Raymond Martinez Fernandez spent the last years of the 1940s writing letters to women he found through mail-order lonely hearts clubs. Some of them he courted, two of them he married, and from several he took money. From late 1947 he did this with Martha Beck, a nurse from Florida who had answered one of his own letters and who traveled with him as his sister. In January 1949 a widow from Albany, New York, named Janet Fay died in the couple's apartment on Long Island. In late February 1949 Michigan police arrested the pair at the home of another widow, Delphine Downing, near Grand Rapids, after she and her small daughter went missing.
The statements Fernandez and Beck made in Michigan led New York detectives to Janet Fay's body. Fernandez pleaded guilty in a Michigan court to shooting Delphine Downing, but he was not sentenced there. New York, which had the death penalty when Michigan did not, extradited both of them, and a jury in the Bronx convicted them of Fay's murder in the summer of 1949. The New York Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in July 1950, with one judge dissenting. Both were electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison on March 8, 1951. The newspapers called them the Lonely Hearts Killers, and the case later became the basis of the 1970 film The Honeymoon Killers.
The case is known mainly from the 1950 opinion of the New York Court of Appeals, which set out the evidence at length, on the reference work Great American Trials, on archival press photo captions from 1949, on New York State Archives records of the prison case files, and on a 2024 local history column about Janet Fay's family. Much of what is told about Fernandez elsewhere, including stories of a head injury, a prison term and other wives who died, remains unconfirmed.
The Court of Appeals summarized Fernandez's early life in a few sentences. He was born in Hawaii to Spanish parents and was brought to the mainland United States as a child. He lived in the United States until 1932, when his mother took him to Spain. There, at the age of 17, he married. The marriage produced four children, and his wife was still living in Spain at the time of his trial in 1949.
In Spain he worked on oil lands his father owned, the court said, and he later took part in the fighting of the Spanish civil war, which the opinion called the Spanish revolution. In 1946 he came back to the United States alone, leaving his wife and children in Spain, and found work with a construction company in Brooklyn. He was 34 years old when he went on trial in June 1949.
At some point after his return he joined a lonely hearts club, one of the mail-order services of the period that put lonely people in touch by letter, and began writing to a large number of women. The court noted that he kept up this correspondence even after he and Beck began living together, that he went to see several of the women he wrote to, and that he married two of them. The opinion does not name those two wives or say what became of them. A press photo caption from 1949 called him a "Mail Order" Romeo and noted that he wore a toupee.
Martha Jule Beck was 29 at the time of the trial, according to the Court of Appeals. She was born in Florida, did well in high school, and graduated from the Pensacola School of Nursing as a registered nurse. She worked in Florida and later held senior hospital posts in California and Arizona. Her first child was born in September 1944. Three months later she married Alfred Beck, who was not the child's father and who, she learned, already had a wife and four children. She left him, gave birth to a second child, his, in December 1945, and was divorced from him in March 1947. Great American Trials describes her as twice married and divorced and, by 1947, as the superintendent of a home for disabled children in Pensacola.
In 1947, according to Great American Trials, she answered a notice in a romance magazine and paid five dollars to join a lonely hearts club. Fernandez was one of the men who wrote to her. The Court of Appeals records that the two met in person in December 1947, at her home in Florida. In the account given in Great American Trials, Fernandez spent two days with her, learned that she had no money, went back to New York and wrote that he no longer loved her. Beck then lost her job, followed him to New York and moved into his apartment.
From then on, apart from short periods, the two lived together in New York City until December 1948. Beck stayed with Fernandez while he went on writing to other women, and she was presented to them as his sister. Great American Trials says it was Beck who proposed that they go beyond swindling the women they met and kill them; the Court of Appeals opinion does not address who first suggested what, and the claim rests on the reference work alone.
Janet J. Fay was a widow who lived in Albany. Her husband, Matthew Fay, a steamfitter, had died suddenly in 1946, according to a 2024 history column by Bob Cudmore in The Recorder, a newspaper in the Daily Gazette group. She had a stepdaughter, a nurse, who had married a physician and lived in the city of Amsterdam, northwest of Albany. Sources give her age differently: Great American Trials says she was 66; The Recorder says she was about 60 when Fernandez began to court her.
