Today’s Heartless Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Fat and calculating, Martha Julie Beck had nothing to offer society. She hated all women more attractive than herself and had a pathological devotion to a hollow-eyed, balding man, Raymond Martinez Fernandez (1914-1951). This inconspicuous couple preyed upon single women and became infamous as the Lonely Hearts Killers.
Fernandez had been born in Hawaii of Spanish parents. He had reportedly served with British Intelligence during the Second World War, until being discharged after receiving a head wound that drastically changed his personality from happy-go-lucky to morose and brooding. He supported himself by making love to lonely women, conning them out of their savings, and deserting them. He wore a cheap black wig to hide his almost bald head and police later described him as “a seedy Charles Boyer.”
He was anything but that to Martha Beck, one of his victims. Beck, a nurse who had been divorced since 1944, operated a run-down home for crippled children in Pensacola, Fla. In 1947, Beck placed an ad in one of the local lovelorn columns and Fernandez replied.
The sleazy con man inexplicably fell in love with the unattractive Martha, and even confessed that he intended to bilk her out of her savings. To his surprise, Martha approved of his crooked ways and offered to join him in his lonely hearts schemes. The couple immediately traveled north looking for victims in the lovelorn columns.
The Happy Couple
Fernandez wooed and won the hearts of dozens of women; some reports later claimed that his victims numbered more than a hundred. He would promise marriage and then depart before the nuptials with his victims’ savings. Often as not during these whirlwind courtships, Fernandez would introduce Beck as his sister. Beck usually moved in with Fernandez when he went to live with his victims. She had no complaints about her lover being with women who were in their fifties or sixties, the age group to which most of the victims belonged.
But when Fernandez roped a younger, more attractive woman, Beck became jealous. This was the case with 28-year-old Mrs. Delphine Dowling of Grand Rapids, Michigan, who had a 2-year-old daughter. Beck moved with Fernandez into the Dowling house but was consumed with hatred for Mrs. Dowling, especially since she slept in a bedroom next to that in which Fernandez slept with his victim.
Mrs. Dowling promised her hand to Fernandez but wanted to wait and see if he was, indeed, sincere. Martha Beck told Fernandez they would not wait, that Mrs. Dowling and her little girl had to be killed. Both disappeared in January 1949. When police investigated they were met by Beck and Fernandez, who told detectives that they had no idea where Mrs. Dowling and her daughter had gone.
Suspicious officers asked for permission to search the house. Beck and Fernandez only shrugged. In the basement detectives found a fresh patch of cement, “the size of a grave,” as one of the described it. They dug up the bodies of Mrs. Dowling and her little girl.
Beck and Fernandez did not deny killing the pair. The talkative Martha freely explained that she had dosed Mrs. Dowling with sleeping pills but the young woman revived and Fernandez shot her in the head. They never planned to kill the little girl, Martha pointed out. They even bought her a puppy but she would not be placated and kept crying for her mother. Martha then filled the bathtub with water, threw the child into it, and held her under the water until she drowned.
Dubbed the Lonely Hearts Killers by the press, Beck and Fernandez reveled in their notoriety. They bragged about killing at least seventeen others. “I’m no average killer, ” boasted Fernandez. “I only got five hundred off the Dowling woman, but take Mrs. Jane Thompson. I got six thousand off of her.” He went to explain how he took Mrs. Thompson to Spain for a vacation and murdered her with doses of digitalis. Fernandez then said that his lover’s line was so effective that it worked on Mrs. Thompson’s mother, Mrs. Wilson, and that he moved in with this woman, too, and then murdered her.
Fernandez confessed murders one after another, talking so rapidly that he began to sweat and had to remove his wig to wipe the perspiration off his bald head. He told how he married Mrs. Myrtle Young in 1948 and took her to Chicago on a honeymoon where the elderly woman died in bed with him. “Poor woman,” laughed Fernandez, “she died of overexertion!”
Beck interrupted to rattle off another string of murders, claiming that she, not Fernandez, was the chief architect of their killings. She explained through giggles that they had killed Mrs. Janet Fay of Manhattan because the 66-year-old woman had cried out for Fernandez when Beck and Fernandez were leaving the victim. It so incensed Beck that another woman displayed affection for her lover that she grabbed a hammer and crushed Mrs. Fay’s head with it. “I turned to Raymond,” Beck said calmly, “and said, ‘look what I have done,’ and then he strangled her with a scarf.”
The couple admitted their killings in the belief that they would be tried and imprisoned in Michigan, where there was no death penalty. To their surprise, Michigan allowed the state of New York to extradite the murderous pair, where they were tried for killing Mrs. Fay. They were even more amazed when their plea of not guilty by reason of insanity was dismissed after both were examined and judged sane. Both were found guilty and sentenced to death.
Through appeals the Lonely Hearts Killers delayed their rendezvous with Sing Sing’s electric chair until March 8, 1951. On the night of his execution Fernandez refused to order a meal, saying he could not keep the food down. He smoked a big Havana cigar down to a stub and then had to be half-carried to the chair to die.
Martha Beck was next, as the tradition was to take the strongest last. She told female warders that she was sick and tired of being portrayed as a flabby, overweight person. She would show the world that she had discipline and would not gorge herself with a last meal. She ordered fried chicken, fried potatoes and a salad, then changed her mind and ordered a double portion of each. When she entered the death chamber she smirked and plopped down so heavily in the electric chair that it creaked and heaved.
Fernandez had the last comment through a note he handed a guard as he sat down int he chair. Later widely published, it read: “People want to know if I still love Martha. But of course I do. I want to shout it out. I love Martha. What do the public know about love?”
The Couple Who Kill Together…
Culled from: Bloodletters and Badmen
Corpse Du Jour!
Here’s one of my favorite of Gunther Von Hagens’ plastination specimens: a man holding his own skin. (Culled from BodyWorlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies.)
