Lady Killers Read online

  Bly got up to leave, but stopped in the doorway of the cell to ask one last question: did Lizzie repent of her crimes?

  Lizzie smiled again. “God will send you back to me,” she said in response. And Bly, with a “little chill” running through her body, left the prison.

  “She Deserved No Friends, No More Than a Cat”

  Lizzie grew increasingly violent as she waited for her trial. She attacked the sheriff’s tiny wife, she removed the steel shanks from the soles of her heavy boots and tucked them away to be used as weapons, and she tried to set her jail cell on fire. She also went on a hunger strike. When none of that got her released, Lizzie tore a strip of cloth from the bottom of her dress and tried to hang herself from the door of her cell. By the time the sheriff cut her down, her eyes were bulging and her features were distorted, but she was still breathing. Five days after her attempted hanging, Lizzie smashed the window of her cell and lacerated her throat and elbows with a shard of glass. The sheriff found her sitting on her bed, covered in blood. “I thought I would cut myself to see if I would bleed,” she told the doctor. After this, she was chained to an iron ring that jutted from the middle of the cell floor.

  Skeptics continued to insist this was all an act. Why else would she have hung herself by the door, moments before she knew the sheriff would be passing by? Others thought her suicide attempts were all too real, because Lizzie believed her trial was imminent. It had actually been postponed until the spring—it was now almost Christmas—but nobody had bothered to tell Lizzie.

  Her trial finally began in Monticello on June 18. A thin, subdued Lizzie entered the courtroom, and people lined the street outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of the murderess. Her lawyer, George H. Carpenter, was gunning for the insanity defense, while the prosecution attempted to establish that money was her motive for killing the two women. Thomas McQuillan sobbed as he identified a set of rings that had belonged to his murdered daughter. Lizzie pinched her nose so tightly it became raw.

  The defense admitted pretty much everything: Yes, the bullets matched the gun. Yes, the rings belonged to Sarah McQuillan. They tried to explain away the blood on the carpet by saying that Lizzie wasn’t very clean and “did not take the usual precautions taken by women.” In other words, the stains were period blood, not “heart’s blood.” The fact that this argument was even ventured reveals the public’s impression of Lizzie: that she was uncivilized, unhygienic, practically feral.

  George H. Carpenter knew he couldn’t prove Lizzie was innocent, but he thought he might be able to prove she didn’t know right from wrong. His argument was twofold: (1) Lizzie Halliday was clearly insane, and (2) there was no motive for the crime—which further proved she was insane. Carpenter brought in an asylum superintendent and three doctors to confirm her insanity, as well as the jailer from Lizzie’s days as an aspiring horse thief. The jailer told the court that Lizzie used to yell “Ma! Pa! Nancy!” from her cell. “Wild as a hawk,” he said. “She was insane then . . . and is insane now.”

  During the trial, multiple physicians stopped by Lizzie’s cell to examine her for signs of madness. They often found Lizzie chatting to the Holy Ghost. Once, she lunged at them with the lid of her toilet held aloft, ready to crack some skulls. She gave nonsensical answers to the most basic questions. Her age? “Nineteen skunks.” Her address? “I washed your shirt.” Her father’s name? “You took my property.”

  “She is shamming,” said one doctor, “and is overdoing the art.”

  George H. Carpenter argued passionately for his pitiful client, noting that Lizzie never spoke a word in her own defense; instead, she sat silently without a single relative or friend in the room while the crowd stared at her “as if she were a wild beast or a monster.” He begged the jury to take the randomness of the McQuillan murders as proof this woman knew not what she did. But the prosecuting attorney urged the jury to instead consider “exterminating the prisoner as an enemy to society.” She was not at all insane, he said, noting that in her day-to-day life Lizzie Halliday was perfectly able to keep appointments, feed her horse, and otherwise function in polite society. And as a counter to Carpenter’s plea that Lizzie had no friends, the prosecutor sniped, “She deserved no friends, no more than a cat.”

  The jury only took a few hours to come to their conclusion: Lizzie Halliday was not insane in the slightest, and was guilty of murder in the first degree. Lizzie covered her face with her handkerchief and kept silent. George H. Carpenter wept.

