hay were the bodies of two women, which were afterwards found to be those of Margaret and Sarah McQuillan, the wife and daughter of Thomas McQuillan of Newburgh, that very McQuillan family upon whom she had called when they lived in Philadelphia. After the discovery of these bodies Mrs. Halliday suddenly developed evidences of insanity. A few days afterwards the body of Paul Halliday was discovered buried under the floor of the house.
Mrs. Halliday was placed in the county jail here and since her incarceration has been a source of constant annoyance to her keepers though they have treated her with every imaginable degree of kindness. For a long time after her arrival she refused to eat and it became necessary for the jail physician to force liquid food through her nostrils. In November she tried to strangle the sheriff's wife. A few days later she set fire to her bedclothes. In December she tried to hang herself with the binding torn from the bottom of her dress. On December 15 she came near finishing herself by gashing her throat and arms in a terrible manner with glass broken from her cell window. For the last three months it has been necessary to keep her chained to the floor.
MONTICELLO, NEW YORK, JULY 5, 1918 [Friday]
VOLUME 92, NO. 29, WHOLE NO. 4711
Mrs. Lizzie Holiday, the Sullivan
County murderess, died In the Mattewan
State Hospital for insane on
Thursday night of last week, where
she had been confined for a quarter
of a century among the worst type of
the criminal insane.
The death of Mrs. Halliday.......
----------------
Frederick News
Maryland, U.S.A.
11 September 1893
A MURDEROUS MANIAC
The Many Crimes Charged Against Lizzie Halliday
A MANIA LIKE JACK THE RIPPER
Middletown, N.Y., Sept. 11.
The solution of the mystery surrounding Lizzie Halliday's awful crimes will be found in the history of her previous life and her relations with her husband.
Young Paul and Robert Halliday have told their stories, and when all this news and old information is put together there is produced a story of very unusual, but not unprecedented criminality.
Lizzie Halliday, herself a type of low humanity, was merely an ignorant, mean, cunning and revengeful woman, with the belief that she possessed the power to deceive everybody she chose. This appears to have been her character under ordinary circumstances, but at certain periods she appears to have become possessed of a mania. On each occasion when she was in this wild mental condition she was expecting to become a mother.
She never did, however, so far as is known, give birth to a living child. This mania, which is not without numerous precedents, assumed in Lizzie Halliday's case a phase almost unbelievably shocking.
In fact, there is excellent reason to assume that her case and that of the mysterious London assassin, known as jack the Ripper, are very similar.
In both the mania appears to have developed crimes of a similar nature, the difference being chiefly that in one it developed in a man and in this last case in a woman.
Lizzie Halliday has killed two men in her life, both of them husbands, and she mutilated both. It has just come out, through the stories told by Paul Halliday's two sons, that the woman confessed to old Paul soon after her marriage to him that she had been married before, and had killed and then hacked her husband.
Old Paul professed not to believe this story, and undoubtedly did not. But it now appears that she treated his body after she had killed him as she had that of her first husband.
Her two subsequent crimes, the killing of the McQuillan women, must have been committed in a pure thirst for blood, induced by her mania and probably whetted by her fearful crime a few days before.
She did not mutilate the bodies of the women, which shows that it must have been merely a thirst for blood which prompted her to the deed.
In a protracted interview with Robert Halliday, the eldest son of the murdered man, he made the following statement: "This woman came from the same county in Ireland as my father. He told me this himself. He first met her in an intelligence office in Newburg, where he secured her services as a housekeeper. Some time after he married her. None of the family liked the woman. Her appearance was against her. She did not conduct herself as a wife should. My father, however, was infatuated with her. She held a peculiar influence over him which nothing could shake. Soon after his marriage to the woman, who gave her name as Lizzie Brown, there began the peculiar succession of crimes which finally led to her being committed to the insane asylum.
"First there was the burning of the house. Then the burning of the barn, and finally the burning of the old mill where my father, his wife and my brother, John, lived, in which fire my brother lost his life.
