2 Jul 1918 - The Barre Daily Times (Barre, Vermont)
Mrs. Lizzie Holiday Lived in Bellows Falls for Two Weeks.
Beacon, N.Y., July 2 - Lizzie Halliday, who a quarter of a century ago killed her husband, and imbecile stepson and two women friends near Burlingham, Sullivan county, and who during her long term of imprisonment at Matteawan state hospital murdered two women attendants, died recently in the state hospital here.
For more than 20 years Lizzie Halliday was the most dreaded of the inmates in the women’s hospital at Matteawan. Since 1906, when she killed Nellie Wickes, a young attendant, she had been closely guarded to prevent another display of her craftsmanship.
She was Elizabeth Margaret McNally, born in Ireland 57 years ago, and came to this country in 1867, where she married Charles Hopkins. Hopkins died suddenly and the only son of the couple eventually found his way into a Pennsylvania institute.
The woman married Artemas Brewster. He died within a year and his widow married Hiram Parkinson, from whom she separated. George Smith was her next husband. After trying to poison him she fled to Bellows Falls, Vt., where she was the wife of Charles Playstell for two weeks.
She burned a small store in Philadelphia for the insurance, and served two years in a penitentiary. Later in Newburg she married Paul Holiday, a septuagenarian with an imbecile son. Her first step was to set fire to the Holiday home, burning to death her newly acquired stepson.
In 1893 Holiday disappeared. A search of the cellar revealed the bodies of Margaret McQuillan and her daughter, Sarah. A day or two later Holiday’s body was found buried under the house. Governor Flower commuted Lizzie Holiday’s sentence of death after a commission of doctors had pronounced her insane.