Murder: True Crime Stories - MYSTERY: Serial Killer Grandparents

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

In rural Missouri, Ray and Faye Copeland looked like any other elderly farming couple, churchgoing, weathered, and unremarkable to the neighbors who waved at them from the road. But behind that ordinary facade was one of the most disturbing operations in American criminal history. The Copelands hired drifters and transient men to help on their farm, used them to write bad checks for cattle, and then murdered them to cover their tracks. By the time investigators uncovered the truth, they had found the bodies of five men buried on and around the property, and Ray and Faye, both in their seventies, became the oldest couple ever sentenced to death in the United States. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy examines the case that shattered every assumption about who is capable of violence, the victims no one came looking for, and the quiet farm where a seemingly harmless old couple hid a killing operation in plain sight.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi listeners, it's Carter. Before today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories, I want to tell you about another podcast I am hosting. I know you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, The First 48. Each week, I'll take you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends,

and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Crime House. When a person goes missing, the world is supposed to notice. Someone files a report. Someone starts asking questions. Someone comes looking. But some men can slip out of the world without making a ripple at all.

Men with no money, no addresses, no unlaw. waiting for them. In the 1980s, men like that could find a hot meal and a cot at a rescue mission in central Missouri. And every so often, a soft-spoken old farmer would come through those same doors looking for a younger pair of hands. He offered honest work, a roof, a little money. To a man who had nothing, it sounded like a second chance. It wasn't. One by one, the men who took that offer disappeared. And when investigating, The creators finally went digging. They found bodies buried in barns and down an old well.

But inside the farmhouse they found something even worse. A handwritten list of names with exes marked beside them in the careful hand of the farmer's quiet church-going wife. Some of those names match the dead. The rest were men who were never found, and to this day no one's sure what what the woman who wrote that list really knew. This is the story of the Copeland Farm murders. People's lives are like a story.

There is a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is murder, true crime stories, A Crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come at every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Thank you for being part of the crime house community.

Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for ad-free access to every episode, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays, where I'm covering cases with questions that I cannot get out of my head, the ones where the evidence points in multiple directions, And every theory feels like a possibility. Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video.

Just search for Crimehouse Studios and be sure to like and subscribe. On paper, today's case looks like it's already solved. An elderly couple in rural Missouri was convicted of killing five men and went to death row for their crimes. You'd think that would be the end of it. It isn't. There's a handwritten list of a dozen names that, nobody has ever fully explained. There are men still missing to this day. And there's a wife whose own son swore she was innocent while a jury decided she was a killer. So the real questions

here aren't who or how. There are how many and how much did she know. All that and more coming up. In the mid-1980s, the American farm economy was coming apart. Land values had crashed, Banks were calling in loans, and a lot of rural families were one bad season away from losing everything they had. At the same time, the country had a growing number of men living on the edges of all of it. Guys who'd lost jobs, lost marriages, lost the thread somewhere along the way. Some struggled with drinking, some struggled with their mental health. They moved from town to town, picking up day labor wherever they could find it. The word people used back then was drifters.

In central Missouri, a man in that situation had a few places he could turn. Church-run missions and rescue shelters in towns like Springfield would give him a hot meal, a bed, and a chance to catch his breath. They were way stations for the people the rest of the economy had no use for. You didn't need references to walk in the door, you didn't need a last known address or phone number or anybody to vouch for you. And every so often, a man would come through those same doors with work to offer. His name was Ray Copeland, and by the mid-1980s, he was in his 70s.

He and his wife, Faye, ran a 40-acre farm just outside of the tiny community of Mooresville, Missouri, not far from the town of Tilla Cawley. They'd bought the place back in 1967 and lived there ever since, raising cattle and hogs, keeping to themselves. Faye was the one who kept things afloat. Over the years, she took whatever work she could find, a factory job, stitching gloves, cleaning rooms at a motel, the kind of jobs that don't pay much, but never stop. Ray ran the cattle. And to the men he hired, Ray came across as harmless, even a little sad.