"Following this at a stated period came her theft of the team of a Newburg liveryman. She hired a horse and buggy in Newburg on the statement that she was a poor Irish servant who wanted to visit her sick mother. The man let her have a horse and buggy. She drove out of town, got an old man to go with her as she did not know the country and within twenty four hours had sold the rig and horse to some gypsies.
"She was arrested, tried and found not guilty on the ground of insanity.
"Two fires in my father's place occurred in quick succession. After a longer period came the conflagration in which my young brother perished. For this crime she was arrested, but on the ground of insanity was remanded to the insane asylum at Middletown. She remained there awhile, was then sent to another asylum, and finally was released as cured at my father's request.
"My father told me subsequently to these affairs that his wife, at the time of their commission, was in a condition peculiar to women. That when in that condition she was subject to spells of insanity. With the disappearance of the physical condition there was a disappearance of the criminal tendencies. I begged my father to leave the woman, but he would not listen to me."
After a great deal of deliberation the coroner's jury arrived at this verdict: "We do say upon our oath that Margaret J. McQuillan and Sarah J. McQuillan came to their deaths from bullets fired from a pistol in the hands of Lizzie Halliday. That said Margaret was killed on or about Aug. 30 and Sarah J Mcquillan on or about Sept 2."
The inquest on the body of Paul Halliday was resumed at 9 o'clock this morning, but nothing new, it is believed, will be elicited. After that the case will sink out of sight until Mrs. Halliday is called to answer at court some time next month.
More articles can be found at:
http://www.casebook.org/press_reports/frederick_news/18930911.html
-----------
The Morning Star
Glen Falls, N.Y.
Vol. XIX. No. 472
Tuesday, June 19, 1894
WEIRD LIFE OF CRIME
Mrs. Halliday's Many Marriages and Murders.
ls It a Case of Insanity or Murderous Perversity?
— Peculiar Fortune In Escaping Punishment
— Attempts at Suicide While In Jail.
MONTICELLO, N. Y., June 18.
—The trial of Mrs. Lizzie Halliday, the Burlingham, Sullivan county, murderess, was begun here before a special term of the court of oyer and termines. Judge Edwards presiding The peculiarity of her case has tended to draw a large number of people from other places to witness the trial. The actions of her counsel, George H.Carpenter, of Liberty, evince a design to rest the case on the plea of Insanity. The district attorney, however, believes that he has evidence which will controvert any such plea and prove this a case of murderous perversity. She is very taciturn, refusing absolutely to say anything to any one. The prisoner is very pale from her long confinement, but the jail physician says she is in good physical condition. All about the floor of the cell were strewn story books and magazines, in which she has seemed to take special delight when alone.
Mrs. Halliday's maiden name was Eliza Margaret McNally. She was born in the county Antrim, Ireland, thirty years ago and came to this country with her parents in 1867. But little is known concerning her early girlhood. Fifteen years ago she married Charles Hopkins, otherwise known as Ketspool Brown, by whom she had her only child, a boy who is now in a Pennsylvania Institution. Upon the death of Hopkins about two years after their marriage she married Artemas Brewer, a veteran and a pensioner, who died with in a year.
Whether these men died natural deaths or were murdered is not known. Her next venture was Hiram Parkinson who deserted her with in a year. She then married, Parkinson being stll alive, George Smith, a veteran and a comrade of her second spouse Brewer. In a few months she tried to kill Smith by giving him a cup of poisoned tea. Faillng in her design she fled to Bellows Falls, Vermont, taking
with her every portable article in the house
She fell in with and married Charles Playsel, the only one of all her husbands who could be called young. They lived together about two weeks. She was next heard of in Philadelphia in the winter of 1888. She called on the McQullans who then kept a saloon at No. 1218 North Front street and wanted to stay there on the plea of old family friendship, the McNallys and the McQullans having been neighbors in Ireland. She started a little shop in that city, which after having insured it on the ten cents a week installment plan she burned, together with the houses of her two neighbors. For this crime she served two years in the Eastern penitentiary In Philadelphia. Her next appearance was in Newburg, N. Y., where she met and married Paul Halliday, a farmer living at Burlingham, Sullivan county, about twenty miles from Newburg. Their married life does not seem to have been pleasant. She soon eloped with a neighbor, stealing a team of horses in order to accelerate their flight. In Newburgh her companion deserted her and she was arrested. Her counsel entered a plea of insanity and she was sent to an asylum, from which place she soon induced her husband, "dear old Paul," as she has called him since, to secure her release.
