This is another case from my own neck of the woods . Back in 1990, I recall people being awed that something like this could happen in small town Missouri. Everybody knows everybody else and are in each others’ business. How could it happen and no one know? I have always said that people will be shocked at what happens behind closed doors. Taking a peek behind those doors can be quite disturbing. (photo above is not the actual farm where these events took place)
Let’s start from the beginning. Ray Copeland was born in Oklahoma on December 30, 1914. World War I was just beginning and poverty was an epidemic in rural areas of the country. Though they were poor, Ray was said to be a spoiled, demanding child. His family moved around a lot in his youth, settling in Ozark Hills, Arkansas. Ray did not finish school, dropping out after around the fourth grade to help the family earn a living.
As he grew older, it became apparent that Ray didn’t like working and decided it would be better to steal for money. His first known crime? Stealing two hogs from his own father and taking them to another town to sell them. He was 20 years old at the time. When his father found out what he had done, he did not press charges. This allowed Ray to expand on his schemes, and he began scamming people out of property and money.
He continued doing this until he was caught and found guilty in 1939 of stealing livestock and forging checks. He received a sentence of one year, which he served. Upon his release, during a scheduled doctor’s appointment, he met Faye Della Wilson, age 19. Ray was 26.
Faye was born in Harrison, Arkansas to a good family. She had six siblings and though her family also struggled financially, they worked hard for their money. Ray and Faye quickly married and within a year, Faye gave birth to their first son Everett, followed quickly by another son Billy Ray.
Ray continued to run into trouble, so he decided to move the family to Fresno, California. While there, Faye gave birth to three more children – Betty Lou, Alvia and William. However, nothing changed and after being accused of stealing horses from a local farmer, Ray moved his growing family back to Arkansas before any charges were filed.
Back home, Ray continued his stealing ways and was arrested several times for stealing livestock. He again decided to move his family, this time to Rocky Comfort, Missouri. Moving a few more times, the family finally landed in Mooresville, Missouri in 1966, a town of approximately 130 people. They somehow managed to purchase a small, 40-acre farm. Clearly purchasing land in a small community in the 1960’s was much different than it would be today.
Ray and Faye Copeland
Mooresville, Missouri
Convicted of murdering 5 men hired to work on their farm
Ray decided he needed to develop a scam to avoid being arrested for stealing livestock. His plan was to buy cattle at auctions with bad checks, then sell the cattle before the auctioneers grew wise to him. He was eventually banned from buying livestock.
Next, he decided he would expand on this scam by hiring vagrants and drifters to work on his farm. Ray convinced them that he was hard of hearing and needed their help at the livestock auctions. He would have them write the checks for the livestock at auction. When the checks eventually bounced, Ray would claim the drifters forged the checks and were long gone by the time authorities notified him of the problem.
This scheme worked for a while. Ray had no regard for the homeless men he was taking advantage of. It apparently didn’t bother him at all that he was taking advantage of desparate, homeless men suffering from mental health issues and just overall down on their luck. However, police were soon onto him and Ray was back in jail when police caught one of the drifters, Gerald Perkins, who exposed the scam.
Sitting in jail and having time to think, Ray decided his plan was good but he needed a way for the vagrants and drifters to avoid being caught and turning him in. He decided to have his victims open accounts in their own names to keep him out of the evidentiary loop. He hired more workers and had them open accounts. He explained that he was never going to get a fair deal at auctions after all his troubles, so the workers agreed. After the purchase, Ray would simply shoot the worker in the back of the head and bury the body on his farm or on a neighbor’s property where he sometimes worked.
When police eventually came around asking for the worker, Ray would simply say they took off and he had no idea where. He would even claim that he was a victim of their scams and he was owed money by them.
Ray’s first victim was Paul Jason Cowart, 21,who was killed on October 17, 1986. Cowart was originally from Dardanelle, Arkansas. He is believed to have come to Missouri looking for work.
The next victim, just a month later, was John W. Freeman, 27, on November 19 of that same year. Freeman came to Missouri from Tulsa, Oklahoma.
It was nearly a year before he killed his next known victim, Jimmie Dale Harvey, also 27, on October 25, 1988. Harvey was originally from Springfield, Missouri.In fairly quick succession, he then killed Wayne Warner on December 8, 1988 and Dennis Murphy on May 1, 1989. Both of these men were believed to be from the Bloomington, IL area.
According to the Livingston County Coroner, J. Scott Lindley, all were killed by a gunshot wound to the back of the head. These were young men killed simply because Copeland considered them collateral damage and his way of escaping prosecution. They were vulnerable and he knew he could trap them.
The beginning of the end of his schemes came on August 20, 1989. A worker, Jack McCormick, was slated to be the next victim. Jack figured out he and others were pawns in Ray’s scheme to swindle money at the livestock auctions. He told Ray he wanted out and was leaving. But, times were hard and Jack needed his last paycheck. While waiting for that, Ray asked Jack to help him trap a raccoon in the barn. Next thing Jack knew, Ray was holding a .22 rifle to his head. Thinking quickly, Jack managed to talk Ray out of killing him, likely promising to leave and never say a word. Amazingly, Ray let him go.
