When a Missouri jury convicted Faye Copeland of five murders in November 1990, she was 69, a mother of six, a grandmother of twelve and a great-grandmother of five. At the penalty phase the prosecutor told the jurors that her age should not count in her favor. The jury recommended death on four counts, and she came to be described as the oldest woman on death row in the United States.
Each of the six people in these cases was 60 or older when the killings at the center of the case took place, with two exceptions: Bruce McArthur’s first two victims died when he was 58 and 59, and Peter Tobin’s two earlier murders date from 1991, when he was 44. Ages are worked out from birth dates, or from the ages that courts and prosecutors gave at the time.
The Copelands lived on a farm near Mooresville, in Livingston County, Missouri, about 65 miles northeast of Kansas City. United Press International put Ray Copeland’s age at 75 and Faye’s at 68 when the couple were arraigned in January 1990, which places her in her middle sixties when the first of the deaths the state alleged occurred, in October 1986.
The state’s account, which the appeals courts accepted, was a cattle-buying fraud. Ray Copeland recruited transient men from missions and shelters with an offer of work. Each was taken to a nearby town to rent a post office box and open a checking account with money the Copelands supplied, then sent to livestock auctions to bid on cattle with checks the account could not cover. The cattle were resold at once. Before the checks bounced, the man was killed. Five were named in the murder indictment: Paul Cowart, 21, of Dardanelle, Arkansas; John Freeman, 27; Jimmie Harvey, 27; Dennis Murphy, 30, of Normal, Illinois; and Wayne Warner. The state alleged the deaths took place between October 1986 and May 1989.
There was no evidence that Faye Copeland had killed anyone herself. The jury convicted her as an accomplice. The Eighth Circuit later listed what the prosecution relied on: she kept the victims' clothing, helped with the paperwork for the bad checks, warned a recruit who survived to stay away from a particular place on the farm, tried to hide any link between her husband and the men, and wrote a list of names with an X beside those of the dead. The court called the list perhaps the strongest evidence. It rested on her own handwriting, and so did the letters she sent to her husband in jail, which the jail had opened under a card she signed at booking.
The case broke open in 1989 because one recruit survived. In the weeks after his report, officers searched the farm on October 9, 1989. The Copelands were arrested that month, first on conspiracy charges tied to the fraud, and in December 1989 a Livingston County grand jury indicted them for murder.
Her defense was that her husband had committed the killings without her knowledge and that she was a battered wife. A psychologist was ready to testify that she suffered from battered spouse syndrome, but the judge kept that testimony out of the guilt phase because her lawyers had disclaimed any mental-condition defense. The jury of eight women and four men convicted her on Saturday, November 10, 1990. At the penalty phase the prosecutor compared the killings to gang violence in Los Angeles and invoked his own young son. The jury deliberated more than three hours and recommended death for the murders of Cowart, Freeman, Harvey and Warner and life without parole for the murder of Murphy. If the recommendations were accepted, United Press International reported, she would be the oldest person on Missouri’s death row.
Ray Copeland’s lawyers said he had senile dementia, and the court had to decide whether he was competent to help in his own defense. A jury convicted him on March 20, 1991, and he was sentenced to death; he died at the Potosi Correctional Center in 1993, aged 78, still awaiting execution.
Faye Copeland’s sentences were upheld by the Supreme Court of Missouri on August 20, 1996. Federal courts then upheld the convictions but set aside the death sentences. The district court wrote on August 4, 1999 that "although the evidence of petitioner’s guilt was strong, the case for the death penalty was rather weak," and the Eighth Circuit affirmed on November 30, 2000, holding that the prosecutor’s closing argument was improper and that her lawyers' failure to object was ineffective assistance. In May 2001 she was sentenced to life without parole. "I think I’ve paid for what I did or what I knew," she said at that hearing.
On August 10, 2002 she had a stroke that left her partly paralyzed and unable to speak. A parole board released her on medical grounds a few weeks later and she was moved to a care facility in Chillicothe. She died there of natural causes in December 2003, aged 82.
On the evening of July 5, 1998, federal fugitive agents arrested a woman of 63 and her 23-year-old son at a Manhattan hotel on a Utah warrant. The charge was minor: the pair were accused of buying a used Lincoln Town Car with a check that bounced. But Irene Silverman, 82, a widow who owned a townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and rented part of it to short-term visitors, was missing that day. The woman was Sante Kimes, and her son was Kenneth.
Her record predated the killings by more than a decade. A federal jury in Nevada had convicted her of five counts of involuntary servitude, along with transporting undocumented immigrants, conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and escape. The Ninth Circuit summarized the evidence: young women from Mexico recruited as maids, isolated from their families, mail and telephone, kept in place by locks, fences and threats of deportation, and physically abused in some cases. She was sentenced in 1986 to five years. In July 1991 the Ninth Circuit rejected every claim she brought from prison.
