Marked With an X

Marked With an X: The Copeland Murders and the Men Nobody Missed

In the autumn of 1989, forty law enforcement officers and a team of bloodhounds descended on a modest forty-acre farm outside Mooresville, Missouri, and began uncovering one of the most disturbing secrets in American criminal history. Raymond and Faye Copeland, aged seventy-four and sixty-eight respectively, were about to become the oldest couple ever sentenced to death in the United States.

For at least three years, Raymond had been recruiting homeless and transient men from mission shelters in Springfield and Joplin, using them to conduct fraudulent cattle transactions, and then killing them when their usefulness was exhausted. Five men were shot through the back of the head with a .22 caliber rifle and concealed in barns, beneath hay bales, and at the bottom of an abandoned well. Faye maintained the financial records of the scheme, and investigators found a handwritten list of twelve names, most of them marked with a single, chilling X.

Drawing on trial testimony, forensic evidence, criminological research, and the psychology of coercive control, this book reconstructs the full story of the Mooresville murders, the victims who deserved better, the institutional failures that allowed the killing to continue, and the one man who survived to make the phone call that ended it all.