347 - The Lonely Hearts Killers

Timesuck with Dan Cummins

Dan Cummins

True Crime, Society & Culture, Religion, Conspiracies, History, Biographies, Education, Adult Humor, Comedy, Dark Humor, Conspiracy, Cults

4.7 • 21.6K Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2023

⏱️ 158 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the late 1940s, troubled lovers Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, ran a scam using dating services commonly known as Lonely Hearts Clubs to con and kill women. Their trial became the most sensationalized of the decade.

Transcript

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0:00.0	How careful are you when you're meeting someone in real life who you've only previously met online?
0:04.8	In this day and age, I think most of us are pretty cautious when it comes to interacting with strangers.
0:09.3	If you go on a tender date, you might send a close friend or family member the location of the place
0:13.8	that you're meeting, give them the time you're supposed to be back, the user name of who you're meeting,
0:19.3	etc. You do this so hopefully, hopefully, if something happens, there's at least someone
0:23.7	who knows where you are, someone who can help you or can direct law enforcement to go help you.
0:28.7	But as always, there are some people who don't take precautions like these. Sometimes maybe because
0:33.0	they're not street smart, but also maybe because they're ashamed of online dating for whatever
0:38.4	reason in this example. They don't want their families to know that they're trying to meet someone
0:42.1	or that they're hooking up here and there just for sexy fun. Maybe they don't want whoever else
0:46.7	they're dating to know. Any number of factors could lead them to wanting to keep their online
0:51.2	entanglements private and that can be dangerous, even deadly and it's not a new phenomenon.
0:58.1	These exact same dynamics were at work 80 years ago back in the 1940s. Of course, there wasn't
1:03.5	Tinder back then or Grindr or any other hook up apps. There wasn't the internet or even Craigslist,
1:09.0	but there were lonely hearts clubs. A lonely hearts club was essentially the 1940s version of Tinder,
1:14.5	just like Tinder, your autobiography of yourself included a picture. Unlike Tinder, your profile was
1:19.8	distributed in the form of a book of eligible people to the club's other members, typically members of
1:24.7	the other sex. And if another member liked you, they might write to you. In the middle of the 20th
1:29.3	century, it was so many more people widowed in the US than now thanks to war and diseases that
1:33.9	didn't have modern medicine to cure them yet. These clubs were extraordinarily popular and they
1:39.0	were especially popular among women in an era where women were still expected to be prim and
1:43.7	proper ladies and follow all kinds of so-called respectable courting rules. Lonely hearts clubs allowed
	...

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