The New York case was about the townhouse. In May 1998, according to the Appellate Division, a woman calling herself "Ava Guerra" telephoned Silverman, and her son, using the name "Manny Guerrin," arranged to lease an apartment. Silverman soon distrusted him; she told people he smelled "like jail" and began planning to evict him. She was in good physical and mental health, rarely went out without staff, and meant to leave the house to an arts charity named for her mother. The court concluded that the Kimeses had installed eavesdropping devices on her telephone and that Sante Kimes, using an alias, had called a title company to confirm that Silverman owned the townhouse with no mortgage. Police later said a document examiner judged a deed to the property forged.
Silverman’s body was never recovered. A New York County jury convicted both mother and son of her murder in 2000, and on June 27, 2000 Sante Kimes received an aggregate sentence of 120 years to life. The Appellate Division affirmed in 2006.
She was then tried in Los Angeles for the March 1998 death of David Kazdin, 63, a businessman and longtime acquaintance. Her son pleaded guilty in November 2003 to killing Kazdin under a plan with his mother, and testified against her. He said Kazdin had discovered that a $280,000 loan had been taken out in his name by forging his signature. In July 2004 the jury convicted her of first-degree murder with special circumstances, and she received life without parole. She was returned to New York to serve her terms, and died on May 19, 2014, at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, aged 79. She denied both killings to the end.
Peter Tobin was born on August 27, 1946, which made him 60 when Angelika Kluk, a 23-year-old Polish languages student working a summer at a Glasgow parish, died in September 2006. He was working as a handyman at the church under a false name, "Pat McLaughlin." He was also a registered sex offender. In 1994, at 47, he had pleaded guilty at Winchester Crown Court to offenses against two girls aged 14 and received 14 years in all. He was released in 2004, and a warrant had been issued in November 2005 after he moved without telling police, as the register required.
He went to London, was admitted to a hospital under another name, and was recognized there from media coverage. On October 9, 2006 he appeared at Glasgow Sheriff Court charged with Kluk’s murder.
The trial at the High Court in Edinburgh ended on May 4, 2007, when a jury convicted him of rape and murder. Lord Menzies sentenced him to life with a minimum of 21 years, which would have put him past 80 at the earliest release date. He received a further 30 months for breaching the sex offender register.
What the Edinburgh jury did not know was that his earlier addresses held two other deaths. Operation Anagram, the inquiry into his history, led detectives to Margate, Kent, where he had rented a house in 1991, aged 44. The deaths of Vicky Hamilton, 15, of Bathgate, West Lothian, who had been missing since February 1991, and Dinah McNicol, 18, a sixth-form student from Essex who had been returning from a music festival that August, came to light in Margate in November 2007. A jury at the High Court in Dundee convicted him of Hamilton’s murder in December 2008, and the minimum term was raised to 30 years. A jury at Chelmsford Crown Court convicted him of McNicol’s murder on December 16, 2009; he was given a life term reported as a whole life order.
Operation Anagram reviewed dozens of unsolved cases across Britain, and no further charges followed. Tobin never admitted any of the killings. He died on October 8, 2022, aged 76, at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, from bronchopneumonia following a broken hip, as a fatal accident inquiry later recorded. His ashes were tipped at sea.
Gary Michael Hilton was a 61-year-old drifter who lived out of a van, camped in the national forests of the southern Appalachians and north Florida, and walked the trails with a golden retriever named Dandy. Between October 2007 and January 2008 he killed four people he met in or near those forests. The motive in each was the victims' bank cards and the numbers needed to use them.
The first two were an elderly couple from Hendersonville, North Carolina. John Bryant was 80 and his wife, Irene, 84. Irene Bryant had earned a veterinary degree from Washington State College in 1947, practiced large-animal medicine in Montana at a time when few women did, and later owned a practice in Skaneateles, New York. In retirement she gardened, judged flower shows, served as president of a garden club and studied judo and karate, the American Veterinary Medical Association’s journal reported in 2008. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in January 2008 that numerous sources placed Hilton in northeast Georgia that October, and John Bryant’s death came to light in Macon County, North Carolina, in February 2008.
Cheryl Hodges Dunlap, 46, a nurse and Sunday school teacher from Crawfordville, Florida, was the next.
The fourth was Meredith Hope Emerson, 24, a University of Georgia graduate whose professors remembered her as an outstanding student of French language, literature and culture. She had won a national scholarship for study overseas from the French honor society Pi Delta Phi in 2004 and trained in martial arts. Hilton was detained in early January 2008 and charged with kidnapping her. The state agreed not to seek the death penalty, and on January 31, 2008 he pleaded guilty to her murder in Dawson County Superior Court. Judge Bonnie Oliver sentenced him to life with parole possible after 30 years, a date that would fall when he was past 90.
