Eliza Margaret McNally, later known as Lizzie Halliday, was born around 1859 in County Antrim, Ireland, and emigrated to the United States as a young child, accounts vary, placing her at either three or eight years old at the time . Little is known about her early upbringing, but as she came of age, her life became defined by a series of turbulent relationships and whispered suspicions of foul play.

Her first marriage in 1879 to a man called Charles Hopkins—real name Ketspool Brown—ended in tragedy when her husband died within two years. The couple had one son, who was later institutionalized. Not long after, she married an elderly pensioner named Artemus Brewer. His death, too, followed soon after their union—less than a year later. A third marriage to Hiram Parkinson was equally short-lived, with Parkinson abandoning her within the first year.

Her fourth husband, George Smith who was a war veteran and had served with Brewer—survived her initial intent on murder: she reportedly tried to poison him by lacing his tea with arsenic. The attempt failed, and she fled with belongings from their home, eventually resurfacing in Bellows Falls, Vermont.

In Vermont, she married yet again Charles Playstel but curiously vanished only two weeks into the marriaage. Her trail then led her to Philadelphia in the winter of 1888, where she showed up at a saloon on North Front Street run by the McQuillan family, former acquaintances from Ireland. Under the alias "Maggie Hopkins," she opened a shop but soon burned it down to collect insurance money, earning a two‑year sentence at Eastern State Penitentiary.

Upon her release, she adopted the name "Lizzie Brown" and took a job as housekeeper for Paul Halliday, a twice-widowed septuagenarian farmer living in Burlingham, New York, with his sons. The couple married shortly thereafter, but neighbors noted Lizzie's troubling "spells of insanity". In the years that followed, the Halliday house and barn burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances. She was also accused of stealing a team of horses and driven them to Newburgh, where she sold them but was acquitted on grounds of insanity, with dates of the incident varying between 1890 and 1893.

In the spring of 1891, tragedy struck at the Halliday homestead when a devastating fire engulfed the house, killing John Halliday, the intellectually disabled son of Paul and Lizzie Halliday. Suspicion quickly fell on Lizzie, especially because she was known to despise John. She claimed he had perished while trying to rescue her from the flames, but investigators discovered something chilling: John’s bedroom door was found locked in the ruins, and Lizzie had the key in her possession.

Not long after, the barn and mill were also consumed by fire. A few weeks later, Lizzie attempted to flee with another man, absconding with a team of horses. They helped her transport the animals to Newburgh, New York, where she sold them, but was caught, deemed criminally insane, and institutionalized. She was later transferred between asylums, declared cured, and returned to Paul Halliday’s home.

By August 1891, Paul Halliday had vanished. When pressed by neighbors, Lizzie claimed he’d gone to a nearby town to do masonry work.  A search warrant followed, and on September 4 the grim discovery was made: the bodies of two women, Margaret and Sarah McQuillan were buried in hay within the barn, both shot dead. These women were identified as members of the McQuillan family, whom Lizzie had stayed with while in Philadelphia.

As if that wasn’t enough, days later Paul Halliday’s own mutilated corpse was found beneath the floorboards of his house, also shot to death. Lizzie was arrested and held in Sullivan County Jail in Monticello, New York, pending trial.

But prison wasn’t peaceful. In her initial months behind bars, Lizzie refused to eat, violently attacked the sheriff’s wife, set her own bed ablaze, attempted to hang herself, and slashed her throat with broken glass, chillingly insisting, “I thought I would cut myself to see if I would bleed”. Her outbursts grew so extreme that jailers had to chain her to the floor for the remainder of her incarceration before trial.

Lizzie’s case exploded in the national press. Tabloid frenzy called her crimes “unprecedented and almost without parallel in the annals of crime,” as The New York World put it. Journalist Nellie Bly even secured jailhouse interviews, confirming many of Lizzie’s past marriages and unraveling layers of deception. Journalists pounced on rumors and sensational claims, one sheriff publicly speculated she might even be connected to the Jack the Ripper murders, though no credible evidence ever surfaced.

Amid mounting scandal and grief, some tabloid narratives even suggested Lizzie was responsible for the mysterious deaths of her previous husbands—at least six fatalities in total. As The New York Times observed in June 1894, “Whether these men died natural deaths or were murdered is not known.” Lizzie also reportedly confessed, to Paul’s son Robert, that she had once killed a husband in Belfast and successfully covered it up.

Lizzie’s trial on June 21, 1894, ended in conviction for the murders of Margaret and Sarah McQuillan and sentenced to death by electric chair. Yet, a medical panel declared her insane, and Governor Roswell P. Flower commuted her sentence to life in a mental institution. She was committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.