Paul Pueller.com

March 2, 1949.

A balding mail order Romeo, who contacted moneyed women through lonely hearts letters, and his fat, unkempt

paramour, confessed today that they had killed two women and a three-year-old girl in the past two

months. Mrs. Martha Beck, twice divorced, met Raymond Fernandez through a correspondence club

when she was living in Pensacola.

Fernandez was then living in New York.

Late in 1947, she came to New York to meet the swarthy Hawaiian-born man

and worked out with them the details of a plan to meet other women through their club and take them for their money.

Together they went to Laurel Town, Pennsylvania, where Fernandez met and married a 40-year-old widow.

After three weeks, the widow left him, so they turned to Chicago.

There, under another name, he married another woman and got

$4,000 from her. Eventually, after similar experiences in Vermont and Massachusetts, Fernandez

and Mrs. Beck met the woman identified as Janet Faye in Albany. McMan quoted Mrs. Beck as saying,

we got $3,000 from her. On January 4th, because she was jealous, the husky Mrs. Beck

slugged Mrs. Faye over the head with a pipe. Fernandez then strangled her, and they stuffed

her body in a steamer trunk. Fernandez then strangled her and they stuffed her body in a steamer trunk.

Fernandez told the prosecutor the slaying took place in his apartment at Valley Stream on Long

Island. They took the body to a house they rented near the Idaho Wild Airport on Long Island

and buried it. The pair came to Grand Rapids January 23rd to meet the widowed Mrs. Downing.

Her husband was killed in 1947 when a truck he was driving was struck by a train.

After living for several weeks in Mrs. Downing's house, Fernandez induced her to sell the property and moved to California.

...