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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 for 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.”

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 arrival, 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.