  The Insanity Commission

  MRS. HALLIDAY TO DIE, ran the headlines the next day. Lizzie had been brought, shuffling, into the court that morning, and stood with no sign of comprehension in her eyes while the judge read the verdict: death by electric chair. It was the first time a woman had ever received this sentence.

  Now that the idea of Lizzie’s death had become tangible, the public suddenly began to question the fairness of the decision. They hadn’t expected the electric chair. It struck many as too harsh, especially since they’d never seen a woman die that way before. Within days, people began to discuss petitioning the governor of New York, Roswell Pettibone Flower, to appoint a commission that would look more closely into the question of Lizzie’s sanity.

  By July, Governor Flower agreed to do so, and appointed three doctors to take a long, hard look into Lizzie Halliday’s psyche. Papers applauded this decision as a humane act, while still vacillating on the question of sanity/insanity themselves. Her insanity would explain so much, since her crime against the McQuillans felt so senseless. She didn’t benefit from it, and she barely knew the women. On the other hand, she’d just been declared officially sane in the court. “Country folks” had one explanation for her mental state: simple “cussedness.” “The lack of motive was evident to them,” wrote one journalist, “and thus they went back to the theory of depravity.”

  Governor Flower’s doctors observed Lizzie during the month of July, while she waited to die. They noted her rapid pulse, her “extreme emaciation.” She was beginning to show symptoms of diabetes and suffered from an “excessive menstrual flow.” She’d stuffed bits of her dress into her nose and ears. She seemed to be numb all over: flies crawled across her face and she didn’t brush them away; the doctors pricked her with a knife and she didn’t flinch. She drooled constantly, her nose dripped, she cursed everyone without being provoked, she kept repeating the number thirteen, and she seemed to think there was a river running outside her cell door. The doctors transcribed some of her ramblings:

  He broke a spine of my ribs. You’ve got that bear sewed up in me. It’s you that done it. You sewed them up in me. You broke three of my legs. You pitched me down from the garret. You put a coat of shingle nails over me. They don’t want you in their house. They’re going to saw off my nose. Take them snakes off me. You brought them in a basket. You tied them around me.

  The doctors acknowledged her intelligence—the intelligence necessary to plan and execute multiple murders—but also noted her inability to resist impulse. She didn’t have the “power to choose,” they said. The violence burst from her without her being aware of it. “Conscious-impulsive insanity,” one doctor termed it. He was deeply offended that the previous testimony of a doctor named Mann—a “so-called expert” who had given in to “the demand of an excited and clamorous public”—had almost led to Lizzie’s execution. There was no doubt in his mind that Lizzie was unable to control her deeply violent nature.

  The other doctors agreed. They couldn’t say for sure if Lizzie recognized the “nature and consequences” of her crimes, but they were positive she lacked the “power to choose between committing and not committing them.” Because of this, they declared her insane.

  This was the first time anyone had taken a nuanced view of Lizzie’s mental state, and it saved her. She was sent to the state criminal asylum at Matteawan and locked up for life.

  Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane

  Lizzie thrived at the asylum. Upon her arri
val, she raved about bugs and muttered incoherently, but the superintendent sat her down and told her that if she wanted to be treated well at the hospital, she needed to act as politely as possible. Surprisingly, Lizzie listened. She began to clean herself, she stopped cursing at the doctors, and she even started doing little chores. Because she was still a celebrity, journalists would occasionally trek out to the hospital to report that the country’s bloodiest murderess was now engrossed in her sewing.

  But at the end of August 1895, mere days after one journalist wrote that Lizzie had “lost that fierce look which characterized her insanity” and was “quiet, industrious, and contented,” Lizzie began plotting again.

  She’d become pals with one Jane Shannon, who was also homicidal, and the two developed a grudge against a pretty young attendant named Kate Ward. Lizzie insisted that she had “become sane” and should be sent back to regular jail, and was sure all the asylum workers in general—and Ward in particular—were conspiring to keep her at Matteawan. So one day, Lizzie and Shannon snuck up behind Ward in the bathroom, ready to shed some blood.

