Raymond Martinez Fernandez was born in Hawaii on December 17, 1914, to Spanish parents, and grew up partly in Connecticut and partly in Spain. He served with British intelligence in Gibraltar during the war and was decorated. In 1945, on a ship home, a hatch cover struck him on the head and he suffered a serious brain injury. His family said he was a different man afterwards, and he came out of hospital with a personality his relatives did not recognise, having lost most of his hair.
He began working the lonely hearts columns, which in the late 1940s were full of widows and single women left by the war. He would correspond, present himself as a courtly Spanish gentleman, visit, propose, obtain access to bank accounts and property, and disappear. He believed he had supernatural powers of attraction, having acquired a book on voodoo in prison in Spain.
Those named in the record are Jane Lucilla Thompson; Myrtle Young; Janet Fay, sixty-six; and Delphine Downing, forty-one, with her two-year-old daughter Rainelle.
In 1947 he wrote to Martha Beck, and from then they worked together, with Beck posing as his sister. Their convicted victims were Janet Fay, a widow of sixty-six killed in Queens in January 1949, and Delphine Downing and her two-year-old daughter Rainelle in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in February.
They were extradited to New York because Michigan could not execute them, and were convicted in August 1949 after a trial the press treated as entertainment. Fernandez was electrocuted at Sing Sing on March 8, 1951, minutes before Beck. Estimates of the number of women he defrauded run to a hundred, and of those he killed to seventeen.