Texas County DA defends sharing case details with KSN News
The DA filed 40 motions and responses in the Butler-Kelley case as Tad Cullum seeks to dismiss charges over an alleged gag-order breach tied to a KSN call.
The Texas County District Attorney’s Office filed 40 court documents, including eight motions and 32 responses to defense filings, as it defended its handling of information shared with KSN News in the Jilian Kelley and Veronica Butler case. The filings come as the office pushes back on a request from Tad Cullum, one of five people charged in the killings, to sanction District Attorney George Leach III and throw out the charges against him.
Cullum’s motion says Leach violated the gag order a Texas County judge put in place on May 16, 2024, after the case drew heavy media attention. The defense points to a call from KSN reporter Julia Thatcher to the district attorney’s office asking whether the daughter of co-defendant Cora Twombly would testify at Cullum’s trial. In the filing, Cullum’s lawyers say that exchange crossed the line set by the court and undermined the protections meant to keep the trial process fair.
The dispute sits inside one of the most closely watched prosecutions in Texas County. Veronica Butler, 27, and Jilian Kelley, 39, disappeared on March 30, 2024, while traveling from Kansas into the Oklahoma Panhandle for a court-ordered child visitation exchange. Their vehicle was later found abandoned along Highway 95 near the Kansas-Oklahoma border, and their bodies were later discovered buried in a chest freezer in rural Texas County. The case has been marked by a custody dispute, multiple suspects and, for some defendants, the possibility of a death sentence.
The broader case has already shifted in one major way. Tifany Adams pleaded no contest and later received life without the possibility of parole, a result prosecutors said took the death penalty off the table in her case. That development, along with the latest round of motions and responses, has kept the litigation active and underscored how much is at stake when a major homicide case is moving through the Texas County District Court under public scrutiny.
A hearing on Cullum’s request to dismiss the charges is scheduled for July 2026, keeping the focus on whether the district attorney’s office can communicate publicly without violating the court’s restrictions. For Texas County residents watching a case that began with a missing-person report and grew into a multi-defendant capital prosecution, the question now is whether the process is protecting both accountability and the fairness of the trial.
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