According to court records, the bodies of two slain women who vanished in rural Oklahoma earlier this year were eventually discovered buried on an agricultural property connected to the grandmother of one of the women’s children. A set of search warrants, filed around the same time that police detained five individuals charged with the murders and made public this week, describe a sophisticated and heinous plan purportedly hatched by members of a group known as “God’s Misfits,” ostensibly to put an end to a contentious custody dispute.
According to court filings, Veronica Butler, 27, and Jilian Kelley, 39, vanished on March 30 in Texas County, a remote area of the Oklahoma panhandle, where Butler was supposed to pick up her daughter for a birthday celebration. That day, she had traveled from Kansas with Kelley, who had been designated by a court order to oversee the visit.
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Prosecutors claim they were enticed there by the suspects who were planning their murders, and their automobile was discovered abandoned at a location along Highway 95 in Kansas, close to the Oklahoma border. Although the actual cause of Butler and Kelley’s deaths has not been disclosed by the authorities, the warrants mentioned that there was “evidence of a severe injury” beside their automobile, with blood found on the road. Police also reported that Butler’s glasses, a shattered hammer, and a weapon that might have been missing from Kelley’s purse were discovered at the site.
On April 13, the remains of Butler and Kelley were found by investigators. Authorities said that the items were discovered within a chest freezer that had been submerged in a meadow that the grandmother’s boyfriend had rented out for cattle grazing and had unlimited access to. Affidavits state that the freezer was located in a pit filled with both concrete and soil.
The owner of the land reported to the authorities that Tad Bert Cullum, 43, his tenant, had inquired on March 28 “if he could cut a tree down, remove a stump, and bury some concrete” in a section beneath the dam where a mass of concrete had been sitting above ground. He claimed that Cullum completed that endeavor during the following day or so.
Tifany Machel Adams, 54, Cullum’s significant other, and the grandmother of Butler’s three children, who shared care of the children, were also detained. Wrangler Rickman, the father of the children and Adams’ son, was reportedly in an Oklahoma City rehabilitation facility at the time of the killings, according to the authorities.
Adams allegedly said that Butler had not shielded his kids from a violent brother when he was requesting full custody of Butler’s kids. A teen who was only given the initials C.W. in court documents said to detectives that she had heard Adams accuse the brother of sexual abuse while speaking with the teen’s parents, Cora Twombly, 44, and Cole Earl Twombly, 50, who are also suspects.
The adolescent stated that, in accordance with the affidavits, her mother had informed her and Cole Twombly that they would be leaving the house on a “mission” the morning of March 30 and had communicated that information with her when Butler and Kelley were killed. The teenager said that prior failed attempts to assassinate Butler near her Kansas home resulted in deaths, and that during at least one of those attempts, Cora Twombly publicly discussed the murder’s course of events.
“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 an anvil through her vehicle windshield,” according to one declaration. According to the paper, Rickman had also said that in recordings retrieved during the child custody dispute, Adams and Cullum had threatened to kill him.
According to records, the Twomblys, along with Paul Grice, 31, and Cullum and Adams, were detained in Texas County.
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation claims that all five of the accused were part of an anti-government organization known as “God’s Misfits,” which met regularly at the Twombly residence and had a religious affiliation. Each person faces charges of two first-degree murders, two kidnappings, and one conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. If found guilty of the murder charges, each of them could face a lifelong prison sentence or the death penalty in Oklahoma.
