Charles Hopkins, a man, enters the record in 1879 as the first known spouse of Eliza Margaret McNally, the woman who would later become infamous under the name Lizzie Halliday. Accounts describe him as a Greenwich, New York local who also went by the name “Ketspool” Brown, and they say the marriage produced a son. For a short time, the story reads like a rough-edged upstate marriage of the era—hard work, few certainties, and a young couple trying to make a life that never quite settles.
Then, two years after the wedding, Hopkins was gone. He died in 1881, and the surviving public summaries don’t preserve a clear, agreed-upon explanation for how it happened—no widely repeated description of an illness, an accident, or a public inquest that fixed the cause in popular memory. What survives instead is the shadow that formed later, when reporters and onlookers began to look backward through the wreckage of Halliday’s later crimes and wonder what, exactly, they’d missed at the beginning.
In that backward glance, Hopkins’s death became less an endpoint than an opening chapter. The same accounts that note his death also describe how quickly the household moved on: soon after Hopkins died, Halliday remarried—this time to Artemus Brewer, described in period reporting as a veteran and pensioner—only for Brewer to die as well within less than a year of marriage. Later still came another marriage that ended in desertion, and then a union with George Smith, whom she was said to have tried to kill with poisoned tea before fleeing. Each episode added another stone to the cairn, until Hopkins’s name—once just a line in a marriage—began to sound like a warning that arrived too early to be heard.
By the time Halliday’s murder trial drew national attention in 1894, Hopkins’s death was being spoken of in the same breath as the pattern. A New York Times report from that period, repeated in later historical summaries, captured the uncertainty that clung to her early widowhood: whether those first husbands died of natural causes or were murdered was not known. That uncertainty matters for the question of suspects and arrests, because it points to the central fact of the Hopkins case as it’s now remembered: no specific, contemporaneous prosecution for his death stands out in the commonly available accounts, and no named accomplice is tied to it in those summaries. The suspicion that attaches to Halliday arrives largely by hindsight—by comparison to what she was later proven capable of doing.
What the record does preserve in sharp detail is what came later, when the crimes were no longer rumors. After time in Philadelphia that ended with a conviction for burning her own shop for insurance money, Halliday returned to New York, attached herself to an older farmer in Burlingham, and slid into a household already tense with grief and suspicion. Fires, disappearance, bodies found hidden, and finally her arrest built into a case that could be proven in court. In June 1894 she was convicted in Sullivan County’s Oyer and Terminer Court for the murders of Margaret and Sarah Jane McQuillan, sentenced to death, and then spared execution when her sentence was commuted after she was declared insane—ending her days in an institution rather than on the chair. That conviction, and the violence that followed in confinement, hardened the story around her name; and in that hardened story, Charles Hopkins remains one of the earliest dead whose fate is recorded, but not conclusively explained, with no clear arrest or charge tied directly to his 1881 death in the widely circulated sources.
