Lady Killers Page 5

  We’ve got to hand it to her, though: Nannie was smart. She knew how to work her best angles. She was clever enough to realize that as a husband killer, she could hide behind this dopey, lovesick persona and possibly escape with her life. If she’d appeared in the press as a matricidal maniac, she would never have gotten the attention she did—the chuckles from cameramen, the jibes from police officers, the doctor who genuinely believed she’d make a great babysitter. (And Nannie adored that attention, Nannie who always felt so constricted by the men in her life, from her controlling father to puritanical Sam Doss.) She was like a reality TV star emphasizing only the most marketable aspects of her shady past. Slowly, her story turned into a twisted fairy tale: the fickle princess who couldn’t find what she wanted, the doomed suitors who couldn’t give her what she needed.

  In prison, Nannie retained her signature humor. In May 1957 she quipped, “When they get short in the kitchen I always offer to help out, but they never let me work there.” The press, still charmed by her, reported this widely. But after two years of being locked up, she told a journalist from the Daily Oklahoman that she’d lost the will to live. She wanted to be tried again in Kansas or North Carolina, where she had also been charged with murder. “Maybe they would give me the electric chair,” she said.

  Alas, life stretched on uneventfully for the murderess whom nobody took seriously. Seven years into her sentence, she faked another heart attack, which got her out of the prison, at least momentarily. (Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with her. Grandma, you rat!) Ten years into her sentence, on June 2—the same day she’d been sentenced to life in prison—Nannie Doss died of leukemia.

  Her notoriety was all used up by then. People had stopped paying attention years before. Headlines called her “Husband-Killer” and “Mate-Poisoner” and “Admitted Slayer” when they announced her death, because her name alone was no longer enough to remind the world why they should care.

  THE WORST WOMAN ON EARTH

  Lizzie Halliday

  At the tail end of the 1800s, a woman named Lizzie was serving time for arson in Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary. She had been a model prisoner for the first one and a half years of her sentence, but two months before her release date, she began acting strange, a bit unhinged. So she was transferred to an asylum, where the physicians confirmed her insanity and looked after her until it was time for her to walk free.

  Lizzie then made her way to the state of New York to hunt for work. In a little town called Newburgh, she met old Paul Halliday, who was looking for domestic help. He’d been married before and fathered six children, one of whom was mentally handicapped and still lived at home on the Halliday farm. Lizzie informed Halliday that she had just arrived from Ireland six weeks ago. They agreed on a salary of forty dollars a month.

  Before long, Halliday realized it would be cheaper to marry Lizzie and get her work for free than to pay for her services. Plus, there was something oddly charming about her—he didn’t mind the thought of having her as a wife. So he proposed, and the two began a relationship that Halliday’s children described as one of “peculiar influence.”

  See, Lizzie brought trouble in her wake like an avenging angel, but no matter how many horrors she inflicted on her husband, he never left her. During the spring of 1891, Halliday came home to find a heap of smoking ashes where his house once stood. Lizzie, who was standing by the ruins, nonchalantly informed him that his handicapped son had just been burned to a crisp. She claimed that the boy died trying to save her from the flames. This story, however, was belied by the fact that when they identified the son’s bedroom door in the rubble, it was clearly locked, and Lizzie herself was carrying the key.

  And yet Halliday stayed with her. Less than a month later, Lizzie burned down his barn and mill, declaring that he needed a new one anyway, and then ran off with another man, determined to become a horse thief. She was quickly apprehended and thrown back in jail, where she immediately began tearing out her hair and screaming at anyone who would listen. This pandemonium got her acquitted on grounds of insanity, and she was sent across the Hudson River to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

  Halliday scoffed at this development. Lizzie was “perfectly sane,” he insisted, and “hoped by her present actions to obtain immunity for her crimes.” But the doctors at the asylum disagreed with him. They kept her for a year and then released her into Halliday’s custody, saying that she was cured.

