Paul Halliday was a 70-year-old man living on a rough, isolated farm in the town of Mamakating in Sullivan County, New York, when he vanished in the summer of 1893. Neighbors later told of a household that had long felt uneasy—fires, shouting, and a young wife whose moods could flip without warning—until Halliday simply stopped being seen in the lanes and hills around Burlingham.
The first story offered to explain his absence sounded ordinary enough to an outsider: his wife, Lizzie Halliday, claimed he had gone off to Bloomingburg to do masonry work or attend to land he’d bought. But those who knew his habits—and those who knew hers—didn’t swallow it. Halliday’s adult son, Paul Halliday Jr., pressed the issue, watching the place and rallying help, convinced something was wrong.
A search warrant followed, along with a warrant for Lizzie’s arrest, and the posse arrived to find her scrubbing at what witnesses described as blood on the rag carpet, with a bloodied rope soaking in water nearby. When she tried to bar the men from the house, she was disarmed and taken into custody.
The barn yielded the first horror. In a basement stall under loose hay and fresh refuse, searchers uncovered two bodies laid side by side and wrapped in rags, their feet tied and their hands bound across their chests. A coroner’s jury was called, crowds gathered, and doctors counted bullet wounds—clusters of shots driven into the chest and heart. The scene widened from a missing-farmer worry to a murder investigation in an instant, and Lizzie Halliday became the central suspect as the farm itself began to read like a ledger of violence.
With Lizzie under arrest, the search turned back to Paul Halliday. Contemporary accounts described fresh earth on tools, theories that his body had been buried, and even a grim suspicion that something had been burned in the kitchen stove, where charred fragments were said to have been found. Within days, investigators discovered Halliday’s body hidden beneath the floorboards of his home—shot multiple times and described in later retellings as bound, with a fractured skull and evidence of mutilation. The shock wasn’t only that he was dead, but that he’d been kept there, under the living space, as if the house itself had been made an accomplice.
Records circulated afterward fix his death to August 1, 1893, but newspaper coverage at the time focused less on a precise date than on the late-August disappearance, the September warrants, and the body’s discovery after the two women were found. However the calendar is pinned, the narrative that formed around the case was clear: Paul Halliday did not leave to start a building job; he was killed on his own property, and the person closest to him—the young wife who controlled the story of where he’d gone—was the one authorities believed held the pistol.
Lizzie Halliday was arrested and charged in connection with the killings, and she was held in Monticello as the case drew national attention. Reports described her behavior swinging between calm and chaos—refusing food to the point of being forcibly fed, speaking erratically, and making the jailers fear both violence and self-harm. The legal path that followed emphasized the murders of the McQuillan women: in June 1894, she was convicted for those killings and sentenced to die by electrocution, a sentence later commuted after she was declared insane and sent to a criminal asylum. In the public mind, Paul Halliday remained her husband-victim as well—the man whose disappearance cracked the case open and whose body under the floorboards became its most unforgettable image—even as the courtroom outcome turned on the other victims’ deaths.
