Septuagenarian Psycho's

[Devious Viper]

by B Callwood

What made a doddery old couple in their 70s, without so much as a parking ticket between them, decide to start murdering young men and making their clothes into a quilt?

In their late 60s, people often take up new hobbies. Bingo is popular with the elderly, as are National Trust coach trips, gardening, queueing in the Post Office and knitting. Brutal mass murder is a less common new pastime for OAPs, but that didn't stop Ray and Faye Copeland.

In October 1999, responding to a tip-off, police in Missouri descended on a remote farm belonging to elderly retirees the Copelands. On digging in the dirt out the back of the farm shack, they made a grisly discovery: Three rotting bodies in shallow graves.

All three men, soon revealed to be Paul Jason Cowart, John W Freeman and Jimmie Dale Harvey, had been shot once in the back of the head - an almost surgically clean shot from close range. Not long afterwards, the stinking corpse of Wayne Warner was discovered wrapped in plastic under the barn floor.

In the house, a .22-calibre Marlin bolt-action rifle was found, and tests revealed it to be the weapon used for each murder. Chillingly, investigators also found a list of farmhands in Faye's handwriting. Twelve of those on the list had a large X by their names, and five of those 12 turned out to be the bodies that had been discovered. The other seven were 'missing', and their return was looking far from likely. The doddery old couple weren't as innocent as they looked.

But then, a discovery was made that was so sinsiter, it chilled even the hardened detectives to the bone. A hand-stitched quilt was unearthed. It was patchwork. The material was the clothes of the murdered men.

Before investigators concluded their business at the farm, one more body turned up, later identified as Dennis Murphy. He was found wedged tight in Copeland's water cistern, with a concrete block tied to his belt. Again, he had taken a single shot to the back of the head. All of the evidence suggested that Ray wasn't one for a fair duel.

Of course, a husband-and-wife killing team would be big news regardless of the circumstances. But what sets the Copelands further apart still from the exclusive pack is their age when they took up slaughter. Ray Copeland began murdering his farmhands in the mid-1980s, when he was shuffling along in his early 70s. He lived the vast majority of his life without blood on his hands, then killed between five and twelve (the seven 'missing' names from Faye's list have not been found to this day) men in his final 10 years of life. His wife was nearing 70 when the human cull began, and had been a loving mother and grandmother up until that point.

In a bid to uncover the remaining bodies, Faye was offered a deal. If she told authorities the whereabouts of the missing men, she would be charged with conspiracy to commit murder rather than the full-blown charge, and would only serve a few months in jail. Still, she insisted she knew nothing, and both Ray (now aged 75) and Faye (68) were slapped with five counts of first-degree murder.

Ray Copeland was born in Oklahoma in 1914, the son of a farmer. His parents drifted around throughout the early part of Ray's life, but eventually settled in Arkansas. Ray committed his first crime when he reached his early 20s, stealing two hogs from his father's farm and selling them on. But it would be half a century before murder entered his mind.

In 1940, Cupid fired a shot at Ray during a visit to his local physician, when he met a Faye Della Wilson. Within six months the lovebirds were married, and a year later they were proud parents of a boy named Everett. Two years after that, their second son, Billy Ray, was born. Following a move to Fresno County, California, and the arrival of two more children (daughter Betty Lou and third son Alvia), Ray was accused of stealing horses by a neighbouring farmer. No charges stuck, but the locals' hackles were raised sufficiently to damage Copeland's reputation beyond repair. It wouldn't be the first time over the next 25 years that Copeland found himself in trouble, both with the law and local cattle farmers, usually for petty crimes, such as writing bad cheques. Still, in 1966 he managed to scrape together the $6,000 required to buy a small farm just outside Chillicothe, Missouri.

During the early 70s, Ray devised a devious, though hardly ingenious, plan to help him buy cattle when his bank account was empty (as it usually was). He'd befriend vagrants, drifters, anyone who was after a quick buck. Under Ray's beady eye, these vagrants would bid at a livestock auction. If he won, the drifter would write out a cheque from Ray's book and, when it bounced, Ray would plead ignorance, pointing out it wasn't his signature on the cheque.

