Read Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of Online
Authors: Harold Schechter
Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (9 page)
S
OMETIME BEFORE
10:00 a.m, Freeman Smith, a cousin of the Housemans, arrived at George Waite’s drugstore on Canal Street to inform Polly of the terrible developments back home. He found her son Albert behind the counter. Telling Smith that his mother had spent the night at the house of a friend named Strong, Albert pulled on his cap and hurried off to notify Polly. When he arrived at Mrs. Strong’s residence, however, he was told, to his great surprise, that his mother had not been there at all.
Moments after he returned to the store, Polly showed up. Hearing Smith’s report, she burst into a storm of grief. Then, accompanied by Smith, she made her way to the ferry that would carry her back home.
By a bizarre coincidence, Emeline’s husband, George, had docked his schooner at a Hudson River pier that same morning and—happily anticipating a reunion with his wife and baby daughter—was striding toward the ferry landing at the same time. He and Polly met on the boat, and it was she who broke the awful news to him. “With convulsive sobs she spoke of the melancholy fate of his dear little child,” writes one nineteenth-century chronicler, “also of his beloved Emeline, whom she had ever prized as dearly as one of her own sisters.” Rendered dumbstruck by the news, Captain Houseman made the trip in a stunned silence.
On Wednesday, December 27, while the coroner’s inquest was still under way, funeral services were held at the village church, where Polly put on another ostentatious show of grief. By the next day, however, suspicion had already begun to fall on her. Writing a desperate letter to Waite, she told him that, if asked by police, he must swear that she had spent all of Christmas Day at his store. Unfortunately for Polly, detectives found the deeply incriminating letter in Waite’s pocket when he was taken into custody for questioning. In the meantime, other officers, scouring the pawnshops in lower Manhattan, located the brokers, who positively identified Polly as the woman who had pawned Emeline Houseman’s spoons and other articles the day after the murder.
By New Year’s day, Polly was under arrest for murder and incarcerated in the Richmond County Jail. A few nights later, while she was alone in her cell, she gave birth to a baby girl. It was found dead the next morning. Officially the child was declared stillborn, though there were many who believed that Polly—whose previous seven pregnancies by Waite had not resulted in a single live delivery—had strangled the child at birth.
I
N THE THIRD
week of June 1844, six months after the murders, Polly was brought to trial. Crowds of New Yorkers, some traveling by chartered boats, swarmed to Staten Island, while the penny papers ran special editions carrying the latest updates on the proceedings. Though the press was unanimous in condemning Polly—“There cannot be a doubt as to the guilt of this wretched woman,” declared the Evening Post—at least one journalist predicted that she would be acquitted. In a brief dispatch on the eve of the trial, Edgar Allan Poe, then a correspondent for a Philadelphia newspaper, wrote: “This woman may possibly escape, for they manage these things wretchedly in New York.”
Poe was right. Though eleven jurors voted to convict, the twelfth refused to render a verdict upon circumstantial evidence.
Her second trial, held in Manhattan in March 1845, generated even more feverish excitement than the first, thanks partly to P. T. Barnum, whose American Museum was located only a few blocks from the courtroom. Looking to cash in on the public’s fascination with the case, the great showman installed a waxwork figure of Polly—depicted as a toothless, eighty-year-old hag—hacking away at her victims. To advertise this attraction, he papered the city with flyers featuring a woodcut illustration of the grisly scene.
After a three-week trial, Polly was found guilty. The verdict was overturned on appeal, however, and a third trial ordered. Feelings about Polly ran so high among New Yorkers that it proved impossible to seat an impartial jury. A change of venue was granted and, in March 1846, the case was removed to Newburgh in Orange County. This time, the jury voted to acquit. When the verdict was announced, Polly “dropped into her seat as if she had been shot” and wept with relief. Then, turning to her lawyer, she said through her tears: “Now I can sue Barnum, can’t I?”
P
OLLY MOVED BACK
to Staten Island, where she purchased a small cottage on Lafayette Avenue in Port Richmond and set up housekeeping with her two grown children, Albert and his sister, Eliza. An object of intense curiosity, she shielded her face with a veil on those rare occasions when she ventured outside. At the age of seventy-five, she was partially paralyzed by a stroke. She survived for another nine
years, dying at the age of eighty-four on July 27, 1892—one week before Lizzie Borden hacked her way into American legend.
on Earth”
Polly Bodine wasn’t the only female criminal comparable to Lizzie Borden. In September 1893—just a few months after the Borden trial ended—another Lizzie was arrested for multiple murder. Her full name was Lizzie Halliday, and her crimes were so appalling that newspapers branded her “The Worst Woman on Earth” and “The Female Jack the Ripper.” Her notoriety, however, was extremely short-lived. Within a few years, she had been mostly forgotten, while her Fall River namesake became part of American folklore.
Born Eliza McNally in 1859, she emigrated from Ireland with her parents at the age of eight. At fifteen she married her first husband, a farmer named Ketspool Brown. Five more marriages—several of them bigamous—followed. Most of her husbands were much older men with army pensions. The first two died under highly suspicious circumstances. The fourth barely escaped with his life after she served him a cup of arsenic-spiked tea. Her sixth and final husband would not be as lucky.
