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Believe it or not, this episode is a love story. It is about people searching for love, killing for love, and dying for love.

In the late 1940s, the world was coming out of World War II. Millions of people had lost their loved ones, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters, and husbands and wives.

People were trying to rebuild their lives and were looking for others to share it with. There was obviously no internet back then, no match.com. But what they did have were lonely hearts clubs, which connected single people by mail. Unfortunately, this opened up the possibility of a lot of people mainly single women to being victimized. They were vulnerable to being raped or robbed.

The victims would be too embarrassed to report them to the police, thus it became a breeding ground for dangerous criminals.

In 1952, Wenzel Brown said it best in an article about the Lonely Hearts Clubs. He wrote,

though the Lonely Hearts Clubs promise much, the result is only unhappiness and disillusionment, and sometimes murder. And our love story has all three.

Hi there, Wondry listeners. Hannah and Sruti here from TrueCram Podcast Red handed. Your favourite podcast red handed. We just wanted to say how excited we are to be included in Amazon Music and Wondry's best podcasts of the year as chosen by their listeners, which is you.

So thank you so much to everyone who listened to us voted for us, all the things you do for us.

Any of you out there who haven't checked out red handed, what are you doing? What are you waiting for? It's a weekly show where we deep dive into the most talked about cases like the Delphi murders, and also those you might never have heard of like the Nathari Child sacrifices in Delhi.

Go listen to Red handed right now on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

From Wondry and Tree Fort, I'm Candace DeLong, and this is Killer Sight.

Through my work as an FBI profiler and psychiatric nurse, I've spent decades studying people's minds. I've interviewed many murderers including serial killers, and the question I get asked time and time again is why did they do it?

I want to give you a satisfying answer to that question, so in this series, I'm diving deep into the mindsets of these criminals to give you my best analysis of what made them do what they did.

This episode is The Lonely Hearts Killers.

Looking through a magazine in the late 1940s, 66-year-old widow Janet Faye discovered an ad that described a Love by Mail Club.

These were clubs that, for a fee, would send you a list of available men or women, a physical description, and in some cases, their financial statements.

These correspondence clubs, also known as Lonely Hearts Clubs, were very popular, especially with the widows whose husband had been lost to the war.

Janet was a very religious woman, and she was uncertain that she would ever find someone that was as devout a Catholic as she was.

So she was happily surprised when she received a letter from a handsome younger man named Charles Martin, who seemed to share her faith and was interested in her despite their 32-year-age difference.

After just a few weeks of letter writing, Janet was smitten.

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