Forensic Files - Season 6, Episode 15 - Killer's 'Cattle' Log - Full Episode | Forensic Files

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

When police in the Great Plains are called about a dead body, a background check on the victim leads them into a bizarre web of homeless drifters, cattle auctions and bad checks — all fronted by elderly couple Ray and Faye Copeland.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

Ray and Faye Copeland were convicted of murdering five men in a cattle fraud scheme in Missouri.

Key points

The Copeland Murders. Ray and Faye Copeland were convicted of murdering five men in a cattle scam.
Faye's Denial. Faye Copeland claimed ignorance of her husband's crimes, despite evidence against her.
The Final Sentences. Both Ray and Faye Copeland received death sentences for their crimes.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

The key to becoming a good cattleman is buying the right cattle.

0:06WatchNov 18, 2021

Tension

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