Irving Flax, a Fair Lawn businessman, was taken from his home on January 23, 1989, by a man he had known for some thirty years. The kidnapper phoned his wife with a ransom demand, and Marilyn Flax did exactly what he told her to. Working with the FBI, she threw twenty-five thousand dollars out of her car window where he directed. John Martini picked up the money and then shot her husband three times in the back of the head so that he could never identify him. Martini left the body in the car, drove his own car onto the Staten Island Ferry, and threw the gun and Flax's car keys into New York Harbor.
Martini was fifty-eight and broke. He was born in 1930. He and his girlfriend, Therese Afdahl, had moved to New Jersey, moving between hotels, the Days Inn in Fort Lee among them, before renting an apartment in Fairview under the names Victor and Joyce Picardi. Short of money, he went to an old friend, John Doorhy, who lent him six thousand dollars and then suggested a quicker way. Doorhy had recently worked at the Flax house and had seen large amounts of cash and several bankbooks there. He told Martini the family's morning routine, that Flax usually left for work between half past nine and ten, drove him to the house, wrote out directions for getting back, and handed him a .32 revolver Martini had bought in Arizona years before, in exchange for a share of the ransom.
Martini and Afdahl slipped the FBI after the payoff but were arrested days later by Fort Lee detectives who recognized them from the descriptions. On January 30, after a meeting with Martini, Afdahl falsely confessed to having shot Flax herself. The police said he had asked her to take the blame, promising that they would marry and live in a cottage provided by the witness protection program.
At trial in Bergen County in 1990 Martini did not dispute that he had kidnapped Flax and fired the three shots. His defense was diminished capacity brought on by cocaine addiction. The jury rejected it at the guilt phase and again at the penalty phase, and he was sentenced to death. Talking to a reporter while he waited in the Bergen County jail, he laughed at the police and called the killing "an accident." Investigators lined up to question him about unsolved cases elsewhere. Earlier killings attributed to him include Anna Mary Duvall, known as Paulie, a widow shot dead in Philadelphia, and Teresa Marie Dempster, twenty-seven, and David Richard Uhl, forty-two, in Arizona; he was also looked at over the deaths of an aunt and her husband.
He said he would rather be executed than sit on New Jersey's death row. He sat there anyway. New Jersey executed no one after restoring the death penalty in 1982, and when the legislature abolished it in December 2007, Martini was one of nine condemned men resentenced to life. He was found dead in his cell at New Jersey State Prison at 2:21 on the morning of September 10, 2009. He was seventy-nine.