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.

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By the spring of 1934, the small colony of European settlers on the Galapagos island of Floreana was tearing itself apart. A relentless drought had withered the crops, the self-proclaimed Baroness was abusing her companions, and the tiny island had become a pressure cooker of resentment, jealousy, and fear. Then people started to vanish. The Baroness and one of her lovers disappeared overnight, and the story given by the remaining settlers didn't match what the others claimed to have heard that day. Months later, two more bodies turned up mummified on a barren island they had no business being on, and a strict vegetarian doctor was suddenly dead from a few bites of spoiled chicken. In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, Carter Roy is joined by Daisy Eagan, host of Strange and Unexplained, to follow the chain of deaths and disappearances that destroyed the Floreana colony, the wildly conflicting accounts the survivors took to their graves, and one of the strangest unsolved mysteries of the 20th century.

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In 1929, a German doctor named Friedrich Ritter and his partner, Dore Strauch, sailed to the uninhabited island of Floreana in the Galapagos to escape what they believed was the worst of human nature. For two years, they had the place to themselves. Then, drawn by Friedrich's articles in the European press, other settlers began to follow. A practical German family arrived in 1932, then a self-styled Austrian Baroness with two younger lovers, who declared the island her personal kingdom and announced plans for a luxury hotel. Within months, the tiny colony was buckling under jealousy, accusations, and the kind of grudges that have nowhere to go on an island just a few miles wide. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, Carter Roy is joined by Daisy Eagan, host of Strange and Unexplained, to trace the rise of the so-called paradise, the strange settlers who built it, and the slow unraveling that would soon turn the Enchanted Islands into one of the strangest unsolved cases of the 20th century.

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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.

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