He was hard of hearing. He couldn't really read or write, and he said as much. He told the many needed a younger pair of hands to help him buy and sell cattle. So he'd turn up at a mission. One of his favorites was the victory mission in Springfield and make an offer that to the right man at the right moment sounded like a gift from God. He promised a roof over their head, three meals, and about $50 a week, cash. for a man with nothing left in the world. Why would he say no? And here's how the work went.

At least the part the men could see. Ray would drive a new hire into a nearby town and walk him through setting up a checking account at a local bank plus a post office box to use as an address. Ray would even put up the money to open the account, a couple hundred dollars to get it started. Then the two of them would head out to the livestock auctions that dot that part of Missouri,

and Ray would tell the man which cattle to bid on and how high to go. The strange part was that all of it happened in the worker's name, the workers' account, the workers' checks. But Ray had a smooth answer ready. It explained that the auctioneers didn't like him and would never give a fair price to an old man with a reputation, so it was simpler all around if the new guy did the buying.

to somebody who was just grateful to be useful again, that didn't sound like a big deal. Small town grudges not his concern, so he signed where Ray pointed. And for a little while, the work was real. The two men would drive out to a sail barn, Ray sizing up the cattle, the younger man holding the paddle and doing the bidding while Ray murmured the numbers. They'd load up the animals, haul them off, and to anyone watching, it looked exactly like, what it was, an old farmer and his hired hand doing business.

What the men couldn't see was where the money actually ended up. As soon as the cattle were bought, Ray would turn around and resell them fast, usually within a few days, and keep the cash for himself. By the time the workers' checks bounced back at the bank, the cattle were gone, and the money was raised, and the only name on any of the paperwork belonged to the hired man. It was a fraud scheme, and it was a clean one, at least on Ray's end. The worker carried all the risk. Ray walked away with all the profit. But a plan like that has a weak point built right into it. Sooner or later, those bad checks come back around, and somebody has to answer for them. And the only person standing between Ray Copeland and a fraud charge,

was the man whose signature was on every one of those checks. There was a tidy, terrible solution to that problem. Get rid of the man. And that's exactly what Ray did. In the fall of 1986, he hired a man named Dennis Murphy and ran him through the whole routine, the bank account, the post office box, the cattle auctions where Murphy bid on animals at Ray's direction

and paid with checks that were never, going to clear. And then one day in October of 1986, Ray asked Dennis to come out to a barn with him. Only one of them walked back. Dennis Murphy was 27 years old, from normal Illinois. He was the first man we know of who took Ray Copeland's offer and vanished. No one reported him missing. No one came knocking. The world just closed over the space where he'd been. like he never stood there at all. And over the next three years, it would happen again and again until it was a pattern.

A month after Murphy, in November of 1986, it was Wayne Warner from Bloomington, Illinois. Then came a long quiet stretch where, as far as we know, the killing stopped. But it started again in the fall of 1988 with Jimmy Dale Harvey, a 27-year-old out of Springfield, Missouri. That December, John Freeman, also 27, from Boonville, Indiana, and the following spring in May of 1989, the youngest of them all, Paul Cowart, just 20, from the little town of Dardanelle, Arkansas. That's five men we know of, and Ray's method almost never changed. Each of them was killed the same way, a single shot to the back of the head from a 22-caliber rifle.

There's an obvious question here. How does a man do this five times and not get caught? The answer is the saddest part of this entire case. Nobody came looking, not because nobody cared exactly. It's that a person only gets reported missing if somebody out there notices they're gone. And for these men, a lot of the time, there was no one left to notice. Their families had already lost track of them years before. They weren't expected anywhere on any given day.

So when one of them stopped turning up around Mooresville, folks just figured he'd wandered off to the next thing like the man before him. The only people who ever came around asking were sheriff's deputies. And they weren't knocking because anyone was worried about a missing person. They were knocking because of the bounced checks. A deputy would trace a bad check back toward the Copeland farm and come by to ask about, say, Dennis Murphy. or Wayne Warner, and Ray and Faye had the same answer ready every single time.

