Having hit an all-time visitor high with the Washinton Times thing, I thought the time was ripe for a new, hopefully weekly-ish feature: the weekend double feature, in which I examine a duo of movies linked by… something. Perhaps they share a core story. Perhaps a director, or writer. Perhaps one was a big influence on the other, and perhaps – like in this case – they’re both based on the same true story.
Raymond Fernandez was a con-man who answered Lonely Hearts ads and cheated women out of their money. Martha Beck was an overweight nurse he met through these ads. She fell madly in love with him, and they became partners in crime, Martha posing as Raymond’s sister to lend him an air of respectability. However, Martha was extremey jealous, and the pair of them killed at least two women – and the 2 yo daughter of one of them as well. Seventeen other murders were attributed to the pair. They were both executed in 1951.
In 1970, Leonard Kastle made a B-movie -his only movie – about the case, with Shirley Stoler as Martha and an unctuous Tony Lo Bianco as Ray, The Honeymoon Killers, which was shown the IFFR in February. 36 years later Todd Robinson, the grandson of one of the policemen assigned to the case, cast the considerably prettier Salma Hayek and Jared Leto in the same roles in his film Lonely Hearts.
