Lizzie Halliday

Serial Killer

Lizzie Halliday: The Murderer Once Called the "Worst Woman on Earth"

Early Life and a Troubled History

Lizzie Halliday was an Irish-American murderer whose crimes made her one of the most notorious women in the United States during the late nineteenth century. Born Eliza Margaret McNally in County Antrim, Ireland, around 1859, she came to the United States as a child. She later used several names, including Lizzie Brown and Maggie Hopkins. Newspaper accounts of her life were often sensational and sometimes contradictory, which makes separating established facts from rumor difficult. Halliday married several times. Two of her early husbands died relatively soon after their marriages, and another husband, George Smith, reportedly survived an attempt by Halliday to poison his tea with arsenic. These earlier deaths caused considerable suspicion after Halliday became famous as a murderer, but investigators never proved that she had killed those husbands. She was also involved in theft and arson and served time at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia after being convicted of burning property for insurance money.

Marriage to Paul Halliday

By 1889, Halliday was living in Sullivan County, New York, where she became the housekeeper of Paul Halliday, an elderly farmer and Civil War veteran. She eventually married him. Their home was near Burlingham, in the town of Mamakating, an isolated rural area where farms, barns and wooded countryside gave Halliday considerable privacy. The marriage was turbulent. Fires destroyed Halliday property, and Lizzie was repeatedly suspected of setting them. During one fire, Paul's son John Halliday died. Lizzie was suspected of having deliberately caused the fire, particularly because accounts stated that John's room had been locked and that she possessed the key. The evidence was never sufficient to establish his death as a proven murder, however, and historical accounts disagree about important details, including the precise year of the fire. For that reason, John Halliday is generally treated as a suspected rather than conclusively established victim. ...

Confirmed Victims: (6)

Charles Hopkins , Date of Death: 1881

Lizzie Halliday - Wikipedia