Kriti Mehrotra
It was on September 15, 2023, when 30-year-old Makayla Fay Meave suddenly disappeared from her Macomb, Oklahoma home, leaving her entire community baffled to the core. She was actually a devoted family woman and a teacher’s aide at the school district, as per CBS’ ’48 Hours: Tracker Dakota Black,’ so her going off the grid was extremely uncharacteristic. Investigators as well as loved ones thus kickstarted an extensive search, only for it to ultimately come to light that her husband had heinously killed her before disposing of her remains.
Makayla Meave and Frank Byers Were Having Issues at the Time of the Incident
A proud native of Cleveland County, Oklahoma, Frank Alan Cole Byers was just a teenager when he first came across Makayla Fay Meave as they were attending Lexington High School. They were reportedly mere classmates from the batch of 2010, so they naturally ended up drifting apart upon graduation so as to focus on their own individual paths in the world. While he proudly served as an Environmental Technician at the nationwide management services company SET Environmental Inc., she was a Paraeducator at Macomb Public Schools.
According to records, Frank and Makayla actually reconnected on Facebook after years, by which point she was already an adoptive mother of 2, and he was a single father to four young girls. Little did either of them know that a casual conversation would become much more as they uncovered an undeniably innate spark, resulting in them soon officially dating and falling completely in love. In fact, in June 2022, the couple tied the knot in a cozy ceremony while surrounded by their closest loved ones, following which they happily settled down with their blended brood of 6 in Macomb.
The Meave-Byers family honestly appeared idyllic from the outside, but their reality was much different, as they were actually on the verge of being broken within a year owing to alleged infidelity. The mother of 6 had reportedly learned that her husband had actively cheated on her for a while, so she packed her bags, moved to the outer shed on their property, and then asked for a divorce. It is believed that she went missing a short time later, with the man she once trusted and thought to be her forever love being the one to report her missing after a day, on September 16, 2023.
Frank Byers Was Arrested a Little More Than a Month Later
When Frank reported Makayla missing, he told officials he had last seen her with a strange man in the driveway of their remote 10-acre property at around 5:30 pm on September 15, 2023. As per his statements, they were in an “open” marriage at her behest because she wanted to “experiment,” so she had even agreed to go on a date with someone after coming in contact with him on Facebook. He then described the stranger as a 6-foot-tall, bald, white male with an older-model white truck, making it clear that he only knew all this because he had seen him pick up the teacher’s aide.
Frank reportedly also claimed that when he asked Makayla about her plans, she allegedly told him he had no right to any knowledge about her companion or their whereabouts before leaving. “She told me right before she left that it is none of my business where she goes or who she sees,” he asserted to local detectives, adding that her disappearance was “pure hell” for their family. However, almost everyone really close to Makayla refuted his narrative by telling officials that she had no interest in an open marriage because she had actually asked him for a divorce recently. That’s when investigators looked deeper into the couple’s relationship, uncovering not only the alleged affair from his side but also his reported attempts to create a fake alibi for himself.
According to records, Makayla’s SIM card was later found in a phone under Frank’s possession, so they hypothesized he had killed her, taken her number, and faked conversations between them. He allegedly hoped to clear his name, but things changed when a cousin would find her remains – with two bullet wounds to the head – in a culvert about 2,000 feet away from their home. She was found on September 20, 2023, shortly following which a search warrant execution yielded significant evidence against her husband of just a year, resulting in his arrest on October 25, 2023. Frank was accused of killing his wife with a .22-caliber weapon inside the shed she was living in before wrapping her remains in a carpet and disposing of them in the drainage culvert.
Frank Byers is Currently Serving a Life Sentence With No Possibility of Parole
Although Frank was arrested in late October, he wasn’t officially charged with one count each of first-degree murder, unauthorized removal of a body, and desecration of a corpse until early November. By this point, he had maintained his innocence at every step of the way, but he went quiet following his formal arrest before ultimately choosing to plead guilty so as to avoid the death penalty. That’s because the evidence against him included at least the bloodstained shed, broken glass, traces of ammonia and bleach, two bullet casings, as well as blood on a pair of his boots, all of which were documented during the search warrant execution.
So, Frank pleaded guilty to Makayla’s murder on January 31, 2025, following which he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. While giving his verdict, the presiding judge stated, in part, “I am happy to have obtained justice on behalf of the State for Makayla and her loved ones. These outcomes are always bittersweet, as nothing we do in a courtroom will ever bring a loved one back. But what we can do in a courtroom is ensure that the person responsible for Makayla’s death will never take another breath as a free man.” Therefore, today, at the age of 34, he is incarcerated at the medium and maximum-security Red Rock Correctional Center in Lawton, Oklahoma, where he is expected to remain for the rest of his natural life.
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