6 Nov 1893 - The Philadelphia Times (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
INCLUDE ARSON COMMITTED IN PHILADELPHIA FIVE YEARS AGO
AN INCIDENT OF THE BLIZZARDWhile the Great Storm of March, 1888, Was Ranging Her LIttle Shop on Kensington Ave Burned for the Insurance and She Served a Term of Imprisonment in the Penitentiary.
Mrs. Lizzie Halliday, now in jail at Monticello, N.Y., for the triple murder of her husband and Mrs. and Miss McQuillan in the Shawansgunk Mountains last September, a crime that attracted universal attention throughout the country on account of its cold-blooded atrociousness, has revealed some details of her past life to a New York World reporter, which show her to have had a Philadelphia career, and to be not unknown in the criminal annals of this city.
Mrs. Halliday was originally known as Maggie McNally, and came to this country with her parents from England when a child. She was to live in Newburgh, N.Y., with the family of Tom McQuillan, the husband and father of her recent victims, somewhere about 1880, being then about 15 years old.
The following year she married in Greenwich, Washington county, NY, a man named Hopkins, much older than herself, by whom she had one child, now supposed to be in Philadelphia.
She left her fifth husband to come to Philadelphia in the winter of 1888, paying a visit to the son of her former employer, Tom McQuillan. John McQuillan, the son in question, was visited by Lizzie or, as she was then known, Maggie - Hopkins, who wished to live with his family, an arrangement that was objected to by Mrs. McQuillan, who said their guest’s hands were too soft for those of a working woman, and sent her away the next day. Maggie or Lizzie was accompanied by her young son, and she rented a little house at 2840 Kensington avenue, bought $37.50 worth of furniture upon the installment plan, which she insured in the Queen Insurance Company for $600, the premium to be paid at a weekly rate of ten cents.
She put a few loaves of bread in the window, added a barrel or two of cabbages and potatoes to her stock and made anxious inquiries among the neighbors about the movements of the policemen on that beat, being particularly anxious to learn how often they passed her place during the early morning.
At 5 o’clock in the morning of March 14, when the great blizzard of 1888 was raging in all its fury the firemen were called to Margaret Hopkins’ house and discovered a bucket filled with cloth and paper saturated with coal oil in her room, and also found that every bit of furniture had been moved from the house the night before.
The two adjoining houses were burned to the ground, their occupants barely escaping with their lives and loosing all their belongings.
Two days later Mrs. Hopkins and her boy, both thinly clad, were found wandering in the streets of Camden and taken to the Homoepathic Hospital, where the doctors found her suffering from peritonitis. She told them she had been driven from her boarding house in Manayunk, and had had a severe fall two weeks before.
When Detectives Geyer and Downey crossed the Delaware to arrest her for arson Mrs. Hopkins pretended to violently insane, but the doctors said she was shamming. She was given a hearing before a Police Magistrate and brought up for trial before Judge Hare, in the Court of Quarter Sessions, on April 12. The evidence of arson was overwhelming, and no defense was offered except that the woman shammed insanity in court and begged to be allowed to see her little boy, who had been given to charge of the Society to Protect Children from Cruelty and placed in a home. Mrs. Hopkins was found guilty by the jury, and on May 4 was sentenced to two years in the Eastern Penitentiary, which she served, and soon after being released appeared in Newburgh.
After Mrs. Hopkins’ first preliminary hearing an old man, with a long, gray beard, who had been seen peddling writing paper about Kensington, inquired of the Fitzpatricks, who lived next door to Mrs. Hopkins in that section of the city, what they had done with his widow.
Then he told Mrs. Fitzpatrick that he had been in the habit of stopping with Mrs. Hopkins and that his valise was there the night before the fire. Mrs. Hopkins had urged him to stay there that night, but the old man said he felt fearful and went to his own room on Frankford road. He congratulated himself upon his narrow escape and added significantly: “When I heard of the fire I thought that was my widow’s house.” The old man was never seen in that neighbohood again.
Mrs. Halliday says that after being released from the penitentiary she went to work for a Mrs. Brown, who was to give her board and clothing and make a report of her conduct every month. She ran away from this place to New York, and by pawning some clothes managed to get enough money to go to Newburgh, where she obtained a situation with Paul Halliday through an intelligence office, marrying him six weeks later. As the result of her first five matrimonial ventures she accumulated about $600, with some of which she started her store in Kensington.
John McQuillan was seen at his home over his saloon, at Fourth and Canal streets, last evening. In addition to the above facts he stated that the Halliday woman, after stopping over night at this home, went to the home of Alexnader Miller, a carpet-weaver, in Kensington, to whom she claimed relationship. Inquiries in Kensington developed the fact that Miller had moved to Franklinville and has been during the summer at the World’s Fair with the exhibit of a carpet factory. He could not be located in Franklinville.