Shortly after her return from the asylum the Halliday house was burned and an idiotic son of Halliday's perished. Mrs. Halliday is supposed to have caused the fire. In August, 1893, Paul Halliday disappeared; the woman said he had gone away, but the neighbors one day when she was from home made a search of the premises. They did not then find Halliday, but in the barn covered up with hay were the bodies of two women, which were afterwards found to be those of Margaret and Sarah McQuillan, the wife and daughter of Thomas McQuillan of Newburgh, that very McQuillan family upon whom she had called when they lived in Philadelphia. After the discovery of these bodies Mrs. Halliday suddenly developed evidences of insanity. A few days afterwards the body of Paul Halliday was discovered buried under the floor of the house.
Mrs. Halliday was placed in the county jail here and since her incarceration has been a source of constant annoyance to her keepers though they have treated her with every imaginable degree of kindness. For a long time after her arrival she refused to eat and it became necessary for the jail physician to force liquid food through her nostrils. In November she tried to strangle the sheriff's wife. A few days later she set fire to her bedclothes. In December she tried to hang herself with the binding torn from the bottom of her dress. On December 15 she came near finishing herself by gashing her throat and arms in a terrible manner with glass broken from her cell window. For the last three months it has been necessary to keep her chained to the floor.
REPUBLICAN WATCHMAN
MONTICELLO, NEW YORK, JULY 5, 1918 [Friday]
VOLUME 92, NO. 29, WHOLE NO. 4711
Mrs. Lizzie Holiday, the Sullivan
County murderess, died In the Mattewan
State Hospital for insane on
Thursday night of last week, where
she had been confined for a quarter
of a century among the worst type of
the criminal insane.
The death of Mrs. Halliday.......
----------------
Frederick News
Maryland, U.S.A.
11 September 1893
A MURDEROUS MANIAC
The Many Crimes Charged Against Lizzie Halliday
A MANIA LIKE JACK THE RIPPER
Middletown, N.Y., Sept. 11.
The solution of the mystery surrounding Lizzie Halliday's awful crimes will be found in the history of her previous life and her relations with her husband.
Young Paul and Robert Halliday have told their stories, and when all this news and old information is put together there is produced a story of very unusual, but not unprecedented criminality.
Lizzie Halliday, herself a type of low humanity, was merely an ignorant, mean, cunning and revengeful woman, with the belief that she possessed the power to deceive everybody she chose. This appears to have been her character under ordinary circumstances, but at certain periods she appears to have become possessed of a mania. On each occasion when she was in this wild mental condition she was expecting to become a mother.
She never did, however, so far as is known, give birth to a living child. This mania, which is not without numerous precedents, assumed in Lizzie Halliday's case a phase almost unbelievably shocking.
In fact, there is excellent reason to assume that her case and that of the mysterious London assassin, known as jack the Ripper, are very similar.
In both the mania appears to have developed crimes of a similar nature, the difference being chiefly that in one it developed in a man and in this last case in a woman.
Lizzie Halliday has killed two men in her life, both of them husbands, and she mutilated both. It has just come out, through the stories told by Paul Halliday's two sons, that the woman confessed to old Paul soon after her marriage to him that she had been married before, and had killed and then hacked her husband.
Old Paul professed not to believe this story, and undoubtedly did not. But it now appears that she treated his body after she had killed him as she had that of her first husband.
Her two subsequent crimes, the killing of the McQuillan women, must have been committed in a pure thirst for blood, induced by her mania and probably whetted by her fearful crime a few days before.
