CHILLICOTHE, Mo. -- Faye Copeland, who was convicted along with her husband of killing five transients, has been paroled, a state official said Sunday night.

Department of Corrections spokesman Tim Kniest said Cope-land was paroled on Friday because of a severe medical condition. Copeland, 81, was serving a sentence of life without parole, but Kniest said state law allows the parole board to release such inmates if they are terminally ill or have a medical condition that cannot be cared for in prison.

Copeland's son, Al Copeland, said his mother suffered a stroke on Aug. 10 that left her partially paralyzed and unable to speak. He said she is staying in a nursing home now.

Faye Copeland was the oldest woman on death row until a federal court commuted her sentence in 1999. A judge in May 2001 sentenced Copeland to life without parole, rejecting her attorney's request that she be released for the time she had already served.

"I think I've paid for what I did or what I knew," she said at that hearing. "God will forgive me for anything I've said or done."

The Copelands lived on a farm near Chillicothe in northwestern Missouri. Authorities said the Copelands used transients in a scheme to buy cattle with bad checks and then killed the men. Faye Copeland's defense during trial was that she was bystander who was a victim of battered woman syndrome.

Found list of names

Jurors were convinced of Faye Copeland's guilt after prosecutors turned up a handwritten list of farmhands in her writing, hidden in a camera case. She had written the names because Ray Copeland was illiterate.

Twelve of the names had scrawled X's by them. Five of those men turned up dead, and police believe three others who are still missing are buried near the others. Copeland's lawyers said the other four turned up alive and well.

Ray Copeland died in 1993 at age 78 at the Potosi Correctional Center while awaiting execution.

Al Copeland said he has been pressing for his mother's release since she was imprisoned, most recently at the Women's Eastern Reception Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Vandalia.

"There's no way in the world mom could have done what they said she had done," he said.

Al Copeland made no such defense of his father: "He was guilty. I have no qualms about that."