THE LONELY HEARTS KILLERS: RAYMOND FERNANDEZ AND MARTHA BECK

Article BY Denise Noe

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Mistreated Boy

Raymond Fernandez was born in Hawaii of Spanish immigrant parents in 1914. When Ray was three, his family moved to Connecticut. There his father ran into job discrimination because of his broken English and dark complexion as he worked intermittently at a series of low paid jobs. The elder Fernandez saw another disappointment in his son who was often sickly and always frail. Young Ray lacked the “macho” his father wanted in a male child.

Frustrated, financially struggling, and disappointed in many ways, the elder Fernandez drank heavily. He was a mean drunk who often used excessive corporal punishment on Ray. The punishments sometimes escalated into outright beatings.

Like so many mistreated children, Ray seems to have developed a deep ambivalence toward his abuser. He feared his father’s wrath yet admired the way he ruled as the undisputed king of his outwardly humble castle.

If only Ray could be strong enough, masculine enough to make his father proud! But alas, the boy was stuck in a small-framed, non-muscular body.

The boy was self-conscious about several things, including his looks and his family’s material deprivation. As an adolescent, he tried to assuage the sense of gnawing emptiness by stealing. Jailed at 15, the teenager decided to reverse the general movement of immigration: he would leave America for Spain, the land of his forebears, and make a fresh start there. Upon his release, he did exactly that. Relatives in the old country were willing to take Ray in and he settled down and grew to adulthood in Spain.

The Great Depression hit the United States and Ray’s father believed he had had enough of life in the supposed land of opportunity. He also wanted to re-establish a relationship with his son so he wrote to Ray Fernandez and told him of his desires. Ray’s mother and father joined him in Spain.

They found that their son had become a well-liked young man. He had a calm, genial manner that easily won him friends, especially among women. The thin lanky physique that his father had often frowned upon brought a smile to many a female mouth.

When Fernandez was about twenty years old, he married Encarnación Robles and fathered a child with her. The financially troubled couple argued frequently and Fernandez solved his marital problems as he previously had solved his legal ones, by leaving the country. Almost as soon as he got back to America, however, Encarnación wrote to him that their young son was very sick. Alarmed, Fernandez took the first boat back to Spain.

There he found a country ripped apart by Civil War. He enlisted in Franco’s army.  After Franco’s victory, Fernandez drifted from job to job. He could not make much money but did the best he could to support himself and his family. He was a gardener and a garbage collector and performed other tasks both manual and menial.

World War II started and Fernandez saw an opportunity. In 1939, he traveled to Gibraltar and set up as an ice-cream vendor, selling this goodie to British military personnel and tourists.

One day a British man asked to speak privately with the ice-cream seller. Apparently the Brit recognized that the extroverted man who easily made friends could be of special use. The British man explained that he was from British Intelligence and said, “We can use you provided you are capable of obeying orders and being discreet.”

Fernandez assured the questioner that he was and he became a low-level spy for the Allies. Precisely what he did remains obscure but Fernandez appears to have demonstrated both intelligence and courage to his spymasters. Bruce Sander, in an article published in Killer Couples, quotes a glowing testimonial that British Intelligence presented to the spy as stating, “Raymond Fernandez was entirely loyal to the Allied cause and carried out his duties, which were sometimes difficult and dangerous, extremely well.”

After the war, the ex-spy did not want to return to his life as a laborer. 

He signed on with a ship, apparently hoping for a life of high-spirited adventure. Instead, he had an accident that would drastically alter his life. A hatch cover slammed across his head, cracking his skull. The accident sheared off much of the thick, black hair of which he had been so proud and left gruesome scars in its place. After this misfortune, Fernandez suffered severe headaches and, although it is hard to pinpoint the exact nature of his personality change, most acquaintances believed his general demeanor and conduct worsened. Where he had previously been calm and controlled, he became grumpy and sullen, sometimes flying into a rage at the slightest provocation. Perhaps the worst damage done was to his ego. Insecure as a child, he had found comfort in knowing that women found him attractive and he knew that his abundant dark hair had been part of his appeal. Being partially bald and scarred must have reawakened the insecurities of his childhood.