Oh, him? Oh, he passed us a bad check, too, and then he just took off one day. No idea where he went. In a world where men like that came and went constantly, that story held, the deputy would jot it down and drive away. Years went by like this. By the end of it, there was something like seven different men all want to, on bad shacks at cattle barns scattered across central Missouri, who shared exactly one thing in common. Every single trail ran back to the same quiet farm outside Mooresville. But no single

deputy in any one county was seeing the whole picture. They each had their own bad check, their own man who'd wandered off, and the same easy answer from the same polite old couple. It would take an outsider to connect those dots. And that outsider almost didn't live long enough to do it. By the summer of 1989, Ray Copeland had been killing his farm hands on and off for almost three years, and he probably would have kept doing it, except eventually he made a bad bet. He picked a man who was paying attention. His name was Jack McCormick. McCormick was a recovering alcoholic who was trying really hard to get his life back on track. He met Ray at that same victory mission in Springfield, and he took the job like the others before him. Same setup, too. He opened a post office box and a checking account,

this time over in the town of Brookfield. Faye even had him sign a blank starter check before they got going, then he and Ray started making the rounds at the cattle sales. But something about Ray put Jack on edge from the start. He couldn't have told you exactly what. The old man was friendly enough, helpful even, but there was something underneath it that didn't sit right, some gap between the gentle way Ray talked and the way his eyes worked a room. Whatever it was, it kept Jack watchful in a way the men before him maybe hadn't been. That instinct might be the only reason this story ever came to light. One evening, Ray asked Jack to come out to a barn behind the house.

He said a raccoon had gotten inside and needed to be dealt with, and he brought along his 22 rifle. The two of them went in to flesh the animal out, poking around in the dark. And Jack, who'd been keeping one eye on the old man the whole time, turned at exactly the wrong moment for Ray. he found himself looking straight down the barrel of that rifle leveled right at his head. Jack started talking fast. He told Ray he was a nobody that no one would ever believe him anyway,

that he'd leave town that night and never breathe a word. And to make it land, he offered Ray something practical. He told Ray he would make good on that bad check. He just needed Ray to drive him to the bank. and he would use his own wages to cover it. For reasons that are still hard to explain, Ray lowered the gun. And he actually got in the truck and drove Jack to the bank.

That was the mistake that cracked the whole thing open. At the bank, Jack closed out the account, and that was the last the Copeland's would get out of him. He flat out refused to go back to the farm for his belongings, Ray had driven him into town thinking he was managing a problem. Instead, he'd handed Jack the one thing he needed. Distance. And Jack used it.

He didn't run that same afternoon. For a couple of weeks, he drifted, turning over what he knew and what on earth to do about it. Then he ran for real. He talked a salesman at a used car lot into letting him take a car for a test drive and never brought it back. He drove it out of Missouri. and kept going until he was a few states away in Nebraska. And from there, once he finally felt safe, Jack McCormick picked up a phone.

He told authorities that an old farmer down in Moorsville was running a cattle check scam. And then he told him the part that was hard to believe. He said he thought there were human bones out on the man's property, that he'd seen what looked like a skull. and part of a limb poking up out of the ground near one of the barns. Then he had to wait and see whether anyone would take the word of a drifter wanted for bad checks. At first, the honest answer was not really.

The tip worked its way to the Livingston County Sheriff's Department where a deputy named Gary Calvert took a look at it. It took another two months for Calvert to actually follow up, but when he and his team finally went out and searched the Copeland farm in October of 1989, they didn't do it halfway. They brought cadaver dogs and walked the property. But they didn't find anything. Still, Calvert didn't let it drop.

So next, he started pulling Ray Copeland's history, and what came back didn't look anything like a harmless old farmer. It was a criminal record that stretched back decades. Livestock theft, forged checks, one stint behind bars after another, going all the way back to when Ray was a young man. The kindly grandfather had been running scams his whole life. Suddenly, the bad checks weren't a coincidence. They were a pattern. With more information on Ray, Calvert pulled Jack McCormick back in and questioned him hard. And here's the thing. Under that pressure, McCormick actually backed off the part about the bones, but he didn't back off the rest.

He laid out the entire check-cashing scheme in detail, and he told them flat out that he was scared to death of Ray Copeland. Then a local resident mentioned something that changed everything. Ray didn't only work his own 40 acres. He hired out, doing odd jobs on neighboring farms all around the area. and on one of those properties near the little community of Ludlow, there was a barn. And lately, that barn had started to smell like something inside it had died. Calvert sent his people out to that barn. They walked the dirt floor, testing it, and in spots it gave a little, softer than packed earth should be.