She did not mutilate the bodies of the women, which shows that it must have been merely a thirst for blood which prompted her to the deed.
In a protracted interview with Robert Halliday, the eldest son of the murdered man, he made the following statement: "This woman came from the same county in Ireland as my father. He told me this himself. He first met her in an intelligence office in Newburg, where he secured her services as a housekeeper. Some time after he married her. None of the family liked the woman. Her appearance was against her. She did not conduct herself as a wife should. My father, however, was infatuated with her. She held a peculiar influence over him which nothing could shake. Soon after his marriage to the woman, who gave her name as Lizzie Brown, there began the peculiar succession of crimes which finally led to her being committed to the insane asylum.
"First there was the burning of the house. Then the burning of the barn, and finally the burning of the old mill where my father, his wife and my brother, John, lived, in which fire my brother lost his life.
"Following this at a stated period came her theft of the team of a Newburg liveryman. She hired a horse and buggy in Newburg on the statement that she was a poor Irish servant who wanted to visit her sick mother. The man let her have a horse and buggy. She drove out of town, got an old man to go with her as she did not know the country and within twenty four hours had sold the rig and horse to some gypsies.
"She was arrested, tried and found not guilty on the ground of insanity.
"Two fires in my father's place occurred in quick succession. After a longer period came the conflagration in which my young brother perished. For this crime she was arrested, but on the ground of insanity was remanded to the insane asylum at Middletown. She remained there awhile, was then sent to another asylum, and finally was released as cured at my father's request.
"My father told me subsequently to these affairs that his wife, at the time of their commission, was in a condition peculiar to women. That when in that condition she was subject to spells of insanity. With the disappearance of the physical condition there was a disappearance of the criminal tendencies. I begged my father to leave the woman, but he would not listen to me."
After a great deal of deliberation the coroner's jury arrived at this verdict: "We do say upon our oath that Margaret J. McQuillan and Sarah J. McQuillan came to their deaths from bullets fired from a pistol in the hands of Lizzie Halliday. That said Margaret was killed on or about Aug. 30 and Sarah J Mcquillan on or about Sept 2."
The inquest on the body of Paul Halliday was resumed at 9 o'clock this morning, but nothing new, it is believed, will be elicited. After that the case will sink out of sight until Mrs. Halliday is called to answer at court some time next month.
More articles can be found at:
http://www.casebook.org/press_reports/frederick_news/18930911.html
-----------
The Morning Star
Glen Falls, N.Y.
Vol. XIX. No. 472
Tuesday, June 19, 1894
WEIRD LIFE OF CRIME
Mrs. Halliday's Many Marriages and Murders.
ls It a Case of Insanity or Murderous Perversity?
— Peculiar Fortune In Escaping Punishment
— Attempts at Suicide While In Jail.
MONTICELLO, N. Y., June 18.
—The trial of Mrs. Lizzie Halliday, the Burlingham, Sullivan county, murderess, was begun here before a special term of the court of oyer and termines. Judge Edwards presiding The peculiarity of her case has tended to draw a large number of people from other places to witness the trial. The actions of her counsel, George H.Carpenter, of Liberty, evince a design to rest the case on the plea of Insanity. The district attorney, however, believes that he has evidence which will controvert any such plea and prove this a case of murderous perversity. She is very taciturn, refusing absolutely to say anything to any one. The prisoner is very pale from her long confinement, but the jail physician says she is in good physical condition. All about the floor of the cell were strewn story books and magazines, in which she has seemed to take special delight when alone.
Mrs. Halliday's maiden name was Eliza Margaret McNally. She was born in the county Antrim, Ireland, thirty years ago and came to this country with her parents in 1867. But little is known concerning her early girlhood. Fifteen years ago she married Charles Hopkins, otherwise known as Ketspool Brown, by whom she had her only child, a boy who is now in a Pennsylvania Institution. Upon the death of Hopkins about two years after their marriage she married Artemas Brewer, a veteran and a pensioner, who died with in a year.
