The Lonely Hearts Killers are executed - March 8th, 1951

On this day in 1951, a serial killer couple known as the Lonely Hearts Killers were put to death at Sing Sing Prison.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that shines a light on the ups and downs
of everyday history. I'm Gabelusier, and today we're looking at
the story of a depraved couple who robbed and killed

(00:22):
in the pursuit of their own twisted relationship. As you
might imagine, today's episode deals with violent subject matter that
may be upsetting for some listeners. The day was March eighth,
nineteen fifty one. A serial killer couple known as the

(00:44):
Lonely Hearts Killers were put to death at sing Sing Prison.
Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez had spent the last several
years praying on strangers. They would place personal ads in
newspapers and magazines, and then target the women who responded
in search of companionship. Initially, the couple only stole money

(01:06):
from their victims, but Beck's jealousy and brutal temper gradually
sent them down an even darker path. Raymond Martinez Fernandez
was born on December seventeenth, nineteen fourteen, in Hawaii. His
parents were originally from Spain, and when Fernandez was a teenager,
he moved back there to work on his uncle's farm.

(01:28):
By the time he turned twenty, Fernandez had gotten married
and started a family of his own. He left his
wife and four kids to serve in the Spanish Merchant
Navy during the Second World War, but he never went
back to them afterward. Instead, he decided to return to
the US and start a new life without them. The
voyage across the Atlantic didn't go smoothly, though. Shortly after

(01:51):
boarding the ship, Fernandez was struck on the head by
a steel hatch cover and wound up being hospitalized in
New York for three months. After recovering from a fractured
skull and brain damage, Fernandez turned to crime and was
quickly arrested for shoplifting. While in prison, he became convinced
he had a special power that made him irresistible to women.

(02:14):
According to Time magazine, he may have gotten the idea
from his Haitian cellmate, who supposedly taught him voodoo and
black magic. Of course, the damage he had sustained to
his frontal lobe may have had something to do with
it as well. In any case, once Fernandez was released,
he hatched a scheme to get rich using his special power.

(02:36):
He started placing personal ads in the Lonely Heart's columns
of local newspapers. Then he would sift through the responses
and meet up with the women he thought were most vulnerable.
Over the course of a few months, Fernandez would get
to know the women and gradually gain their trust, along
with access to their bank accounts. Then, once he had it,

(02:57):
he would simply help himself to the cash and disappear.
Martha Beck was meant to be the latest in a
long line of such victims, but instead she became Fernandez's
lover and eventually as partner and murder. Martha Jule Beck
was born on May sixth, nineteen twenty in Milton, Florida.

(03:18):
At her trial, she later claimed to have had a
traumatic childhood, one in which she was abused by her
family members and bullied by classmates for being overweight. As
a teenager, she ran away from home and joined a
traveling circus. Later in life, Beck found work as an
undertaker's assistant and then as a nurse in an army hospital.

(03:39):
By the time she was twenty six, Beck was an unemployed,
single mother of two living in Pensacola. She was unhappy
with the direction of her life and dreamed of finding
a romantic partner to help set things right again. She
quickly became obsessed with that idea, buying every romance novel
and magazine she could find, and losing herself in the fantasy. Finally,

(04:01):
in nineteen forty seven, she joined a lonely hearts club
advertised in one of her magazines. She would soon start
receiving letters from her potential matches, and as luck would
have it, the first one came from Raymond Fernandez in Brooklyn.
He responded to Beck's letter, fully intending to con her,
but then they wound up hitting it off for real.

(04:23):
At first, Fernandez would travel from New York City to
Florida for short visits, but eventually it made more sense
for Beck to just move in with him. It was
around that time that she handed over her children to
the Salvation Army so that she could dote on Fernandez
without distraction as someone who had already abandoned his own family.

(04:43):
Fernandez appreciated the gesture, viewing it as a sign of
Beck's love for him. In fact, he became so convinced
of her loyalty that he eventually told her about his
life of crime and his scheme to defraud lonely women
out of their money. Most people would been repulsed by
that kind of confession, but not Beck. She thought the

(05:04):
whole thing sounded exciting and she wanted in on the action.
For the next two years, Beck and Fernandez worked together
to seduce, rob and in some cases, kill, unsuspecting women.
They continued to find their targets by answering lonely hearts ads,
except now. When Fernandez brought the women back to his place,
Beck was there posing as his sister. That lie helped

