23 Jun 1894 - The Daily Sentinel Tribune (Bowling Green, Ohio)
The Most Inhuman Woman Fiend of the Century - Murder Seems to Have Been Her Diversion - Some of Her Deeds
The Trial of Lizzie Halliday for murder, which is now in progress in the pretty village of Monticello, N.Y., is attracting the attention of the whole country thereabout, such as no other trial has done before it. For almost a year she has languished in the jail there awaiting trial for three murders - those of her husband, Paul Halliday, and of Mrs. Margaret McQuillan and Sarah J., her daughter - between the 30th of last August and 2d of last September. The accompanying portrait shows a far more human looking thing than that which the dwellers in Walker valley wanted to hang last year when they found her dead husband’s body under his own cabin floor, after having found those of the McQuillans in the barn. The shock of coarse hair has grown long enough to be gathered in a neat wavy knot. The faded and dirty calico wrapper has been replaced by a quite coquettish blouse and tie.
But however she has improved in appearance, Lizzie Halliday has turned since she has been in jail an even more abnormal monstrosity than the country people who got the rope out at Bennett’s hotel to hang her thought she was. She has made disclosures since she was shut up here that make one pause to wonder whether this is the nineteenth century or the sixteenth, New York state or the Scotch border about the time of the Regent Murray. Bigamy has been her pastime, murder her diversion, arson the serious business of her life for ten years. She is only 28. Yet, until her arrest for these crimes, she has never been punished for any offense save by a short two year term in the Eastern penitentiary at Philadelphia. Then she had burned up, not only her own little house on Kensington avenue, but those of the two neighbors on either side at midnight during the blizzard of March, 1888.
Aside from the light that they have thrown on her own character, her disclosures are mainly interesting in the suggestion that the summer boarders of Orange and Sullivan counties have been living for years in the neighborhood of a nest of murderous banditti, who could do business in Sicily in free competition with the Mala Vita. One of her statements, which seemed at the time mere raving, was that she had not murdered the McQuillans and her husband, but had seen them murdered by a band of brigands who made a practice of doing away with people, generally peddlers with packs and desolate women with stolen money or jewelry in their possession. The bodies, she said, were thrown into the “old lead mines” The “old lead mines” are some disused working about ten miles from Paul Halliday’s house. A very brief inquiry showed that no longer ago than the summer of 1890 Samuel Hutch, a peddler, was found murdered in that very place. The suggesion, of course, arises that Lizzie Halliday had heard of this murder, and the same kind of low cunning that led her to “play crazy” last fall, inspired the thought of putting her own murders upon the unknown assassins of Hutch. But the reference is not at all a strained one that she may have become, upon marrying Paul Halliday, a decoy for a band who did all the murders. On them, too, if there are nay such, she puts the murder of John Halliday, her worthless stepson, who was burned to death in the incendiary fire which destroyed the original Halliday house in May, 1891. It was murder as well as arson, for she or they knew that the imbecile and crippled man was in the house when it was fired and permissively, if not actively, kept him there.
Five husbands may certainly be credited to Mrs. Lizzie Halliday, and a companion who was probably the sixth. With one or possibly two exceptions, these were all men of the Paul Halliday type - old men whose senile fancies were captivated by the attribute which he who runs may read in the nose and mouth and chin shown in this photograph. She only murdered one as far as known - Paul Halliday. Her first, “Ketspool” Brown, otherwise known as Hopkins, whom she married ten years ago, died a natural death in Vermont soon after she married him and had her only child. Poor old Artemas Brewer, a broken down veteran of Greenwich village, Washington county, whence her first husband had also come, was her second, and he died in a year, glad to escape from her beatings and hair pullings. His old army comrade, George Smith, saw him die and knew what a life he had led, and still he married the widow. She gave him a cup of poisoned tea a few months afterward and laughingly left him writhing on the floor. When the doctors brought him around he was glad to know that she had fled with another old man, one Hiram Parkinson. It is not known that she married Parkinson at all. A little while afterward she did marry Charles Playstel in Bellows Falls, Vt., the only man on her list who could be called young. It will be seen that this she Henry VIII, went to the alter, or rather, to a justice of the peace. This may have been due to her County Antrim antecedents. Her people, the McNallys, came from Ireland to Newburg in 1867. Or it may have been a discreet regard for the stern self protective moral sense of rural communities. Couples who have “forgotten to go to church” are in the country liable to midnight visitations of buckets of tar and bundles of feathers.
It is interesting to know that when she decoyed the McQuillans, mother and daughter, from New burg over to their deaths in Walker valley, she knew that she was dealing with old friends of her family. The McQuillans and McNallys were neighbors, both in the old country and ht enew. When she turned up in Philadelphia in the winter of 1888 she first went to John McQuillan’s saloon and home at 1218 North Front street, and wanted to stay there on the old family friendship plea. She had her boy, Charlie Hopkins, with her then, and money enough to come in a cab and then hire a little shop at 2840 Kensington avenue, which she insured on the “10 cent a week” installment premium plan, and then set fire to it.