A gripping investigation of the violent murder of two women at the hands of religious, anti-government extremists in the Oklahoma Panhandle—and a profound search for the nature of good and evil in one of the most fiercely independent and traditionally conservative corners of America.On the day before Easter in 2024, Veronica Butler and Jilian Kelley went missing. Butler, 27, was embroiled in a custody battle for her children with their paternal grandmother and Kelley, 39, was a court-approved supervisor for the day’s visitation. They were on their way from rural Kansas to the Oklahoma Panhandle to celebrate Butler’s daughter’s sixth birthday. But they never arrived.Family members found Butler’s blue Kia on a lonely dirt road south of the state line. Blood, broken glasses, a pistol magazine, and a shattered hammer littered the scene, but the women were gone. Weeks later, the children’s grandmother and Butler’s legal antagonist, along with four others, were arrested on suspicion of murder. All were members of a religious, anti-government group that called themselves “God’s Misfits.” Authorities later recovered the bodies of Butler and Kelley from a chest freezer buried deep in a cow pasture. The murders shocked the conscience of the panhandle community and left many asking how such violence could occur in a place with a proud tradition of faith and fair play.A riveting blend of true crime and moral inquiry, God’s Misfits goes far deeper than the sensational headlines. Through rigorous, exclusive reporting and fast-paced storytelling, Max McCoy peels back the layers of a rural community steeped in conservative politics, deep faith, and generational distrust of government—fertile ground for the sovereign-citizen ideology, conspiratorial thinking, and violent imagination that gripped God’s Misfits. In his tireless search for the nature of good and evil, McCoy reveals how devotion warps into zealotry, how patriotism is weaponized, and how backroads communities quietly incubate extremism. God’s Misfits forces us to confront the fault lines of our society and ask what these murders tell us about the soul of the heartland.
