they were just prostitutes. they were just drug addicts. they were just women. the key to becoming a good cattleman is buying the right cattle at the right price. in the 1980s, one cattleman in missouri had a unique talent for choosing the very best cattle and paying very little for it. some of his farm hands however paid a very steep price. ♪ 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. the checks were inevitably worthless. >> it was odd that several of them would have checks, and then when we went to looking for them, 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 morristown, just outside of chillicothe. the farm was owned by 78-year-old ray copeland and his wife, fay. >> 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. >> 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 marry, you stay with them. the 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. you'd have to go out there milking the cows barefooted. and this included in the wintertime. >> when the copeland children left the farm to pursue their own dreams, ray looked for farmhands to help work the farm. he was up in age and hard of hearing and wasn't a great businessman. >> because ray could not read or

write, and with book keeping, writing names down, where they were at, things like this, he needed somebody to write them down. >> to find workers, ray would go to local homeless missions. 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 $50 a day for their labor and also theip provided their room and board. >> for many men offered that in a country setting would be paradise. 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. in 1986, a sheriff's deputy asked ray copeland if he knew murphy's whereabouts. copeland said murphy simply took off one day. >> he said, you know how transients are, they're here today and gone tomorrow, and they would just leave. >> when copeland was told murphy was a thief, he wasn't surprised because he had been swindled, too. 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 scam. none could be located until police received a call from nebraska. the informant said he knew where murphy and the other transients had gone. could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance. everybody knows that.

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♪ 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 transient. he moved a lot. he and 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, 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. we had really searched this farm, hadn't found a thing. so, you know, you always think,

well, maybe this didn't happen. >> after nine days of searching without success, they brought jack mccormick to the scene. >> i said, jack, just point to 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, really, 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'd get arrested, he would call me to come bail him out. i bailed him out of jail quite a few times. >> about every 18 months, seems like the police were 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 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. >> the 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 we had everything paid for? we didn't owe for nothing. we had the truck paid for, everything, all the machinery and all.

the farm and everything. why would he turn around and do something like that, if he did it? (soft, calm music.) hi, you've reached emma. i'm out of the office right now, but will get back to you just as soon as i possibly can. your call is important to me. join princess cruises for exclusive discovery at sea experiences. enjoy cruises from $499 during our 50th anniversary sale. call your travel consultant or 1-800-princess. princess cruises. come back new. i have $40,ney do you have in your pocket right now? $21. could something that small make an impact on something as big as your retirement? i don't think so. well if you start putting that towards your retirement every week and let it grow over time, for twenty to thirty years, that retirement challenge

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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 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 the sale barn. they'd go back next time and write a larger check with the pretense that he would make the check good, and -- but the check then when it got to 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 a gun. >> ray had the pretense of a

coon being down in a hole there in the barn. he wanted jack to get down with a stick and poke it out of the hole. and jack said when he got down there, he said he was already kind of scared ray. but when he got down there, he said he wouldn't take his eyes off of ray. he kept looking up at him because ray had the .22 rifle and supposedly was going to shoot the coon when he poked it out of the hole. jack said he looked up real fast, and when he looked back, ray had the rifle pointed at him. >> mccormick said he talked 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 scam. when investigators searched the copeland's home, they discovered

and old .22 caliber rifle and a full assortment of men's clothing, none of which belonged to ray copeland. >> different sizes, shoes. 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 guyer, a forensic odontologist. dr. guyer photographed the skulls. he performed a dental examination and took x-rays and created a transparent dental chart for each body.

>> you make a chart of everything you find in the pre-mortem records to match to the post-mortem records. >> in this case, the pre-mortem records posed a challenge. 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. i remember one of them had a condyle in 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 post-mortem dental charts, dr. guyer identified the other four bodies as wayne warner, paul cowart, jimmie dale harvey and john freeman.

cowart, harvey and freeman were three of the four names on the copeland list marked with an "x." 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 tests 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.

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e ♪ 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.

>> i was not with him when he 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 faye denied any knowledge of the murders. >> i asked no questions. wouldn't have done me any good if i had have, because he'd have 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 one of my brothers was scraping the bottom of his bowl that had oatmeal. he didn't like the sound, took a frying pan to him. myself, personally, milking cows, a cow kicked a bucket

over, he took a pair of metal cow kickers and beat me with them. for no reason. that was an 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. but before the checks could bounce, prosecutors say ray copeland would sell the cattle and kill the worker and bury the body.

>> they were lower than anybody else. he could care less about them. they were on government payroll. they didn't need to be there. they didn't even need to be alive. he had said that lots of times about transients. >> forensic tests proved that the men were all killed with ray copeland's gun. ray copeland was convicted of five counts of murder and sentenced to death. >> hooray. ray deserved it. for what he done to the transients and the people all through his life. and he deserved the 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. i've carried broken bones. from him. but he was my husband, legally. >> i think she had some ideals 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 faye 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 convicted her on, was the piece of paper with the names on it. >> before ray copeland could be executed, he died in prison in 1993. in 1999, after ten years on

death row, faye copeland's sentence was commuted to life in prison. >> i never go to bed, never close my eyes, before i relive a lot of my life over, wondering, was i to blame? you know, so why should i have to pay for something he done? if he done it. >> ray and faye copeland don't get much sympathy from the transients who live in the missions on commercial street. >> 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 copelands' list, thomas park, franklin hudson and dale brake are still missing. police believe they, too, were murdered and that their bodies are buried nearby, somewhere.

in 1996, two young boys fishing in an ohio lake found what looked like a human skull. all of its teeth were missing, and markings on the skull told a tale of unspeakable violence. police had no idea who this person was or how long the skull had been in the water. hamilton, ohio is an industrial city of about 62,000 people in the southwestern part of the sta