Georgia’s bargain left the other states free. A Leon County, Florida, jury convicted him of first-degree murder, kidnapping and grand theft in the Dunlap case on February 15, 2011. The jury unanimously recommended death, and Circuit Judge James C. Hankinson sentenced him on April 21, 2011. In his sentencing order, as summarized by the Florida Supreme Court, the judge credited a childhood in an abusive household, foster care, abuse of the stimulant Ritalin, a childhood brain injury and military service, and rejected claims of poverty and severe mental defects. A defense neuropsychologist testified that Hilton’s brain injury, emotional disorder, drug use and sleep deprivation left him unable to act rationally; under cross-examination he agreed Hilton had an IQ of 120. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed on March 21, 2013.
In federal court in Asheville, Hilton pleaded guilty on March 27, 2012 to the kidnapping, robbery and murder of the Bryants on national forest land, and on April 25, 2013 Judge Martin Reidinger sentenced him to four life terms plus 15 years, without parole, consecutive to the state sentences. On April 1, 2026 the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the denial of his federal habeas petition. In August 2026 he asked the Supreme Court for more time to petition for review, describing himself as a death-sentenced prisoner in Florida custody.
Thomas Donald Bruce McArthur was born on October 8, 1951, in Lindsay, Ontario. He was 67 at sentencing, a grandfather who ran a landscaping business whose clients included many older, well-off property owners and who played Santa Claus at a shopping mall in the off-season. One client called him a "cheerful, kind grandfather."
He was 58 when the first of the eight men died, in September 2010, and 65 when the last did, in June 2017. Skandaraj Navaratnam, 40, a Tamil refugee from Sri Lanka, died in September 2010. Abdulbasir Faizi, born in Afghanistan, a married father of two daughters, followed in December 2010. Majeed Kayhan, 58, a rug salesman from Afghanistan, died in October 2012, when McArthur was 61. Soroush Mahmudi, 50, who had come to Canada from Iran as a refugee in 1985, died in August 2015. Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, 37, who arrived in 2010 aboard the MV Sun Sea, died in January 2016, and Dean Lisowick in April of that year. Selim Esen, a university graduate in sociology and philosophy, died in April 2017, and Andrew Kinsman, 49, a building superintendent and longtime volunteer, in June 2017.
Toronto police formed a task force in November 2012 to look into the cases of the first three men. On November 11, 2013 they interviewed McArthur as a witness, because his username and telephone number appeared in Navaratnam’s email contacts. He denied a relationship with Navaratnam, said he did not recognize Faizi and acknowledged a past relationship with Kayhan. He was not treated as a person of interest, and the task force was shut down in April 2014. In June 2014 he received a record suspension for a 2003 assault conviction. In June 2016 a man he knew reported an assault to police; McArthur went to police himself, said the encounter was consensual, and was released without charge, and his record check came back clean.
What led to him was a calendar. After Kinsman was reported missing in June 2017, the word "Bruce" on his calendar led a second task force, Project Prism, to McArthur. Police first named him a suspect in September 2017. They arrested him in Toronto on January 18, 2018, when he was 66, and charged him that day with the first-degree murders of Esen and Kinsman. Six more counts followed between January 29 and April 16, 2018.
On January 29, 2019 McArthur pleaded guilty to all eight counts before Justice John McMahon of the Ontario Superior Court. Crown attorney Michael Cantlon said each killing involved planning and deliberation and that McArthur had targeted men on the margins of society, among them immigrants and men facing housing or financial hardship. At the sentencing hearing the Crown asked that the parole ineligibility periods run consecutively, for a total of 50 years. McArthur’s lawyer asked for 25, citing his client’s age.
On February 8, 2019 Justice McMahon sentenced him to life on each count, concurrent, with no eligibility for parole for 25 years. He called the murders "pure evil," but he declined to impose consecutive periods, saying a longer term would be largely symbolic and that there was "a fine line between retribution and vengeance." He gave weight to the guilty plea and to McArthur’s age. McArthur would be 91 before he could apply for parole, CBC News reported, and the judge said it was very unlikely he would ever be released.
An independent civilian review led by the retired judge Gloria Epstein reported in April 2021 that the cases of McArthur’s victims were often given less attention than the cases deserved, and that systemic discrimination had contributed to deficiencies in several investigations. It made 151 recommendations.
Kevin Gavin was 66 when he was arrested in January 2021, a handyman who did repairs and errands for older neighbors in a New York City Housing Authority development for seniors in Brownsville, Brooklyn. He lived in the building himself, though it was set aside for the elderly. His birth date has not been reported; going by the ages prosecutors gave, he was 60 or 61 at the first death, in November 2015.
Three women in the building died over five years. Myrtle McKinney was 82, Jacolia James 83, Juanita Caballero 78. The Brooklyn Paper reported police as saying he gained access by presenting himself as a friendly, helpful neighbor to people with physical impairments. Prosecutors said the women trusted him to do repairs and errands.