Whether these men died natural deaths or were murdered is not known. Her next venture was Hiram Parkinson who deserted her with in a year. She then married, Parkinson being stll alive, George Smith, a veteran and a comrade of her second spouse Brewer. In a few months she tried to kill Smith by giving him a cup of poisoned tea. Faillng in her design she fled to Bellows Falls, Vermont, taking
with her every portable article in the house
She fell in with and married Charles Playsel, the only one of all her husbands who could be called young. They lived together about two weeks. She was next heard of in Philadelphia in the winter of 1888. She called on the McQullans who then kept a saloon at No. 1218 North Front street and wanted to stay there on the plea of old family friendship, the McNallys and the McQullans having been neighbors in Ireland. She started a little shop in that city, which after having insured it on the ten cents a week installment plan she burned, together with the houses of her two neighbors. For this crime she served two years in the Eastern penitentiary In Philadelphia. Her next appearance was in Newburg, N. Y., where she met and married Paul Halliday, a farmer living at Burlingham, Sullivan county, about twenty miles from Newburg. Their married life does not seem to have been pleasant. She soon eloped with a neighbor, stealing a team of horses in order to accelerate their flight. In Newburgh her companion deserted her and she was arrested. Her counsel entered a plea of insanity and she was sent to an asylum, from which place she soon induced her husband, "dear old Paul," as she has called him since, to secure her release.
Shortly after her return from the asylum the Halliday house was burned and an idiotic son of Halliday's perished. Mrs. Halliday is supposed to have caused the fire. In August, 1893, Paul Halliday disappeared; the woman said he had gone away, but the neighbors one day when she was from home made a search of the premises. They did not then find Halliday, but in the barn covered up with hay were the bodies of two women, which were afterwards found to be those of Margaret and Sarah McQuillan, the wife and daughter of Thomas McQuillan of Newburgh, that very McQuillan family upon whom she had called when they lived in Philadelphia. After the discovery of these bodies Mrs. Halliday suddenly developed evidences of insanity. A few days afterwards the body of Paul Halliday was discovered buried under the floor of the house.
Mrs. Halliday was placed in the county jail here and since her incarceration has been a source of constant annoyance to her keepers though they have treated her with every imaginable degree of kindness. For a long time after her arrival she refused to eat and it became necessary for the jail physician to force liquid food through her nostrils. In November she tried to strangle the sheriff's wife. A few days later she set fire to her bedclothes. In December she tried to hang herself with the binding torn from the bottom of her dress. On December 15 she came near finishing herself by gashing her throat and arms in a terrible manner with glass broken from her cell window. For the last three months it has been necessary to keep her chained to the floor.
MONTICELLO, NEW YORK, JULY 5, 1918 [Friday]
VOLUME 92, NO. 29, WHOLE NO. 4711
Mrs. Lizzie Holiday, the Sullivan
County murderess, died In the Mattewan
State Hospital for insane on
Thursday night of last week, where
she had been confined for a quarter
of a century among the worst type of
the criminal insane.
The death of Mrs. Halliday.......
----------------
Frederick News
Maryland, U.S.A.
11 September 1893
A MURDEROUS MANIAC
The Many Crimes Charged Against Lizzie Halliday
A MANIA LIKE JACK THE RIPPER
Middletown, N.Y., Sept. 11.
The solution of the mystery surrounding Lizzie Halliday's awful crimes will be found in the history of her previous life and her relations with her husband.
Young Paul and Robert Halliday have told their stories, and when all this news and old information is put together there is produced a story of very unusual, but not unprecedented criminality.
Lizzie Halliday, herself a type of low humanity, was merely an ignorant, mean, cunning and revengeful woman, with the belief that she possessed the power to deceive everybody she chose. This appears to have been her character under ordinary circumstances, but at certain periods she appears to have become possessed of a mania. On each occasion when she was in this wild mental condition she was expecting to become a mother.
She never did, however, so far as is known, give birth to a living child. This mania, which is not without numerous precedents, assumed in Lizzie Halliday's case a phase almost unbelievably shocking.