The ship he boarded sailed for the United States of America but Fernandez first re-visited the nation of his childhood from a jail cell because he had stolen items from the vessel. After a year behind bars, Fernandez went to Brooklyn to look up his sister. The kind-hearted woman gave her brother shelter and he gave her a hard time. Unable to find employment, he was generally in a bad temper and often verbally lashed out at her.

During this period, Fernandez began practicing voodoo. His sister was disconcerted by the odor of incense that frequently wafted from his room as well as the indecipherable chantings he uttered as he knelt before his makeshift altar.

According to Sander, Fernandez told his sister “a fantastic story about learning Voodoo spells and rites from a prisoner in Tallahassee with whom he had become friendly.” He also claimed he had learned how to “hypnotize folks from a distance” and “make women do what I want by thought concentration.”

Fernandez’s sister understandably scoffed at his bragging. But Fernandez was to show that he did indeed have a certain baffling power over some members of the female gender.

He wrote to several members of various lonely-hearts clubs. In 1947, he began writing to Jane Thompson.

Thompson’s marriage had recently collapsed. Bespectacled and plain-faced, she was not sure she would be able to find another husband and a life of solitude frightened her. The letters she received from Fernandez impressed her with their tone of gentle caring. She was also excited by this man’s romantic approach: he asked for a lock of her hair! She was delighted to send it to him.

She did not know that the hair was for a voodoo spell that Fernandez believed would put a woman completely under his power. Soon the letter writers arranged a meeting.

Wearing a toupee of thick, black hair over his hated baldness, Fernandez was gratified to find Thompson easily falling under his “spell.” While Fernandez was to attribute much of his success with women to voodoo, it is more likely that his firm belief in it helped him radiate the confidence that so many women found appealing. Fernandez had a gut-level understanding of female needs and knew how to make women feel that he desired them. He gazed at each woman as if he were utterly enthralled by her and his piercing dark eyes seemed to turn into mirrors that reflected back an image of youth and beauty to women who were often insecure, aging, and homely. He also never gave the impression that he was just after sex but appeared to care about each woman as a person.

The couple traveled to Spain on Thompson’s funds while pretending to be married.

Strangely, Fernandez took Thompson to meet his real wife – after he convinced Mrs. Fernandez to let herself be introduced to his ersatz wife as an old friend named “Senora Robles.” Why would Encarnación participate in such a bizarre deception, especially when it was so demeaning to her? Like many things about this case, the answer is not known with certainty. However, it is known that Fernandez had a knack for convincing women that he was madly in love with them and a talent for appearing sincere when spouting the most outrageous lies. It is also a common practice among con artists to play on the larcenous spirit in their victims. Perhaps he told his wife that he needed to get money from Thompson so he could finally provide support for her and their young son. If only he pulled this off, he might have insisted, he would settle down once and for all with the woman he deeply loved and had pined for while they had been apart, Encarnación.

The odd trio went out to restaurants, theaters, and bullfights without Thompson suspecting that Ray’s old friend was really his wife and the mother of his child.

However, one day Fernandez and Thompson had a loud, raucous argument in a hotel room.

Thompson was found dead the next morning of digitalis poisoning. Police immediately suspected her “husband” but could not question him because Fernandez took the first boat back to America before his lover’s corpse was cold.

In the US he scammed Jane Thompson’s mother. After several hours, he was able to draw a good facsimile of Jane Thompson’s signature and affixed it to a document purporting to be her last will and testament that left everything she had to Ray Fernandez. Then he sought out her mother, Mrs. Wilson, and showed her the document. His appearance of total sincerity and conviction gulled her into believing it genuine.

The document scared Mrs. Wilson for it said that the home that she had shared with her daughter now belonged to him. He quickly assured her that he was not going to make her leave – after all, she was the mother of a woman who had been so dear to him. The two of them could share the home. “I shall see that you are not disturbed,” he said. “Things for you will continue just as before.” The older woman was grateful to the man who seemed so caring and considerate. She probably thought her daughter must have been lucky to be loved by such a kind, generous person.

