A man was arrested yesterday at a grocery in Wisconsin. He was stabbing boxes of Frosted Flakes, Grapenuts, and Cheerios.
Cereal Killer.
Oh, those Serial Killers.
I have to bring this up because on this date, March 8, 1951, the Lonely Hearts Killers were executed. Lonely hearts and all, there were two of them.
They were a dubious duo. Martha Beck and Raymond Martinez Fernandez. They were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in New York for all their bad deeds.
Let me give you a word or two about what they did. In a nutshell, they focused on women who placed personal ads in newspapers. They would search them out and then create schemes to seduce, rob, and murder them.
Yes. They eventually got caught. Beck and Fernandez boasted of killing as many as seventeen women throughout their escapades. However, the evidence collected indicates there may have been only four victims.
These two, by all appearances, seemed to be an unlikely coupling in crime. First, there was Martha Beck. She was significantly overweight and not attractive, in the least bit, by society standards. Beck must have had trouble finding a good man because she joined a lonely hearts club that she read about in a magazine ad. The precursor to the apps of today, like Tinder, and Bumble, and Match. Anyway. Her first letter came from Ray Fernandez from Brooklyn.
Fernandez had some hurdles too. He was from Spain, and during WWII, served in Spain’s Merchant Marine Corps. When the war ended, he decided to come to America — seeking work. Shortly after boarding a ship on his way to the United States, a steel hatch fell on him. That’s was some bad luck. It fractured his skull and injured his frontal lobe.
I’m not excusing the guy, but an injury to the head can cause some long-lasting problems. Or create a whole big bunch of questionable realities. I think it might have been the case for young Ray Fernandez.
Upon his release from a hospital, he quickly turned to petty crime. Crime didn’t pay for him. Instead, he went to prison for a year. And it was there that he met his cellmate, who convinced Fernandez to believe in voodoo and black magic. Fernandez later claimed black magic gave him irresistible power and charm over women. VooDoo like you do.
Not long thereafter, he conjured up his assault-on-women scheme. In 1946, Fernandez found his first victim in a lonely hearts club. It mainly went like this. He’d date a much older woman and ultimately gain their trust. And once she trusted him, he would loot her bank account. At some point, the flip switched. The following year, he took one of his victims to Spain. She would up dead in a hotel room.
Right after that, Fernandez responded to Beck’s note. He fully intended on making her a mark. But instead, they fell in love. He finally told her about his scheming. She liked the plan so much she schemed right along with him. Over the next two years, Beck started posing as Fernandez’s sister. I guess this gave him more credibility with those older women. And then he would rob them blind.
They robbed quite a few women successfully. But as they say, all things must come to an end. So, in 1949 Fernandez hooked up with a younger woman in Michigan. She became suspicious of the “brother and sister.”
This young woman had let the duo move into her home. But. She wouldn’t marry Fernandez and definitely did not give him access to her money. Not only was Beck tired of waiting, but she was jealous too. They killed the woman and her two-year-old daughter and buried them in the basement.
I don’t know how the police found out. But they pinned the murder on Beck and Fernandez. The two dopes confessed immediately because they thought their lives were safe in Michigan — a non-capital punishment state. But whoops. They didn’t count on being extradited to New York, where the electric chair was an option. And the black magic was zapped right out of the both of them.
I should add. At any one time, it’s believed that there are around 25-50 active serial killers in the United States. That’s about one per state on the high end. Be careful who you share your Fruit Loops with.
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“When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin’, but not to help.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
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“What is more important, that Caesar is assassinated or that he is assassinated by his intimate friends? … That,’ Frederick said, ‘is where the tragedy is.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains
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“Murder is like potato chips: you can’t stop with just one.”
― Stephen King, Under the Dome
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Heartbreak and cereal. We are talking Grape Nuts, crazy.