Fernandez wrote to her through a lonely hearts club under the name "Charles Martin," the Court of Appeals said. In late December 1948 he and Beck drove to Albany, and he courted her there; Beck was introduced as his sister. The Recorder, drawing on the historian David Fiske, says the courtship began at her apartment on New Year's Eve and that Beck stayed at a hotel. Fernandez proposed and Fay accepted. Early in 1949 she took the couple to meet her stepdaughter and her stepdaughter's husband in Amsterdam. He later said the visitors "weren't suspicious in any way."
On January 3, 1949, Fay withdrew more than $4,000 in cash and cashier's checks from Albany banks and gave the money to Fernandez, the court found. Great American Trials adds jewelry and bonds. That same day the couple drove her to an apartment they had rented in Valley Stream, in Nassau County on Long Island, where they had moved in the middle of December 1948. That evening Fay and Fernandez wrote letters to her friends in Albany, each sheet marked "Surprise" above her signature.
Janet Fay died in the Valley Stream apartment in the early morning of January 4, 1949, between about 3 and 4 a.m. How she died was the central question at the trial, because the two defendants told it differently from each other and differently from their own earlier confessions.
In the confessions they gave in Michigan in March 1949, as the Court of Appeals described them, both said that Beck struck Fay with a hammer and that a scarf was then tightened around her neck, with Fernandez taking part. Beck's statement said that the two of them realized they had gone too far. The Recorder, summarizing the prosecution's case, says Beck became jealous when she saw Fernandez embrace Fay, that she struck Fay with the hammer, and that Fernandez strangled her with a scarf.
At the trial both changed their accounts. Fernandez testified that he had gone to the bathroom while Beck was with Fay in the living room, and that when he came back Fay was bleeding and Beck was saying she was dead. He said he had tied the scarf around her neck to stop the bleeding and denied strangling her. Beck testified that Fay was alive when she went into the living room, that there was an argument and she slapped Fay, and that she remembered nothing more until Fernandez shook her and she saw Fay was dead. The court noted that each account put more of the blame on the other defendant.
The steps that followed were not in serious dispute, and the Court of Appeals set them out. The couple concealed Janet Fay's death and her body. Fernandez tried without success to cash a $2,000 check Fay had given him. About ten days after the death, the body was hidden at a house the couple had rented in Queens.
Over the signed "Surprise" sheets, the couple typed notes to Fay's friends in Albany saying how happy and contented she was with "Charles." Her family noticed. The Recorder says the stepdaughter's household received a typed letter that worried them, because Fay never typed her letters; her stepdaughter's husband said later that none of her letters had ever been typed and that the family thought it very unusual. The stepdaughter persuaded the Albany police to look for her stepmother, the column says, and Great American Trials also credits her with alerting New York police.
Later that winter Fernandez and Beck set out by car, heading, the Court of Appeals said, toward Alaska. They got as far as Grand Rapids, Michigan. There they stayed with Delphine Downing, a widow who lived near the city with her young daughter. Like Fay, she had come to know Fernandez by letter. Great American Trials describes her as a widow with a 2-year-old daughter and gives her age as 41; a press photo caption written in Grand Rapids on March 3, 1949, called the child 20 months old. Other ages circulate for the mother, and the point remains unsettled.
On the night of February 26, 1949, Fernandez shot Delphine Downing. The Court of Appeals recorded this from his own testimony at his New York trial, given after he was told he had the right to refuse to answer questions that might incriminate him. Great American Trials says she had turned against him after seeing him without his toupee. Her daughter died in the house as well; Great American Trials attributes the child's death to Beck. Neighbors reported that the mother and child were missing, Great American Trials says.
On February 28, 1949, Michigan police arrested Fernandez and Beck at the Downing home, where they had been asked about Delphine Downing's whereabouts. The Court of Appeals was careful to say that Janet Fay's death in New York was not the reason they were taken into custody; it was the Michigan disappearance.
Over the following days both defendants made statements to the Kent County authorities. Statements given on March 1 and March 2 implicated them in the Downing deaths and also led police to Janet Fay's body in Queens, the court said; those statements were not put in evidence at the New York trial. Fernandez gave a further confession on March 3, and Beck gave a corrective statement on March 11. Those two were the confessions the New York jury heard. The Recorder says the couple told the Michigan police about the New York widow as well, and that Fay's stepdaughter identified her body.