When the authorities began to get suspicious, Copeland tweaked his plan so the drifter would open an account in his own name to finance the purchase, though the account would, of course, be empty when the cheques were written. However, once a drifter became too recognisable to get away with passing over the toytown money, Ray simply did away with him.

The police were alerted to the foul goings-on by Jack McCormick, a self-confessed "common gutter tramp and drunk" who had helped out on the Copeland farm and had soon started fearing for his safety. According to McCormick, he had discovered Copeland's cattle auction scam. Later, digging in the barnyard, he uncovered a fresh human skull, after which Ray had tried to kill him. McCormick fled.

Apparently, the discovery of a human skull wasn't enough to persuade McCormick to give the cops a bell, though. It took a TV show called Crimestoppers, which mentioned that cash was paid for tips that led to arrests. Not one to pass up a buck, McCormick got straight on the phone to drop a hint about Copeland. Regardless of his motives, though, it was McCormick's phonecall that alerted the authorities to the Copeland farm and led to the discovery of the five corpses.

On 1 November 1990, at the age of 69, Faye Copeland stood in court charged with murder. In her defence, she claimed she had no knowledge of her husband's activities. She also stated she was a victim of Battered-Woman Syndrome. Soon after her sentencing, Faye told Lee Kavanaugh of the Kansas City Star: "I couldn't have flowers at home, he didn't like me to be tending to anything other than him. As long as I was with him or working the cattle or the tractor that was OK. But flowers, no, he didn't like them."

The prosecution, however, were having none of it. They just had to hold up the dead-men quilt, and Faye was nailed. The fact she had passed her husband a jailhouse note reading "remain cool" didn't help her case either. She was sentenced to death by lethal injection. Upon hearing the verdict, she burst into hysterical tears.

On hearing of his wife's fate, Ray was his usual caring self, telling the Sheriff, "Well, those things happen to some, you know?" Of course, Ray was also handed the maximum sentence, making the Copelands the oldest couple in American history to be sentenced to death. On receiving his judgement, Ray told a nearby guard, "I'm OK," setting everyone's minds at ease.

Neither would live to receive their punishment. Seventy-eight-year-old Ray died in 1993 awaiting execution. After an appeal, Faye, by now also 78, had her sentence commuted to life imprisonment. From behind bars, she told Kavanaugh: "I've often thought since, maybe this was for the best. Where did I go wrong, if I went wrong? I know one place was getting married at all. But he was my life for many, many years. I didn't know nothing else. Will I get out? I may go out feet-first but I'll get out of here. Someday."

Women's activist groups tried to win her freedom, but to no avail. Instead, following a stroke in 2002, she was paroled to a nursing home, and the 82-year-old murderess died a year later.

According to the Public Interest Litigation Clinic, "Mrs Copeland's convictions and sentence were secured through repeated violations of her constitutional rights. The only evidence her attorney attempted to present on her behalf was the testimony of a psychologist that Mrs Copeland suffered from Battered-Woman Syndrome, supported only by testimony that her husband was verbally abusive. The court refused to permit counsel to present that testimony to the jury, in violation of the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment."

Last year, somebody claiming to be Heather Copeland, great-granddaughter of Ray and Faye, posted on the Blog Of Death website's messageboard that, "These people are my great grandparents. I live in Chillicothe and recently buried my grandmother who died of old age, diabetes and pneumonia. I love her and to this day believe she had nothing to do with it!"

Mike Oxbig, who claims to be the nephew of one of the victims, hit back: "F*** you b***h. They murdered those people and one of them being my uncle. She probly seduced some of them. There are probly more murders, so shut the f*** up."

King Tractor Press deemed the whole messy saga worthy of a loose comicbook retelling. Written by Shaun Granger (whose great grandmother is Ray Copeland's sister), Family Bones, due out this autumn, tells of a young boy from the city who goes to stay on his elderly aunt and uncle's farm and discovers a dark and sinister world beneath the pleasant countryside façade. Of the comics, Granger recently said: "I have a deep love of rural America. It's a story about growing up in spite of tough barriers. My family is a little nervous about Family Bones coming out. I'm hoping people will understand it's not glorifying serial-killing, but showing how a person can live through horrors but still grow beyond their circumstances."

Unfortunately for the men whose clothes went to make up Faye Copeland's quilt, they won't get the chance.