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the key to becoming a good cattleman is buying the right cattle at the right price
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in the 1980s one cattle man in missouri had a unique talent for choosing the very best cattle and paying very little
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for it some of his farmhands however paid a very steep price [Music] [Applause] [Music]
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[Applause] [Music] in chillicothe missouri the local barber shop is still the place to hear news and
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swap stories and even pick a few tunes it is also the place where farmers still make a living raising cattle and selling
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them at auction in the late 1980s cattle auction houses throughout the state were being swindled
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buyers who were mostly drifters and transients would show up make their purchase pay by check
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and then disappear [Music] the checks were inevitably worthless it was odd that several of them would
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have checks and then when we went to look at forum we couldn't find them we'd enter them into the computer but
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they never showed up many of the buyers had at some point worked on this farm in moorestown just
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outside of chillicothe the farm was owned by 78 year old ray copeland and his wife faye
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they appeared to be just an elderly farm couple that were kind of shy and didn't mix much with the
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people but never knew of them you know causing any problem here [Music] the small farm wasn't enough to support
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the copelands faye also worked in a factory and later as a motel maid we were just everyday people i was
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taught from childhood on you married you stayed with them husband was the boss and he was the boss
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but it was a hard life and the family was poor the only shoes we ever had was school
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shoes too and you'd have to go out there mucking the cows barefooted and this was included in the wintertime
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when the copeland children left the farm to pursue their own dreams ray looked for farm hands to help work the farm
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he was up in age hard of hearing and wasn't a great businessman because ray could not read or write
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and with bookkeeping writing names down where they were at things like this i mean he needed
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somebody to write him down to find workers ray would go to local homeless missions
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just ask people if they'd like to go out you know make some money and you know
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get paid at the end of the day or you know we can help you get some finances started
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and they go out you know get people and help them get it uh account started you know in a bank
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these men were usually on the run themselves many had addictions family problems or
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suffered from mental illness most had been arrested for vagrancy petty theft or similar offenses
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ray copeland paid them fifty dollars a day for their labor and also provided room and board
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one of these men uh who was offered that kind of money and a place to live especially maybe in a country setting
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why it would just be it would be paradise it would be something it would be a dream come true for a man like that
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one of the men wanted in connection with writing bad checks to cattle auction houses was 27 year old dennis murphy a
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drifter from illinois who for a time had worked for ray copeland [Music] in 1986
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a sheriff's deputy asked ray copeland if he knew murphy's whereabouts copeland said murphy simply took off one
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day he just took off in the middle of the night i haven't seen him since they would leave in the middle of night
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and he didn't know where they went he said there again he said you know how transits are they're here today and gone
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tomorrow and they would just leave i don't know i understand it that's murphy when
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copeland was told murphy was a thief he wasn't surprised because he had been
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swindled too no i don't we're looking for him we wrote some bad checks i know you wrote one to me
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it's in that drawer here you are copeland also had a check from murphy which had bounced because of
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insufficient funds in addition to murphy seven other men were wanted in connection with the cattle auction check
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scan none could be located until police received a call from nebraska the informant said
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he knew where murphy and the other transients had gone [Music] there were eight men wanted for writing
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bad checks to cattle auction houses in central missouri all had disappeared from the area
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without a trace then police got a telephone call from jack mccormick a drifter and small time
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con man who at one time had worked on ray copeland's farm he was a transit he moved a lot he had a
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lot of stories and i think he liked to tell a lot of stories mccormick said he thought he saw some
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human bones including a skull on the copeland farm the farm covered 40 acres including a
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pond a barn fields and woods county deputies chillicothe police the state highway patrol and the county
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coroner all searched the area surveying the property and looking for possible burial sites on the property
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and possible places where the deaths actually took place we had search dogs backhoes and we'd punched a lot of holes
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around in the farm and we had really searched this farm hadn't found a thing so
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you know you always think well maybe maybe this didn't happen after nine days of searching without
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success they brought jack mccormick to the scene i asked him i said jack just point to