So they went out and got shovels and started to dig. A foot or two down, they hit clothing, and then they found the men. In that single barn, they uncovered the remains of three men buried in shallow graves. Each one had been shot once in the back of the head. The killings had happened somewhere else. The bodies were dragged in afterward and covered with dirt. and it didn't stop there. The search spread to other places Ray was known to work.

In a second barn, they found a fourth body, and then in an old well, they found a fifth. This man had been wrapped up and dropped down into the dark, and he was still wearing a belt with the name Dennis pressed into it. That was Dennis Murphy. The very first man to disappear back in October of 1986, and the last of the five to be found at the bottom of a well killed exactly like all the others. All told, the search stretched across days,

and while the crews worked the barns in the fields with dogs and digging equipment, word tore through Livingston County. The quiet old couple out past Mooresville was not what anyone had thought. People who'd waved at Ray and Faye on the road were now watching crews, carry bodies out of the ground a few miles from their own homes. But even identifying those men turned into its own quiet heartbreak, because they'd lived on the margins for so long, most of them had medical records that were ancient or missing entirely.

Several hadn't seen a dentist in decades. The usual ways of putting a name to a body just weren't there. Dennis Murphy was finally identified in part by the unused, usual shape of one of the joints in his jaw. But investigators did the work anyway, and one by one, the bodies got their names back. Paul Coward, John Freeman, Jimmy Dale Harvey, Wayne Warner, and Dennis Murphy. And while part of the team was recovering bodies, others were going through the Copeland's house. And what they found inside is where this stops looking like fraud that got out of hand. and starts looking like something much colder.

They found Ray's gun collection and in it a 22 caliber Marlin rifle. Ballistics testing tied it to the bullets pulled from the victims. That was the murder weapon. And they found the missing men's clothing. Some of it stitched into a homemade quilt. Pieced together, scrap by scrap. And tucked inside a camera case, they found a hand-rength. they found a handwritten list of names, names of men who'd worked the farm.

The handwriting was Faze. And beside a dozen of those names, someone had drawn an X. Five of the men with X's next to their names were the bodies investigators had just pulled out of the ground. Which left detect as wondering, what about the other seven? That question would haunt this case for decades, but the people who could answer it weren't talking. Police had arrested Ray and Fay Copeland on October 9, 1989, right around that first empty search of their farm, and before anyone had found a single body, at that point, the only charge was fraud. It was only after the bodies started turning up in the days that followed, that both of them were charged with murder.

Ray was 74 years old, Faye was 68. Once they were locked up, Ray mostly stonewalled. Across the whole investigation, he would only ever cop to being responsible for three of the killings, never all five, and he wouldn't say much beyond that. At one point, he even tried to pin one of the deaths on McCormick, claiming he'd watch Jack dump a body in that well. That was impossible because McCormick didn't set foot on that farm until years after Dennis Murphy was already dead. But Ray was never really the hard question. The hard question was Fay. Had she been her husband's partner in all of this, or one more person he controlled?

The answer depended a lot on what that marriage had actually been like behind closed doors. And once the secret was out, the people who knew the Copeland's started to talk. The picture they painted was bleak. For decades, neighbors had quietly believed that Ray was a cruel, controlling man, and that he was abusive to his wife and his children. When investigators and reporters started asking around, that picture filled in fast, They said Ray beat his family and kept Faye under his thumb completely. She was the one who had handled everything that involved reading or writing in that household because Ray couldn't.

That's almost certainly why that list of names was in her handwriting and not his. And the paperwork told the same story. A woman tangled up in every part of her husband's business. There were pasture rental agreements in Faye's handwriting. renting land to two of the victims, Wayne Warner and Dennis Murphy. When one bank closed John Freeman's account, it mailed the leftover balance to the Copeland's address. Faye signed for that letter herself. Then she handed it right back to the mail carrier, said she had no idea who John Freeman was,

and told them to quit sending his mail. After her arrest, jail staff even intercepted notes she tried to pay. passed to Ray, notes that hinted she knew something incriminating might turn up out on that property. For the prosecution, that all pointed in one direction. For Fay's defenders, it pointed somewhere else entirely. To prosecutors, the list and the paperwork proved Faye Copeland knew exactly what was happening on that farm. But there was another way to read all of it. And it started with who Faye said she was.

