Martini was born in 1930 and had a long record. He was fifty-eight when the New Jersey case occurred and had killings behind him in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
In January 1989 he and an accomplice abducted Irving Flax, a businessman, from his home in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, demanded a ransom from his wife by telephone, took the money and then shot him. He was arrested days later.
The others named in the record are his aunt and her husband; Anna Mary Duvall, known as Paulie; and Teresa Marie Dempster, twenty-seven, and David Richard Uhl, forty-two.
He was convicted and sentenced to death in New Jersey on December 12, 1990. He was also convicted of three murders in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
He died in his cell in 2009, having spent nineteen years under sentence of death. New Jersey abolished capital punishment in December 2007 and commuted the sentences of everyone on its death row, so he was serving life by the time he died.
The gambling debt is the recorded motive and the ransom call is what identified him. The entry notes that New Jersey executed nobody between the restoration of its death penalty in 1982 and abolition twenty-five years later, which is the reason a man sentenced in 1990 died of natural causes in prison.