The Lonely Hearts Killers

Raymond Fernandez was a merchant seaman born in Hawaii to Spanish parents. In 1945 a steel hatch fell on his head aboard ship and fractured his skull. He came out of hospital changed and drifted into fraud, answering lonely hearts advertisements and robbing the women who placed them. One of them, Jane Thompson, died suddenly in Spain in November 1947 while traveling with him. Weeks later he wrote to Martha Beck, a Florida nurse who left everything to follow him.

They traveled as brother and sister so Fernandez could keep proposing marriage. On January 4, 1949, in a rented apartment in Valley Stream, New York, Beck beat sixty-six-year-old widow Janet Fay with a hammer and strangled her with a scarf. About ten days later they buried her under fresh concrete in the cellar of a rented house in South Ozone Park, Queens. In late February Fernandez shot widow Delphine Downing at her Michigan home, and Beck drowned her two-year-old daughter, Rainelle.

Michigan police, alerted by neighbors, arrested the two at the Downing house on February 28, 1949. Michigan had no death penalty, so both were sent to New York to answer for Janet Fay. Their trial opened in the Bronx in June 1949; in August a jury convicted both of first-degree murder, which carried a mandatory death sentence. They were electrocuted at Sing Sing on March 8, 1951.