The chilling story of Lizzie Halliday: New York’s first female serial killer, considered “the worst woman in the world”

Lizzie Halliday born in 1859 in the United StatesOf Irish origin, this young woman is the responsible for the death of four people in Upstate New York and the latest protagonist of ‘NY Killers’, Mamen Sala’s section for ‘Fourth Millennium’.

In 1889 she becomes Paul Halliday’s housekeepera sixty-year-old widowed farmer who lived in Burlingham with his children. The Hallidays’ marriage was marred by what Paul described it as “sporadic moments of madness” Lizzie’s. In May 1891, just three years after coming into the family, the mill on the Halliday farm burned to the ground, killing the son de Halliday, John, a boy with whom Lizzie did not get along at all.

Paul Halliday disappeared in August of that year. Lizzie claimed that Paul had gone to a nearby village to do some bricklaying work. As neighbours suspected that something was not right with Lizzie’s story, a search was carried out at the house where Halliday had disappeared on 4 September. The bodies of two women were found buried in the hay in the barn.

The women were later identified as Margaret y Sarah McQuillanNew York residents, the mother and daughter of the family with whom Lizzie had lived during her time in Philadelphia. When questioned, Lizzie behaved erratically, Tearing his clothes and speaking incoherentlyShe was eventually arrested and found to be simply pretending to be insane.

A few days after the McQuillans were found, Paul Halliday’s body was discovered under the floorboards of his family home. Paul was also dead, as were the two Philadelphia women, due to a gunshot wound to the head. Lizzie was then charged with the murders and booked into the Sullivan County Jail in Monticello. There she refused to eat, attacked the sheriff’s wife, set fire to her own bed and He tried to commit suicide by hanging and cutting himself the throat with a broken glass.

Lizzie became the first woman in history to be sentenced to death by electric chaira sentence she was spared when Governor Roswell P. Flower commuted her sentence to life in a mental institution after declaring her insane. In 1906, Lizzie murdered a nurse, Nellie Wickes, by stabbing her more than 200 times with a pair of scissors. Halliday eventually died of kidney disease on June 28, 1918. The New York Times called her “the worst woman in the world.”