  Lizzie, strong as ever, threw Ward to the floor and stuffed a towel into her mouth. While Shannon held the girl down, Lizzie began to tear out her hair, scratch at her face, and pummel her with brutal force. By the time the other attendants realized what was happening in the bathroom, Ward was unconscious. Had they arrived any later, Ward would likely have died.

  Lizzie did her time in solitary confinement for the attack, but eventually the superintendent allowed her back into the regular life of the asylum. She’d calmed down, she was behaving again, and the years began to pass uneventfully for her. She gained sixty pounds after months of having starved herself in jail. She got a bad case of the measles in 1896, and the press reported it dutifully.

  In 1897, Lizzie became fixated on the idea of false teeth. She wanted every single one of her teeth replaced, convinced that a fresh set would make her look more attractive. So she began to fake toothaches, and told the doctors that the only cure for her would be the removal of every tooth in her head. The doctors inspected her and found all her teeth perfectly healthy, but Lizzie kept complaining, and about six months later, she finally got her way. She was taken on a little outing to a town called Fishkill Landing, where some brave dentist gave her a shiny new set of teeth.

  A crowd gathered around the dentist’s office to wait for her, and when Lizzie emerged she grinned widely, looking very pleased with herself. Perhaps she felt like she had officially moved up in the world. She would never have been able to afford false teeth years ago, when she was working as a housekeeper and running from husband to husband with her little boy on her arm.

  The next autumn, a group of inmates wrote and starred in a “thrilling war drama” at the asylum. Lizzie Halliday watched from a row close to the stage. She hadn’t cried or spoken a word during her own thrilling drama, but now, in the audience, she sobbed every time the hero was in danger. The press repeated this fact with relish. The moment looked like a poignant end to Lizzie’s story—a redemption, even.

  The Last Killing

  Nellie Wicks was one of the best attendants at Matteawan. She was only twenty-four and had already been promoted to head attendant of the women’s department. Wicks had dreams of leaving the asylum to study nursing, but she mostly kept those dreams to herself.

  One of her star patients was Lizzie Halliday, who was now in her midforties. Lizzie had become so calm and reliable that she was given sewing privileges, which meant she had access to a whole basket of materials: fabric, thread, scissors. Sometimes she muttered a vague death threat, but the entire asylum had learned to ignore those. Lizzie never acted on them anymore.

  By the autumn of 1906, Wicks announced that she had big news: she was going to leave the asylum and study to be a trained nurse. Lizzie was heartbroken and begged Wicks to stay, but Wicks assured her everything would be fine. As the date of departure grew nearer, Lizzie stopped begging and began to threaten her, saying she would rather kill Wicks than let her go. As usual, no one paid any attention to Lizzie’s threats, especially not Wicks. She knew the two of them had a special bond, and she genuinely believed Lizzie would never harm her.

  But deep in Lizzie’s psyche, the old murderous impulses were beginning to wake. One morning, as Wicks walked into the bathroom, Lizzie crept in behind her, clutching a pair of scissors that she’d taken from the sewing basket. Wicks didn’t notice that anyone else was in the room until Lizzie struck her hard on the head. When Wicks crumpled to the floor, Lizzie snatched her keys and locked the bathroom door from the inside. She then proceeded to stab Wicks over two hundred times: in the face, in the neck, and “where it would do the most good”—the heart.

  Attendants heard Wicks screaming, but by the time they managed to break the door down, it was too late. Wicks was unconscious and bleeding heavily. She died on a cot twenty minutes later. Instead of becoming a nurse, she earned a dubious fame: she was now the first known United States female law enforcement officer to be killed in the line of duty.

  When the coroner asked Lizzie why she’d done it, Lizzie responded, “She tried to leave me.”

  The Worst

  Back to the old question of whether Lizzie was faking it. Over a century later, the insanity commission’s report still rings true: Lizzie was intelligent, cunning, and at times self-aware, but unable to resist her own surges of violence. (And let’s be honest—even if she was stone-cold sane, the very act of pretending to be insane for decades does seem, in itself, like a type of madness.)

