Faye Copeland, Missouri
Faye Copeland, White, sentenced to death on Apr 27, 1991 for the murder of four white males (ages 21, 27, 27, and unknown) in Livingston County from Oct. 1986 through May 1989.
She was sentenced to death in April 1991, along with her husband Ray Copeland. Together they were found guilty of murdering four men, in four separate incidents, during the late 1980s. Ray Copeland escaped the executioner - he died of natural causes in October 1993.
Ray (1914 - 1993) and Faye Della Copeland (1921 - 30 December 2003) 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 76 at the time of sentencing. Faye was the oldest woman on death row until her sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1999.
Prior to the murder convictions, Ray had a long history of crimes, ranging from petty theft to grand larceny. He was convicted of writing bad checks on a number of occasions. 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 by then was loath 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.
On November 1, 1990, 69-year-old Faye Copeland went to trial. According to articles in the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, Faye claimed she did not know her husband was a murderer. Although her marriage to Ray was fraught with abuse, the jury convicted her of four counts of murder and one of manslaughter. 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 on his wife his reply reportedly was, "Well, those things happen to some you know"; he apparently never asked about Faye again. Ray is rumored to have been a spoiled child, often demanding things. Although he came from a poor family, if Ray wanted something, it was said to have been soon acquired for him by any means possible. He was strongly disliked by neighbors, who believed he beat Faye and their four children.
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 (disease). She left behind five children, seventeen grandchildren, and (at last count) twenty-five great-grandchildren.
Ray had died (1993) previously of natural causes while awaiting execution.
In other media
Their story has been fictionalized in a comic book, Family Bones, written by Faye Copeland's nephew, Shawn Granger. The case was also documented in a Forensic Files episode and more recently in an episode of Wicked Attraction titled "Murder at Twilight." The play "Temporary Help" by David Wiltse, which appeared off Broadway in 2004, was also based on this story.
References
- Book, The Copeland Killings, by Tom Miller
- Book, Family Bones, by Shawn Granger
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