McKinney’s death in November 2015 was not at first treated as a crime. Her doctor, who had not seen her body, signed a death certificate dated December 1 that gave the cause as complications from hypertension and diabetes. The city’s Medical Examiner later ruled the death a homicide, and in December 2015 police announced they were investigating it as one. No one was charged. When Jacolia James died on or about April 30, 2019, her death became the second in the building in less than four years, and tenants began a campaign for security cameras. At a City Council hearing in June 2019 an authority official confirmed that the building still had none.
The case broke within a week of the third death. Prosecutors said surveillance video showed Gavin using Juanita Caballero’s stolen debit card in the days after January 14, 2021. Detectives from the 73rd Precinct and the Brooklyn North Homicide squad arrested him on January 21, 2021. He confessed, according to the indictment announcement, telling investigators he had argued with each of the women over money he said she owed him. DNA recovered from James had been matched to him. On March 2, 2021 a grand jury indictment charged one count of first-degree murder and three of second-degree murder, and District Attorney Eric Gonzalez called him an alleged serial killer who had murdered three of his elderly neighbors who trusted him.
The case then sat in the courts for five years. On April 24, 2026, by then 71, Gavin pleaded guilty before Justice Dineen Ann Riviezzo of Brooklyn Supreme Court to all four counts in exchange for a sentence of 30 years to life. Relatives of James and Caballero wept in the courtroom, News 12 reported. On May 20, 2026 Justice Riviezzo imposed the promised sentence. Parole eligibility under that term comes after 30 years, when he would be about 101.
The courts reached for age in different ways. In Toronto McArthur’s lawyer asked for the lower parole-ineligibility period because of it, and the judge gave it weight alongside the guilty plea; the result was a first parole date at 91. In Missouri the prosecutor told the jury it should not count for Copeland, and the death sentences fell on other grounds, the improper closing argument. Tobin’s first minimum term would have put him past 80, and he died in custody at 76. Hilton’s Georgia term allows parole after 30 years, when he would be past 90, and his Florida death sentence was still under federal review in 2026. Gavin was 71 when he took a sentence whose minimum runs three decades.
Three of the six have died: Copeland at 82 in a care facility after a stroke, Kimes at 79 in prison, Tobin at 76 in a hospital under a sentence of life. Of the three still alive, McArthur may first apply for parole 25 years after his sentencing, Gavin after 30 years, and Hilton remains under sentence of death in Florida. Copeland said in 2001: "I think I’ve paid for what I did or what I knew."
• 1986: Sante Kimes is sentenced to five years on federal involuntary servitude counts.
• October 1986 to May 1989: the deaths for which Faye Copeland was convicted, in Livingston County, Missouri.
• November 10, 1990: Copeland convicted by a Chillicothe jury; Ray Copeland convicted March 20, 1991.
• 1991: the deaths of Vicky Hamilton and Dinah McNicol, later traced to Peter Tobin, then 44.
• March 1998: David Kazdin dies in Los Angeles.
• July 5, 1998: Kimes, 63, and her son arrested in Manhattan.
• June 27, 2000: Kimes sentenced to an aggregate 120 years to life in New York.
• 2002: Copeland paroled on medical grounds after a stroke; she dies in December 2003, aged 82.
• July 2004: Kimes convicted of Kazdin’s murder in Los Angeles.
• September 2006: Angelika Kluk dies in Glasgow; Tobin is 60.
• May 4, 2007: Tobin convicted of the rape and murder of Kluk.
• October 2007 to January 2008: Hilton, 61, kills four people.
• November 2007: the deaths of Hamilton and McNicol come to light in Margate, Kent.
• January 31, 2008: Hilton pleads guilty to the murder of Meredith Emerson and receives life.
• December 2008 and December 2009: Tobin convicted of the murders of Hamilton and McNicol.
• September 2010 to June 2017: the eight deaths for which Bruce McArthur was convicted.
• February 15, 2011: Hilton convicted by a Florida jury in the Dunlap case; sentenced to death April 21.
• March 27, 2012: Hilton pleads guilty in federal court to the murders of John and Irene Bryant.
• May 19, 2014: Kimes dies, aged 79.
• November 2015 to January 2021: the three deaths for which Kevin Gavin was convicted.
• January 18, 2018: McArthur arrested, aged 66.
• January 29 and February 8, 2019: McArthur pleads guilty and is sentenced to life with no parole for 25 years.
• January 21, 2021: Gavin arrested, aged 66.
• October 8, 2022: Tobin dies in custody, aged 76.
• April 1, 2026: Eleventh Circuit affirms denial of Hilton’s federal habeas petition.
• April 24 and May 20, 2026: Gavin pleads guilty and is sentenced to 30 years to life.