On March 1, 1949, police called at a house on Byron Center Road in Wyoming Township, outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, because the neighbors had not seen Delphine Downing, a young widow, or her two-year-old daughter, Rainelle, for days. Inside were a man and a woman who said they were brother and sister. In the basement were the bodies of the mother and the child. The man, Raymond Martinez Fernandez, confessed almost at once.
Downing had met Fernandez through the lonely hearts correspondence clubs of the postwar years, as all his victims did. He had come to stay with his supposed sister, Martha Beck. On February 28 Downing became agitated and Fernandez gave her sleeping pills. When Rainelle saw her mother in a stupor and cried, Beck choked the child. Afraid that Downing would notice the bruises, Fernandez shot her as she lay unconscious. The couple stayed on in the house for several days, until Beck, enraged again by the child's crying, drowned her in a basin of water.
Weeks earlier, in January 1949, they had killed Janet Fay, a sixty-six-year-old widow who had become engaged to Fernandez and moved into their apartment on Long Island. When Beck found Fay in bed with Fernandez, she struck her on the head with a hammer, and Fernandez strangled her. Fay's family grew suspicious when she vanished, and the pair fled west.
Fernandez had been born in the Territory of Hawaii on December 17, 1914, to Spanish parents, and grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. As a young man he worked on an uncle's farm in Spain, married Encarnación Robles and had four children, whom he later abandoned. He served in the Spanish merchant marine and, during the Second World War, with British intelligence. In late 1945, on a freighter bound for Curaçao, a steel hatch cover fell on his head and fractured his skull; he was in the hospital until March 1946 and came out, by his family's account, a changed man, balding and scarred. Soon afterward he was jailed for a year for trying to smuggle stolen clothing through customs at Mobile, Alabama, and in prison in Tallahassee a cellmate taught him voodoo, which he came to believe gave him power over women.
He was already a swindler of lonely women when Martha Beck answered his letter in 1947. Jane Lucilla Thompson, with whom he traveled to Spain, died there on November 8, 1947, after leaving him everything; no autopsy was done, and Fernandez moved into her New York apartment as her widower. Beck, a nurse and single mother from Pensacola, Florida, left her job and her two children to join him, and from then on she played his sister, which made the women trust them. On August 14, 1948, he married Myrtle Young; drugged and robbed, she was put on a bus home to Arkansas and died soon afterward.
Because Michigan had no death penalty, the pair were extradited to New York, where they were tried only for the murder of Janet Fay. Fernandez tried to take back his confession, saying he had made it to protect Beck, and both denied the seventeen murders the press attributed to them. The prosecutor, Edward Robinson, confronted Fernandez with Jane Thompson, the Downings and Myrtle Young, all dead after meeting him. Both were convicted and sentenced to death, and on March 8, 1951, they were electrocuted at Sing Sing. The case inspired the film The Honeymoon Killers and several others.