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On March 8, 1951, chubby Martha Beck took her closing steps to the demise room on the famed Sing Sing Jail up the river from New York.
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She was solely 30 years outdated however unafraid of what awaited her.
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Earlier than her executioner flipped the change on the electrical chair, Beck provided an emotional homage to like and romance.
“My story is a love story. However solely these tortured by love can know what I imply… Imprisonment within the Dying Home has solely strengthened my feeling for Raymond…,” Beck advised reporters.
She was referring to Raymond Fernandez, an oily lothario who had charmed Martha into homicide. On the banks of the Hudson River, he needed the world to know he felt the identical.
“I wanna shout it out; I really like Martha! What do the general public learn about love?” Fernandez mentioned.
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Beck was born in tiny Milton within the Florida Panhandle. She was chubby and puberty got here early for the troubled woman who ran away and joined the circus.
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Beck completed faculty and bought her nursing diploma however had issue touchdown a job attributable to her weight.
Nevertheless, with the Second World Struggle raging, she bought employed at a California U.S. Military hospital.
Promiscuous Martha turned pregnant and returned to Florida. Not lengthy after giving beginning, she turned pregnant once more by a bus driver named Alfred Beck whom she would marry and simply as shortly divorce.
She additionally bought a job on the Pensacola Youngsters’s Hospital the place she was thought of a “superb nurse.”
Off hours, her escape was romance magazines, novels and saccharine tales on the silver display. That’s when Raymond Fernandez answered her advert in Mom Dinene’s Household Membership for Lonely Hearts.
Six years older than Martha, Fernandez believed voodoo and black magic gave him extraordinary energy over ladies. And he confessed to Martha his felony schemes, fleecing lonely ladies after which eliminating the witnesses.
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Martha would do something for Raymond.
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Right here’s the deal: Martha would pose as Raymond’s sister, it could look respectable. The issue was that when Raymond’s romantic machinations have been in play, she would change into extraordinarily jealous and violent.
The primary to die was widow Janet Fay, 66, in 1949. When Beck caught Fay and Fernandez within the sack, she pulverized her love rival’s cranium with a hammer. Her lover strangled the girl.
Now, New York was too scorching and the pair went on the street to a suburb of Grand Rapids, Mich.
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There, they met widow Delphine Downing, a 28-year-old mom of a toddler. Downing was drugged after which the panicked pair shot her within the head. Her baby? Martha drowned the crying child within the bathtub.
As a substitute of getting out of Dodge, the pair caught round just a few days after the double homicide – unhealthy transfer.
On March 1, 1949, cops confirmed up, seemed round and arrested the lovebirds.
Investigators across the nation favored the couple for a slew of murders, presumably as many as 17. Actually, Fernandez had murdered a earlier hearts sufferer, Jane Lucilla Thompson, in Spain in 1946.
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Resigned to their destiny, the pair advised Michigan detectives a lurid story of intercourse, deception and homicide. The Grand Rapids DA assured the pair they might not be turned over to salivating New York murder detectives.
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A return journey to New York meant demise within the electrical chair at Sing Sing. However New York Gov. Thomas Dewey managed to wangle that return journey for the pair.
Already, the New York tabloids have been calling the femme fatale “fats,” “simpering,” “Large Martha,” “a 200-pound determine of wrath,” “the laughing divorcee,” “unattractive,” “a bizarre lady,” and worse.
The trial was moved to The Bronx and the proof introduced by prosecutors was staggering. Seventeen homicides in all however the pair have been solely tried for the Janet Fay homicide.
When Fernandez took the stand, he claimed his Michigan confession was bogus.
“All my statements have been made for the aim of serving to Martha,” he mentioned. “I really like her. It couldn’t be the rest.”
Now, it was Martha’s flip to take the stand, lastly ending weeks of hypothesis by the Day by day Information, New York Put up and Day by day Mirror. Would she throw Fernandez underneath the bus?
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“Raymond bought fairly a kick out of the pictures of a number of the outdated hags who write to him and anticipated him to correspond with them,” she mentioned. “We cherished one another and I take into account it completely sacred… You referred to the lovemaking as irregular however for the love I had for Fernandez, nothing is irregular!”
She added: “A request from Mr. Fernandez to me is a command. I cherished him sufficient to do something he requested me to!”
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On Aug. 22, 1949, a scorcher within the Large Apple, the Lonely Hearts Killers have been discovered responsible. The sentence was demise. On demise row, the melodrama continued till the bitter finish.
The night time the couple died within the chair – he went first – was a grand slam. Two low-rent killers have been additionally slated to die for murdering an airline clerk.
On demise day, Fernandez mentioned: “The information delivered to me that Martha loves me is the perfect I’ve had in years. Now I’m able to die!” he mentioned. “So tonight I’ll die like a person!”
He was carried to the inexperienced room screaming.
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