Wedding In Death Row

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31305, 27 February 1967, Page 2

Wedding In Death Row

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) CHICAGO, Feb. 23.

The wedding ceremony was simple and short, and when it was over the bride and groom kissed for the first time. There were no bridesmaids no bouquets, no guests and no music today at the marriage of a convicted killer sentenced to die in the electric chair, and a blonde divorcee who has two children.

The groom, Marty Tajra, aged 35, and the bride, Mrs Frances Marie Beattie, aged 25, had never even touched each other before.

They had always been separated by a wire screen in the visiting room at Cook County Gaol.

Criminal Court Judge,

James Geroulis, performed the ceremony in his chambers.

When he pronounced the couple man and wife, he wispered to the groom, “I think you’d better kiss her now.” The newlyweds embraced for the first time—and they did not mind doing several encores for photographers. The bride, more composed than the groom, wore a bluebordered white suit and carried a corsage of orchids. The groom wore a prisonissue navy blue suit, white shirt and a dark tie. Plain-clothes guards escorted Tajra to the judge’s chambers from his cell in “death row.”

The Rev. John Corn, the gaol’s Episcopal chaplain, served as witness to the marriage. He said he could not perform the ceremony because the couple would not co-habit as man and wife. It was all over in 10 minutes.

Tajra gave his bride a final kiss on the lips and walked between two guards to a lift which took him to a tunnel and back to death row. The romance began when Mrs Beattie was visiting another prisoner. “Marty and I started to talk,” she said. "I kept coming back to visit him every two weeks. Then I began to come every week. “After seven months he

asked me to wait for him. “I would have waited for him if it took forever.”

Tajra asked her to marry him. The answer was yes. Tajra was sentenced to death for killing the assistant manager of a restaurant during a hold-up in 1961. He has an appeal pending before the Illinois Supreme Court. Meanwhile his wife will go on working as a part-time waitress and will visit her husband once a week for the allowed half an hour.