The Lonely Hearts Killers

On this day in 1951, Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, aka The Lonely Hearts Killers, were executed by electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in New York. Before their demise, the killer couple had bragged about seducing, robbing, and murdering seventeen women. While evidence suggests that there may have only been four victims, the strange couple is still notorious among male-female serial killer pairs.

Raymond Martinez Fernandez was born on December 17, 1914, in Hawaii, to parents who had immigrated there from Spain. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Connecticut, and as an adult, Raymond Fernandez moved to Spain. There he married and fathered four children. He would abandon this family later in life. During World War II Fernandez served in the Spanish Merchant Marine and in the British Intelligence Service and at the end of the war decided to return to the United States. It was during this return trip, by boat, that a steel hatch fell on his head, causing a skull fracture and frontal lobe damage. Not only did his injuries cause baldness, which Fernandez covered with a cheap toupee, they also led him to believe that he had power over women and could turn them into his sex slaves. These beliefs were exacerbated when, after being imprisoned for stealing clothes, his cellmate taught him about voodoo and black magic. He would find another believer in his "powers" when he met Martha Beck.

Martha Beck, nee Seabrook, was born on May 6, 1920, in Milton, Florida. She was overweight as a child and underwent puberty prematurely. In those days it was common for doctors to attribute these issues to a glandular problem. As a young woman, Beck studied nursing but had trouble finding a job due to her weight. She eventually worked as an undertaker's assistant, preparing female bodies for burial, until she moved to California and started working in an Army hospital. During this time, she took several lovers and ended up pregnant. She tried to convince the father to marry her but when he refused, Martha returned to Florida. She told her friends and family that she had married while in California but her husband had been killed while serving in the Pacific. This earned her the sympathy of the whole town and the local newspaper even published her story. Shortly after giving birth to her daughter, Martha became pregnant by a Pensacola bus driver named Arthur Beck. The two soon married but were divorced just six months later. After the divorce, Martha Beck gave birth to a son and started working at the Pensacola Hospital for Children. When she wasn't at work, she spent her time reading romance novels and watching romantic movies. In 1947, she placed a lonely hearts ad which Raymond Martinez answered.

Martha Beck's lonely hearts ad was not the first that Raymond Fernandez had answered. In 1946, he met an older woman through a lonely hearts club and dated her until he was able to gain access to and loot the woman's bank account. Not long after, he took another woman to Spain, where she was found dead in her hotel room. When Fernandez answered Beck's ad it was originally with the intention of conning her too. However, the two ended up falling in love and when Fernandez confessed his criminal activities to Beck, she turned her children over to the Salvation Army and went with him to New York to assist him in his schemes. Beck began posing as Fernandez's sister in order to make their female targets more comfortable with staying in the same house as Fernandez. Beck was extremely jealous of the women that Fernandez met through the lonely hearts club and did everything she could to make sure that he never consummated these "relationships". In 1949, Fernandez became engaged to 66-year-old Janet Fay who came to live with him in his Long Island apartment. When Beck found the two in bed she smashed Fay's head in with a hammer. Fernandez then strangled Fay to make sure she was dead. Fay's family became suspicious about her disappearance, causing the killer couple to leave town.

Beck and Fernandez ended up in Wyoming Township, Michigan, a suburb of Grand Rapids. There they met a young widow named Delphine Downing. They moved in with Downing and decided to make her their next target. Downing, who had a two-year-old daughter, became suspicious of the "brother and sister" and would not relent to Fernandez's insistence that they get married. On February 28, 1949, Downing grew agitated and Fernandez gave her some sleeping pills to calm her down. Downing's daughter, frightened by her drugged mother's condition, began crying. This enraged Beck, who was already angered by Fernandez's attentions towards Downing, and she began to strangle the child. However, when the child did not die Fernandez worried that Downing would be suspicious upon waking up and seeing her bruised and distressed daughter. He shot and killed Downing while she was still unconscious and the couple stayed in the dead woman's house. When her daughter started crying again, Beck murdered the child by drowning her in a basin of water. They buried the bodies of Downing and her daughter in the basement, but neighbors became suspicious and reported their disappearances to the police, who showed up on March 1, 1949, to arrest Beck and Fernandez.

It didn't take long for Raymond Fernandez to confess to seventeen murders, although he later tried to retract the confession, saying he only made it to protect Martha Beck. During their trial, which was highly sensationalized by the press, Beck claimed that, as a child, she had been raped by her brother and when she told her mother about it, she responded by beating Martha and blaming her for the rape. Newspaper reporters mocked Beck's appearance and Beck responded by writing letters to the editor. Fernandez and Beck were convicted of the murder of Janet Fay, the only one they were tried for, and sentenced to death. Before their execution, on March 8, 1951, they made their final statements:

"I wanna shout it out; I love Martha! What do the public know about love?" - Raymond Fernandez

"My story is a love story. But only those tortured by love can know what I mean. I am not unfeeling, stupid or moronic. I am a woman who had a great love and always will have it. Imprisonment in the Death House has only strengthened my feeling for Raymond." - Martha Beck

Since their execution, the killer couple has left their mark on pop culture. The Honeymoon Killers, released in 1970, starred Shirley Stoller as Martha Beck and Tony Lo Bianco as Raymond Fernandez. An episode of the tv crime drama Cold Case was also based on the pair's misdeeds.

One of the more surprising twists in the Fernandez and Beck saga involves renowned authors Harper Lee and Truman Capote. In 1936, when Lee was 10 years old and Capote was 12, the two met and befriended a girl named Martha, who was visiting a family who lived across the street. Capote and Martha decided to run away together and managed to hitchhike to Evergreen, Alabama, where they were reported to police by a hotel clerk. Years later they would realize that Martha Beck was their young friend.

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