Lizzie Halliday: The Worst Woman on Earth

Behavior, the thick cloud of fear that had come upon the town of Burlingham since Lizzie Halliday arrived, and the dark look in her strange blue eyes, neighbors knew they would never see the man again. To rid their sleepy little town of the evil that was Lizzie Halliday for good, they summoned police to assist them in searching for evidence of foul play and wasted no time trying to get to the truth, even at the risk of their own lives. If an arrest could be made, the violence would stop. A plot was hatched and was carried out with as little delay as possible. The townspeople knew that every hour passing might hold some unforeseeable horrors so long as Lizzie Halliday was a free woman. Distracting Lizzie with some invented urgent business, they were able to drive the woman from the remains of the farmhouse long enough to search the place for any shred of evidence that might put an end to her rampage once and for all.

All the unsuspecting search party of concerned neighbors was expecting to find on that fateful day were answers as to the mystery of Paul’s disappearance. And find them they did, almost immediately upon entering the house; a bloodstain on the floor, a length of rope soaked in blood. It might have turned the stomach of those who were less brave, but those artifacts were just two small grisly clues that could barely hint at the horror to come. Nothing could have prepared them for the sheer carnage that they would find at the Halliday farm that day.

One man felt himself peculiarly drawn to the barn where Paul Halliday had found Lizzie after his home was torched and his son was murdered. His name was Frank McQuillan, and he lived in a neighboring town. He was not particularly interested in Paul Halliday’s fate. He had questions of his own that were soon to be answered.

Approaching the barn with some trepidation, he smelled an intense stench of rotting flesh. The smell confirmed his suspicions that he was in the right place. Despite his own fear and a sense of foreboding that hit him like a lead weight as he pushed open the heavy wooden barn doors, Frank managed to enter the barn and locate the source of the putridity; two stacks of buckwheat in the hayloft of the barn. With a hand over his nose to protect himself from the reek of death, he used his other hand to grasp for a hoe. Then he began the laborious task of climbing the ladder to the hayloft, feeling his heart beating hard against his ribcage with every step up the rungs into the shadowy loft. There the stench was so strong he nearly swooned, but managed to right himself to uncover the truth. Gingerly turning over the pile of hay, Frank McQuillan fell to his knees and vomited when he saw what he had uncovered: it was not Paul Halliday at all, but instead, the bodies of two women, absolutely riddled through with bullets. Though they had been in the haystack for a considerable amount of time, he did not need to call the sheriff to ask for any help in identifying them; they were his own wife and daughter.

A search through the house provided further confirmation; a couple of the McQuillan’s rings were now among Lizzie’s things. It had not been the answer anyone had been looking for. But it was enough to call for her immediate arrest. And for Frank McQuillan, it was hard, horrible closure. The final nail in Lizzie’s casket would not turn up for another couple of days of intense searching, when finally the stench of decay reached the noses of the search party from under the floorboards in the Halliday home. There was Paul Halliday. He had been shot and several newspapers, though they do not give details, describe the man’s body as being “mutilated beyond belief.”