While living in Thompson’s mother’s home, Fernandez continued writing to lonely-hearts club members and stealing dollars, checks, jewelry and whatever of value he could grab from them.  His victims were not wealthy so his takes were never high but he was able to make a living through the sheer number of swindles.

The women he conned were single during a time when unmarried women could still be called “spinsters” with no sense of irony. They yearned for passion, which Fernandez seemed to bring, and marriage that he routinely promised. When they realized that they had been taken, they were too ashamed to go to the police about it. They would have had to reveal themselves as fools and, perhaps even worse, to tell the police that they had shared physical intimacies with a man to whom they were not married.

On one of these swindling sorties, he encountered a woman who was to change his life, a sensuous, dark-haired, very lonely, 300-pound nurse named Martha Beck.

Sad Martha

Born Martha Seabrook in Milton, Florida on May 6, 1920, she came into the world with a glandular problem that caused her to be morbidly obese, and she was endlessly teased and jeered by her schoolmates. The unhappy child was plunged into further confusion and grief when her father deserted the family while she was a toddler. To compound her many problems, a brother sexually assaulted Martha when she was thirteen years old.

Once Martha reached adulthood, she applied to and was accepted by a school of nursing. She graduated first in her class after taking examinations in 1942 and getting high marks. For once, it looked like Martha Seabrook was going to succeed at something.

However, she had difficulty getting employment despite her qualifications.  She attributed this to her weight. It is quite possible that she was right for extremely fat people have long been, and still are, discriminated against.

Finally, an undertaker hired her to prepare corpses for him. The job was a bitter disappointment. Seabrook had honed her skills in nursing school and knew that she could give good care to patients. Yet she could only get a job working with those no longer able to benefit from the quality of that care.

In her free time, the lonely woman escaped the disappointments and failures of her life by reading true romance magazines. She also frequented theaters to watch movies like The Garden of Allah and Gaslight that starred her favorite actor, Charles Boyer.

After eight months working for the mortician, Seabrook heard that there was a nurse shortage in California so she decided to take her chances there. She hoped she would be given the opportunity to care for those who could still be helped. Shortly after her arrival in the sunshine state, she got a job at a hospital.

Seabrook also started to partially live out the fantasies of romance that she had nurtured for so long. She had an affair with a bus driver. Soon the morbidly obese twenty-something nurse soon found herself pregnant and demanded that her boyfriend marry her. He put her off, and then apparently decided it was better to be dead than wed, at least to her. He attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Pacific Ocean. Rescuers pulled him out before he could drown but he made a hurried and complete exit from Seabrook’s life.

Seabrook was unable to track him down and her mind apparently snapped under the stress of having to face an unwed pregnancy in an era when it was a disgrace. She was hospitalized for psychiatric reasons.

She appeared to recover after a few days. Then she behaved quite sensibly for her circumstances, moving to Pensacola, Florida so she could put on a wedding ring and plausibly pretend to be the wife of a soldier away in the war. Around the time of her baby’s birth, she sent herself a phony telegram saying her husband had been killed in action.

The new mother and ersatz war widow found herself a genuine beau by the name of Alfred Beck. Oddly, like the father of her child, he was a bus driver. The two soon married but Alfred Beck divorced Martha within a year, while she was pregnant for the second time.

Although her personal life was once again bleak, Martha Beck’s career took a turn for the better. The Pensacola Crippled Children’s Home hired her.  She did so well at her work that she was promoted to superintendent. It seemed like she was finally going to make something of herself as a nurse.

Perhaps her on-the-job success encouraged Beck to take another chance on love for she joined Mother Dinene’s Family Club for Lonely Hearts and received a letter from Ray Fernandez. She took a liking to the man whose epistles were so courtly and charming.

Unbridled Passion

After corresponding regularly for awhile, they agreed to meet in Florida. When Beck saw the thin, black-haired gentleman who had written her such flowery letters, she fell head over heels. She thought he resembled her idol, Charles Boyer.

