A Jack the Ripper in Female Shape to be Electrocuted
Middletown, N.Y., Sept. 14.
The jury trying Lizzie Halliday has found her guilty of the murder of her husband, Paul, as charged against her.
The solution of the mystery surrounding Lizzie Halliday's awful crime will be found in the history of her previous life and her relations with her husband.
Lizzie, herself a type of low humanity, was merely an ignorant, mean, cunning and revengeful women, with the belief that she possessed the power to deceive everybody she chose.
This appears to have been her character under ordinary circumstances, but at certain periods she appears to have become possessed of a mania. On each occasion when she was in this wild mental condition she was expecting to become a mother. She never did, however, so far as is known, give birth to a living child. This mania, which is not without numerous precedents, assumed in Lizzie Halliday's case a phase almost unbelievably shocking.
In fact there is excellent reason to assume that her case and that of the mysterious London assassin, known as Jack the Ripper, are very similar.
In both the mania appears to have developed crimes of a similar nature, the difference being chiefly that in the one it developed in a man and in this case in a woman.
Lizzie Halliday has killed two men in her life, both of them husbands, and she mutilated both.
Her two subsequent crimes, the killing of the McQuillan women, must have been committed in a pure thirst for blood, though she did not mutilate the bodies of the women.
Robert Halliday says she was the daughter of a Mrs. Peggy Brown, who came of a family known by his father in County Ulster in the north of Ireland.
This is where old Paul lived and from where he first emigrated to this country. He knew Lizzie's mother there, but the woman who afterward became his wife and his murderess was not born at the time he left.
Lizzie's first appearance on the scene here was when she applied to Mrs. J.H. Smith, the keeper of the Newburg intelligence office, for a place. She had just arrived in this country, she said, and she looked as if she told the truth.
She was very commonly dressed and in need of both clothes and washing. A place was obtained for her at Mrs. Vaughan's in Newburg where she gave satisfaction for a month.
Twice she stayed away all night, and there is reason to believe that she went to gypsy camps in the neighborhood. At the end of a month she left the place and applied to Mrs. Smith for another.
It was there old Paul Halliday, then a man more than 70, met her. He was looking for a woman to keep house for him, and he chose Lizzie. He took her home with him, and after living together for a short time, they were married. His subsequent murder and the hiding of his body under the barn flooring were an almost natural sequence of Lizzie's previous life.
