Ray And Faye Copeland, The Elderly Serial Killer Couple
YouTubeRay Copeland killed at least five farmhands in the 1980s — and Faye made a quilt out of their clothes.
At the time of their sentencing in the early 1990s, Ray and Faye Copeland were the oldest couple ever sent to death row. At 76 and 69, the two were convicted of committing five murders on their Missouri farm in the late 1980s.
Unlike the other serial killer couples on this list, there doesn’t seem to have been a pathological element to their crimes. Instead, the Copelands appeared to have been motivated by old-fashioned greed.
Ray Copeland was born in Oklahoma in 1914. Like many other men his age, he drifted around looking for work during the Great Depression. Unlike many other men, he also dabbled in check fraud and livestock theft.
He met and married Faye in 1940, and they had several children. But becoming a family man didn’t bring an end to Ray’s life of crime. Instead, he started buying cattle at market with bad checks and resold them for cash as quickly as possible. He was thrown in jail for this crime several times — but then he had an idea.
Ray and Faye started hiring drifters to carry out their dirty work for them. Ray would send the men to market with the fraudulent checks, sell the cattle, and then shoot the farmhands to cover his tracks. He then buried them on the property, while Faye made a quilt from their clothing scraps.
As reported by the New York Daily News in 2003, the Copelands may have gotten away with their crimes if it weren’t for Jack McCormick, who was hired to work on the farm in 1989. He came across a human skull while digging in the barn one day, quickly left town, and notified the police about what he’d found.
Investigators raided the property, digging up the land with heavy machinery and uncovering five bodies. Both Ray and Faye were sentenced to death, becoming the oldest couple on death row in American history.
“I was raised to love my husband and support him no matter what,” Faye later said from prison. “The man is the head of the family. The Bible says it should be that way.”
Ray died of natural causes while incarcerated in 1993. Six years later, Faye’s sentence was commuted to life in prison. She was paroled in 2002 after suffering a stroke, and she died in a nursing home a few months later.
