Twombly seeks new lawyer, Texas County murder trial may slip to 2027

Cole Twombly’s search for a new lawyer has put another clock on a Texas County murder case that already stretches across multiple defendants, a death-penalty filing, and months of stalled and shifting trial dates.

At a monthly status hearing in Texas County District Court, an attorney with the public defender system told the court that Twombly’s current lawyer is no longer employed by the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System. The court said an additional attorney must be appointed before the case can move forward, and the agency’s director has been assigned to name new counsel. That step matters because Twombly had been set for a February 2027 trial in one of the state’s most closely watched capital cases.

Twombly is one of five people charged in connection with the killings of Veronica Butler and Jillian Kelley. The women disappeared on March 30, 2024, while traveling from Hugoton, Kansas, to Oklahoma for a custody exchange involving Butler’s children. Their bodies were later found buried inside a chest freezer on rural Texas County property, a discovery that turned a custody dispute into a sprawling murder prosecution with statewide attention.

The case has already shown how one change can ripple through the whole schedule. In October 2025, prosecutors sought the death penalty against Twombly and Tad Cullum. By November 2025, reporting said Cullum’s trial was set for June 1, 2026, and Twombly’s for October 19, 2026. Tifany Adams later resolved her case with a no-contest plea and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on February 2, 2026. That left Twombly and Cullum as the main remaining trial defendants in the public eye.

The latest counsel problem now threatens to push Twombly’s case further out. Because the prosecution is a capital case, the defense side cannot simply keep moving on the existing schedule if one lawyer is no longer available through the state system. The court acknowledged the issue but still wants the case to stay on track, signaling that judges and lawyers are trying to balance the defendant’s right to counsel with the county’s demand for a resolution.

The next steps are straightforward, but they could take time. The Oklahoma Indigent Defense System must name replacement counsel, the new attorney must get up to speed on a case involving five defendants and voluminous discovery, and the court will then have to decide whether the February 2027 setting still holds. If the appointment process drags, another continuance would not just affect Twombly’s trial date; it would also add pressure to a case that has already tested patience in Texas County and beyond.