The Grandparents Who Killed for Cattle Money

0:00 There's a farm in Missouri that looks exactly like every other farm around it. An older couple lived there, married almost 50 years, five kids, 17 grandkids. And between 1986 and 1989, that very same couple murdered at least five men. Today we're talking about Ray and Fay Copeland. Trust me, this one gets stranger the further in you go. [Music] Picture the most harmless looking couple that you can imagine.

0:50 Gray hair, a farm in Moore'sville, Missouri, married almost 50 years, raised in his 70s, Fay right behind him. Five kids between them and 17 grandkids. That's a couple that you'd trust to watch your house or maybe even your own kids. Between 1986 and 1989, that same couple murdered at least five men. And investigators believe the real number could run as high as 12. Every one of those victims was a homeless drifter. Ray had personally recruited off the street. And not one of them had family looking for them. That's the detail that kept it going. To understand how a couple gets to that point, you have to go back almost 70 years.

1:31 First, let's talk about Ray. He was born in Oklahoma in 1914. Second to five kids on a farm already struggling before the Great Depression made everything worse. By his teens, the economy had collapsed so badly that Ray dropped out of school in the fourth grade to help feed the family. He never learned to read and write well after that. And he never worked a job outside of farm labor his entire life. That upbringing shaped him into somebody who figured rules were for people who could afford to follow them. Around age 20, he stole two hogs from his own father's farm and sold them in another town. He stole from his own dad. That habit of exploiting whoever trusted him the most followed Ray for the next six decades.

2:15 By 1936, he was in a jail sale in Harrison, Arkansas for forging government checks. Over the next 20 years, he racked up a rest after a rest for a livestock theft and check fraud. And every time his reputation caught up in one town, the family packed up for the next one. His kids never stayed anywhere long enough to make a real friend. Somewhere in that moving back in 1940, a 19 year old named Fay Wilson met him. They married within six months, fast even by the standards of the era. Fay was from Harrison too. And by every account from her own kids, her life from that point revolved around Ray. He controlled the money, the moves, everything.

2:57 Her daughter testified Ray dictated exactly what the family could do, couldn't do, and there was no discussion involved. Her son said his father treated Fay worse than trash and more than one witness described watching Ray hit her. Fay worked outside the home for years, factory jobs, motel housekeeping, childcare, and every dollar went into keeping the family afloat during Ray's stance behind bars. She also had a real talent for sewing, quilting specifically. So hang on to that because it resurfaces later in a way that really unsettles the investigators. By the time the Coplin's bought that 40-acre farm in Moorsville in the late 60s, Ray had burned through every ounce of goodwill he had left.

3:40 Auctioneers wouldn't sell him livestock anymore because his checks kept bouncing. He needed a new way to buy cattle, and what he landed on was one of the coldest, most patient schemes in true crime history. Ray started showing up at homeless shelters and rural missions across southwest Missouri, offering drifters $50 a day plus room and board to help him with, quote, "lives stock purchases." These were men with nothing, no permanent address, some struggling with alcohol, all of them just looking for honest work and a warm bed. Or a while, Ray gave them exactly that. Ray would open a bank account in that worker's name using a post office box for the address, and the worker would ride along to a cattle auction and write checks for whatever Ray picked out.

4:27 Before those checks bounced, Ray had already resold the cattle for cash. Once the fraud caught up, the worker would vanish, and Ray would tell everyone asking that the man had scammed him too, and then took off. That scam worked for a while until Ray found something even more permanent. Once a worker knew too much, Ray would walk him toward the barn under some excuse, usually a raccoon getting into the feed and shoot him once in the back of the head with a 22 rifle. Five confirmed victims died that way between 1986 and 1989, Dennis Murphy, Wayne Warner, Jimmy Harvey, John Freeman, and Paul Cowert, the youngest at just 20 years old.

5:09 Think about what investigating a case like this would look like in rural Missouri in the middle of the 80s. No shared database between counties, barely any DNA testing, and a missing transient worker didn't rank high on a sheriff's department already stretched thin. Ray understood that better than most of the cops did, and picked his victims because he knew nobody would come looking. Except one man did the math differently. Jack McCormick, 57, showed up at the farm in 1989 through that same shelter pipeline. When Ray walked him toward the barn with that same tired raccoon story, something didn't go according to plan, and McCormick actually talked his way out of getting shot. He got off that farm alive, he made it to Oregon, and was picked up by police there on the old bad check charges.

5:57 Instead of writing it out quietly, he called the crime hotline and told them everything he had seen. Investigators, of course, were skeptical since their only source had a fraud record, but they pulled Ray's history, saw decades of livestock fraud tied to transient workers and got themselves a search warrant. They searched the Copeland property for a full week and came up empty, since Ray had never buried anyone on his own land. Only when they expanded to neighboring farms, Ray had worked at over the years did things break open. Three bodies turned up in shallow graves inside one barn. Another was found beneath the haystack of bales. Dennis Murphy was pulled from a water-filled well, chained to a concrete block so that he'd stay down, and people probably drank from that well. Inside the house, investigators found two things that sealed the case. A quilt, Fay had sewn from fabric squares cut from the clothing the victims wore when they died, and a handwritten list in Fay's own hand, 12 names, with X marks next to five of them, matching the five bodies recovered. The other seven names have never been connected to a body, and nobody knows to this day who they were. Fay won on trial first, in November of 1990. Her defense argued that she was a battered woman too terrified of Ray after 50 years to do anything but comply. Missouri had only just started allowing such testimony so the judge kept the psychologist off the stand. Jurors heard about the abuse through

7:28 her own kid's testimony anyway, but they also heard about the quilts and the list, and that's what stuck with them. She was convicted on all five counts, sentenced to death, on four, and life without parole on the fifth. When Ray found out that his wife had gotten the death penalty, he reportedly said, "Well, those things happen to some, you know." Cold as that farmhouse in January. His own trial came a few months later. His lawyers argued that he was too senile to stand trial, and that went nowhere. He was convicted on all five counts too. At 76 and 79 years old, Ray and Fay became the oldest couple ever sentenced to death row in American history. Ray never made it to execution date. He died of natural causes and a Missouri prison in October of 1993 at 78 years old. Never once, expressing remorse, or offering a single clue as to the other seven names on Fay's list.

8:24 Faced case worked its way through federal appeals for years, and in 1999, a judge agreed that sentencing had probably been unfair, commuting her death sentence to life without parole. She spent the next few years at Chilli Co. Correctional Center until a severe stroke in 2002 left her paralyzed and unable to speak. The governor granted her medical parole so she wouldn't die behind bars. She passed away in a nursing home in her hometown that December at 82. And here's the surprising part of the case that really people tend to grasp too. It's the shock of a sweet looking older couple turning out to be serial killers. The scheme worked because exactly who Ray chose to target. Unhoused men in the 1980s were about as invisible to the system as a person could be. No fixed address, no family filing a report, no employer noticing that they hadn't shown up to work. The Ray understood that invisibility better than anyone, and he used it as a weapon for several years. Dennis Murphy, Wayne Warner, Jimmy Harvey, John Freeman, and Paul Cowert were real people who took a job offer from a stranger because it beat whatever alternative there was that day. They deserved to be better than an ex next to their name on an old woman's notebook. And somewhere out there are seven more names that nobody has ever managed to put a face to. Thank you for listening to 10 Minute Murder,

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