© 2008 William Ahearn
Lines have to be drawn, distinctions need to be made and criteria formed if weeding the garden of insanity and murder is ever going to end. In these essays, a serial killer is one obsessed by killing and keeps on killing. The reason or motive is never clear – even if the killer actually can articulate one – but it’s one of the few things in life that isn’t about the money. So I have eliminated from my list of serial killers any killings that were motivated by greed. That includes the wife killers, the husbands killed by poison, hit men, spree killers, murderers who kill to avoid capture and anyone else that has an understandable motive.
For a look at the white male in serial killer films, go here.
There is always an exception and in this case it’s “The Honeymoon Killers,” Leonard Kastle’s 1970 film depicting the sordid adventures of Ray Fernandez and Martha Beck who were also known as “The Lonely Hearts Killers.” Whether money actually drove Fernandez and Beck or whether it grew out of their disastrous relationship isn’t something that can be measured. For Martha Beck – a 230-pound nurse who met Fernandez through letters in a lonely-hearts club publication – it was about the romance or, more specifically, the sex.
For more on the killers go here and here.
Although Fernandez had been suspected of a murder prior to meeting Beck, there is no question that they killed several – maybe a dozen – women after they began their folie à deux. It is an incredibly odd story in crime history and it’s been told three times in films.
“The Honeymoon Killers” has become something of a classic. Martin Scorsese was hired to direct the film and was fired within the first week of shooting. There is talk of another director coming and going after that and finally the writer, Leonard Kastle, took over the direction. As with many films “The Honeymoon Killers” simplified the story of the duo and the black and white photography works with the pedestrian and banal attitudes of the killers. Tony Lo Bianco, Shirley Stoler, and Doris Roberts (who was also in “No Way To Treat A Lady”), are in the cast and this is a good, totally unpretentious film. Most of the violence is off-camera and there is nothing exploitive about the movie beyond the actual facts of the case.
Wish that were true of Todd Robinson’s 2006 flick “Lonely Hearts.” Starring John Travolta and James Gandolfini, and scripted by a son of one of the Long Island, NY investigators who built a case against Fernandez and Beck. It’s a decent procedural and has some interesting scenes, but the film suffers by casting Selma Hayek as Martha Beck. That’s romanticizing the killer and giving Ray a motive he never had. This flick definitely goes for the titillation and it’s really not the story that needs to be told.
The last thing that I thought I needed was a third film on this depraved duo but “Deep Crimson” (Profundo carmesí) made in 1996 by Arturo Ripstein, is a really strange treatment of the subject becoming almost a film noir as it winds its way to its bitter ending. While this film is more of an improvisation of the facts – it makes no claim to be based on a true story – than the others, it is far more cinematic and involving than either. A good crime story and a nice flick from Mexico.