In fact, there is excellent reason to assume that her case and that of the mysterious London assassin, known as jack the Ripper, are very similar.
In both the mania appears to have developed crimes of a similar nature, the difference being chiefly that in one it developed in a man and in this last case in a woman.
Lizzie Halliday has killed two men in her life, both of them husbands, and she mutilated both. It has just come out, through the stories told by Paul Halliday's two sons, that the woman confessed to old Paul soon after her marriage to him that she had been married before, and had killed and then hacked her husband.
Old Paul professed not to believe this story, and undoubtedly did not. But it now appears that she treated his body after she had killed him as she had that of her first husband.
Her two subsequent crimes, the killing of the McQuillan women, must have been committed in a pure thirst for blood, induced by her mania and probably whetted by her fearful crime a few days before.
She did not mutilate the bodies of the women, which shows that it must have been merely a thirst for blood which prompted her to the deed.
In a protracted interview with Robert Halliday, the eldest son of the murdered man, he made the following statement: "This woman came from the same county in Ireland as my father. He told me this himself. He first met her in an intelligence office in Newburg, where he secured her services as a housekeeper. Some time after he married her. None of the family liked the woman. Her appearance was against her. She did not conduct herself as a wife should. My father, however, was infatuated with her. She held a peculiar influence over him which nothing could shake. Soon after his marriage to the woman, who gave her name as Lizzie Brown, there began the peculiar succession of crimes which finally led to her being committed to the insane asylum.
"First there was the burning of the house. Then the burning of the barn, and finally the burning of the old mill where my father, his wife and my brother, John, lived, in which fire my brother lost his life.
"Following this at a stated period came her theft of the team of a Newburg liveryman. She hired a horse and buggy in Newburg on the statement that she was a poor Irish servant who wanted to visit her sick mother. The man let her have a horse and buggy. She drove out of town, got an old man to go with her as she did not know the country and within twenty four hours had sold the rig and horse to some gypsies.
"She was arrested, tried and found not guilty on the ground of insanity.
"Two fires in my father's place occurred in quick succession. After a longer period came the conflagration in which my young brother perished. For this crime she was arrested, but on the ground of insanity was remanded to the insane asylum at Middletown. She remained there awhile, was then sent to another asylum, and finally was released as cured at my father's request.
"My father told me subsequently to these affairs that his wife, at the time of their commission, was in a condition peculiar to women. That when in that condition she was subject to spells of insanity. With the disappearance of the physical condition there was a disappearance of the criminal tendencies. I begged my father to leave the woman, but he would not listen to me."
After a great deal of deliberation the coroner's jury arrived at this verdict: "We do say upon our oath that Margaret J. McQuillan and Sarah J. McQuillan came to their deaths from bullets fired from a pistol in the hands of Lizzie Halliday. That said Margaret was killed on or about Aug. 30 and Sarah J Mcquillan on or about Sept 2."
The inquest on the body of Paul Halliday was resumed at 9 o'clock this morning, but nothing new, it is believed, will be elicited. After that the case will sink out of sight until Mrs. Halliday is called to answer at court some time next month.
More articles can be found at:
http://www.casebook.org/press_reports/frederick_news/18930911.html
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The Morning Star
Glen Falls, N.Y.
Vol. XIX. No. 472
Tuesday, June 19, 1894
WEIRD LIFE OF CRIME
Mrs. Halliday's Many Marriages and Murders.
ls It a Case of Insanity or Murderous Perversity?
— Peculiar Fortune In Escaping Punishment
— Attempts at Suicide While In Jail.
MONTICELLO, N. Y., June 18.