Jack fled to Nebraska, but soon told authorities what he knew. He had a lot of details, including having seen a closet filled with clothes belonging to the missing men. It was common for homeless men or those in shelters to put their names on the tags of their clothing. He also told them something they never expected to hear. Ray told them he was certain that if they searched, they would find multiple human remains on the Copeland property.
Authorities in Nebraska forwarded the information to Missouri, who listened and managed to get a search warrant for the farm. Because this was a rural area with few law enforcement resources, they called in the North Central Missouri Major Case Squad to take over the investigation. During the first week of the search, authorities found very little. They knew Ray sometimes worked for neighboring farmers. When they checked those properties, they found the remains of three bodies. In the following week, they found two more bodies. One was found, wrapped in black plastic, after working to remove around 2,000 bales of hay from a barn on that property. This body was later identified as Wayne Warner.
The final body, that of Dennis Murphy, was found at the bottom of a well, chained to a cinder block with a shotgun blast to the back of his head. He was wearing a belt with the name Murphy on it.
Following autopsies, it was discovered that each man was shot in the back of the head with a .22 rifle. Ballistics later found that a .22 rifle belonging to the Copeland’s matched the bullets found in the victims’ skulls.
They also found a journal or register of the workers the Copeland’s had hired over some period of time that included their names and some dates. Twelve of those names had an ‘X’ scrawled beside their names, including the five men whose bodies were found on the farm. This led to the belief that they had killed at least seven others whose bodies were never found.
The register was in Faye’s handwriting, which is part of what led authorities to believe that she was an active participant with full knowledge of the murders. However, it was later revealed that Faye kept most of the bookwork on the farm because having dropped out of school in the fourth grade, Ray was functionally illiterate.
Additional evidence found at the Copeland home were two written agreements, signed by Dennis Murphy and Wayne Warner, to rent pasture ground from Ray Copeland. This further linked those victims to the Copelands.
The most odd thing found during the search of the home was a handmade quilt Faye had made out of some of the clothing of the murdered men. Many believed the quilt was the Copeland’s trophy, a reminder of what they had done to these men. This quilt also seemed to be further evidence that Faye had full knowledge of what was happening at their family farm.
So, the Copeland’s were both arrested. Throughout the investigation and after her arrest, Faye maintained she had no knowledge of the murders. In fact, when prosecutors offered her a deal where she could plead to conspiracy only in exchange for a lesser sentence (and tell where the other bodies were buried), Faye continued to deny her own involvement. She would have likely only served a few years at the most had she agreed to this deal.
For his part, Ray initially tried to plead insanity. He gave that up in hopes of working out a deal for himself, but prosecutors weren’t interested in making a deal and charged him with first degree murder. In Missouri at that time, that meant he was eligible for the death penalty.
Faye Copeland, during an interview in 1999 while serving out her life sentence at the Women’s Eastern Correctional Center in Vandalia, Missouri
Faye was tried first. In her case, the defense attorneys tried to use the battered women’s syndrome to explain her part in these crimes. Evidence of this was disregarded, however, because this syndrome was only allowed to be used as a defense when the victim was the spouse of the defendant. Faye’s team was using it to defend against the murders of others, not her spouse.
Either way, the jury didn’t buy it and both were found guilty in separate trials and sentenced to death. When Ray heard about Faye’s sentence, he had an ‘oh well’ attitude. He is quoted as saying “Well, those things happen to some, you know.” He never asked about her again. After 50 years of marriage, he did not care what was happening to her or take any responsibility for it.
By this time, Faye was 69 and Ray was 76. They were the oldest couple sentenced to death in the United States. However, neither was executed. Ray died on October 19, 1993 at the Potosi Correctional Center while awaiting execution. In 1999, Faye’s sentence was commuted to life in prison. The ruling stated that the evidence did not support that her involvement warranted a death sentence. Though she was relieved from the death penalty, many women’s groups were still outraged that she was serving time at all, believing her claim that she was a battered wife, doing what her husband made her do.
While some in the quiet town of Mooresville agreed that Faye was as guilty as Ray, people closer to the family say she was an abused woman. Ray’s own brother (John) was quoted as saying, “She was scared to death of him.” Her children also believed she was wrongly convicted and would never have helped commit those murders. They agreed Ray was an abuser and a bully to everyone he knew. Their son, Alvie, said about his father, “He was guilty. I have no qualms about that.”
Faye had a stroke and was released from prison on August 1, 2002 and immediately placed in a nursing home in Chillicothe, Missouri. She died just over a year later on December 20, 2003. The couple had 5 children and 21 grandchildren.
Of the twelve names on the Copeland register, 5 were murdered, 3 are still missing and 4 turned up alive and well, according to defense attorneys.