Mere minutes before her tragic demise, 20-year-old Tiffanie Adams, who was pregnant, made a distressing call to her father, Bruce Adams.

“Bruce could hear Tiffanie’s voice, a hint of panic in her tone, before the call abruptly disconnected,” recounted retired Sullivan County Sheriff Clark Cottom during the November 23 episode of Oxygen’s Killer Relationship with Faith Jenkins. “The phone rang again almost immediately, and this time, Tiffanie was audibly screaming.”

The call on November 5, 2014, ended just as suddenly as it began.

“I knew something was terribly wrong,” Bruce recalled, his voice heavy with emotion. “I was losing my mind, desperate to figure out what had happened and where she was.”

Convinced he heard Tiffanie’s stepfather, Brian Orr, in the background, Bruce sprinted the short distance of 75 yards to Brian’s home. There, he found Brian and Tiffanie’s mother, Christina Orr, standing in the driveway, claiming ignorance of Tiffanie’s whereabouts.

For weeks, Tiffanie’s whereabouts remained a mystery until a farmer discovered her body abandoned in a corn field about five miles from her home. She’d been strangled to death with her own sweatshirt.

“I cared for her so much,” her dad said through tears. “I still think one day…she’ll come walking in like this never even happened.”

“It’s not particularly common that a person at eight and a half months pregnant would just up and take off,” Cottom remarked. “Her social media stopped. She didn’t pick up her Friday paycheck. This girl lived from paycheck to paycheck. She wasn’t gone because she wanted to be.”

Family Tensions Lead to Friction

Investigators began by taking a look at those closest to Tiffanie. After a tumultuous relationship, Tiffanie’s parents split up in 2009 when Christina left Bruce for their neighbor Brian Orr.

Tiffanie initially tried to support her mom and the new relationship, but eventually began to feel that Brian wasn’t the right fit for her mom.

“Brian was so controlling and Tiffanie did not like seeing her mom being treated that way,” her aunt Donna Adams explained. “It didn’t matter what she said. Her mother just did not want to leave the relationship.”

The friction often spilled over into Tiffanie’s relationship with Brian’s adult son Johnus Orr, a man known for having a temper.

“He was high-strung,” Bruce said. “Always wanting to fight everybody.”

Missing Surveillance Footage

Since Bruce believed he may have heard Brian’s voice in one of Tiffanie’s final phone calls, police started their investigation there. 

But according to now-retired Sullivan City Police Officer Jacob Fischer, Brian and Christina both insisted they had been doing maintenance on a building in town, before returning home and encountering Bruce a few minutes later. They both insisted that they had never seen her that day.

During his conversation with the couple, Fischer noticed a trail camera on the porch of Brian’s house that might shed more light on Tiffanie’s whereabouts that day. Yet, when Brian opened the camera, he noticed the SD card was missing, leading to another dead end. 

Tiffanie Adams’ Body is Discovered

Then, three days after she disappeared, investigators got their first break in the case when Tiffanie’s cell phone data revealed her phone had last been used along a county road five miles from Sullivan, right by a lake. 

“We were dragging the bottom of the lake. We had cadaver dogs, we had tracking dogs,” Fischer said. “We spent several nights in winter temperatures out here with these dogs, but it was nothing that led us anywhere in the investigation. The clock’s ticking.”

For weeks, there were no clues to Tiffanie’s whereabouts until Dec. 30. A farmer called the sheriff’s office to report that he’d been out combining his corn field, when he discovered a woman’s body laying amidst the crops. 

Authorities later confirmed it was Tiffanie. She’d been strangled with her red sweatshirt, killing both her and her unborn child.

“I’ve been a policeman for a long time, that was the hardest autopsy I’d ever been part of,” Cottom shared. “The reality of that baby dying is not the way life is supposed to be.”

Inside the sweatshirt, authorities found husks from the cornstalks, suggesting that the attack had taken place in the cornfield. 

Cell Phone Records Reveal Telling Clues

Investigators got a more detailed account of Tiffanie’s phone records and learned that the day of her death there were 14 text messages exchanged between the phone and a phone registered to her stepbrother Johnus and his wife Amber. 

Bruce also reported seeing Johnus the day Tiffanie disappeared fiddling with something on his dad’s front porch, suggesting he may have been the one to remove the SD card. 

Yet, Johnus didn’t have a car, so investigators couldn’t figure out how he would have gotten to a field five miles away. As the investigation continued, Amber told detectives that her husband sometimes borrowed a Chevy Blazer from a friend. The friend confirmed that Johnus was using the vehicle the day Tiffanie disappeared and a red fiber found in the Blazer was matched to Tiffanie’s sweatshirt. 

A closer examination of phone records showed that Johnus has used Tiffanie’s cell phone that day to text his wife, claiming the vehicle had broken down. By a stroke of luck, authorities were able to recover Tiffanie’s cell phone at the bottom of the lake, which still had a record of the deleted text messages. Johnus even referred to himself by name in the messages to his wife, which were sent from the cornfield, placing him at the murder scene.

According to Cottom, about a year before her murder, Tiffanie went to the hospital claiming that she’d been raped by her stepbrother. Although she never filed a formal report, investigators learned that Tiffanie brought up the allegations again during a fight with Johnus at the Dollar General just two months before her death.