  The couple muscled through another year of marriage, and then Paul Halliday disappeared.

  Lizzie told the neighbors her husband was away on business, but some of them had noticed suspicious activity around the Halliday farm during the past couple of days—eerie sounds, figures creeping about at night. Besides, there was just something weird about Lizzie Halliday, and the neighbors didn’t particularly trust her. So one day, when Lizzie was out, they decided to search the Halliday farm. They wondered, nervously, if they’d find a body.

  They found two.

  Naturally Ugly

  In 1860, Lizzie Halliday was born Elizabeth Margaret McNally in County Antrim, Ireland, and came over to New York State with her parents and nine siblings when she was still a child. On American soil, she grew into a tempestuous adolescent. “She was inclined so much to quarreling that the family all disowned her for years,” said her brother John. “She could not stay in a place any time when working out on account of her violent temper.”

  She was a highly physical, unpredictable girl. At one point, she attacked her father; another time she sprang violently at her sister Jane. If she showed love, it was with equally mad conviction. When she returned home after a long absence to find that her father had passed away, she flung herself on his grave and began tearing away the earth with her bare hands.

  Lizzie was short but incredibly strong, and people always noticed her muscular limbs, as well as her lovely, translucent Irish skin. But her large nose and larger forehead drew mockery and even disgust from observers. One neighbor hissed that Lizzie had a “repulsive face, and the most peculiar nose I ever saw.” A landlord called her “naturally ugly.”

  She wasn’t educated, but she was cunning, and she was always on the hunt for money. Unfortunately, she left poor impressions on many of her employers: she wore unusual clothes, she was subject to mood swings, and, quite frankly, she scared them. Once she threw a knife at a young man who was teasing her; another time, she spat in the face of a little girl. When an employer tried to correct her baking methods, Lizzie went screaming to the nearest courthouse, claiming the employer had assaulted her. In fact, she was always popping up in court; she even tried to arrest two young boys who pointed their toy pistols at her. But when her mood lifted, she could be found attending a Methodist church or staring in fascination at a nearby religious revival.

  Between jobs, she got married, and between marriages, she took more jobs. At the age of fifteen, she married an old army deserter who went by the fake name Ketspool Brown. The two spent their relationship locked in fear; Lizzie told her family that Brown wanted to murder her, while Brown informed his doctor: “I am afraid of her; she has threatened my life.” They had a son, and childbirth sent Lizzie into a spiral of depression. She visited her sister and complained that she heard nonstop singing and saw lights flashing around the room. At one point, while she sat mending a dress, she cried, “What’s the use of living?” and tore up the garment.

  After three years of marriage, Ketspool Brown died of typhoid fever, and Lizzie worked her way steadily through three more husbands, all of whom were significantly older than her. None of the marriages were happy. She tried to kill one husband with a cup of poisoned tea, and tore up his featherbed in the streets for no apparent reason. Her fifth husband was young and handsome, unlike the rest, but things fell apart when he confessed to Lizzie that he had “pounded his first wife to death.” Terrified, she took her son and ran off to Philadelphia, where she opened a shop, insured it, and then burnt it down f
or the insurance money, destroying several neighboring houses in the process.

  After doing two years in the Eastern Penitentiary and, subsequently, the asylum, Lizzie was released, only to find that her son had disappeared. “My boy is now about twelve years old,” she told a reporter years later. “I’ve never been able to find him since.”

  Heart’s Blood

  A few miles from the Halliday farm, there lived a sweet, harmless family called the McQuillans: seventy-four-year-old Tom, his wife, Margaret, and their nineteen-year-old daughter, Sarah. It was the summer of 1893, and Sarah was on vacation and thoroughly enjoying it. On August 26, a woman showed up at their house in a wagon and introduced herself as Mrs. Smith, saying she was looking to hire a cleaning lady. Sarah would have normally taken the job, but she was preoccupied with her lounging, so Margaret volunteered. A neighbor thought Mrs. Smith seemed odd, and urged Margaret not to take the position. But Margaret brushed her off and drove away with Mrs. Smith, calling out, teasingly, “Goodbye, if I shouldn’t see you again!”

