As Frank Byers watched through a window of his house in Macomb, Okla., his wife,Makayla Meave-Byers, stepped into an older-model white pickup truck in the driveway and drove off with a bald, 6-foot-tall White man — never to be seen alive again.
At least that’s what Frank told authorities when he reported that Makayla — a 30-year-old teacher’s aide and devoted mother to her blended family’s six children — was missing on Sept. 16, 2023.
Then on Sept. 20 a cousin made a chilling discovery: Makayla’s body — dressed in a red t-shirt with no pants or underwear — shot twice in the head and wrapped in carpet, had been stuffed into a narrow drainage culvert about 2,000 ft. from the Byers’ home, according to the affidavit authorizing Frank’s arrest.
“Frank treated her like she was nothing,” Makayla’s mother, Barbara Harper, 55, charged in a family Zoom call with PEOPLE along with her husband and daughter. “Discarded her like she was nothing.”
In recent years, Frank, a father to four girls, had reconnected with his high school classmate Makayla — a mother to two teenagers she adopted out of foster care — on Facebook. Makayla, who was unable to have biological children, quickly took to mothering Frank’s young girls, for whom he then had primary custody, and they soon after married in June 2022.
Makayla and Frank Byers at their wedding, June 11, 2022.facebook
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“She was a mother, first and foremost,” recalls sister Andria, 34. “That was the most important job in her life.”
Investigators believe the shed in which Makayla lived is where Frank allegedly shot her that Sept. 15 day.
Law enforcement arrests Frank Byers for the murder of his wife, Oct. 25, 2023.Pottawatomie County Sheriff’s Office
Pottawatomie County Sheriff’s Office
Pottawatomie County Sheriff’s Office investigators listed among the recovered evidence a recently fired .22 rifle, several .22 shell casings each stamped with the letter “F” and Makayla’s bloodstains on Frank’s work boots.
Investigators also found text messages — some of which they allege Frank sent through his wife’s phone and social media in an attempt to build the alibi for what they called in the affidavit her “fictitious date" with the man Frank claimed he saw with Makayla.
Other messages sent from Frank’s own phone went to a woman whom he had met at a gas station and with whom he hoped to pursue a relationship, the affidavit alleges.
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“I am not getting back with” Makayla, he allegedly told the woman in their text messages, according to the affidavit, adding: “I’m willing to do anything and everything I possibly can to make sure you are secure in this.”
A vigil is held at a local high school in Lexington, Okla., several days after Makayla’s body is recovered, Sept. 23, 2023.Courtesy Kaitlyn Snow
Courtesy Kaitlyn Snow
Frank, 32, was charged in October with first degree murder, the unauthorized removal of a dead body and the desecration of a human corpse. He has pleaded not guilty and maintains his innocence.
“I’d just like to ask Frank, ‘Why couldn’t you just let her leave?’” says step-father Scott Harper, 55. “You’ve destroyed many lives with the choice that you made that day.”
A preliminary hearing in the murder case is slated for April 5.
source: people.com
