Martha Jule Seabrook was born in Milton, Florida, on May 6, 1920. A glandular condition gave her an adult body in childhood and she was abused because of it; she trained as a nurse, was refused work in a hospital because of her weight, had two children by different men and worked as superintendent of a home for crippled children in Pensacola. In 1947 a friend entered her name in a lonely hearts club as a joke, and Raymond Fernandez wrote back.
Fernandez had been running a fraud on widows and spinsters through those columns for years: he courted them by post, married or moved in with them, took their savings, and left. Martha Beck found him out almost immediately and, rather than leaving, joined him. She travelled with him as his sister, which is what made the scheme work at close quarters, and she was violently jealous of every woman he had to be attentive to. Myrtle Young was among the women who died.
They were convicted of the murder of Janet Fay, a sixty-six-year-old widow from Albany, whom Beck beat with a hammer in January 1949 in Queens and whom they buried in a cellar, and of Delphine Downing and her two-year-old daughter Rainelle in Michigan the following month. Michigan had no death penalty, so they were extradited to New York, which did.
They were tried in a trial that was covered principally as a spectacle about Beck's weight and their sex life, and the newspapers named them the Lonely Hearts Killers. Both were convicted in August 1949. They were electrocuted at Sing Sing on March 8, 1951, Fernandez first. Estimates of the total run to seventeen or twenty; three were proved.