Ray and Faye Copeland

In rural Missouri, a man working for a friendly 75-year-old farmer and his sweet 69-year-old white-haired wife discovered a skull while plowing a section of their fields. The worker reported his find to the police, and a subsequent search of their property revealed 5 male bodies, all shot in the head with a .22 caliber rifle. In the house, a notebook was found with lists of temporary employees hired at the farm, some of the names marked with a sinister X. Upstairs in the bedroom, the police discovered a patchwork quilt spread on the bed, made by the wife from pieces of cloth torn from the clothing of the victims buried in the fields out back.

Ray and Faye Copeland were convicted of killing five drifters (and likely killed at least seven more, though no bodies were recovered), and ultimately became the oldest couple ever sentenced to death in the United States— Faye was 69 and Ray was 75 at the time of sentencing. Faye was the oldest woman on death row until her sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1999.

The Copelands were caught and charged with murder after a drifter spotted human remains on their land. Evidently, Ray had hit upon the scheme of hiring drifters, having them pay for cattle at auction with bad checks (which Ray now loathed to do personally, given his prior convictions), then killing the drifters once they were no longer of any use, with a single bullet to the back of the head. It is unclear if Faye had any knowledge of this scheme, and her lawyers argued that she suffered from battered woman syndrome.

Faye had written a list of names that included the murdered drifters, each of whom had an X next to his name (as did 7 others, who remain missing). As Faye was sentenced to death by lethal injection, she sobbed uncontrollably. When Ray Copeland was told about the verdict of his wife his reply was, “Well, those things happen to some you know,” he apparently never asked about Faye again.

On August 10, 2002, Faye Copeland suffered a stroke, which left her partially paralyzed and unable to speak. Weeks later in September 2002, Governor Holden authorized a medical parole for Faye, fulfilling her one wish that she not die in prison. She was paroled to a nursing home in her hometown. The following year, on December 30, 2003, 82-year-old Faye Della Copeland died at the Morningside Center nursing home in Chillicothe, Missouri, from what Livingston County coroner Scott Lindley described as natural causes. She left behind five children, seventeen grandchildren, and (at last count) twenty-five great-grandchildren.

Ray died of natural causes while awaiting execution.

Source:Winged