Faye Della Copeland was born in Harrison, Arkansas, in 1921 and married Ray Copeland in 1940. Ray, born in Oklahoma in 1914, had left school in the fourth grade and had a lifetime record of theft, forgery and cattle fraud going back to the Depression. They moved constantly ahead of his convictions and raised six children, settling eventually on a farm at Mooresville in Livingston County, Missouri.
The fraud was the point and the murders served it. Ray recruited drifters and casual labourers from homeless shelters and employment offices in Kansas City and elsewhere, men with no families and no fixed address. He would put a man up on the farm, send him to a livestock auction to buy cattle with a cheque drawn on an account with nothing in it, and take delivery of the animals. When the cheque bounced the buyer of record was a man nobody could find, because Ray had shot him with a .22 rifle and buried him.
Five bodies were recovered in 1989 and 1990, in a barn and on neighbouring farms: Paul Cowart, John Freeman, Jimmie Harvey, Wayne Warner and Dennis Murphy. The investigation began when a former farmhand who had got away telephoned Crime Stoppers.
The evidence against Faye was that she had kept the books. A list of the hired men's names was found in her handwriting, with a mark against several of them, and a quilt was recovered that had been made from their clothes. She said she had been beaten and dominated by Ray for fifty years and had known nothing.
Both were convicted in 1990 and 1991. Faye received the death penalty and at sixty-nine became the oldest woman ever sentenced to death in the United States. Ray died of natural causes on death row in October 1993. Faye's sentence was commuted to life in 1999, and after a stroke she was granted medical parole in 2002. She died in a nursing home on December 5, 2003, aged eighty-two.