Martha Beck

Martha Beck had two overriding ambitions in life: firstly to be a nurse and secondly, to fall in love with and marry a good man. Unfortunately these aims were somewhat thwarted by her voluptuous proportions – she weighed well over 200lbs. Having qualified as a nurse in her native Florida the only job she could find was in a mortuary. After 18 months of washing corpses she hightailed it over to California where there was a shortage of trained nurses and once installed, she set out to net a man. This achieved, she gave birth at which point her husband threw himself off a pier in a vain attempt to kill himself. On being saved, rather than face the rest of his life with Martha, he disappeared for good. Back in Florida Martha turned to Lonely Hearts clubs and soon met Raymond Fernandez, a faded lothario whose sole income came from fleecing lonely widows he had met through the agencies. The pair found soulmates in each other and spent the next few years operating as a brother and sister team – him marrying the widow and she organising the transfer of the widow's assetts. Things went wrong when they felt obliged to bludgeon one of the unfortunate women to death in New York so the quickly took off to Michigan where a Mrs Delphine Downing and her small daughter Rainelle became the pair's next victims. Mrs Downing was beaten to death when she ordered Fernandez and Martha from her home on discovering that her husband-to-be was bald and Rainelle was later drowned in a bath tub by Martha when she would not stop crying. Quickly caught, the Michigan authorities agreed to extradite the pair to New York where the death penalty was very much in use. They were executed on 8 March 1951. There was one slight hitch when it was discovered that Martha was too fat to fit in the electric chair so she was seated on the arm rests for her flight to eternity.