Frank Byers told authorities, that he watched his wife through a window, while she got into an older model white pick-up truck and drove off from their home in Macomb, Oklahoma with a bald 6 foot tall man before she disappeared.
At least this was Frank’ side of the story when he told police his wife Makayla, a 30-year-old teacher’s aide and devoted mother to her blended family’s six children, was missing on Sept. 16, 2023.
A five day search took place after Makayla’s disappearance, involving family and law enforcement on foot, with drones and by kayak in the wooded areas surrounding the couple’s remote 10-acre property.
Then on September 20th a cousin made a chilling discovery. He found Makayla’s body, dressed in a red t-shirt with no pants or underwear, shot twice in the head and wrapped in a carpet. The carpet and her body were stuffed into a narrow drainage culvert about 2,000 feet from their home.
“Frank treated her like she was nothing,” Makayla’s mother, Barbara Harper, 55, charged in a family Zoom call along with her husband and daughter. “He 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.
About a year later, Makayla learned that Frank was cheating on her and they briefly separated. However, Makayla returned, living out of a nearby shed, to continue raising his girls.
“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 shot her on September 15th.
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 Frank sent through his wife’s phone and social media in an attempt to build an alibi. He tried to build a fictitious date with the man he originally told officers she disappeared with in the pick-up truck.
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.
“I am not getting back with” Makayla, he told the woman in their text messages. “I’m willing to do anything and everything I possibly can to make sure you are secure in this.”
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 5th.