  A few days later, the so-called Mrs. Smith returned to the McQuillan house in a panic, saying Margaret had fallen from a ladder and desperately wanted to see her daughter. Tom McQuillan wanted to go himself, but Mrs. Smith was adamant: Margaret insisted on seeing Sarah. So the girl got in the wagon and the two drove away.

  When two days passed with no word from his wife or daughter, Tom McQuillan grew suspicious and set out to find Mrs. Smith’s house. He soon realized the woman had given him a fake address and a false name; no one knew who he was talking about when he inquired about the mysterious Mrs. Smith who needed her house cleaned.

  Meanwhile, one of Halliday’s sons was also starting to suspect foul play. His father had been absent for too long, now, and Lizzie’s excuses weren’t adding up. After keeping an eye on Lizzie for a few days to see if he could figure out what was going on, the son went to the police and procured a search warrant.

  When the local constable and his crew arrived to search the house, they found Lizzie preoccupied with cleaning blood from a carpet. Upon spotting the men in her doorway, she sprang up, outraged, and threatened to kill them if they tried to enter her home. The constable ignored her, and Lizzie snatched up a board and smacked him on the hand, screaming that she would “cut his heart’s blood out.”

  Undeterred, the men investigated the premises. The house seemed empty, but the barn soon gave up its terrible secret. Under a layer of garbage, covered by a pile of hay, they found the bodies of Margaret and Sarah McQuillan. Their feet and hands were tied, and their heads were wrapped in cloth. Both woman had taken multiple bullet wounds to the chest.

  At first, Lizzie shrugged off the awful evidence, saying that if something bad had been done, she had nothing to do with it. But soon enough she began acting peculiar. She picked at her clothes, claiming there were potato bugs crawling across her. Later, when a curious neighbor asked her about the discovery of the bodies, she refused to look at him, but had a “sneak look” in her eyes as she turned away. Slowly, a question began forming in the minds of everyone around her. It was a question people would ask of Lizzie Halliday for the rest of her life: was she insane, or was she faking it?

  Successful Women Adventuresses

  Lizzie was arrested and hauled off to jail in Burlingham, while back at the Halliday farm, the search for bodies continued. Paul Halliday’s surviving children were now sick with worry about the fate of their father, so one of his sons brought a friend and snuck into the farmhouse early one morning to see if the police had missed anything. When the two men reached the kitchen, they noticed some of the floorboards didn’t match the others and pried them up.

  Beneath the floorboards, the earth looked loose and fresh. The men brought over a crowbar and sank it into the ground until it met with resistance—but the object they hit wasn’t firm, like a rock or a brick. There was something soft down there. Thoroughly spooked, they ran for backup.

  Soon enough, the son’s worst fears were confirmed: Lizzie Halliday had buried his father under her own kitchen floorboards. The “badly decomposed” corpse of old Paul Halliday had multiple bullet wounds in the chest and had been struck hard on the head—so hard that the left eye was knocked out of its socket.

  On September 8, 1893, Lizzie was shipped off to a second jail in Monticello, New York. News of her crimes had now spread throughout the entire region, and her old house back near Newburgh was stripped to the bones by morbid artifact hunters. In Monticello, hundreds of people lined the streets to watch her arrival. The jailers hurried her into her cell without any problem, but every now and then she’d let out a “deafening shriek,” as though to “appraise the public on the outside that she was in confinement.”