Surprisingly, Fernandez, accustomed to deceiving women only to bilk them out of bucks, was smitten as well. Most articles about the case say that Fernandez was attracted to Beck “despite” her weight. However, it seems equally possible that he was attracted to her because of it. For some people, fat is a powerful aphrodisiac and the skinny Fernandez may have been a fat admirer. At any rate, the couple spent many steamy hours in hotel rooms gratifying their mutual passion.

Fernandez soon realized that Beck had no money and no property. After two days of sensual bliss, he wanted to return to women who would gratify his greed rather than just his lust. He made an excuse to Beck and headed back to New York.

From the Big Apple, he wrote his large lover a “Dear Johnette” letter. The epistle devastated Beck but it was only the beginning of her troubles.

Word about Beck’s hotel trysts got back to the board of the Pensacola Crippled Children’s Home. The time period was one in which “moral turpitude” was grounds for firing and Beck got the axe.

Unemployed and bereft of her love, saddled with the care and support of two little children, the understandably frightened woman cast about for a life preserver. She determined that wily little Ray Fernandez would be her salvation whether he liked it or not.

The jobless nurse and single mother packed up her bags, took her kids, and headed for Fernandez’s home. For reasons that can only be speculated upon, Fernandez’s reaction to these uninvited and unannounced visitors was to take them in.

What could those reasons have been? Fernandez was used to loving and leaving women – after fleecing them. They were suckers but not this woman. She wanted to impose on and take from him. That was quite a switch and may have even been an oddly refreshing one. The demanding, take-no-nonsense Beck had a will as strong as his. Her fat may have inflamed his erotic passion while her brashness aroused deeper emotions, perhaps even a kind of respect in this twisted man.

However, he soon concluded that the apartment they shared with Jane Thompson’s mother was too crowded for a couple of demanding, energetic little tykes. If she was going to stay with him, Fernandez told her, the kids would have to go.

Beck did not want to return to being a jobless single mother. Even more, she did not want to lose Fernandez for with him she felt that she was actually living out the love stories she had read about in countless romance magazines. He was her own Charles Boyer, just as handsome and charming as the original and a thousand times more precious because he could actually hold her in his arms.

The kids were packed off to Beck’s relatives in Florida.

Not long thereafter, Mrs. Wilson also vacated. Beck may have given her the creeps and, if so, Wilson can be credited with astute judgment.

To Fernandez’s surprise, Beck was not upset when he told her that he had been swindling women through lonely-hearts clubs. Instead, she wanted to join him in the fleecing. Sanders’ analysis was probably right on target when he wrote, “She had suddenly seen an opportunity for hitting back at her own sex, for squaring the long overdue account for all the humiliation and misery she had suffered from the years of tender girlhood.” The pigeons represented every skinny girl who had taunted her, every slender woman who had a husband while she had only True Romance, all the women hired over her as nurses who were no better than she but were favored because they were at a socially acceptable weight. Moreover, she would be a part of deceiving other women into thinking that they had this wonderful, entrancing man and all the while she would know that he was really hers.

They decided that Beck would pose as Fernandez’s sister when they met victims and the loving couple became partners in crime. 

Their first mutual mark was a Pennsylvania schoolteacher named Esther Henne. This “unclaimed blessing” exchanged several letters with Fernandez and was impressed by the eloquence, interest, and concern his epistles radiated. The woman was eventually convinced that she had finally found true love and connubial bliss would soon follow. The skinny suitor visited his amour with his full-figured sister in tow.

Fernandez proposed marriage and the teacher accepted. She found herself on a strange honeymoon, however. Each night, her groom retired to his own bedroom while the bride shared sleeping quarters with her supposed sister-in-law. When the wife objected to this bizarre arrangement, Beck became intimidating which was not hard given that there was a considerable size difference between the two women. The three returned to New York. The wife discovered that her finances had been bled dry but was too frightened to risk a confrontation with Fernandez and Beck. Instead, she just left.

Sanders wrote, “For two years these confidence tricksters worked at their cruel and unrelenting racket, duping the gullible into mock marriages with the alleged brother, and then extracting their personal wealth and making life so generally intolerable that the dupes were glad to decamp.”

