Oklahoma authorities say they found evidence of foul play in the “suspicious disappearance” of two women who went missing on Saturday while picking up children.
Veronica Butler, 27, and her friend Jilian Kelley, 39, were on their way to pick up Butler’s 6-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son in Eva, Oklahoma, for her daughter’s birthday, a source close to Butler told ABC affiliate KVII. But the women “never made it to the pick up location,” the Texas County Sheriff’s Department said in an advisory last week.
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation could not confirm the women’s “exact relationship” or where they were going, telling the outlet that the situation was “still under investigation.”
According to an announcement by state investigators, detectives located the vehicle they were driving in abandoned on the side of a rural highway in Texas County, Oklahoma.
In an update on Wednesday, authorities said they gathered information obtained from the vehicle that indicates the women’s disappearance involved foul play. No arrest was made and a spokesperson for the state bureau of investigation told HuffPost in an email on Friday there was no update in the investigation.
Butler’s pastor, Tim Singer, told ABC that both women were involved in church communities in Hugoton, Kansas.
Kelley is a mom of four and the secretary at her local church that runs the children’s program, her mother told local news station KSNW.
The source close to Butler told KVII that it’s “really hard to deal with knowing” that Butler was missing.