The Grandparents Who Killed for Cattle Money

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There's a farm in Missouri that looks exactly like every other farm around it.

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An older couple lived there, married almost 50 years, five kids, 17 grandkids.

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And between 1986 and 1989, that very same couple murdered at least five men.

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Today we're talking about Ray and Fay Copeland.

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Trust me, this one gets stranger the further in you go.

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[Music]

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Picture the most harmless looking couple that you can imagine.

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Gray hair, a farm in Moore'sville, Missouri, married almost 50 years,

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raised in his 70s, Fay right behind him.

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Five kids between them and 17 grandkids.

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That's a couple that you'd trust to watch your house or maybe even your own kids.

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Between 1986 and 1989, that same couple murdered at least five men.

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And investigators believe the real number could run as high as 12.

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Every one of those victims was a homeless drifter.

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Ray had personally recruited off the street.

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And not one of them had family looking for them.

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That's the detail that kept it going.

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To understand how a couple gets to that point, you have to go back almost 70 years.

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First, let's talk about Ray.

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He was born in Oklahoma in 1914.

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Second to five kids on a farm already struggling before the Great Depression made everything worse.

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By his teens, the economy had collapsed so badly that Ray dropped out of school

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in the fourth grade to help feed the family.

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He never learned to read and write well after that.

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And he never worked a job outside of farm labor his entire life.

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That upbringing shaped him into somebody who figured rules

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were for people who could afford to follow them.

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Around age 20, he stole two hogs from his own father's farm and sold them in another town.

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He stole from his own dad.

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That habit of exploiting whoever trusted him the most followed Ray for the next six decades.

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By 1936, he was in a jail sale in Harrison, Arkansas for forging government checks.

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Over the next 20 years, he racked up a rest after a rest for a livestock theft and check fraud.

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And every time his reputation caught up in one town, the family packed up for the next one.

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His kids never stayed anywhere long enough to make a real friend.

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Somewhere in that moving back in 1940, a 19 year old named Fay Wilson met him.

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They married within six months, fast even by the standards of the era.

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Fay was from Harrison too.

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And by every account from her own kids, her life from that point revolved around Ray.

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He controlled the money, the moves, everything.

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Her daughter testified Ray dictated exactly what the family could do,

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couldn't do, and there was no discussion involved.

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Her son said his father treated Fay worse than trash and more than one witness

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described watching Ray hit her.

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Fay worked outside the home for years, factory jobs, motel housekeeping,

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childcare, and every dollar went into keeping the family afloat during Ray's stance behind bars.

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She also had a real talent for sewing, quilting specifically.

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So hang on to that because it resurfaces later in a way that really unsettles the investigators.

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By the time the Coplin's bought that 40-acre farm in Moorsville in the late 60s,

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Ray had burned through every ounce of goodwill he had left.

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Auctioneers wouldn't sell him livestock anymore because his checks kept bouncing.

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He needed a new way to buy cattle, and what he landed on was one of the coldest,

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most patient schemes in true crime history.

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Ray started showing up at homeless shelters and rural missions across southwest Missouri,

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offering drifters $50 a day plus room and board to help him with, quote, "lives stock purchases."

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These were men with nothing, no permanent address, some struggling with alcohol,

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all of them just looking for honest work and a warm bed.

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Or a while, Ray gave them exactly that.

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Ray would open a bank account in that worker's name using a post office box for the address,

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and the worker would ride along to a cattle auction and write checks for whatever Ray picked out.

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Before those checks bounced, Ray had already resold the cattle for cash.

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Once the fraud caught up, the worker would vanish, and Ray would tell everyone asking that the man had

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scammed him too, and then took off. That scam worked for a while until Ray found something even more

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permanent. Once a worker knew too much, Ray would walk him toward the barn under some excuse,

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usually a raccoon getting into the feed and shoot him once in the back of the head with a 22 rifle.