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where these bodies or where this skull and leg bone was and he got outside there kind of beside
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the barn looking off down through the pasture and finally he said well really he said i didn't see any
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he said it could have probably been a dish pan or something down there but a look into copeland's background
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showed an interesting coincidence 20 years earlier he had been arrested numerous times for the same thing
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writing bad checks every time he get arrested he would call me to come and bail him out
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i bailed him out of jail quite a few times about every 18 months seemed like his
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police out there and him being gone for a while it was common for us as growing up
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but ray appeared to have settled down because there had been no arrests in the 20 years since
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and he had never been arrested for any violent crime police soon learned that copeland worked
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on some other farms in the area to earn extra money one was a farm just a few miles away
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in the barn where copeland worked storing bales of hay police discovered a shallow grave
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and the badly decomposed bodies of three men lined up head to toe they had probably been there for two or
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three years and were unrecognizable they were just wrapped in blankets and in an earthen grave is what they were
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in this situation they were in some clay ground which tends to kind of ward off decomposition because the air
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doesn't get to it as quickly as it was in say a different type of soil three men had been killed by a gunshot
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wound to the head but there was no evidence linking ray copeland or anyone else to the crimes
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a few days later in another nearby barn on the same property police removed hundreds of bales of hay
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and under a floorboard was another body six weeks later in a nearby well was yet
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another body the man was wearing a belt which said dennis but was this dennis murphy
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and was the killer ray copeland why would he do something like that when he had we had everything paid for we
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didn't know for nothing he had we had truck paid for everything all the machinery and all for arm and
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everything why would he turn around and do something like that if he didn't [Music]
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the bodies of five men had been recovered from a farm in missouri jack mccormick a former employee of ray
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copeland's farm told police that copeland was running a check fraud scam he said copeland gave him a few hundred
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dollars to open a checking account and told him to use a post office box as his address
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copeland then took mccormick to cattle auctions and sat in the stands signaling mccormick when to bid on cattle
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when he won the bidding mccormick would pay for the cattle with a check and sometimes the check would clear and
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then they would kind of have a standing at sale barn they'd go back the next
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time and write a larger check with the pretense that he would make the check good
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and but to check then when he got the bank didn't clear copeland sold the cattle bought in
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mccormick's name and before the check had time to bounce copeland confronted mccormick with the
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gun ray had the pretence of a [ __ ] being down in the hole there in the barn around here trying to be nice i think
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he's in that hole he wanted jack to get down with the stick and poke it out of the hole
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and jack said when he got down there he said he was already kind of scared of ray uh but when he got down there he
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said he wouldn't take his eyes off a ray he kept looking up at him because ray had the 22 rifle and
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supposedly was going to shoot the [ __ ] when he poked it out of the hole i get a good shot at him come on keep
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trying he'll come out he'll come out yeah he'll come right out i'll show you
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jack said he looked up real fast and then when he looked back ray had the rifle pointed at him
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mccormick said he'd talk copeland out of shooting him he promised copeland he
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would leave the area and never come back mccormick fled missouri and for five months kept quiet
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because he feared copeland would kill him if he ever told anybody about the scan
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when investigators searched the copeland's home they discovered an old 22-caliber rifle
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and the full assortment of men's clothing none of which belonged to ray copeland
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clothes from several different people but different sizes shoes suitcases there was numerous suitcases
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in the house none of it belonged to this family or these clothes wouldn't fit
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ray or faye copeland and hidden in a camera case was a list of men hired by ray copeland
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to work on the farm four of the names were marked with an x which corresponded to the four who were
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wanted in connection with passing bad checks investigators sent the skulls of the
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victims to dr ronald geyer a forensic odontologist dr geyer photographed the skulls
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he performed a dental examination and took x-rays and created a transparent dental chart for each body
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so you make a chart of everything you find in the premortem records to match to the postmortem
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records in this case the pre-mortem records posed a challenge some of them are kind of sketchy and old
