On August 4, 1885, Artemus Brewer, a 44-year-old man, died in Greenwich, New York, closing the brief final chapter of a life rooted in Washington County and remembered there in burial. Later retellings would describe him as a veteran drawing a pension, the kind of steady, known figure a small town assumes will keep to routine until time takes him naturally.
Yet the timing of his death—after a short marriage—left a quiet seam of unease that would only be tugged open years later, when the name of the woman beside him began turning up in darker headlines.
Earlier that same year, records and genealogical accounts place Brewer in a marriage to Eliza Margaret McNally, later widely known as Lizzie Halliday, an Irish-born immigrant who moved through a string of marriages and aliases. Some summaries compress the timeline and place Brewer’s death earlier, but other online memorial and family-history sources anchor him in Greenwich with the August 1885 death date. However the dates are framed in secondary tellings, the common thread is that Brewer’s death came soon after the wedding, leaving little time for anything to be widely understood about what went wrong—or even to be properly wondered about while the town’s attention was still close to the grave.
In the public record that survives online, there is no clear account of an arrest, a named killer, or a courtroom reckoning tied directly to Brewer’s death. What appears instead is the later shadow cast backward: during Halliday’s 1890s murder case, the press revived her early marriages and raised the question that had once been left alone—whether the men who died after marrying her had succumbed to illness or to something done to them. A New York Times line, repeated in later historical summaries, captured the uncertainty bluntly: whether those earlier husbands died naturally or were murdered was simply not known. That ambiguity, rather than any documented charge, became the lasting official shape of Brewer’s end.
As Halliday’s later life unraveled, the pattern that would retroactively pull Brewer into suspicion grew hard to ignore. Accounts describe her attempting to poison a subsequent husband, George Smith, with arsenic in tea before fleeing, and later turning up in Philadelphia under an alias, where she was convicted of burning a shop for insurance money and sentenced to prison time. After returning to New York, she became the housekeeper—and then wife—of an older farmer, Paul Halliday. Fires followed: a home burned, a son died, and suspicion clung to her again; then Paul Halliday vanished. Neighbors pressed authorities, a search warrant was obtained, and bodies were found—two women shot and hidden in a barn, and Paul Halliday later discovered shot beneath his floorboards. Those discoveries produced arrests, murder charges, and confinement as her behavior in custody was described as erratic and violent, feeding both fear and fascination in the newspapers that carried the story far beyond Sullivan County.
The legal outcome of Halliday’s case was decisive for the later murders but not for Brewer’s. In June 1894 she was convicted in Sullivan County Oyer and Terminer Court for murder and sentenced to death by electrocution, a sentence later commuted after she was declared insane; she spent the rest of her life in an institution. Press coverage around the trial amplified the speculation that two husbands had died within a year of marrying her and that she had tried to poison another—fuel for the idea that earlier deaths, including Brewer’s, belonged to the same violent arc. Even so, in the source material available online, Brewer’s death remains an unresolved prologue: no documented arrest made on his behalf, no formal charge recorded naming a killer, and no verdict that answers whether the end in Greenwich was misfortune, undetected foul play, or something that could no longer be proven once the world finally decided to look back.
