Killings of Veronica Butler and Jilian Kelley

On March 30, 2024, 27-year-old Veronica Butler and her 39-year-old friend Jilian Kelley disappeared while traveling from Kansas to Oklahoma. Butler was on her way to pick up her two children, who were in the care of her former mother-in-law, Tifany Adams, amid a long-running custody dispute between Butler and Adams over the children from Butler's previous marriage to Adams's son. Butler had been granted weekly supervised visitation while the custody dispute was before the courts, and Kelley — one of the people assigned to supervise those visits — accompanied Butler on the trip because the usual supervisor was unavailable. Days after the women were reported missing, their vehicle was found abandoned near a highway in Texas County, Oklahoma.

The disappearances were initially investigated as missing-person cases, but the discovery of the abandoned vehicle led investigators to suspect foul play. On April 17, 2024, the bodies of Butler and Kelley were found inside a chest freezer buried in a cattle pasture owned by one of the suspects, more than eight miles from where the vehicle had been left; a stun gun was recovered near the site. Autopsy results released later showed that Butler had sustained 30 sharp force injuries, including 10 wounds consistent with defensive injuries, along with a head laceration likely caused by a stun gun, while Kelley had been stabbed nine times.

On April 13, 2024, after police reclassified the disappearances as murders, investigators arrested four suspects: Tifany Adams; her boyfriend, Tad Bert Cullum; and a married couple, Cora Twombly and Cole Twombly. All four were charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. A fifth suspect, Paul Jeremiah Grice, 31, was arrested on April 24, 2024, and charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of kidnapping, and conspiracy to commit murder. Investigations found that the group had made preparations that included purchasing stun guns and cellphones used to communicate before the killings, and the suspects were alleged to belong to an anti-government group. On October 7, 2024, kidnapping charges against three of the suspects, including Adams, were dropped and replaced with charges of unlawfully removing and desecrating a corpse; Adams also faced two counts of child neglect.

Two of the suspects, Grice and Cora Twombly, reached plea agreements with prosecutors in December 2024, agreeing to testify against their co-defendants in exchange for the state not seeking the death penalty against them; under the terms reported, Grice would receive life without parole and Cora Twombly life with the possibility of parole after at least 30 years, though as of 2026 neither sentence had been finalized. Adams pleaded no contest on October 14, 2025, to two counts of first-degree murder, unlawful removal of a dead body, unlawful desecration of a human corpse, child neglect, and conspiracy. Her sentencing, originally set for January 28, 2026, was postponed to February 2, 2026, when she was sentenced to life without parole on both murder counts, plus two five-year terms for unlawfully removing a body and two seven-year terms for unlawfully desecrating a corpse; she is incarcerated at the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center. Cullum and Cole Twombly have pleaded not guilty, and the Texas County district attorney announced in October 2025 that prosecutors would seek the death penalty against both; their trials are scheduled for October 19, 2026, and February 22, 2027, respectively. Cullum unsuccessfully petitioned to have the trial judge, Jon Parsley, removed from his case, and by March 2026 one of the two men had moved to have the death penalty excluded as a sentencing option and declared unconstitutional, a motion prosecutors opposed.

In March 2025, Butler's mother filed a wrongful death lawsuit against all five defendants, and a bill was introduced to rename part of Oklahoma State Highway 95 in honor of the two women; by January 2026, the community had raised enough money to install permanent markers as part of that renaming effort.