Two women drove to a custody exchange. Neither one came home.
On March 30, 2024, Veronica Butler and her friend Jilian Kelley drove from Kansas toward the Oklahoma Panhandle for a routine custody exchange. Neither woman made it home. Two weeks later, their bodies were found inside a chest freezer, buried in a cattle pasture — and investigators said the person behind it all was Butler’s own mother-in-law, Tifany Adams.
The two had been locked in a years-long custody dispute. On the day of the exchange, Butler’s car was found abandoned near a highway in Texas County, Oklahoma. Within two weeks, five people connected to a self-described anti-government group calling itself “God’s Misfits” were in custody: Tifany Adams, Tad Cullum, Cole Twombly, Cora Twombly, and Paul Grice. Investigators said a stun gun and burner phones had been purchased in advance of the killings.
Two of the five — Paul Grice and Cora Twombly — took plea deals to avoid the death penalty and testified against their co-defendants; they await formal sentencing. Tifany Adams entered a no-contest plea and, on February 2, 2026, was sentenced to life without parole plus additional time for evidence tampering. Tad Cullum and Cole Twombly have pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against both, with trials scheduled for October 2026 and February 2027.
The full documentary covers the custody battle, the disappearance, the investigation that led to the five arrests, the discovery of the bodies, the plea deals and courtroom testimony, Adams’s sentencing, and where the case stands now for the two defendants still awaiting trial.
Sourcing
This account draws on Wikipedia’s aggregated case timeline (itself citing contemporaneous AP, CNN, CBS News, NBC News, BBC, People, The Independent, The Oklahoman, KSN, KFOR, News Channel 10 and ABC7 Amarillo reporting), Crime Online’s February 2, 2026 sentencing coverage, and The Oklahoman’s December 18, 2024 reporting on preliminary-hearing testimony. The identification photo of Veronica Butler and Jilian Kelley was released by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation and widely republished in coverage of the case; the five booking photographs are Texas County, Oklahoma Sheriff’s Department releases. No unlicensed news-broadcast footage was used in this video.
Per standard practice on this channel, Tad Cullum and Cole Twombly are described throughout as having pleaded not guilty and as awaiting trial — neither has been convicted of anything.
Related reading
No well-reviewed book has been written about this case specifically yet. Rather than link an unrelated true-crime title just to fill the slot, here is an honest, case-scoped Amazon search: Books and further reading on the God’s Misfits case.
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