Even before Raymond Fernandez met Martha Beck he had been swindling women out of their money. Born in Hawaii in 1914, he had a history of petty crime and a penchant for moving around, bouncing from Spain to Grenada to the U.S. He began preying on women through lonely heart’s clubs, the equivalent of dating apps today, and likely killed his first victim in Spain in 1947 around the time he began corresponding with Beck.
Beck, born Martha Seabrook in Florida in 1920, was a divorced nurse with two children whom she abandoned when she and Fernandez got together. Instead of swindling Beck, Fernandez fell for her, telling her about his schemes. Together they continued what he’d started. Fernandez lured Janet Fay, a 66-year-old widow from Albany, to their Long Island home in January 1949, convinced her that Beck was his sister, stole the woman’s money, and murdered her. Beck smashed in her skull with a hammer. “She kept screaming,” Fernandez later told detectives (via the St. Louis Globe-Democrat). “I was scared the noise would wake up the neighbors. So I took a scarf and wound it around her neck.” After the murder, the couple moved to a new address and buried Fay’s body in the cellar.