In 1948, they found a pigeon too feisty to do as she was told and then get out of the way. Middle-aged widow Myrtle Young of Greene Forrest, Arkansas hoped that life was not passing her by and when she started exchanging letters with the dashing, romantic Fernandez, she was sure she had found a new lease on life. His marriage proposal was eagerly accepted. In August she traveled to Cook County, Illinois where she and her thick-haired Latin Romeo soon wed.

Young was outraged when her ostensible sister-in-law insisted on sharing her honeymoon bed. Beck forced Young to take a heavy dosage of barbiturates. Then she and Fernandez put the semi-conscious woman on board a bus headed for Little Rock, Arkansas. When the bus pulled into the depot, those around Young realized that she was not in an ordinary sleep and rushed her to the hospital where she died shortly after her arrival.

She was unable to share with police the story of her strange honeymoon and coerced doping.

Did Beck and Fernandez intend to kill Young? That cannot be answered with certainty although they were obviously willing to risk it when they forced the barbiturates on her. It is known that they would commit quite deliberate murders soon after this crime.

Although nothing was proven about the death of Jane Thompson, it is possible that Fernandez murdered before he even met Beck. There are no reports of Beck’s being violent before her association with Fernandez. By herself she was pitiful; with him she became murderous.

Beck appears to fall into the pattern of a previously non-criminal woman whose sociopathic tendencies are unleashed through her relationship with a sociopathic man – a man whom she may in turn influence to become even more anti-social than he had previously been.

Why did Beck and Fernandez prey on women? As previously noted, Beck may have had a grudge against other women. Females often feel they are in competition for male company and Beck probably believed she had been unfairly passed over for slimmer women in both work and love.

Fernandez had been abused by a man as a child but, as already noted, his feelings toward his domineering father were profoundly mixed and included admiration, envy and a desire to impress him along with fear and loathing. It is probable that, is often true of abused children, he was contemptuous of his ineffectual mother who watched her son being bullied and beaten but was too weak to do anything about it. Just as his mother put up with alcoholism and child abuse rather than risk losing her husband, his victims wanted marriage so badly that they believed his lies. That fools deserve whatever they get is the con artist’s classic creed. Fernandez expanded it to cover those whose lives he took along with their valuables.

Fernandez and Beck continued pulling cons. Using the alias “Charles Martin,” he began writing to a 66-year-old widow in Albany named Janet Fay.

Fay knew that she was long past the age when women are usually regarded as attractive but she still hoped for someone with whom to share her life. She lived in a large apartment; it was too big for one person and reinforced her sense of loneliness. A deeply religious Roman Catholic who faithfully attended mass, Fay was pleased to find that this eloquent and refined Charles Martin shared her beliefs. His letters were filled with references to God, Jesus Christ, and the church. The elderly woman was thrilled when he asked for a lock of her hair.

They arranged to meet in December 1948. To trap this particular pigeon, Fernandez altered his appearance to make himself look older because he knew that a woman in her sixties would find it incredible to be courted by a man in his thirties. He put white streaks in his wig and make-up to deepen lines around his eyes.

In late December, Martin and his “sister” traveled to Albany to meet Fay. The courtly gentleman showed up on Fay’s doorstep carrying a bouquet of flowers. They spent much of their time sharing their similar religious convictions.

As the New Year of 1949 rolled around Fay found herself entranced by this dark-haired, well-spoken, and devoutly Christian man. So smitten was she that she agreed to take all her cash, bonds and jewelry out of the bank and fork it over to the man she thought of as her husband-to-be. Martin’s helpful sister packed the money and valuables in a trunk. Unbeknownst to Fay, the trunk had been the property of the late Myrtle Young.

Fay probably anticipated a romantic elopement when she set off with her fiancé and future sister-in-law for the small town of Valley Stream. The trio rented a little apartment. Settling into her new digs, Fay spoke of writing to her stepdaughter. Beck reacted sourly to the idea and harsh words were exchanged. Suddenly the 300-pound Beck grabbed a hammer and slammed Fay’s head with it. The elderly woman’s skull cracked but she did not die instantly. As blood flowed from her head, Fernandez strangled her. False teeth plopped out of her mouth as she died. Nonplussed, Beck shoved the corpse into a cupboard and threw the dentures away.

