Spared execution, N.J. murderer dies at 79

John Martini insisted he would rather be executed than languish on New Jersey's death row.

Yesterday, the man whose murder victims included a North Jersey businessman and a widow he shot to death in Philadelphia died in his cell at New Jersey State Prison. He was 79.

Martini was pronounced dead at 2:21 a.m., said Deirdre Fedkenheuer, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections. The cause of death was not confirmed.

Martini was among nine former death-row inmates given life sentences in 2007, when New Jersey legislators abolished the death penalty.

Born in 1930, Martini grew into a tough-talking, lifelong criminal.

In interviews with a reporter 20 years ago, he laughed at law enforcement and jokingly referred to the 1989 murder of Irving Flax, in northern New Jersey, as "an accident." His brown eyes were dark and glassy; he showed no remorse during the interviews.

In 1990, Martini was placed on death row for killing Flax, a Fair Lawn businessman whom Martini kidnapped; he demanded ransom from his wife.

Marilyn Flax, working with the FBI, threw $25,000 out a car window to Martini, as he instructed. Instead of freeing Flax, Martini shot him three times in the back of the head so Flax could not identify him. Then Martini fled with his girlfriend.

The two were captured a short while later.

As Martini sat in the Bergen County Jail, investigators lined up to interview him about unsolved cases, including the killings of his aunt and uncle in Atlantic City, the killings of his cousin and two friends in Arizona, and the shooting death of a 62-year-old woman killed in Philadelphia.

He later pleaded guilty to two slayings in Arizona. A Philadelphia jury also found him guilty of killing Anna "Polly" Duval, the widow Martini bilked of $25,000 in a real estate transaction. She flew to Philadelphia from Arizona to meet him, and Martini shot her three times in the head before he left her body in a field near Philadelphia International Airport in 1977.

Marilyn Flax could not be reached for comment yesterday. Before New Jersey abolished the death penalty, she was among those who spoke in favor of capital punishment.

Not all killers deserved execution, Flax told a reporter, but "the death penalty was designed for John Martini."

She wrote to the governor in 2005 that "John Martini is a cold-blooded, serial murderer," adding later, "I will never forget my husband, Irv - not his life, and certainly not his death. I live with this reality every day."

During his 1989 interviews, Martini warned he could get out of the county jail any time. Shortly afterward, he bribed a guard who unwittingly brought him diamond cutting wire that Martini used to saw through the bars in the law library.

His plan included kidnapping the guard's child for ransom. He might have been successful, but another inmate turned on him when Martini revealed they had to kill a guard to get out.

During his interviews, Martini boasted that state execution did not scare him.

But more than a decade later, when the state set a date, Martini fought to stay alive. By that time, Martini had grown old in prison, his hair gray and thin, his face ashen, with barely a resemblance to the cocky criminal who once hijacked a tractor-trailer full of women's underwear.

Even on death row, Martini was in the news. He was an eyewitness to the 1999 slaying of Robert "Mudman" Simon, a Warlocks gang member convicted of killing a Franklin Township police officer.

Martini watched as a fellow death-row inmate, Ambrose Harris, fatally beat Simon, stomping his head so hard he crushed Simon's skull. Harris, already serving time for murder and rape, was found not guilty; his attorneys argued he'd acted in self-defense.