—The trial of Mrs. Lizzie Halliday, the Burlingham, Sullivan county, murderess, was begun here before a special term of the court of oyer and termines. Judge Edwards presiding The peculiarity of her case has tended to draw a large number of people from other places to witness the trial. The actions of her counsel, George H.Carpenter, of Liberty, evince a design to rest the case on the plea of Insanity. The district attorney, however, believes that he has evidence which will controvert any such plea and prove this a case of murderous perversity. She is very taciturn, refusing absolutely to say anything to any one. The prisoner is very pale from her long confinement, but the jail physician says she is in good physical condition. All about the floor of the cell were strewn story books and magazines, in which she has seemed to take special delight when alone.
Mrs. Halliday's maiden name was Eliza Margaret McNally. She was born in the county Antrim, Ireland, thirty years ago and came to this country with her parents in 1867. But little is known concerning her early girlhood. Fifteen years ago she married Charles Hopkins, otherwise known as Ketspool Brown, by whom she had her only child, a boy who is now in a Pennsylvania Institution. Upon the death of Hopkins about two years after their marriage she married Artemas Brewer, a veteran and a pensioner, who died with in a year.
Whether these men died natural deaths or were murdered is not known. Her next venture was Hiram Parkinson who deserted her with in a year. She then married, Parkinson being stll alive, George Smith, a veteran and a comrade of her second spouse Brewer. In a few months she tried to kill Smith by giving him a cup of poisoned tea. Faillng in her design she fled to Bellows Falls, Vermont, taking
with her every portable article in the house
She fell in with and married Charles Playsel, the only one of all her husbands who could be called young. They lived together about two weeks. She was next heard of in Philadelphia in the winter of 1888. She called on the McQullans who then kept a saloon at No. 1218 North Front street and wanted to stay there on the plea of old family friendship, the McNallys and the McQullans having been neighbors in Ireland. She started a little shop in that city, which after having insured it on the ten cents a week installment plan she burned, together with the houses of her two neighbors. For this crime she served two years in the Eastern penitentiary In Philadelphia. Her next appearance was in Newburg, N. Y., where she met and married Paul Halliday, a farmer living at Burlingham, Sullivan county, about twenty miles from Newburg. Their married life does not seem to have been pleasant. She soon eloped with a neighbor, stealing a team of horses in order to accelerate their flight. In Newburgh her companion deserted her and she was arrested. Her counsel entered a plea of insanity and she was sent to an asylum, from which place she soon induced her husband, "dear old Paul," as she has called him since, to secure her release.
Shortly after her return from the asylum the Halliday house was burned and an idiotic son of Halliday's perished. Mrs. Halliday is supposed to have caused the fire. In August, 1893, Paul Halliday disappeared; the woman said he had gone away, but the neighbors one day when she was from home made a search of the premises. They did not then find Halliday, but in the barn covered up with hay were the bodies of two women, which were afterwards found to be those of Margaret and Sarah McQuillan, the wife and daughter of Thomas McQuillan of Newburgh, that very McQuillan family upon whom she had called when they lived in Philadelphia. After the discovery of these bodies Mrs. Halliday suddenly developed evidences of insanity. A few days afterwards the body of Paul Halliday was discovered buried under the floor of the house.
Mrs. Halliday was placed in the county jail here and since her incarceration has been a source of constant annoyance to her keepers though they have treated her with every imaginable degree of kindness. For a long time after her arrival she refused to eat and it became necessary for the jail physician to force liquid food through her nostrils. In November she tried to strangle the sheriff's wife. A few days later she set fire to her bedclothes. In December she tried to hang herself with the binding torn from the bottom of her dress. On December 15 she came near finishing herself by gashing her throat and arms in a terrible manner with glass broken from her cell window. For the last three months it has been necessary to keep her chained to the floor.
Inscription
The hospital's cemetery, which includes the remains of nearly 1,000 patients that died there, is just south of the new Beacon High School on Matteawan Road.
"There are no names on the headstones there, just numbers are listed," Murphy said. "Every now and then people call the Historical Society to locate a decedent that died at Matteawan. One person from Iowa found their great-grandfather through a corresponding name-number cemetery list stored in Albany."
July 30, 2011
http://ozzyalbra.blogspot.com/2011/07/matteawan-state-hospital-for-criminally.html
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