Faye Copeland was 69 when a jury in Chillicothe, Missouri, convicted her in November 1990 of five counts of first-degree murder. The dead were five homeless and transient men who had come to work for her husband, Ray, on the couple's farm near Mooresville, in Livingston County. Prosecutors said the men had been used in a cattle-buying fraud and then shot before the bad checks they had written could bring anyone looking for them. There was no evidence that Faye Copeland fired a shot. The state's case was that she was an accomplice, and the jury agreed. It recommended death on four of the counts, and she came to be described as the oldest woman on death row in the United States.
Her husband was convicted of the same five murders in a separate trial in 1991 and was also sentenced to death. He died in prison in 1993. Her own death sentences were upheld by the Supreme Court of Missouri in 1996 and then set aside by the federal courts, which found that the prosecutor's closing argument at the penalty phase had been improper and that her lawyers had failed to object to it. She was sentenced to life without parole in 2001, released on medical parole after a stroke in 2002, and died in a nursing home in Chillicothe at the end of 2003.
The Copelands lived on a farm near Mooresville, a small place in north central Missouri about 65 miles northeast of Kansas City, according to United Press International. Ray Copeland did chores and other work on neighboring farms in the county. At the start of 1990, when the couple were arraigned, UPI gave his age as 75 and hers as 68.
Little about Faye Copeland's early life is recorded in the court files or the news reports. At the penalty phase of her trial, her lawyers asked the jury to weigh that she was the mother of six, the grandmother of twelve and the great-grandmother of five; that she had been a loving and caring member of her family; that she had been a conscientious and diligent worker; and that she had never been arrested before. The Eighth Circuit later noted that she had no history of violence.
The Supreme Court of Missouri's opinion records two other details of the couple's life. The man who was county prosecutor when the murder charges were brought had earlier represented Ray in a bankruptcy matter in 1987 and Faye in litigation with a bank from 1987 to 1989. And Ray claimed to be hard of hearing. An Associated Press report at the time of her death said that Ray was illiterate, and that this was why it was Faye who wrote out the list of farm helpers.
The courts described the fraud in similar terms at each stage of the case. Ray Copeland recruited homeless men from shelters and missions with the offer of work, the Supreme Court of Missouri said. The opinion names missions in Springfield and Joplin. Each new man was taken to a nearby town to rent a post office box and to open a checking account with money the Copelands supplied. He ordered printed checks and signed blank starter checks over to the couple. Then he went to livestock auctions and bid on cattle, paying with checks the account could not cover. The cattle were sold again at once.
Before the checks bounced and the banks and sellers came looking for the buyer, the man was killed. That was the prosecution's account, and it was the account the appellate courts accepted on review. The Eighth Circuit put it in one line: Ray Copeland resold the cattle before the checks cleared and then shot each man to prevent an investigation.
UPI reported that prosecutors put the couple's profit from the resales at $32,000. An Associated Press report printed in the University Daily Kansan in November 1990 gave the figure as about $22,000.
Five men were named in the murder indictment, according to UPI's report of the January 1990 arraignment. Paul Cowart was from Dardanelle, Arkansas; UPI gave his age as 21. John Freeman was 27, and UPI gave his hometown as Tulsa, Oklahoma. Jimmy Harvey, whose first name the Supreme Court of Missouri spells Jimmie, was 27, from Springfield; UPI's report says Springfield, Illinois. Dennis Murphy was 30 and from Normal, Illinois. Wayne Warner's age and hometown were not known when the charges were read.
Prosecutors said the five were killed between October 1986 and May 1989. Investigators had not said at the arraignment what the motive was. All five had come to the Copelands as men without settled homes, the kind of hired help the courts and the press of the time called transients, and several other homeless men who had worked for the couple had not been found, UPI reported.
The court records keep some traces of the men's dealings with the Copelands. Faye Copeland wrote out pasture rental agreements in the names of Wayne Warner and Dennis Murphy, which officers later found in the house. When John Freeman's last check bounced, his bank closed the account and mailed the balance by certified letter to the Copeland address. Faye Copeland signed for the letter, later gave it back to the carrier, and told the bank she did not know Freeman or how the letter had come to her address, and asked it not to send any more of his mail, the Supreme Court of Missouri recorded.
