On March 1, 1949, police called at a house on Byron Center Road in Wyoming Township, outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, after neighbors reported that the widow who lived there, Delphine Downing, twenty-eight, and her two-year-old daughter, Rainelle, had disappeared. The two people still in the house, a man and a heavyset woman who said she was his sister, were arrested. In the basement lay the bodies of mother and child. The man, Raymond Fernandez, quickly confessed. The woman was Martha Beck.
Martha Jule Seabrook was born on May 6, 1920, in Milton, Florida. Overweight, blamed at the time on a glandular problem, she reached puberty early, and at her trial she said her brother had raped her and her mother had beaten her for it. Truman Capote later said that as a boy of ten he had run away from home for a day with an older girl who became the Lonely Hearts Killer. She studied nursing but could not find work because of her weight, prepared women's bodies for burial for an undertaker, then nursed at an Army hospital in California, where she became pregnant by a man who would not marry her. Back in Florida she told everyone the father had been killed in the Pacific, and the town mourned him. She then became pregnant by a Pensacola bus driver, Alfred Beck, married him and was divorced within six months. By 1946, with two children, she was working at the Pensacola Hospital for Children. In 1947 a lonely hearts ad brought her a letter from Fernandez.
Fernandez, born in Hawaii on December 17, 1914, to Spanish parents and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, had abandoned a wife and four children in Spain and served in the Spanish merchant navy and with British intelligence in the war. After a jail term for theft, during which a cellmate taught him voodoo, he claimed black magic gave him power over women, and he had been swindling women he met through the personal columns. He visited Beck, returned to New York, and when she was abruptly fired she turned up on his doorstep. Told his trade, she sent her children to the Salvation Army and joined him.
She posed as his sister, which reassured the women; some agreed to stay with the pair because another woman was in the house. She was violently jealous and went to great lengths to keep him from sleeping with his marks, and when he did, both felt her temper. The police would attribute seventeen murders to them, and suspicion ran as high as twenty; they denied all of them. In 1949, three were proved. Janet Fay, sixty-six, became engaged to Fernandez and came to stay at his apartment on Long Island. When Beck caught her in bed with him, she hit Fay on the head with a hammer, and Fernandez strangled her. Fay's family grew suspicious, and the couple fled west to the Downing house.
On February 28, Delphine Downing became agitated and Fernandez gave her sleeping pills. Her daughter saw her stupor and began to cry, and Beck, enraged, choked the child without killing her. Afraid Downing would notice the bruises when she woke, Fernandez shot her as she lay unconscious. The couple stayed on in the house for days, and when Rainelle's crying enraged Beck again she drowned the girl in a basin of water. They buried both in the basement.
Michigan had no death penalty, so they were extradited to New York, which did. Fernandez tried to take back his confession, saying he had made it only to protect Beck. The Fay murder was the only one for which they were tried. The press made the trial a spectacle, and named them the Lonely Hearts Killers. Both were sentenced to death, and they were electrocuted at Sing Sing on March 8, 1951. The case became the film The Honeymoon Killers in 1970 and was retold in Deep Crimson, Lonely Hearts and Alleluia.