I met this song many years ago from Robin Morton's singing and from the first edition of his Folksongs Sung in Ulster. In that version the girl is Betsy. Some years later I came across one of the other versions, possibly on here and possibly an Australian one, where the girl is Liza. It struck me that the appearance of two very different shortened forms of "Elizabeth" could be because there was a real murder of a girl of that name.

Names certainly get changed by singers and broadside printers (including the assorted surnames cited above) and the rest of the text remains fairly stable, but why would a singer or printer have made that particular change unless they knew of an actual murder of a girl known as both Betsy and Liza?

I have just been reminded about this by reading the fairly recently published second edition of Folksongs Sung in Ulster.

Unless documentary evidence ever turns up, we can only speculate, but I am inclined to believe an actual murder of an Elizabeth.