LONELY HEARTS KILLERS TO DIE: THE DAILY RECORD, MARCH 8, 1951

The last door closed on Martha Beck the night before she died, when the State Court of Appeals at Albany refused to stay her execution and that of her lover, Raymond Fernandez. With it went their last chance of a commutation. The next day a small daily in Dunn, North Carolina, ran the United Press story at the top of its front page: "Prison clocks ticked away the last hours today in the lives of the two 'lonely hearts' lovers who killed two widows and a child for lust and money." The two of them, the paper said, had given up all hope, and they would die before midnight.

The wire copy sums each of them up in a phrase. Beck is "Pudgy Martha Beck," 31, "a divorcee who was pregnant at 13," and she met the court's ruling "with impatience and finality." Fernandez is her "sauve paramour," balding at 36. Behind the labels was a partnership that began with a lonely-hearts letter in 1947. Fernandez courted women through the personal columns, and Beck traveled with him posing as his sister, a presence that reassured the women who took them in. She was violently jealous of every one of them.

The victims behind the paper's first sentence were Janet Fay, sixty-six, who had come to stay with Fernandez on Long Island and was killed there, and Delphine Downing, twenty-eight, a widow, and her two-year-old daughter, Rainelle, whose bodies police found in the basement of the Downing house outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, on March 1, 1949. Michigan had no death penalty, so the couple were sent to New York, which did. The front-page story stops in the middle of a sentence about Fernandez and jumps to page five. They were electrocuted at Sing Sing on March 8, 1951, as the paper said they would be.

What survives here is only the front-page opening of a wire report; the rest ran on page five and is not reproduced, so whatever it went on to say about Fernandez or the final appeals is missing. Two details do not square with the record of Beck's life. Born on May 6, 1920, she was 30, not 31, on the day she died, and nothing in that record supports the line that she was pregnant at 13. Nor is Janet Fay recorded as a widow. The pair were tried only for Fay's murder, and both were sentenced to death for it. The police attributed seventeen killings to them, which they denied and which were never proved.

The Daily Record of Dunn, North Carolina, published this on March 8, 1951, and the Library of Congress believes issues of that period in Chronicling America are in the public domain. For papers less than ninety-five years old the Library adds a caution, that they may carry some copyrighted third-party material; nothing in this story is marked as separately copyrighted. The scan is the Library's own copy, with the citation and rights statement printed below it.

The transcription runs word for word up to the point where the paper breaks off, at "Fernandez, balding at 36," and the jump line "(Continued On Page Five)" is kept as printed. The continuation on page five was not captured and is not transcribed. Punch holes and scuffs mark the margin and the lower part of the page, but none reach the type, so nothing is marked illegible. The misprint "sauve" for suave stands, "divorcee" goes without its accent, and the United Press logotype is rendered "(UP)."

Transcription

Transcribed word for word from the page scan. Original spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and typographical errors have been kept exactly as printed. Unreadable words are marked [illegible]. Nothing has been modernised or corrected.

Lonely Hearts

Killers To Die

SING SING PRISON, N. Y., (UP)—Prison clocks ticked away the last hours today in the lives of the two "lonely hearts" lovers who killed two widows and a child for lust and money.

Pudgy Martha Beck and her sauve paramour, Raymond Fernandez, gave up all hope of escaping death tonight in the electric chair. They will die before midnight.

NO STAY OF EXECUTION

Their last chance of winning a commutation of sentence slipped away last night when the State Court of Appeals at Albany refused to stay their execution.

Mrs. Beck, 31, a divorcee who was pregnant at 13, accepted the court's action with impatience and finality. Fernandez, balding at 36,

(Continued On Page Five)

Transcriber's notes

- Readability: good. This is mid-century newsprint, coarser than the 1895 page and showing paper wear — a row of dark punch-holes or binding marks runs down the left margin of the column, and there are scattered scuffs and a crease across the lower tiles — but none of it touches the article's type. Every word was legible. No [illegible] markers were needed.

- "sauve" is printed as set, split across lines as "sau-/ve", where "suave" is wanted. Kept as printed.

- The wire-service credit in the dateline is the United Press logotype — a condensed, joined "UP" inside parentheses rather than ordinary letters — and is transcribed as "(UP)". The same logotype appears in the unrelated items below.

- "divorcee" is printed without the accent, as set.

- The sub-headline "NO STAY OF EXECUTION" is set in bold caps, centred, within the column, and is given on its own line in the order printed.

- The article breaks off mid-sentence at "Fernandez, balding at 36," and carries the jump line "(Continued On Page Five)", which is transcribed as printed. The remainder of the story is on page five and is not in these tiles; the crop ending mid-sentence is the paper's own break, not a fault of the crop.

- The headline is a two-line, single-column head. It is not split across columns, and this was confirmed against the full-page scan, which also shows nothing of this article above the headline.

- Unrelated matter inside the crop, not transcribed: immediately above the headline, the last three lines and jump line of a preceding story about government loans, ending "(Continued on Page Eight)"; below the article, the standing head "State News Briefs" and two items under it — a Raleigh item on Gov. Kerr Scott missing a Marine helicopter crash at Camp Lejeune, and a Henderson item on the Marvin E. Faulkner trial in Vance County ending "(Continued On Page Three)" — and then the headline "Man Is Caught At Still Site" with its story about Franklin Jernigan and a 100-gallon still, also ending "(Continued On Page Three)". The Jernigan item contains the printer's error "rarested"; it is noted here only because it falls inside the crop, and it is not part of this transcription.

- There is no photograph with this article.