(05:28):
put their victims at ease, since it meant there would
be someone else in the house with them. However, it
also proved a hindrance to the criminals. That's because Beck
was incredibly jealous and didn't want Fernandez to actually be
intimate with anyone but her. On the occasions when he
did sleep with one of their targets, Beck would fly

(05:48):
into a rage and blow their cover. Beck's explosive temper
turned deadly in nineteen forty nine when Fernandez got engaged
to one of his marks, a sixty six year old
named Janet Faye. One night, Faye went to stay with
Fernandez at his Long Island apartment and Beck caught the
two of them in bed together. The jealous lover assaulted

(06:11):
Faye with a hammer, and then Fernandez strangled her to
make sure she was dead. And the days that followed,
Faye's family began to ask questions about her sudden disappearance,
but by the time the police got involved, the couple
had already fled to Michigan in search of their next victim.
They eventually found her in Wyoming Township, a suburb just

(06:32):
outside of Grand Rabbits. Her name was Delphine Downing, a
twenty eight year old widow with a two year old daughter.
Downing opened her home to the alleged brother and sister,
but she wasn't as charmed by Fernandez as the older
widows had been, and the more he tried to speed
things up with her, the more suspicious she became that

(06:53):
something nefarious was going on. One night in late February,
Downing got upset and Fernand gave her some sleeping pills
to calm her down. While she was unconscious, her daughter
began to cry, setting off Beck's cruel temper. Beck responded
by choking the child until she was quiet, leaving deep
bruises along her throat. Fernandez worried that Downing might go

(07:17):
to the police if she woke up and saw what
they had done, so to make sure that didn't happen,
he shot Downing while she was still unconscious, and then
Beck drowned her daughter in a basin of water. They
buried the bodies in the basement and continued to live
in Downing's house for the next several days. Eventually, Downing's
neighbors reported her missing and police came to the house

(07:39):
to investigate. Fernandez and Beck played dumb with the officers,
even going so far as to invite them inside to
search the house themselves. The police called their bluff and
quickly found the makeshift graves in the basement. The couple,
now dubbed the Lonely Heart's Killers by the press, were
arrested that day and charged with murder. Once in custody,

(08:02):
the killers dropped the act and admitted to the murder
of Downing and her daughter. They knew they would be convicted,
so they didn't see any reason to deny their crimes,
especially since they'd been arrested in Michigan, a state without
the death penalty. In fact, the couple was so secure
in that knowledge that they even confessed to the murder
of Janet Fay, the widow in upstate New York. Clearly,

(08:25):
the couple was not well versed on the concept of extradition.
Within a matter of weeks, state officials succeeded in getting
the couple extradited to New York, where capital punishment was
still allowed. Fernandez tried to tip the scales by confessing
to more than a dozen other murders, all of which
supposedly took place in Michigan. His gamble failed, though, and

(08:48):
the couple was eventually tried in New York, at which
point Fernandez recanted his earlier confessions and claimed he had
made them up to protect Beck. To this day, it's
unclear exactly how many people were murdered by the Lonely
Hearts killers. We know of three for certain, but at
one point they were linked to as many as seventeen others.

(09:09):
Whatever the true number, Fernandez and Beck were ultimately tried
for just one, the murder of Janet Faye. The couple
pleaded insanity at trial, but the New York jury didn't
buy it. Shortly after the guilty verdict was delivered, they
were both sentenced to death by electrocution. The sentence was
carried out on March eighth, nineteen fifty one, at the

(09:32):
Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. Fernandez was
put in the electric chair first, followed shortly afterward by Beck.
According to reporters who were present that day, the couple
continued to swear devotion to each other until their dying breaths.
When asked if he still loved Beck, Fernandez responded, of

(09:53):
course I do, and I want to shout it out.
As for Beck, she told the press quote, I am
a woman who had a great love and always will
have it. Imprisonment in the death house has only strengthened
my feelings for Raymond. There are many appalling details in
the story of the Lonely Hearts Killers, but I can't

(10:15):
help feeling a sting of pity when I hear those
final words, because how deluded and lost and utterly broken
must they have been to think that what they found
and did together at anything at all to do with love.
I'm Gabelusier, and hopefully you now know a little more

(10:36):
about history today than you did yesterday. You can learn
even more about history by following us on Twitter, Facebook,
and Instagram at TDI HC Show, and if you have
any comments or suggestions, you can always send them my
way at this Day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to
Chandler May's for producing the show, and thank you for listening.

(10:59):
I'll see you back here again tomorrow for another day
in History class