In August 1989 a man named Jack McCormick called the Crime Stoppers hotline about an elderly couple, Ray and Faye Copeland, who ran a farm at Mooresville, outside Chillicothe in northern Missouri. McCormick had worked for them. He said he had seen human bones on the property and that Ray had tried to kill him. The police were skeptical until they looked up Ray's record. In October 1989 dozens of officers and a team of bloodhounds searched the farm with a warrant. At first they found nothing. Then they found the bodies of three young men in a barn nearby, and later two more, one of them in an old well close to where another man had been buried. All five had been shot in the back of the head with the same .22 caliber Marlin bolt-action rifle, which was found in the Copelands' house.
Ray Copeland was born in Oklahoma in 1914 and grew up moving from place to place with a family struggling through the Depression. As a young man he stole livestock and forged checks until he was caught and served a year in jail. After his release in 1940 he met Faye Wilson, born on August 4, 1921, and they married soon after. They had several children quickly and kept moving them around because of Ray's reputation, while he served one jail term after another. Faye worked in a factory and later as a motel maid to keep the family going.
Because he was known as a fraud, Ray could not buy and sell cattle in his own name. He began picking up drifters and hobos, many of them from missions, and hiring them as farmhands, then sending them to livestock markets to buy cattle with his bad checks. He sold the animals quickly, and when the checks bounced the buyer of record had moved on. Police eventually caught up with the scheme and Ray went back to jail. When he came out, he made sure the hired men could no longer be traced back to him.
The five dead men were Dennis K. Murphy, of Normal, Illinois, killed on October 17, 1986; Wayne Warner, of Bloomington, Illinois, killed on November 19, 1986; Jimmy Dale Harvey, twenty-seven, of Springfield, Missouri, killed on October 25, 1988; John W. Freeman, twenty-seven, of Boonville, Indiana, killed on December 8, 1988; and Paul J. Cowart, twenty, of Dardanelle, Arkansas, killed on May 3 or 4, 1989. In the house investigators found a list of farm helpers in Faye's handwriting. Twelve of the names had been marked with an X, among them those of five of the dead; the other seven men were missing. They also found a quilt Faye had made from the clothing of the murdered men.
Faye was tried first, beginning on November 1, 1990. Her defense presented her as a dutiful wife and mother who had endured beatings and ill-treatment from her husband for decades and had known nothing of the killings, a victim of battered woman syndrome. The prosecution relied on the list and the quilt. The jury convicted her of five counts of first-degree murder, and she received four death sentences and one life term; she sobbed when the sentence was read. At sixty-nine, she was the oldest woman on death row in the country. Ray was tried in March 1991, convicted of five murders and sentenced to death. Told that Faye had been sentenced to death as well, he said only that those things happen to some.
Ray died of natural causes in prison on October 19, 1993, and his body was cremated. Faye's lawyers appealed on the ground that the jury had not been allowed to hear evidence that Ray had abused her for years, and on August 6, 1999, federal Judge Ortrie D. Smith overturned her death sentences, leaving the convictions in place, and she was resentenced to five consecutive terms of life without parole. On August 10, 2002, she had a stroke that left her partly paralyzed and unable to speak, and that September Governor Bob Holden granted her medical parole so that she would not die in prison. She died in a nursing home in Chillicothe on December 23, 2003, at eighty-two, leaving five children and seventeen grandchildren.