  But it’s also likely Lizzie was faking certain things. She seemed aware of what “insanity” looked like in the public’s opinion, and she performed it: the hysterical shrieks from the jail cell, the way she calmed down when she thought no one was looking. None of this negates the overall diagnosis of the insanity commission—none of this makes her sane!—but it does explain why spectators and the press were so torn about her. They were picking up on an underlying shrewdness, and this made it hard for them to fully accept that she had no idea what she was doing when she nicked the scissors to kill Wicks or lured the McQuillan women home with her or bashed Paul Halliday so hard on the head that his left eye fell out. She may have been “wild as a hawk,” but she knew how to premeditate murder, which is what made her such a terrifying cipher.

  Some people tried to explain away her crimes in far more sexist and, quite frankly, ridiculous terms—perhaps because “madness” was such a vague, threatening, and ultimately unsatisfactory explanation for murder. There were those who speculated that Lizzie’s “wild mental condition” happened every time she was pregnant, but that all her children were born dead. Some were convinced she had a secret lover who helped her drag the heavy bodies of the McQuillan women out to the barn—because, they said, Lizzie wasn’t strong enough to drag the bodies herself. Others claimed Lizzie had been a “young and comely member of a roving band of gipsies” in her youth, and somehow the seed of that freedom bloomed to violence in her heart. There were even those who believed Lizzie was actually Jack the Ripper, come over to America to wreak havoc on more female bodies. When someone finally asked her if she were the Ripper, Lizzie snapped, “Do they think I am an elephant? That was done by a man.”

  Perhaps the vaguest explanation for Lizzie’s crimes—beyond simple “cussedness”—came from the newspaper headlines that followed her every move. In print, she was talked about in a language of excess, of superlatives: “Multimurderess,” “Arch Murderess,” “The Worst Woman on Earth.” She became a symbol of the unimaginably awful, the greatest female horror that turn-of-the-century New York had ever seen. There was a glee to the term, with its echo of freak show terminology: “Come see the Worst Woman on Earth, appearing after the Two-Headed Lady! Fifty cents for a peek!”

  A century later, multimurderess Aileen Wuornos would earn another major superlative—the first female serial killer—that demonstrated, as it did with Lizzie, the potent combination of media frenzy and
“collective amnesia” that makes lady killers so intensely scrutinized during their lifetime and so eminently forgettable afterward. Wuornos was not the first, just like Lizzie was probably not the worst. But it sounded really good to phrase it that way. And it made people look.

  Perhaps because she seemed so steeped in violence, so intrinsically homicidal, Lizzie triggered greater disgust in the courtroom and in the media than other female serial killers who claimed more victims than she did. Lizzie murdered—well, she murdered like a man. Most female serial killers use poison, not physical violence, and go after the people closest to them. Not Lizzie Halliday. Lizzie stabbed, shot, bludgeoned, and hunted down strangers. (No wonder she drew comparisons to Jack the Ripper.) Even her appearance confirmed this idea that she was somehow unfemale. There was nothing about Lizzie that charmed the public, no appealing detail to latch onto the way that people latched onto other, prettier killers. Lizzie was seen as squalid and savage: wild as a hawk, friendless as a cat, bleeding openly onto the carpet, letting flies crawl all over her face. Not simply nonfemale, in fact, but nonhuman.

  And though she “only” killed five people (as far as we know), the fact that she kept murdering even after she was sentenced contributed to the idea of her as an unredeemable killer, someone who would always be bad—the worst, the very worst. Even the apparatus of law and medicine couldn’t quell the ceaseless violence within her. They tried to contain her, but they couldn’t stop her and they couldn’t save her, because what she needed to escape—what she could never escape—was herself.

  On June 28, 1918, poor, mad, shrewd Lizzie Halliday died of Bright’s disease (a perpetual inflammation of the kidneys). She was fifty-eight years old and had been in the asylum for almost half her life. None of her relatives claimed her body, so she was buried in the asylum cemetery, where the graves are marked only by numbers. Decades later, the asylum closed down. After years of receiving superlatives in the papers, Lizzie lies beneath a nameless gravestone, overrun with grass and flowers.