Tifany Adams, a 54-year-old Kansas grandmother, has been accused of killing her daughter-in-law and another woman.
Adams is a member of a religious gang called “God’s Misfits” and is said to be an “unhinged” conspiracy theorist.
Along with her boyfriend Tad Cullum, 43, and Cole and Cora Twombly, 50 and 44, Adams has been charged with the murders of Veronica Butler, 27, and Jilian Kelley, 39, which occurred in March.
The four suspects are all members of the “God’s Misfits” antigovernmental religious sect, according to court documents.
Leanne Webb, who met Adams last year, told The New York Post that Adams is “unhinged” and would post disturbing messages on her Facebook page.
“She has a lot of weird beliefs, and thinks that the rest of the world is corrupt. It was all conspiracy theories and stuff that didn’t make any sense,” said Webb.
Webb, who later unfriended Adams, told The Post the grandmother reposted an article in February which claimed modern society was living in a simulation.
“She posted a few times a day sometimes, but it was all stuff like that,” she said. “It was just bizarre, bizarre stuff, and they were going to raise [her grandkids] to believe the same things.”
The leader of the “God’s Misfits” religious group, who goes by the name Squirrel, denounced the suspects to NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield, saying “Not my God, the God that I serve condemns such hate. I have no relation with them at all.”
Butler and Kelley were traveling together to pick up Butler’s children, ages six and eight, on March 30, when they disappeared about three miles from their destination.
Their bodies were recovered after “pools of blood” were found next to their empty car.
Butler was going through a nasty divorce and custody battle, and Kelley, a pastor’s wife, was one of her supervisors for her visitations with the kids.
Adams’ son, Wrangler Rickman, technically had custody of his and Butler’s two children, but he was confirmed to be in an Oklahoma rehab facility, leaving the kids largely under Adams’ supervision.
Butler had wanted more than the weekly mandated visits with her kids under supervisors such as Kelley, but Adams – who was also known to have kept Rickman away from the children – had no desire to give in.
According to a witness, Adams and Cullum had plotted to kill Butler previously in February, creating a plan to make it look like an accident “because anvils regularly fall off of work vehicles.”
The couple had gone as far as traveling to Butler’s Hugoton, Kansas, home to pull off the plan, but Butler never left her house, CNN reported.
It appears Adams had a more detailed plan to eliminate the mother of her grandchildren the second time around, as search records recovered for Adams showed she had looked up the level of pain caused by a taser, various gun shops, and how to buy prepaid cell phones.
In late February, Adams went to a Walmart and bought three prepaid, unregistered phones.
In March, Butler filed a motion to grant her more visitation time with her children, and days later, Adams purchased five stun guns from a nearby gun shop.
On Easter weekend, Butler was set to take the kids to a birthday party with family after picking them up from Adams, but Adams claims Butler told her she could not make the kids visit during a phone call the morning of March 30.
However, records show Butler was already on her way to picking up Kelley, who was not the regular supervisor of Butler’s visits.
A woman named Cheryl Brune usually went with Butler, but Butler believed she was unavailable that day. Burne, however, told police that she had been available but Adams had called her and told her to take a couple of weeks off.
According to Cora Twombly’s 16-year-old daughter, Adams and Cullum left around 9 a.m. to meet up with Cora and Cole Twombly, and they were on a “mission.”
The group had all been provided with burner phones so that they wouldn’t be using personal devices.
Adams had left the grandchildren at the home of another “God’s Misfits” couple that hosted meetings the night before the killings.
Cullum was working the night before on a pasture that he rented to let cattle graze and asked the owner if he could do some heavier work on the land, including using a skid steer and a bulldozer to remove a tree and bury concrete.
When the Twomblys’ daughter woke up on the Saturday morning that Kelley and Butler went missing, her mother and Cole Twombly were gone, and when they arrived home a couple of hours later, they ordered the girl to clean the inside of their Chevrolet truck.
The daughter asked them what had happened, and they shockingly admitted to the killings, saying the mission had not gone as they planned but they no longer had to worry about Veronica Butler.
The daughter asked why Kelley had to die, and Twombly said that her supporting Butler made her guilty by association.
Adams picked up her two grandchildren around the same time the Twomblys got back home on March 30, according to police.
Melissa and Joey Padilla, two relatives of Butler, went out and searched for her after she didn’t arrive with the kids at the party, and around noon, they found the abandoned vehicle along with pools of blood and contacted police, who began their investigation.
That sparked a missing person report and a request from the public’s help for information, and days later, police got search warrants for Adams’ phone, which unveiled the searches.
On April 13, the four suspects were arrested despite not yet finding the bodies, and the next day, police found the bodies as the lack of traffic cameras extended the investigation.
Police had tracked the burner phones to the property Cullum had worked on that night, about eight-and-a-half miles from where Butler’s car had been found, and authorities said all three phones were discovered near Butler’s car around the time she and Kelley disappeared.
Authorities discovered a hole that was dug, filled back in, and covered with hay on the pasture, and inside the hole, they found two sets of remains confirmed to be Butler and Kelley.
During the suspects’ court appearance on April 17, Butler’s relatives had to be restrained from the accused, with family members screaming that Adams was a “f****ing b****” while the others were “sorry pieces of sh*t”.
