According to court filings, the bodies of two slain women who went missing in rural Oklahoma earlier this year were discovered buried on an agricultural property owned by the grandmother of one of the women’s children. A series of search warrants, filed around the time law enforcement detained five people accused in the deaths and revealed publicly this week, detail a sophisticated and macabre scheme allegedly devised by members of a group known as “God’s Misfits,” ostensibly to settle a custody battle.
Veronica Butler, 27, and Jilian Kelley, 39, went missing on March 30 in Texas County, a sparsely populated area of the Oklahoma panhandle, where Butler planned to pick up her daughter for a birthday party, according to court filings. She had driven from Kansas that day with Kelley, who was assigned to supervise the visit under a court order.
Their car was discovered abandoned along Highway 95 in Kansas near the Oklahoma border, where investigators believe they were led by the suspects who had planned to kill them. Authorities have not specified what caused Butler and Kelley’s deaths, but warrants indicate that the area around their car indicated “evidence of a severe injury,” with blood on the road. Police also discovered Butler’s spectacles, a broken hammer, and a revolver possibly missing from Kelley’s purse at the site.
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On April 13, investigators found Butler and Kelley’s remains. They were discovered inside a chest freezer buried in a meadow that the grandmother’s boyfriend rented for cattle grazing and had access to at any time, according to authorities. According to the affidavits, the freezer was inside a hole filled with mud and concrete.
The property owner informed authorities that his renter, 43-year-old Tad Bert Cullum, had asked on March 28 “if he could cut a tree down, remove a stump, bury some concrete” at an area below the dam where a concrete pile was sitting above ground. He said Cullum completed the project over the next day or so.
Cullum was arrested alongside 54-year-old Tifany Machel Adams, his significant other, and the grandmother of Butler’s three children, who shared care of them. Authorities stated Adams’ son and the children’s father, Wrangler Rickman, was in a rehabilitation program in Oklahoma City at the time of the deaths.
Adams said that Butler had failed to safeguard his children from a violent brother while pursuing full custody. A adolescent, known only by the letters C.W. in court records, told detectives that she witnessed Adams accuse his brother of sexual abuse during conversations with the teen’s mother, 44-year-old Cora Twombly, and her husband, 50-year-old Cole Earl Twombly, both of whom are suspects.
According to the affidavits, the girl stated that her mother informed her of Butler and Kelley’s deaths and had previously informed her and Cole Twombly that they would be out from the house on a “mission” the morning of March 30. The murders occurred after prior unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Butler near her Kansas home, according to the youngster, who added that in at least one of those cases, Cora Twombly openly discussed how the murder would unfold.
“C.W. stated that Cora told her that the plan to kill Butler in Kansas was to get in front of her while she was driving and to throw and anvil through her vehicle windshield,” according to one document. According to the document, Rickman referenced death threats from Adams and Cullum in recordings gathered during the child custody battle.
In addition to Cullum and Adams, the Twomblys, along with 31-year-old Paul Grice, were arrested and detained in Texas County, according to records.
According to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, all five suspects allegedly belonged to “God’s Misfits,” an anti-government group with a religious background that held frequent meetings at the Twombly home. Each faces two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of conspiring to commit first-degree murder. If convicted on the murder charges, they could face life in prison or the capital penalty in Oklahoma.