Faye Copeland, Once the Oldest Woman on Death Row, Dies at 82 in a Missouri Nursing Home
Copeland was convicted of five murders of farmhands killed in a livestock swindle with her husband. A stroke had left her unable to speak, and she died on medical parole.
Published
For years, Faye Copeland was the oldest woman on death row in the United States. On December 30, 2003, Missouri prison officials said she had died, at 82, in a nursing home in her hometown.
Copeland died on Sunday, December 28, at the Morningside Center nursing home in Chillicothe, of what the Livingston County coroner described as natural causes. A stroke in August 2002 had left her partly paralyzed and unable to speak, and she was released on medical parole to the nursing home a few weeks later.
She and her husband, Ray, were convicted in separate trials of murdering transient men they had hired as farmhands at their farm near Chillicothe in the late 1980s. Prosecutors said the couple used the men to buy cattle with bad checks, then killed them and buried them. The five victims were Paul Jason Cowart, 21, of Dardanelle, Arkansas; John W. Freeman, 27, of Tulsa, Oklahoma; Jimmie Dale Harvey, 27, of Springfield, Missouri; Wayne Warner; and Denis Murphy. Faye Copeland said her husband had committed the killings without her knowledge, but jurors were shown a list of farmhands in her handwriting, kept because Ray could not read. Twelve names had an X beside them, and five of those men were found dead.
She was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder as an accomplice and sentenced to death on four. In 1999 a federal judge vacated the death sentences because of the prosecutor's closing argument at the penalty phase, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit upheld that ruling in 2000. Ray Copeland, who prosecutors said shot the men, died in prison in 1993, at 78, while awaiting execution.
The Associated Press reported that a federal court commuted Copeland's sentence to life in prison in 1999, while the Eighth Circuit's ruling describes an order that vacated her death sentences and required either a new sentencing hearing or a life sentence.
Sources
- Copeland v. Washington, 232 F.3d 969 (8th Cir. 2000), US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
- Convicted killer dies in Mo. nursing home, Lawrence Journal-World (Associated Press)
- Ray Copeland, Radford University, Department of Psychology