The case broke open because one recruit escaped. In July 1989 Ray Copeland hired a man from a mission in Springfield, a recovering alcoholic who agreed to work for him, according to the Supreme Court of Missouri. On August 6, 1989, working behind the barn, the man saw what he believed were human remains. Faye Copeland seemed upset and told him that she and Ray did not want anyone going back there.
The printed checks for his account arrived on August 8. After an auction at Green City, the man decided to quit and asked to close his account at a bank in Brookfield. The next morning, the court said, Ray Copeland drew him to the barn on a pretext and pointed a .22 rifle at him. The man talked his way into a ride to Brookfield. On the way Ray stopped at the courthouse in Chillicothe, where Faye was waiting, and she followed them to the bank, where the account was closed with one check still outstanding. Later a woman he met at a bar drove him back to the farm to collect his things, and Faye Copeland wrote down the woman's name and license plate number.
About two weeks later, in Nebraska, the man called a crime-stoppers line and reported that he had seen three or four bodies, the court said. He was afterward arrested in Oregon over the bad check written at the Green City auction and on a car theft charge. The Eighth Circuit said it was only when this man escaped and told the police that the Copelands were caught.
Two more recruits followed in the weeks after his escape. In August 1989 Ray Copeland took on a man from a mission in Joplin, who grew suspicious and went back to Joplin. In September another man agreed to buy cattle for him, opened a post office box and an account in Gallatin, and signed a blank starter check over to the couple. Faye Copeland took him to a sale barn and kept a running record of his bank dealings. At a restaurant, the court said, she told him that if anyone asked who she was, he should say she was his wife. He survived. Ray Copeland was arrested a few days later.
Officers executed a search warrant at the Copeland farm on October 9, 1989, acting on the escaped man's report, the Supreme Court of Missouri said. UPI dated the start of digging on the farm to October 10, and reported that the search then spread to nearby farms where Ray Copeland had worked. No bodies were found on the couple's own farm.
In a closet in the guest bedroom officers found men's clothing in a range of sizes, some of it later identified as belonging to the victims, and luggage identified as a victim's. They found notes in Faye Copeland's handwriting with the banking details of two of the recruits and the name and license number of the woman who had driven the escaped man back to the farm. In a Polaroid camera case was a list of names in her handwriting, each marked either "back" or with an X. Three of the dead men's names carried an X, according to the state supreme court. In her purse were a signed blank check from the escaped man and a signed blank starter check from the last recruit.
Officers talked with Faye Copeland for about two hours while the search went on. She said she did not know Paul Cowart, although his clothes were in her closet. She said she did not know two other men whose names were on her list, but admitted knowing the man who had escaped. She said she wanted to call her son and her lawyer but did not use the phone. She was then taken to the sheriff's department and arrested about 45 minutes after she got there. The Supreme Court of Missouri later held that she had not been in custody during the two hours at the house, so her statements there could be used.
Three of the men, Cowart, Freeman and Harvey, were found on October 17, 1989, on a farm where Ray Copeland had worked, UPI reported; the state supreme court placed those graves near Ludlow. Wayne Warner was found later in October on another nearby farm. Dennis Murphy was found on November 21, 1989.
All five died of gunshot wounds, the Supreme Court of Missouri said, and one bullet was matched to a .22 rifle found in the Copeland home. Prosecutors said Ray Copeland was the gunman.
UPI reported that the Copelands were arrested in October 1989, first on conspiracy-to-steal charges tied to the cattle fraud. In December 1989 a Livingston County grand jury indicted them for murder, and the fraud charges were dismissed once the murder charges were filed. The couple were arraigned separately a week after the indictment, each on five counts of first-degree murder. Both pleaded not guilty and were held without bond in the Livingston County jail. Prosecutors said from the start that they would seek the death penalty.
There was a turn before trial that later became part of Faye Copeland's appeals. The county prosecutor, the lawyer who had represented the couple in the earlier civil matters, negotiated a plea agreement with Ray Copeland's lawyer: Ray would plead guilty and receive life without parole, and the state would not seek death against Faye. Judge E. Richard Webber reconsidered, disqualified the prosecutor from Ray's case, and declined to approve the agreement. The Supreme Court of Missouri held in 1996 that the agreement had never been accepted by the court, so it stayed unenforceable, and that the judge had acted within his discretion.