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Five confirmed victims died that way between 1986 and 1989, Dennis Murphy, Wayne Warner, Jimmy Harvey,

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John Freeman, and Paul Cowert, the youngest at just 20 years old.

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Think about what investigating a case like this would look like in rural Missouri in the middle of the 80s.

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No shared database between counties, barely any DNA testing, and a missing transient worker didn't

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rank high on a sheriff's department already stretched thin. Ray understood that better than most of the

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cops did, and picked his victims because he knew nobody would come looking. Except one man did the

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math differently. Jack McCormick, 57, showed up at the farm in 1989 through that same shelter pipeline.

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When Ray walked him toward the barn with that same tired raccoon story, something didn't go

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according to plan, and McCormick actually talked his way out of getting shot. He got off that farm

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alive, he made it to Oregon, and was picked up by police there on the old bad check charges.

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Instead of writing it out quietly, he called the crime hotline and told them everything he had seen.

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Investigators, of course, were skeptical since their only source had a fraud record, but they pulled

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Ray's history, saw decades of livestock fraud tied to transient workers and got themselves a search warrant.

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They searched the Copeland property for a full week and came up empty, since Ray had never buried

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anyone on his own land. Only when they expanded to neighboring farms, Ray had worked at over the

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years did things break open. Three bodies turned up in shallow graves inside one barn. Another was found

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beneath the haystack of bales. Dennis Murphy was pulled from a water-filled well, chained to a concrete

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block so that he'd stay down, and people probably drank from that well. Inside the house,

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investigators found two things that sealed the case. A quilt, Fay had sewn from fabric squares cut

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from the clothing the victims wore when they died, and a handwritten list in Fay's own hand,

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12 names, with X marks next to five of them, matching the five bodies recovered. The other seven

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names have never been connected to a body, and nobody knows to this day who they were. Fay won on

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trial first, in November of 1990. Her defense argued that she was a battered woman too terrified

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of Ray after 50 years to do anything but comply. Missouri had only just started allowing such

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testimony so the judge kept the psychologist off the stand. Jurors heard about the abuse through

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her own kid's testimony anyway, but they also heard about the quilts and the list, and that's what

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stuck with them. She was convicted on all five counts, sentenced to death, on four, and life without

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parole on the fifth. When Ray found out that his wife had gotten the death penalty, he reportedly said,

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"Well, those things happen to some, you know." Cold as that farmhouse in January. His own trial came

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a few months later. His lawyers argued that he was too senile to stand trial, and that went nowhere.

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He was convicted on all five counts too. At 76 and 79 years old, Ray and Fay became the oldest

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couple ever sentenced to death row in American history. Ray never made it to execution date. He

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died of natural causes and a Missouri prison in October of 1993 at 78 years old. Never once,

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expressing remorse, or offering a single clue as to the other seven names on Fay's list.

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Faced case worked its way through federal appeals for years, and in 1999, a judge agreed that

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sentencing had probably been unfair, commuting her death sentence to life without parole. She spent

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the next few years at Chilli Co. Correctional Center until a severe stroke in 2002 left her paralyzed

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and unable to speak. The governor granted her medical parole so she wouldn't die behind bars.

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She passed away in a nursing home in her hometown that December at 82.

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And here's the surprising part of the case that really people tend to grasp too.

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It's the shock of a sweet looking older couple turning out to be serial killers.

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The scheme worked because exactly who Ray chose to target. Unhoused men in the 1980s were about

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as invisible to the system as a person could be. No fixed address, no family filing a report,

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no employer noticing that they hadn't shown up to work. The Ray understood that invisibility

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better than anyone, and he used it as a weapon for several years. Dennis Murphy, Wayne Warner,

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Jimmy Harvey, John Freeman, and Paul Cowert were real people who took a job offer from a stranger

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because it beat whatever alternative there was that day. They deserved to be better than an ex

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next to their name on an old woman's notebook. And somewhere out there are seven more names that nobody

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has ever managed to put a face to. Thank you for listening to 10 Minute Murder,

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