Faye told anyone who would listen that she never questioned Ray, not once in nearly 50 years. She said she was terrified of him. She said she'd been raised to believe a wife stands by her husband, no matter what he is, and that she had bowed her head and taken whatever he handed her for her entire married life. And Fay had come from almost nothing to begin with. She was born in 1921 and raised in the hills of Arkansas. She had a big religious family and lived in a cabin with a dirt floor. She married Ray around 1940 when she was still a teenager,

and from that day forward, wherever Ray went, Fay went too. She kept the books he couldn't read. She wrote the letters he couldn't write. For half a century, by her own account and her families, she absorbed his temper and asked no questions. The defense's whole argument was that this wasn't a partnership at all. It was a cage. So, which was she?

An accomplice or the most trapped person on that whole farm? That was the question a jury would have to answer. The two of them were tried separately, and Fay went first in November of 1990 in a courtroom in Chilicothe. Her defense wanted to lay all of it out for the jury, what her marriage had actually been. They had a psychologist ready to testify that Fay suffered from battered woman syndrome. It's a recognized pattern. When someone's been controlled and abused for years, they can get to a place. where they can't push back against the person hurting them or even question them.

But the jury never heard most of it. On a legal technicality, her lawyers hadn't filed the right notice ahead of time, the judge kept that testimony out of the part of the trial where the jury decided whether she was guilty. So the people deciding whether Faye Copeland was a murderer heard very little about the decades of fear and control, standing behind her. What they did hear about was the list and the quilt. Those two things became the heart of the case against Fay. And the man making that case was a young assistant

attorney general named Kenny Holsoff, who years later would go on to serve in the U.S. Congress. But here's what's striking. Holsoff never argued that Fay fired a single shot. He never claimed that she was even present when the men were killed or when the bodies were buried. His argument was narrower and in a way more chilling. He argued that she knew, that she helped, that the list in her handwriting and the quilt sewn from dead men's clothes were proof she'd been a knowing part of it all along. The jury agreed. They found Faye Copeland guilty on five counts of.

of first-degree murder. She was sentenced to death for four of them and to life in prison without parole for the fifth, the murder of Dennis Murphy. When the verdict was read aloud, the 69-year-old grandmother broke down and sobbed. Ray's trial came a few months later in the spring of 1991.

The evidence against him was overwhelming. The scheme, the witnesses, his own rifle matched to the bullets. The jury convicted him, him on all five murders and he got the death penalty too. When he heard his own verdict, Ray had two words. He said, quote, I'm okay. And when a sheriff later told him that Fay had been sentenced to die,

the man who'd spent half a century controlling her barely reacted. He said, quote, well, those things happened to some, you know. By most accounts, he never spoke about his wife again. But there's one detail that complicates that. At one point, Ray apparently offered to plead guilty and take full responsibility in exchange for the state taking the death penalty off the table for Fay. The deal got tangled up in a fight over which prosecutor would handle the case and fell apart before it ever became real. And whether that was a rare flicker of conscience or just one more move from a lifelong con man, no one can say.

Either way, with those two verdicts, Ray and Fay Copeland made a grim piece of history. At 76 and 69 years old, they became the oldest couple ever sentenced to death in the United States. Neither of them was ever executed. Ray died in 1993 at the age of 78 at the United States. the Potosi Correctional Center, still sitting on death row, still waiting. Faye's story took a turn. In 1999, a federal court threw out her death sentence, not because anyone decided she was innocent, but because the prosecutor had crossed a line during the sentencing part of her trial and a court ruled that she hadn't gotten a fair hearing.