Faye Copeland was tried first, in Livingston County Circuit Court before Judge Webber. The state was represented by Assistant Attorney General Kenny Hulshof, who later served in Congress; her lawyer was the public defender David Miller.
The prosecution's case rested on the paper trail. The Eighth Circuit listed what the state relied on: that she stored the victims' clothes in a closet, helped with the paperwork for the bad checks, warned the escaped man to stay away from the place where he had seen the remains, tried to hide any link between herself, her husband and the transient men, and wrote the list of names with X marks beside those of the victims. The court called the list perhaps the strongest evidence against her. Letters and notes she sent to Ray in jail were also used. Jail staff had opened them under a card she signed at booking agreeing that her mail could be opened. The notes, the Missouri court said, suggested that she expected something incriminating might turn up in the searches; in one she wrote that once the search warrant expired, things would cool down. A handwriting expert matched one letter, which the sheriff had copied, to samples of her writing.
In closing, the prosecutor told the jury that X marks the spot. The defense objected in part, and the judge sustained the objection as a statement of personal opinion. On appeal the state supreme court held that the inference, that the men marked with an X were dead, was a fair one to draw from the evidence.
The defense case was that Ray Copeland had committed the killings without his wife's knowledge, that she was a bystander, and that she was a battered wife, the Associated Press reported. A psychologist, Dr. Marilyn Hutchinson, was ready to testify that she suffered from battered spouse syndrome, but the judge kept that testimony out of the guilt phase. Missouri law required advance notice before a defendant could rely on a mental disease or defect, and her lawyers had expressly disclaimed such a defense. Duress is not a defense to murder in Missouri, the state supreme court said, and the statute allowing battered spouse evidence covered self-defense only. Her relatives were allowed to testify about how Ray treated her, but at trial, according to the same court, they gave little support to the claim of abuse.
The jury of eight women and four men convicted her on a Saturday, November 10, 1990, of all five counts of first-degree murder, UPI reported.
At the penalty phase, Dr. Hutchinson testified that Faye Copeland fit the profile of a battered woman. The state answered with a court-appointed psychiatrist, Dr. Jacks, who testified over the defense's objection that she was not a battered woman. The prosecutor argued that her age should not count in her favor.
The prosecutor's closing argument became the center of the federal case years later. As the Eighth Circuit quoted it, he told the jury of a television news report about gangs in Los Angeles whose members were killing each other over turf, and said it was "the same thing, right here in our backyards." He called the killings the modern equivalent of "thirty pieces of silver." He said there had never been a more complete disregard for the sanctity of human life than in this case, and told the jury to "stand firm." In rebuttal he spoke of the effect of the killings on the families and invoked his own young son and the defense lawyer's son. He also told the jury that her use of clothing from the victims to make quilts was obscene; the Missouri court later said that argument had support in the record. Her lawyers did not object to the comparisons.
The jury deliberated for more than three hours and announced its decision at 8:50 on a Tuesday night, according to the Associated Press report in the University Daily Kansan. It recommended death for the murders of Paul Cowart, John Freeman, Jimmy Harvey and Wayne Warner, and life without parole for the murder of Dennis Murphy. Judge Webber ordered a presentence investigation before final sentencing. If the recommendations were accepted, UPI said, she would become the oldest person on Missouri's death row; the AP report said she would be the oldest person sentenced to death in Missouri since the state brought back the death penalty in 1977. Her lawyer said he would seek a new trial and would appeal the exclusion of the battered-wife testimony.
The jury had found two aggravating circumstances for each of the four men whose deaths drew a death recommendation: that the murder was committed for money or something of monetary value, and that the victim was a potential witness in a pending investigation of the bad-check cattle buying. For Dennis Murphy, for whom there was no pending investigation, only the first was submitted. The judge imposed the sentences the jury recommended: death on four counts and life without parole on the fifth.
Ray Copeland's trial was set for January 1991, but the court first had to decide whether he was mentally competent to assist in his own defense. His lawyers said he suffered from senile dementia, including an organic brain disorder, UPI reported. The Supreme Court of Missouri later noted that he had a degenerative brain disease that made it unlikely he would live to be executed.