Beck and Fernandez sat around the house discussing ways to get rid of the body. Fernandez mentioned that his sister in Astoria lived in a home with a big basement. Myrtle Young’s trunk was not big enough to hold Janet Fay so they bought a new one and then headed for Fernandez’s sister’s house.

Could they leave the trunk in her cellar for a little while? They asked. Certainly, his sister replied. The January weather was freezing so Beck figured the body would keep for a few days before giving off a telltale odor.

Fernandez and Beck then rented a house in Queens that had a cellar. After securing this residence, they fetched the trunk from his sister’s home. They buried Fay in a hole in the basement that they filled over with cement. When the cement hardened after a few days, the couple went to the real estate agent for the property and said they did not want the house after all.

Beck wanted to get Fay’s property from American Express but knew it might set off alarms if she or Fernandez did it themselves. She believed she could persuade Fay’s stepdaughter to help them. Thus she typed the following letter and mailed it to that stepdaughter, Mary Spencer.

    Dear Mary,
I am all excited and having the time of my life. I never felt so happy before.  I soon will be Mrs. Martin, and go to Florida.  Mary, I am about to ask you a great favour. I would like you to call on the American Express Agency and have them ship my trunks and boxes that I have there to me. The address is on the various stickers I am enclosing in the letter.
    I would like to sort out many things before I leave for Florida. I am so happy and contented, for Charles is so good and nice to me and also his family. They have done everything to make me feel comfortable and at home. I will close with my best wishes for you both and love and kisses for the children. I really do miss you all, but I am sure that my prayers are granted to me by sending me this wonderful man.
    God bless you all.
                                        Janet J. Fay

Spencer immediately spotted this epistle for a phony. She knew her stepmother could not type. The formal signature also jarred. She went to the police with her suspicions.

In the meantime, Fernandez and Beck traveled to Grand Rapids, Michigan so he could meet 41-year-old Delphine Downing, a widow he was courting through a lonely-hearts club.

Downing had lost her husband in the recent war. She wanted to remarry but feared that eligible men would not be interested in a ready-made family and would run when they learned of her almost 2-year-old daughter, Rainelle. She had been pleased that Fernandez had not lost interest when she told him she was the mother of a toddler.

Delphine introduced the pair to Rainelle and allowed “brother and sister” to stay in her home so she and Fernandez could get better acquainted. Fernandez seemed entranced by Rainelle and spent much time playing with her. The child’s mother was equally entranced by the debonair Latin who courted her in such a thoughtful and romantic manner.

One evening at Delphine’s home, Fernandez was relaxing and reading the newspaper. He had kicked off his shoes and removed his toupee.

Suddenly the door opened. A stunned Delphine Downing exclaimed, “You’re bald!”

Understandably upset by the look of disappointment on her face, Fernandez said, “Look, honey, you don’t have to act this way because I cover a bald patch. Heck, it’s no crime, Delphie.”

She shrank from his approach. She had thought he was suave, handsome, and young. “Don’t touch me, you imposter!” she cried. “Why, you’re old.  Old!”

He tried to sweet talk her but she would have none of it. She ordered both he and his “sister” to leave her house immediately.

An angry Fernandez grabbed her but she struggled out of his grasp and ran. Unfortunately, she ran right into Beck who had been attracted by the commotion.

Accounts differ as to what precisely transpired next in what order and at what time. One of those versions holds that Fernandez took a pistol out of his jacket pocket and shot Delphine Dowling in the head. She slid to the floor.

As Fernandez watched his latest mark gasp her last breath, his mind was not on her death but on the disgust she had recently hurled his way. “Martha,” he said plaintively, “she saw me without the toupee and said I was old. She didn’t want me. She said we had to leave tonight. Martha, you don’t think I’m old – not too old?”

She took him in her heavy arms, held his long lean head against her well-endowed chest and gave him the reassurance he craved. Of course he was still attractive, still youthful, she told him.

A baby’s cry disturbed this loving scene.

Beck told Fernandez they should take care of this problem the way they had that of Janet Fay. He should dig a hole in the cellar that would be big enough for mother and child.