On March 2, 1949, according to the Court of Appeals, Fernandez pleaded guilty in the County Court of Kent County, Michigan, to having shot and killed Mrs. Downing. The opinion mentions the plea because his own defense lawyer brought it into the New York trial record. A Michigan sentence on that plea was not reported.
Great American Trials says that a notebook found on Fernandez held the names of about 20 missing women. That list has never been tied to any further charge.
The Michigan prosecutor in the case was Roger McMahon of Kent County. A Bettmann Archive press photograph dated March 3, 1949, shows him with Beck and says Michigan officials were waiting for Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York to sign the warrant and extradition papers so that the pair could be taken to New York to stand trial for the death of Janet Fay. Both The Recorder and Great American Trials explain the choice the same way: New York had the death penalty, and Michigan did not.
The extradition went ahead. An Associated Press photograph dated March 15, 1949, shows Fernandez and Beck at an airplane ramp in Grand Rapids, leaving for Nassau County with two Nassau County detectives, Captain Elmer Robinson and Charles Hildebrandt.
Fernandez and Beck later said they had been promised in Michigan that their statements would not be used outside that state. McMahon and the New York prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Edward Robinson, both denied making any such promise. The trial judge left the question to the jury, and the Court of Appeals held that this was correct, since it turned on whose account the jurors believed.
A Nassau County grand jury indicted Fernandez and Beck for the first-degree murder of Janet Fay. The case was prosecuted by the office of the Nassau County District Attorney, Frank A. Gulotta. Great American Trials names Edward F. Breslin, James W. Gehrig and Edward Robinson Jr. as the chief prosecutors; the Court of Appeals refers to Robinson and to Philip Huntington, who also argued the appeal. The trial was moved out of Nassau County to Bronx County, in New York City, and was heard by Justice Ferdinand Pecora.
Before trial, both defendants retained the same lawyer, Herbert E. Rosenberg. On June 6, 1949, Fernandez wrote to Justice Pecora saying he had no money and that his friends and family could not help with his defense, and asked the court to assign Rosenberg to him. The prosecution did not object, and the judge made the assignment, so that Rosenberg represented Fernandez by assignment and Beck by retainer at the same time.
On June 29 the defense told the court it had not had time to study the transcripts, and the judge offered to add another lawyer. The next day Rosenberg reported that both defendants were perfectly satisfied and wanted no one else. The question of whether one lawyer could properly defend two people whose stories blamed each other became the main issue on appeal. In January 1950, before the main appeal was decided, the Court of Appeals denied a motion concerning the assignment of John McKim Minton as Fernandez's counsel on appeal; Minton went on to argue the appeal for him.
Selecting the jury took twelve court days and three panels with more than 600 prospective jurors, according to the Court of Appeals. The prosecution challenged 32 of them because they said they opposed capital punishment, and Justice Pecora excused them without letting the defense ask whether their views would actually stop them from returning a guilty verdict. That ruling was the second major point argued on appeal.
The trial began in June 1949. The Court of Appeals described it as lasting ten weeks and producing a record of more than 4,000 pages; Great American Trials gives the dates as June 9 to August 18, 1949.
The prosecution put in the confessions from Michigan, the evidence of the money, the typed notes and the hidden body, and testimony from Fay's family. The Recorder says her stepdaughter testified about the couple's visit to her home in Amsterdam.
Both defendants testified. Fernandez's position at trial was that Beck alone had killed Fay while he was out of the room, and that his own part came afterward, in hiding the body. If the jury had believed him, the dissenting judge on appeal later wrote, he would have been guilty at most as an accessory after the fact. Beck's account was that her mind went blank after the argument with Fay. Great American Trials says both defendants testified at length about their private life together, apparently in an effort to show insanity, and that Beck told the court of four suicide attempts. According to the same account, when Beck was called to testify she crossed the courtroom and kissed Fernandez before guards pulled her away. Turner Classic Movies, in a 2006 essay on the film based on the case, records that Beck said at the trial that she loved Fernandez enough to do anything he asked.
