He Said His Wife Left Home with Another Man. Now He's Charged with Her Murder

Makayla Meave-Byers, a mother of six, was found with two gunshot wounds to the head in a drainage culvert about 2,000 feet from her home

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.

A five-day search — involving family and law enforcement on foot, with drones and by kayak in the wooded areas surrounding the couple’s remote 10-acre property – ensued, according to Makayla's family.

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.

Related: Search for Missing Okla. Mom Ends When Cousin Finds Body Wrapped in Carpet in Drainage Culvert

“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.

About a year later, Makayla learned that Frank was allegedly cheating on her and they briefly separated, according to her family, who notes that Makayla returned — living out of a nearby shed — to continue raising his girls.

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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.

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.”

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.

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