The former nurse and mother of two filled a bathtub with water. Then she drowned little Rainelle Dowling in it.

After breaking through the thin layer of cement in the basement with his shovel, Fernandez dug out a little pit.  Delphine was shoved inside it along with her dead baby and it was covered over.

Another version of the Downing murders holds that they were stretched out over a couple of days. When Delphine Downing ran into Beck, the “sister” tried to soothe her and convinced the woman to take some sleeping pills. Rainelle saw her mother in an unnatural sleep and started crying. A frazzled Beck choked the girl into unconsciousness but not death.

Fernandez now believed that they had to kill Delphine Downing. “If she wakes up and sees Rainelle,” he pointed out, “she’ll go to the police.”

Then he got the gun that had belonged to Downing’s late husband. He put it against her head and pulled the trigger. Rainelle had regained consciousness and the toddler saw her mother being slaughtered. Fernandez and Beck carried the mother’s body into the basement and buried it.

For two days, they took care of little Rainelle as the confused and terrified little girl cried and could not eat. Finally, Fernandez decided that their only course was to kill the baby too. He ordered Beck to murder Rainelle.

“I can’t do it, Ray!” Beck said. “I can’t.”

Fernandez told her that she could and would. Reluctantly, she complied, drowning the child, then helping Fernandez bury her beside her mother in the cellar.

Although accounts differ about the killings of Delphine Downing and her daughter, there is no dispute as to what Fernandez and Beck did after killing little Rainelle. The deadly duo capped the night off with a trip to a theater to take in a movie. There the couple enjoyed sodas and popcorn along with the show. They returned home very tired and eager to get some sleep.

Fernandez and Beck did not have time to settle into bed before they heard a knock on the door. Fernandez answered. Policemen were on the porch and they invited themselves in.

What were they there for? Fernandez wondered. They could not possibly know what had happened to Delphine and Rainelle Dowling – could they?

“You Raymond Fernandez?” a policeman asked. “You ever know a Mrs. Janet Fay?”

Fernandez was too scared to answer.

Beck saw the police and said, “Leave him alone. Don’t you goddamn cops touch Ray or I’ll –“ She made threats but was not able to act on them before being clapped into handcuffs.

The police searched the place and found the bodies of mother and infant buried in the cellar.

The story of the Lonely Hearts Killers made headlines across the nation. While only these three murders would be definitely established as theirs, there were persistent rumors that they had done away with other lonely pigeons. Some estimates say they killed twelve.

Both murderers seemed less concerned with the possible death sentence hovering over than with their reputations. When interrogated by the police, Fernandez told investigators, “I’m no average killer!  I have a way with women, a power over them.”

Beck was distraught by the terms of ridicule and disgust like “Obese Ogress” with which she was tagged by the newspapers. “I’m still a human being,” she protested, “feeling every blow inside, even though I have the ability to hide my feelings and laugh. But that doesn’t say my heart isn’t breaking from the insults and humiliation of being talked about as I am.”

When they were in custody, a dispute arose between Michigan and New York as to which state would try them. Michigan had no death penalty while New York had a busy electric chair.

Roger McMahon, district attorney of Michigan’s Kent County, used their fear of New York’s death penalty to persuade them to sign a 73-page confession. He promised that they would not be extradited to New York if they did.

McMahon lied.

Michigan allowed them to be extradited to New York so they would face the ultimate penalty for the murder of Janet Fay.

They went on trial in the middle of 1949’s simmering heat wave. The weather did not keep intrigued spectators from crowding into the courtroom where they sat, cheek by jowl, wiping sweat off their foreheads and fanning themselves while listening to testimony about sex and deception, mayhem and murder.

Judge Ferdinand Pecora heard the case. He was reputed to be a no-nonsense jurist who did not allow a case to get bogged down in irrelevant details.

Herbert Rosenberg defended both Beck and Fernandez. Nassau County District Attorney Edward Robinson, Jr. (not the famous actor) prosecuted them. He put a variety of witnesses on the stand, including the medical examiner who had autopsied Janet Fay, detectives and forensic experts, and relatives and friends of the victim.