Both had entered pleas of insanity. Fernandez withdrew his during the trial, at his own specific request, his lawyer said. Beck's plea stayed in. Two psychiatrists called by the prosecution, Dr. Lichtenstein and Dr. McCartney, had examined her in the jail at Mineola. They testified that she knew the nature and quality of her act and knew it was wrong, and that she had no loss of memory at the time of the killing. A psychiatrist for the defense called her mentally unsound, Great American Trials says. In his charge to the jury, Justice Pecora said that "that kind of abnormality does not, in and of itself, constitute the kind of insanity" that would excuse a criminal act.
The jury deliberated for about 12 and a half hours, according to Great American Trials, and found both defendants guilty of murder in the first degree. Under New York law at the time the sentence for that verdict was death, and both were sentenced to die in the electric chair. They were held at Sing Sing Prison at Ossining, where they were later executed. The New York State Archives holds their case files in its series of files on inmates sentenced to electrocution: Beck as prisoner 108594 and Fernandez as prisoner 108595.
The Court of Appeals, New York's highest court, decided the appeal on July 11, 1950, in People v. Fernandez, reported at 301 N.Y. 302. It affirmed both convictions.
Judge Lewis wrote the main opinion. On the jurors, he held that a declared objection to the death penalty did not automatically disqualify a juror under the statute, but that the trial court had discretion to excuse a juror who could not try the case impartially, and such a declaration was some evidence of that. It would have been better practice, he wrote, to allow further questioning before ruling, but the rulings were not reversible error. On the Michigan confessions, he held that the dispute over the alleged promise was a question of credibility for the jury. He gave the promise argument no weight at all as to Beck's March 11 statement, because she had acknowledged it could be used against her in New York. He found that the warning Dr. Lichtenstein said he had given Beck before her examination, if the jury believed it, answered her objection to the psychiatric evidence. On joint representation, he relied on the presumption that the trial judge had done his duty and on the judge's later praise of defense counsel.
Judge Desmond agreed with the result. On the lawyer, he wrote that the defendants had chosen Rosenberg long before trial, had asked for the assignment themselves and had told the judge they were satisfied, and that a defendant is entitled to counsel of his choice. On the jury, he went further than Judge Lewis: refusing to let the defense question the excused jurors was, in his view, "plain error" under the Code of Criminal Procedure, but it did not affect the defendants' substantial rights and was not a ground for reversal.
Judge Conway dissented and would have ordered a new trial. He argued that the conflict between the two defendants was obvious. Fernandez's defense, if believed, meant that Beck alone was guilty, and a lawyer pressing that point for one client would be harming the other. He wrote that the trial judge's charge never put Fernandez's accessory defense to the jury, that the lawyer could not ask for such an instruction without stressing Beck's sole guilt, and that the court had faced "the impossible task of defending two clients" and should have acted. "The duty devolved upon the court to take prompt action," he wrote.
After the Court of Appeals ruled, the case went to Governor Dewey and to the federal courts. Great American Trials records that Dewey refused clemency and that the United States Supreme Court declined to review the case. Fernandez also complained of cruel treatment at Sing Sing, and a request for a writ of habeas corpus on that ground was denied, according to the same work.
Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing on March 8, 1951. Fernandez died first and Beck after him, Great American Trials says. The New York State Archives' index to the Sing Sing case files lists March 8, 1951, as the date each left the prison's custody. The Recorder gives their ages at death as 36 and 31.
Janet Fay's stepdaughter had been the first to push the authorities to look for her, according to The Recorder's account, and she identified the body and testified at the trial. The column quotes her husband as saying that the visitors from New York had not seemed suspicious in any way, and that the typed letters, unlike anything Fay had sent before, struck the family as very unusual. The Recorder's 2024 column marked the case's connection to Amsterdam, where the family lived.
Little else has been reliably reported about Janet Fay or Delphine Downing. Fay is known to have been a widow in Albany after her husband's death, with family in Amsterdam and friends in Albany to whom she wrote. Downing is known to have been a widow raising a young daughter near Grand Rapids.
Great American Trials lists as further reading Wenzel Brown's Introduction to Murder, published in New York by Greenberg in 1952, as well as accounts in general crime reference works by Richard Glyn Jones, Carl Sifakis and Colin Wilson.