A jury found him guilty on March 20, 1991, of five counts of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to death by lethal injection on each count by Judge Webber, whom UPI identified at the sentencing as a Scotland County circuit judge. A spokesman for the attorney general's office said he apparently became the oldest inmate on death row in the nation. He died at the Potosi Correctional Center in 1993, at 78, while awaiting execution, according to the Associated Press. The Eighth Circuit wrote that he was ill at the time of his trial.
Faye Copeland's appeal and her motion for post-conviction relief were decided together by the Supreme Court of Missouri, sitting en banc, on August 20, 1996. Chief Justice Holstein wrote the opinion; all the judges concurred. Rehearing was denied on September 17, 1996, and the United States Supreme Court declined to review the case in 1997.
The court rejected every claim. It held that the battered spouse testimony had been properly kept out of the guilt phase, that the state's psychiatrist could testify at the penalty phase once she had put her mental condition in issue, that the evidence was enough to convict, that the jury instructions were correct, and that her statements at the farm were admissible. It found that the two aggravating circumstances were supported, and that the death sentences were neither excessive nor disproportionate compared with other Missouri cases involving murders for money and the killing of witnesses.
On the closing arguments, the court agreed that four of the prosecutor's comments, comparing the case to crimes outside the record, were improper. It said the comparisons might arguably have been reversible error had the defense objected at the time. But because there had been no objection, the court reviewed them only for plain error, and in light of what it called overwhelming evidence it found no manifest injustice.
The post-conviction hearing brought out a different picture of the marriage. Several family members who had said little at trial about violence by Ray now described abuse of animals, of Faye Copeland and of themselves. The motion court doubted their credibility, noting among other things that Ray had died by then, and found that her trial lawyers had presented the evidence that was available at the time. The state supreme court found those findings not clearly erroneous. It also rejected a claim, raised by relatives, that her lead trial lawyer had been drinking; the second-chair lawyer, the trial judge and the prosecutor all said he had not been intoxicated.
Faye Copeland then petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri. On August 4, 1999, the district court upheld her convictions but found the penalty phase constitutionally flawed because of the prosecutor's closing argument and her lawyers' failure to object to it. It granted the writ and ordered the state either to hold a new sentencing hearing or to sentence her to life without parole.
The district court's reasoning, as the Eighth Circuit later quoted it, turned on how weak the case for death had been. "Although the evidence of petitioner's guilt was strong, the case for the death penalty was rather weak," the court wrote. There was no evidence that she had shot any of the victims. Ray Copeland had designed the scheme and carried it out, her role was minor, and the prosecutor had tried by improper means to turn her case into one that called for death.
Both sides appealed. The state wanted the death sentences restored; Faye Copeland wanted a new trial. A three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit, with Judge Heaney writing, affirmed the district court in all respects on November 30, 2000.
On the penalty phase, the state conceded that the remarks had been improper. The panel found the case close in its facts to earlier Eighth Circuit decisions that had vacated death sentences after similar arguments, including a prosecutor's comparisons to violent gangs and to his own son. Because the improper comments formed the core of the argument for death, the panel held that the Missouri court's contrary conclusion was an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law, and that the failure to object amounted to ineffective assistance of counsel. The death sentences were vacated.
On the guilt phase, the panel called it a close question but declined to order a new trial. The improper remarks there had been isolated, part of a much longer argument, and answered by the defense. It also held that the evidence was enough to support the convictions under Missouri's accomplice statute, and that because her relatives had testified about her mistreatment, the exclusion of the expert testimony at the guilt phase did not require a new trial.
The panel did not need to decide her other penalty-phase claims, but it remarked on one of them. Her trial lawyers had not put in evidence a neighbor's report that Ray had struck her in the back with a board. Dr. Jacks, the state's psychiatrist, later signed an affidavit saying that had he known of that incident, he could not have testified that she showed no symptoms of battered spouse syndrome. The panel called the affidavit far more troubling than the other points raised.
In May 2001 a judge sentenced Faye Copeland to life without parole and turned down her lawyer's request that she be released for the time she had already served, the Lawrence Journal-World reported. At that hearing she said, "I think I've paid for what I did or what I knew."