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and the biggest problem was that the records were old and these people had not had dental
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treatment in the period of time from the time the records were made up to the time of
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their death some of the transients records were almost 30 years old and the skulls were
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missing many teeth which complicated the comparison and then it got down to the point i think that
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some of them we had to look at the bone patterns and i remember one of them had a condyle the joint
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in the jaw right up here that the condyle was misshapen that matched a panoramic dental x-ray
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belonging to dennis murphy positively identifying the body found in the well by comparing pre and postmortem dental
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charts dr guyer identified the other four bodies as wayne warner paul cowart jimmy dale harvey
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and john freeman coward harvey and freeman were three of the four names on the copeland
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list marked with an ex coroner scott lindley performed autopsies on all of the bodies and
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discovered that the cause of death in each case was a gunshot wound to the head from a
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small caliber gun shot at close range if it's at close range the inside layer
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of the skull tends to break away or flake away and there's more cracking and
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damage to the skull and inside the skulls lindley found bullets and bullet fragments
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ballistics test revealed that the lands and grooves on those fragments matched the lands and grooves from ray
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copeland's 22-caliber rifle police arrested ray copeland as well as the person they believed was his partner
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in crime what surprised me more than anything else was them actually arresting mom
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for the same thing but what role did 68 year old faye copeland play in the murders
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[Music] ray copeland was arrested and charged with the murder of five men in what was believed to be a modern day
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cattle rustling scheme they also arrested his wife faye but i was not with him when he'd done
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his bad deeds i knew nothing about it and it didn't include me while in prison
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faye wrote a letter to her husband assuring him that things would cool down soon
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faye's handwriting matched the handwriting on the list of the missing men but fade denied any knowledge of the
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murders i asked no questions wouldn't have done me any good if i had him because he just slapped me across
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the house ray copeland's long history of violence had previously been hidden from everyone
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but the copeland family there was one time he uh one of my brothers was scraping the bottom of his
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boulder it had oatmeal he didn't like the sound took a frying pan to him myself personally
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milking cows the old cow kicked the bucket over he took a pair of metal cow kickers and
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beat me with for no reason uh that was everyday occurrence with him faye and ray copeland were each tried
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separately these trials were the biggest news to ever hit livingston county missouri
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prosecutors believe that ray copeland hired the workers at the homeless mission he set up each one with a post office
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box and a checking account and took them to the local cattle auctions [Music] but before the checks could bounce
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prosecutors say ray copeland would sell the cattle and kill the worker and bury the body
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so they were lower than anybody else they could he could care less about him they were on government payroll they
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didn't need to be there they didn't even need to be alive he had said that a lot of times about
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transients forensic tests proved that the men were all killed with ray copeland's gun
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[Music] ray copeland was convicted of five counts of murder and sentenced to death
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hooray ray deserved for what he done to the transits and the people all through his life
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and he he deserved a death sentence faye copeland denied any involvement in the murders saying she was an abused
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wife who only did what she was told back then i just dropped my head and went ahead and took it
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i've carried bruises of carried broken bones from him but he was my husband legally
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i think she had some idea as far as the cattle scam going on as far as the killings
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i don't know i don't think so i hope pray to god she didn't know the list of workers in fayette
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copeland's handwriting helped seal the case against her faye copeland was also convicted of
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murder and was sentenced to death that is the only thing i think they can victor on was the piece of paper with
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the names on before ray copeland could be executed he died in prison in 1993. in 1999 after 10 years on death row
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faye copeland's sentence was commuted to life in prison i never go to bed never close my eyes
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but when i relive a lot of my life over one dream was i to blame you know so why should i have to pay for
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something he does if he didn't ray and faye copeland don't get much sympathy from the transients who live in
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the missions on commercial street i said i hope they keep her till she croaks don't have any feelings for people like
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that at all of the eight men on the copeland's list thomas park franklin hudson and dale
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break are still missing [Music] police believe they too were murdered and that their bodies are buried nearby
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somewhere [Music] [Music] so [Music] you