The 1970 film The Honeymoon Killers, written and directed by Leonard Kastle and produced by Warren Steibel, was based on the case. According to the American Film Institute catalog, it opened in New York on February 4, 1970, had been developed under the titles The Lonely Hearts Killers and Dear Martha, and starred Shirley Stoler as Martha Beck and Tony Lo Bianco as Fernandez, with Mary Jane Higby as Janet Fay. Turner Classic Movies' essay on the film says Kastle wanted an "anti-Bonnie and Clyde" that showed crime as ugly and its perpetrators as pathetic. The film's story invents and compresses some events, and it is not a source for the facts of the case. The Recorder notes that the case also inspired the 2006 film Lonely Hearts and several television episodes.
How Janet Fay died. The jury accepted the prosecution's case that both defendants were guilty of her murder, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. But the two confessions, the two trial accounts and the prosecution's summary do not match on who did what. Fernandez always maintained at trial that Beck acted alone and that he only helped afterward. Judge Conway, dissenting in the Court of Appeals, thought the jury should have been told how to treat that defense.
The Michigan promise. Both defendants said they had been promised their Michigan statements would stay in Michigan. Both prosecutors denied it, the jury heard the conflict, and the appeal court left it there.
The Michigan plea. The Court of Appeals records that Fernandez pleaded guilty in Kent County on March 2, 1949, to killing Delphine Downing, and that he described shooting her in his New York testimony. No sentence on that plea has been reported, and the death of her daughter, which Great American Trials attributes to Beck, was never tried against either of them in New York.
The wider count. Fernandez claimed after his arrest to have killed 17 women, according to The Recorder, but the authorities could not confirm this. Great American Trials says a notebook found on him listed about 20 missing women. Neither figure was ever the subject of a charge, and later retellings that treat them as proven killings go beyond the record. The Court of Appeals says only that he married two of his correspondents and visited others; it does not say that any of them died.
Beck's role in the scheme. Great American Trials says Beck proposed that the couple kill the women rather than only swindle them. That is one account; the court record does not settle it.
1932: Fernandez, who was born in Hawaii and raised partly in the mainland United States, is taken to Spain by his mother; he marries there at 17.
1946: He returns to the United States alone and works for a construction company in Brooklyn; he joins a lonely hearts club.
March 1947: Martha Beck is divorced from Alfred Beck.
1947: Beck joins a lonely hearts club and begins writing to Fernandez.
December 1947: Fernandez and Beck meet in person at her home in Florida; she later moves to New York to live with him.
1948: Fernandez keeps writing to women; he marries two of them, per the Court of Appeals.
Mid-December 1948: The couple move to a rented apartment in Valley Stream, Nassau County.
Late December 1948: Fernandez, as "Charles Martin," courts Janet Fay in Albany, with Beck posing as his sister.
January 3, 1949: Fay withdraws more than $4,000 and gives it to Fernandez; the couple drive her to Valley Stream.
January 4, 1949: Fay dies in the Valley Stream apartment in the early morning.
Mid-January 1949: About ten days after her death, per the Court of Appeals, Fernandez hides her body in a rented house in Queens.
February 26, 1949: Fernandez shoots Delphine Downing near Grand Rapids, by his own later testimony; her young daughter also dies.
February 28, 1949: Michigan police arrest Fernandez and Beck at the Downing home.
March 1 to 3, 1949: Both make statements to Kent County authorities; Fernandez confesses on March 3.
March 2, 1949: Fernandez pleads guilty in the County Court of Kent County to killing Delphine Downing.
March 11, 1949: Beck gives a corrective statement.
March 15, 1949: Both are flown from Grand Rapids to New York with Nassau County detectives.
June 6, 1949: Fernandez asks Justice Pecora to assign Herbert E. Rosenberg as his lawyer.
June 1949: Trial opens in Bronx County.
August 1949: The trial ends (August 18, per Great American Trials) with verdicts of guilty of first-degree murder against both; death sentences follow.
January 13, 1950: The Court of Appeals denies a motion on Fernandez's appellate counsel.
July 11, 1950: The Court of Appeals affirms both convictions, Judge Conway dissenting.
After July 1950: Governor Dewey refuses clemency; the U.S. Supreme Court declines review.
March 8, 1951: Fernandez and Beck are executed at Sing Sing.
February 4, 1970: The Honeymoon Killers opens in New York.