  Lizzie was a performative prisoner, which didn’t help her public image. People thought her alleged insanity was a bit too much, what with all the incoherent monologues and earsplitting screams. She tore at her clothes, ripped her blankets to pieces, refused food, and answered questions with deranged nonsequiturs. Plus, most of this wild behavior happened when someone was watching. If you managed to catch a glimpse of Lizzie when she thought she was alone, you might find her sitting “moodily and lost in thought” on her bed, the apparent picture of sanity. The public waffled: was she or wasn’t she? On September 12, the New York Times declared definitively: MRS. HALLIDAY NOT INSANE. By November 7, the headline cried: MRS. HALLIDAY WAS INSANE. No one could make up their mind.

  In those days, the public instinctively distrusted any plea of insanity. People called it the insanity dodge, convinced that certain prisoners falsified madness to go free. The common misconception was that there was “widespread abuse” of this plea, used by shady lawyers as “a last resort for cheating justice.” In reality, the public’s suspicions were unfounded. “Public delusion . . . is that the insanity dodge is a thing which succeeds very frequently,” said Dr. Carlos F. MacDonald in 1895, discussing Lizzie’s case at a meeting of the Medical Society of the State of New York. “It is wrongfully put forth in a certain number of cases, but it is a well-known fact that it seldom succeeds where it is wrongfully offered.”

  One woman wanted to decide for herself if Lizzie was using the insanity dodge. Nellie Bly was an intrepid girl reporter who was already famous for her sharp investigations into the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island and the lurid baby-buying trade in New York City. She used her considerable celebrity to score an exclusive two-part interview with Lizzie, and in October, Bly faced the triple murderess in her cell. The cell was decorated, Bly noticed, with photos of lingerie models and political figures that had been torn out of magazines. A spread titled SUCCESSFUL WOMEN ADVENTURESSES was displayed on the windowsill, along with a little tin can full of flowers.

  It took a while to get Lizzie talking about the McQuillan murders—at first, she only wanted to discuss the state of her finances back in Newburgh—but Bly finally got Lizzie to open up. Sort of. Lizzie concocted a crazy tale about the night of the murders, claiming she had been drinking moonshine and eating bread and butter with Paul Halliday and the three McQuillans when, out of nowhere, someone chloroformed her. While Lizzie was out cold, that same mysterious person managed to kill both Paul Halliday and the McQuillan women, and Lizzie woke up with no idea that anything bad had happened.

  Bly was understandably skeptical about this wild recounting, and asked Lizzie why she hadn’t noticed the bloodstains and bullet holes in the house, or the fact that something had clearly been buried under the kitchen floor. “I didn’t see anything,” Lizzie responded, coolly.

  Lizzie had used this bizarre rhetoric before, actually—acknowledging that she was there at the scene of the crime, but totally denying any responsibility. When she was jailed for arson back in Pennsylvania, her alibi had been similarly passive and self-victimizing: “Oil was poured out of a lamp over the floor and a match set to it. I saw it all, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t speak because I was afraid I would be killed, but I lay in bed with my eyes open
watching the whole thing done.”

  During the interview with Bly, Lizzie mentioned a mysterious “gang” that liked to shoot their victims “where it would do the most good”—that is, directly in the heart. In a second interview with Bly, she took out the bit about the chloroform but brought back the gang, claiming she had been outside when the murders happened, watching everything through the window. “The McQuillan women were sitting on the sofa and [a man] shot them,” she said. “I heard the one moan when she was hit and then she opened her eyes and said: ‘My God! Did you bring me here to murder me?’”

  Bly knew she was getting nothing but lies from Lizzie. Eventually, she grew annoyed and decided to push the issue. “I believe that you alone and unaided killed your husband and the McQuillan women and buried them,” she snapped at Lizzie. “I don’t believe you were ever insane one moment in your life, and that you are the shrewdest and most wonderful woman criminal the world has ever known.”

  Lizzie just smiled at her.

  Determined to get a confession, Bly pushed harder. “Did you or did you not kill those people?” she asked. It was almost midnight in the jail cell. “Some other time. My head feels bad now,” said Lizzie. “Some other time.”