Margaret Davison McQuillan, about 49 years old, was a white woman whose life ended in the shadow of a Sullivan County farm, at a moment when the Catskills were still a patchwork of small communities where everyone noticed when something felt off. In late August 1893, she and Sarah McQuillan—described in accounts as her close family member—vanished into the orbit of Lizzie Halliday, a woman who had drifted through aliases and trouble, and who had once been taken in by the McQuillans during
her earlier years in Philadelphia.
By the time neighbors began to question what was happening at the Halliday place in Burlingham, unease had already settled in. Paul Halliday, Lizzie's husband, had disappeared, and Lizzie's explanations sounded thin enough to sharpen suspicion rather than soothe it. With a search warrant, men searched the property looking for the missing farmer. Instead, on September 4, 1893, they made a discovery that turned rumor into horror: two bodies hidden under hay in the barn, shot and concealed as if the farm itself were being used as a grave. Those bodies were identified as Margaret and Sarah McQuillan.
The investigation narrowed quickly to Lizzie Halliday. In the days after the barn discovery, Paul Halliday's body was found beneath the floorboards of the home, also shot, deepening the case from disappearance to a triad of killings tied to one household. Lizzie was arrested and held in the Sullivan County jail in Monticello to await trial. Behind bars, she became a spectacle as well as a suspect—reported to have swung between silence and violence, refusing food until it was forced, lashing out at the sheriff's wife, setting fire to her bedding, and attempting to hang herself or cut her own throat, all while some observers argued over whether madness was real or performed.
When the case reached court, it produced one of the era's most sensational outcomes. On June 21, 1894, Lizzie Halliday was convicted in the Sullivan County Oyer and Terminer Court for the murders of Margaret McQuillan and Sarah Jane McQuillan, and she was sentenced to die in New York's new electric chair—an unprecedented sentence for a woman at the time. The conviction did not end the story cleanly: after a medical commission declared her insane, Governor Roswell P. Flower commuted the death sentence to confinement in a mental institution, and Lizzie was sent to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where she spent the rest of her life.