She was arrested for the first time in her mid-twenties. Living in Philadelphia, she opened a small shop, then promptly torched it for the insurance money. Convicted of arson, she did two years in Eastern State Penitentiary. In 1889, shortly after her release, she was hired as a housekeeper by Paul Halliday, resident of a small village in upstate New York. A twice-widowed farmer just shy of his seventieth birthday, Halliday had a substantial spread, a military pension, and a severely disabled son. Not long after Lizzie went to work for him, the old man proposed marriage, apparently as a way to avoid paying her wages. Lizzie, forty years his junior, accepted.
Not long after their wedding in May 1890, Lizzie—according to a report in the
New York Times
—“eloped with a neighbor, stealing a team of horses in order to accelerate their flight. In Newburg[h] her companion deserted her and she was arrested. Her counsel entered a plea of insanity, and she was sent to an asylum.” Discharged as cured in May 1893, she was returned to the care of her husband. A few weeks later, Halliday’s house burned down. His disabled son, home alone at the time, died in the conflagration.
Beyond her acute mental derangement, it’s impossible to know what drove Lizzie Halliday to perpetrate the crimes that secured her reputation as a female Jack the Ripper. Early on the morning of Wednesday, August 30, 1893, she hitched her horse to an old buckboard and drove twenty-three miles to the home of a poor farmer named Thomas McQuillan, whose wife, Margaret, and nineteen-year-old daughter, Sarah Jane, hired themselves out as menials. Representing herself as a boardinghouse keeper named Smith who required a live-in house cleaner, she proposed paying Mrs. McQuillan the “princely sum” of $2 a day plus board for her services. Mrs. McQuillan jumped at the offer. Packing a few belongings, she accompanied Lizzie back to the
Halliday farm. That same night, after Margaret went to bed, Lizzie snuck into her room, chloroformed her, shot her through the heart with her husband’s revolver, dragged her body into the barn, and concealed it in a pile of hay.
Whether Paul Halliday was already dead by then is unknown. At some point during that evening, Lizzie shot him while he dozed on a couch, then crushed his skull with an axe. As the
New York Times
reported, she then “drew the couch away from the wall, lifted the planks, dug a shallow hole, tied the old man’s face in a wet cloth and rolled him off the couch into the grave beside it. Having filled up the grave and restored the boards to the floor, she then wheeled the couch back to its place against the wall and went to sleep on the blood-soaked couch with the seeming peacefulness of a child.”
After awakening in the late morning, she climbed back into her wagon, drove back out to the McQuillan farm, and persuaded nineteen-year-old Sally “to return with her on the pretext that Mrs. McQuillan had met with a disabling accident. Sometime between Thursday at midnight and sunset on Friday, this poor girl was shot full of bullets while sleeping and, with her hands and legs bound as her mother’s were, dragged to the barn and laid beside her mother’s body.”
A few days later, on Monday, September 4, neighbors, suspicious about Paul Halliday’s whereabouts, searched the barn, where they discovered the decomposing corpses of the two McQuillan females covered with hay. Two more days would pass before Paul Halliday’s remains were unearthed from beneath the kitchen floorboards. Following her arrest for these butcheries, Lizzie was not merely likened to Jack the Ripper; some observers proposed that she actually was the Ripper. “Recent investigation shows that Mrs. Halliday is in all probability connected to the Whitechapel murders,” claimed one widely circulated newspaper story, “for it has been proved she was in Europe at the time of the murders and often refers to the murders when she is in possession of her mental faculties.”
Found guilty of murdering her husband, she was condemned to the electric chair, but the sentence was later commuted and she was sent back to her former institution, the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Several years later, when her favorite nurse, a young woman named Nellie Wickes, informed her that she had gotten engaged and was resigning, Lizzie threw herself at Wickes’ feet and begged her to stay. When the young nurse repeated her intention to leave, Lizzie sprang to her feet, seized a pair of scissors attached to a chain at Wickes’ waist, and stabbed her more than two hundred times in the neck and face. The young woman died a few minutes later, just as her fiancé arrived at the hospital to help her pack her belongings.
Lizzie Halliday was still immured in Matteawan when she died of natural causes on June 18, 1918, at the age of fifty-eight.
[
Sources: Anon., The Early Life of Polly Bodine, Together with the Complete Testimony Given in at Port Richmond on the Preliminary Examinations, Much of Which Was Taken with “Closed Doors,” Consequently Never Before Published (New York, 1846); Henry Lauren Clinton, Extraordinary Cases (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896); Will M. Clemens, “The Staten Island Mystery of 1843,” The Era Magazine, vol. XIV, no. 4 (October 1904): 324–333.
]
THE WATERVILLE POISONER
O
NE OF THE MOST INFAMOUS OF ALL
B
RITISH CRIMINALS WAS THE NINETEENTH
-century serial poisoner Dr. William Palmer. A womanizing rogue whose addiction to horse racing, expensive wine, and fine cigars kept him constantly in debt, he supplemented his medical income by dispatching assorted family members—including his wife and brother—after taking out hefty insurance policies on their lives. Other victims he appears to have murdered for pure pleasure, including several of his own children, whom he reportedly killed “by getting them to lick a mixture of honey and arsenic from his fingers.” In late 1855, after his close friend John Parsons Cook won £3,000 at the racetrack, Palmer poisoned him with strychnine, then attempted to collect the money for himself. When a postmortem was conducted on Cook’s body, Palmer took part in the procedure, doing his best to sabotage the examination. As a result, he has gone down in history not only as Victorian England’s “Prince of Poisoners” but also as one of only two medical murderers known to have conducted autopsies on their own victims.