Accused of double murder: The grandmother, her boyfriend and the couple who hosted anti-government religious meetings
CNN
Authorities say a five-year custody dispute ended in a plot involving burner phones and stun guns and the killings of Veronica Butler and Jilian Kelley.
Tifany Machel Adams did not want her grandchildren to see more of their mother. The children’s mother, Veronica Butler, however, wanted more access to her kids than the court-ordered supervised Saturday visits she was allowed. It was the latest flash point in a custody fight that had already gone on for five years. These are some of the details investigators laid out in probable cause affidavits submitted as part of requests for warrants for the arrest of Adams, her boyfriend Tad Cullum and married couple Cole and Cora Twombly. Each has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of kidnapping and a count of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the killings of Butler, who had children with Adams’ son, and another woman, Jilian Kelley. This story uses the statements from the affidavits and other official statements to unravel how investigators say the murders happened. The four suspects were walked separately into the Texas County Courthouse on Wednesday, each shackled and wearing a striped jail jumpsuit and protective vest. All four defendants were denied bond during their initial court appearance, according to the court docket. They were assigned court-appointed attorneys with the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System, according to Charles Laughlin, the agency’s executive director. The agency’s policy is not to speak to the media regarding pending cases, Laughlin told CNN in an email. The two victims, Butler and Kelley, disappeared in the empty, open landscape of Oklahoma’s panhandle while traveling from Kansas to pick up Butler’s children from Adams late last month.
Brian Walshe on Thursday came face-to-face for the first time with the man who had been having an affair with his wife before her death, as he took the stand to testify in Walshe’s murder trial.
The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed Texas to use a congressional map that will boost President Donald Trump’s effort to keep Republicans in control of Congress, blocking a lower court decision that found the new boundaries were likely unconstitutional because they were drawn based on race.
The US military carried out a strike Thursday on a suspected drug boat in the Eastern Pacific, killing four people on board, according to a social media post from US Southern Command.
A grand jury voted against indicting New York Attorney General Letitia James after being asked to look at the mortgage fraud case against her a second time, according to multiple people familiar with the development Thursday.
National Guard troops deployed to Washington, DC, can remain there for now, after a federal appeals court on Thursday temporarily froze a judge’s ruling that would have soon required them to leave the city’s streets.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bad week just got worse. That’s after the long-awaited release Thursday of an inspector general’s report on his sharing of highly sensitive military attack plans on the unclassified app Signal earlier this year.
President Donald Trump has hired a new architect for the White House ballroom amid disputes between the president and his architect originally contracted to complete the project, several sources have told CNN.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth risked compromising sensitive military information that could have endangered US troops through his use of Signal to discuss attack plans, a Pentagon watchdog said in an unclassified report released Thursday. It also details how Hegseth declined to cooperate with the probe.
If nothing else, the controversy over the Trump administration’s second strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean has surfaced a long-overdue debate about its already legally dubious first strikes.
Two top House lawmakers emerged divided along party lines after a private briefing with the military official who oversaw September’s attack on an alleged drug vessel that included a so-called double-tap strike that killed surviving crew members, with a top Democrat calling video of the incident that was shared as part of the briefing “one of the most troubling things” he has seen as a lawmaker.
Authorities in Colombia are dealing with increasingly sophisticated criminals, who use advanced tech to produce and conceal the drugs they hope to export around the world. But police and the military are fighting back, using AI to flag suspicious passengers, cargo and mail - alongside more conventional air and sea patrols. CNN’s Isa Soares gets an inside look at Bogotá’s war on drugs.
Young Americans are “a generation under profound strain” with little confidence in institutions and widespread economic concerns, according to a Harvard Institute of Politics survey of adults younger than 30 released Thursday.
As lawmakers demand answers over reports that the US military carried out a follow-up strike that killed survivors during an attacked on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, a career Navy SEAL who has spent most of his 30 years of military experience in special operations will be responsible for providing them.