Her sentence dropped to life in prison. For a stretch there, she'd been the oldest woman on death row in America. After that, she was just an old woman serving life, but along the way, she did finally share parts of her story. Years earlier, she gave a rare interview to a reporter named Lee Kavanaugh of the Kansas City Star. She talked about a marriage that had never left any room for her at all. She said she hadn't even been allowed to keep flowers at the house because Ray didn't like her intending anything but him. She said, quote, I was raised to love my husband and support him no matter what. But there was iron in her by then, too, looking back on all those years of swallowing it.

She said maybe the two of them would have gotten along better if she had, quote, knock the shit out of him a few times. And when the reporter asked whether she thought she'd ever get out of prison, Faye said, quote, I may go out feet first, but I'll get out of here. By then, something surprising had started happening on the outside. To a lot of people, Faye Copeland had stopped being a monster and become a question. A couple named Tom and Janet Block founded a group called Missourians Against State Killing and took up her cause. Petitions went around, one of them with thousands of signatures,

arguing that an old woman who'd been beaten down her entire life, who posed no danger to anyone, had suffered enough. For a while, it looked like the public might decide Faye's story for itself, even if the courts never fully would. In the end, it wasn't the petitions or the courts that got Faye out. In 2002, she suffered a stroke that left her paralyzed and unable to speak. And in a grim way, she'd kind of been right. all along, she did get out feet first. The state granted her a medical parole and she was moved to a

nursing home in Chilacothe. She died there in late December of 2003 at the age of 82. To the very end, she insisted she never knew her husband was killing those men. So here's where I keep landing with this one. On paper, the case is closed. There were convictions, there was a murder weapon matched by ballistics, by the letter of the law. It's solved. But the questions

that actually keep me up are still wide open. The first is that list. Twelve names, 12 X's. Five of those men were found in the ground. Prosecutors believe the rest were dead too. But seven of those

men have never been found, and some were never even identified. There are graves out there somewhere in the Missouri countryside that no one has ever stood beside. There are families. If these men had families who may have spent the rest of their lives just not knowing. The second question is the one a jury answered even if history hasn't. Did Faye Copeland help her husband kill these men or was she a battered woman who wrote down names she was ordered to write and never let herself understand what the exes meant you can build a real case either way and that's what makes it stick with me on one side the list was in her hand the pasture agreements were in her hand she signed

for a dead man's mail and then lied about knowing him she sewed a quilt out of clothes their owners were never coming back for on the other side. She handled every scrap of paper on that farm because Ray couldn't read her right. So of course it was all in her handwriting. An X beside a name might mean a man was dead or it might just mean a man was gone. And a thrifty farmwife turning left of her clothes into a quilt is on its own, well, just a thrifty farm wife. Her own son believed she was innocent.

The defense's psychologist, Dr. Marilyn Hutchinson, examined Faye and concluded she fit the profile of a battered abused wife. But the court's own appointed psychiatrist examined her too and concluded she didn't. And during the part of the trial where the jury decided her guilt, they never got to hear any of it. I don't know the answer. I'm not sure. Anyone does. but the thing I can't put down isn't really about Ray or Faye or who knew what. It's about how easy it was. Ray Copeland didn't get away with this for years because he was some criminal genius. He got away with it because he understood something ugly and true about the world.

He understood that there are people we've quietly decided not to see. men with no money, no addresses, no one keeping track of them. Men we file away under a word like Drifter, so we don't have to think of them as somebody's son. He was betting that the rest of us wouldn't notice and for a long, long time. He was right. So before we go, I want to say their names one more time. Dennis Murphy, Wayne Warner, Jimmy Dale Harvey, John Freeman and Paul Cowart, who was only 20 years old.

And for the men still out there in unmarked ground, the ones we never found, the ones we may never be able to name. I hope that someday somebody comes looking, because every one of them was a person, and every one of them mattered. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True, crime stories. Come back next time for the story of another murder and all the people that affected.

Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. and to enhance your murder true crime stories listening experience, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday, completely ad-free, no waiting for part two,

plus ad-free and early access to every show across Crimehouse and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back. on Tuesday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team,

Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Protovsky, Lori Marinelli, Nicolette Tavallero, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Hi listeners, it's Carter. Before today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories, I want to tell you about another podcast I am hosting. I know you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, The First 48.

Each week, I'll take you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow. the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.