Then the case went to the defense. Rosenberg called Fernandez to the stand July 11, 1949. He said he had had nothing to do with Fay’s death. He admitted confessing to it when questioned by the police in Michigan but claimed he was only being chivalrous, taking the blame so his ladylove could go free. “All my statements were made for the purpose of helping Martha,” he testified. Apparently the prospect of electrocution had led him to discard his wish to shield the woman he loved.

Robinson tore into the defendant on cross-examination. He questioned him about Jane Thompson, Myrtle Young, Delphine Downing and her daughter Rainelle. Robinson grew louder and louder in his outrage until Ray’s co-defendant shouted, “Mr. Fernandez is not deaf!”

The witness admitted he had shot and killed Delphine Downing but again denied murdering Janet Fay.

That led to another outburst from an agitated Beck. “I think at this time,” she told Judge Pecora as she rose to her feet, “I want to take the stand!

The judge admonished her not to talk out of turn.

However, Rosenberg called her as a witness on the morning of July 25, 1945. Wearing a gray and white polka dot dress and a double-strand pearl necklace, the “Obese Ogress” took the stand. Her lawyer took her through her sad background as a teased youngster and her adulthood of disappointments. He led her to her relationship with Fernandez and her agreement to become his criminal confederate.

Finally, her testimony turned to the murder of Janet Fay. Beck said she remembered Fernandez telling her to keep the woman quiet. Then she was amnesiac. The next thing she recalled, she was standing over a dead Fay and Fernandez was shaking her shoulders, asking, “My God, Martha, what have you done?”

If Beck had indeed killed Janet Fay, she suggested, it was due to her deep love for Fernandez. When the prosecutor questioned her, she said, “We loved each other and I consider it absolutely sacred.” Later she stated, “a request from Mr. Fernandez to me is a command. I loved him enough to do anything he asked me to.”

The Lonely-Hearts case went to the jury on August 18, 1949. They began deliberating at 9:45 p.m. and had a verdict by 8:30 a.m. the next morning.

Both defendants were convicted of first-degree murder. The jury did not recommend mercy.

On August 22, Judge Pecora sentenced Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck to death in the electric chair.  It would be almost two years before the sentence was carried out.

While awaiting execution, Martha wrote poetry.

Memo to Ray
By Martha Beck

Remember, sweetheart, the night that you and I
Side by side were sitting.
Watching o'er the moonlit sky
Fleecy clouds were flitting,
How close our hands were linked then,
When, my darling, when will they be linked again?
What to me the starlight still
Or the moonbeam's splendour,
If I do not feel the thrill

Of your fingers tender?

The poem was shown to Ray who was moved to tears by it. He took pencil to paper and scrawled a note for her. It read: “I would like to shout my love for you to the world.”

The bizarre couple was executed at Sing Sing on March 8th, 1951.

On the last day of her life, Martha Beck set a goal for herself and, pitifully, failed to keep it.  She was tired, she said, of hearing people ridicule her as a glutton so she would deliberately show them that she possessed self-control by not overdoing it on her last meal. Then she changed her mind and asked for a double order of everything, wolfing down heaping helpings of salads, fried potatoes, and chicken. Unlike Fernandez, however, she showed a certain amount of courage since she was able to walk to the electric chair on her own.

Fernandez collapsed on the death day. In keeping with the tradition of executing the more distraught prisoner first, guards carried him into the death chamber before Martha.

The Martha Beck/Raymond Fernandez affair was the basis of a film called The Honeymoon Killers, made in the 1970s.  Starring Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco and written and directed by Leonard Kastle, it stuck pretty close to the facts and became something of a cult classic for its daring (by contemporary standards) depictions of sex and violence.  The horrible couple was again cinematically portrayed in 1996 when acclaimed Mexican director Arturo Ripstein came out with Deep Crimson.

There have been many other homicidal couples but perhaps none were so unlikely as Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck. Their union was distinguished by their viciousness toward other people and, paradoxically, their devotion to each other. Fiction can imitate and dramatize but could not possibly outdo the singular passion and perversity of the Lonely-Hearts Killers.