Her supporters had pressed for her release for years. The Associated Press reported in 2003 that a 1995 petition with 3,000 signatures had asked the governor to free her, and that a 1999 petition said she had caused no problems in prison and should be brought home. In 1999, Kenny Hulshof, by then a member of Congress, said that the list in her handwriting showed she was more of an accomplice than she claimed.
On August 10, 2002, she had a stroke that left her partly paralyzed and unable to speak, her son told reporters. She was paroled on a Friday a couple of weeks later because of a severe medical condition, a Department of Corrections spokesman said, and was moved to a nursing home. Missouri law allows the parole board to release a prisoner serving life without parole who is terminally ill or has a condition that cannot be treated in prison. The board's chairman told Missourinet that the board defines terminal as having about six months to live and also weighs the prisoner's mobility and whether the prison system can care for the illness, and that it does not grant medical parole easily.
Faye Copeland died of natural causes on a Sunday at a nursing home in Chillicothe, her hometown, where she had been living on medical parole, the Associated Press reported on December 31, 2003; the Department of Corrections announced the death, and the Livingston County coroner gave the cause as natural causes. She was 82. A Washington Examiner history column in 2009 gave the date of her death as December 28, 2003.
The list. The Associated Press reported in 2003 that twelve names on the list in her handwriting had X marks beside them, that five of those men had been found dead, and that prosecutors believed three other missing men had also been killed. The Supreme Court of Missouri described the list as several names each marked "back" or with an X, with three of the dead men's names marked X. No other deaths were charged, and no court found that any other man on the list was killed.
Her knowledge. Her defense always held that she knew nothing of the killings. The jury found otherwise, and the convictions were upheld at every stage. What she actually knew, as opposed to what the jury inferred from the list, the clothing, the paperwork and her letters, was never established by any admission. The federal district court described her role as minor.
The abuse claim. Whether Ray Copeland abused her was disputed throughout. At trial her relatives gave little support to it; after Ray's death several of them described abuse, and the courts doubted them. The state's psychiatrist later said he could not have given his opinion had he known of a neighbor's report of an assault.
Ages and hometowns. Reports differ on Ray Copeland's age: UPI gave it as 74 in November 1990 and 75 in May 1991, and the AP gave it as 75 in November 1990. UPI gave Paul Cowart's age as 21 and placed John Freeman in Tulsa and Jimmy Harvey in Springfield, Illinois.
The profit. Prosecutors' figure for the couple's take from the cattle resales was reported as $32,000 by UPI and as about $22,000 by the AP.
1986 to 1989: Five hired men are killed; prosecutors date the killings from October 1986 to May 1989.
July 1989: Ray Copeland recruits a man from a mission in Springfield.
August 6, 1989: The recruit sees what he believes are human remains behind the barn.
August 1989: He escapes after Ray Copeland points a rifle at him, and about two weeks later reports bodies to a crime-stoppers line from Nebraska.
September 1989: Another recruit opens an account in Gallatin; Ray Copeland is arrested a few days later.
October 9, 1989: Officers search the Copeland farm under a warrant.
October 17, 1989: Three bodies are found on a farm near Ludlow; a fourth is found later that month.
November 21, 1989: The fifth body is found.
December 1989: A Livingston County grand jury indicts both Copelands for murder.
January 1990: Both are arraigned and plead not guilty.
November 10, 1990: A jury convicts Faye Copeland of five counts of first-degree murder.
November 1990: The jury recommends death on four counts and life without parole on one.
March 20, 1991: A jury convicts Ray Copeland of five counts of first-degree murder.
May 1991: Ray Copeland is sentenced to death.
1993: Ray Copeland dies at the Potosi Correctional Center, aged 78.
August 20, 1996: The Supreme Court of Missouri affirms her convictions and sentences.
1997: The United States Supreme Court declines review.
August 4, 1999: A federal district court vacates the death sentences.
November 30, 2000: The Eighth Circuit affirms.
May 2001: She is sentenced to life without parole.
August 10, 2002: She has a stroke.
2002: She is released on medical parole to a nursing home.
December 2003: She dies in Chillicothe, aged 82.