Post Mortem | Tracker Dakota Black

0:09Welcome to Postmortem. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green, and today we're discussing Makayla Meave, who was first reported missing by her husband, Frank Byers, in 2023. Now, he told police that his wife had gone out on a date with another man saying that they had an open marriage, but then she never returned from that date. An extensive search was launched and Lieutenant Dakota Black, a tracker and detective with the Potawatomi County Sheriff's Office, was brought in on this case. So joining me now is 48 Hours correspondent Peter Van Sand, who reported on this episode. Peter, it's always great to see you.

0:48Hi, Anne-Marie. Great to be with you again. And of course, we want to remind the viewers and listeners, if you haven't listened to this episode of 48 Hours, you can find it in your podcast feed, the full audio version of it. So go take a listen and come on back for this conversation because we got questions and Peter has the answers. So, Peter, Michaela and Frank Byers, they're living in a small rural town of Macomb, Oklahoma. Lieutenant Dakota Black described the area as beautiful and serene, and it certainly looks that way, but also said there are a lot of dark secrets that live there, too. What does she mean by that?

1:30Well, it's hard to believe, but Oklahoma has the highest rate of domestic violence of any state in the country. And Dakota Black told us she in her own life has experienced violence in a relationship. And while Macomb only has a population of less than 30, and keep in mind, Michaela, Frank, and the girls, they make up 20 % of the population of Macomb. It's near an intersection of multiple interstate highways. And Dakota Black said criminals moving through the area are known to dump victims' bodies there. And there are people living in Pottawatomie County in poverty. Some are off the grid with no electricity or running water, toilets, or even a roof over their head.

2:13There are some drug problems, and it's an open carry state. A lot of people have firearms. And Lieutenant Black said they have missing people that are never found, homicides that are never solved. And I do want to say that while the sheriff's office there is small, they serve this large rural county with distinction and professionalism. And they were outstanding in their efforts to find Michaela. That's the impression that I got just from watching the hour. Like they just seem so on point and so unbiased and completely focused on like where the evidence is driving them. That's right. So let's talk a little bit about Michaela and Frank's relationship.

2:56They were old high school classmates. They did not date in high school. But then many years later, out of the blue, Frank contacts her on Facebook and they start a relationship. They are married in 2022. And it's a large blended family because Michaela, she already has two kids. Frank has four of his own daughters. But was Michaela's family worried about the relationship that she had with Frank? because there must have been red flags. Yeah, her sister Andrea said that at the beginning of this relationship, Frank was a romantic person. One time he left rose petals in the bathtub, but that didn't last long according to the family.

3:40Michaela couldn't have kids of her own, but she had such a maternal gene, and her family believes that these four kids that Frank had were a really draw for her, more than Frank himself. detectives believe that frank used those young girls his four daughters to lure michaela in he told her that they'd been abused by his then girlfriend and investigators would later determine that that was all a lie and a tactic he used to convince other women to be with him as well you might say it was frank's business model and it worked what a way to describe it and And her mother, Barbara, and her sister, Andrea, say that they saw bruises on Michaela.

4:21But Michaela said they were just from roughhousing with the kids. And the family believed her at the time. And looking back now, the family wished they had questioned her more about those bruises. According to Barbara and Andrea, he was also a compulsive liar. And Frank had this pattern of cheating, lying. And Michaela had left at least once. Let him know, that's it. I'm not going to deal with this anymore. But she came back. She always felt because of this devotion she had to those four children that she couldn't leave them just in Frank's hands. Michaela's sister, Andrea, said that they were headed for divorce and Michaela had temporarily moved to another structure on the property.

5:04But then on September 15th, 2023, Michaela returns home from work, intending to pick her things up and leave for good. But she was never seen alive again. Frank then reports Michaela missing in the afternoon of September 16th, and the responding officer, Deputy Dustin Richardson, went to the buyer's property to check it out. Typically, police will wait longer than just a few hours for a missing persons report. but why did Richardson decide to investigate this one you know relatively quickly yeah investigator Richardson his instincts right away told him this just isn't adding up he listened to Frank on the 911 call and also spoke to Frank on the phone and he just had a hunch that something seemed off and when he got there Frank launched into his explanation as if he had a story planned out in Richardson's mind that the last time he saw Michaela, she was leaving to go on a date with a bald man in a white truck.

6:06And Frank also claimed that they had an open marriage. And he said that they agreed to this arrangement to try to fix their marriage. And we hear on Deputy Richardson's body camera footage that he thought Frank Byers was squirrely. You know, as an audience member, I kind of went through like, what does that word mean? To me, when I hear somebody squirrely, I think of them as kind of like a fast talker. Someone's got an answer to everything, but nothing's adding up. Squirrely is a great word, and it just means you can't trust him. There's something about him that's just not right. And that's what he picked up on right away.

6:43Right. So he goes to the school where she works, where Michaela works as a teacher's aide. And then he goes back to the buyer's property. and Frank at this point has smashed open the lock to the structure where Michaela was living temporarily when she sort of like moved out of the first structure because she doesn't want to be with him. This is all starting to look kind of more and more suspicious to Richardson. What is it that is bothering him? Well, Richardson asked Frank if he had a gun because they had discovered some shell casings inside Michaela's shed where she lived. And Frank said yes, and he shows the gun to Richardson.

7:23Well, Richardson noticed he was able through his training to tell that the gun had been recently fired. And Frank told him that, well, these shell casings on the floor of Michaela's shed were from Michaela, get this, shooting at coyotes on the property. He claimed she would sit inside her shed with the door open and fire at coyotes, which was ridiculous to her family because she hated guns. And the shell casings were found that they were going in a direction that showed that the shooter was not firing outside of her shed, but rather into the shed, which told Richardson, we may have a homicide scene here.

8:03Right. This guy's something's off about what he's telling police. So this missing persons investigation pretty quickly turns into a criminal investigation. There's a massive search that's launched and we are introduced to Lieutenant Dakota Black. She's leading the charge. She is a detective, but she's also a tracker. What exactly is a tracker? Well, Dakota Black told us that she is trained to look for signs that a normal detective might not see. She found people in all kinds of places like trees and houses that didn't belong to them. And she's trained to use her power of observation to look for the little clues, like evidence that someone had once been through an area, details that others might miss, helping to locate missing people, fugitives or suspects.

8:54People always think of a track or two from the old cowboy movies and saying, yes, someone was just here 45 minutes ago. She's not that precise, but she's close and she has a way about her that she notices things that others don't. Well, listeners may also associate the term with the CBS show that we have called Tracker starring Justin Hartley. When things or people go missing, I get hired to help find them. All right. So he's a sort of a bit of a lone wolf, this character, lone wolf for hire. But Lieutenant Dakota Black is not. She's an essential part of a team at the county sheriff's office. Right, Peter?

9:33Absolutely. Cops have always told me, you know, that they stay emotionally detached, sort of like a doctor treating a patient. But Dakota Black keeps her heart right on her sleeve. And that extra caring, that devotion really works for her. And during one interview with producer Liza Finley, Dakota Black teared up. She cried as she thought about the horrors that Michaela went through and how in her own life she had been threatened. I had never seen this level of emotion from a law enforcement detective ever in my career. And that passion pushed and pushed her to get this case solved. And as I understand it, Dakota's whole team was kind of singing her praises.

10:16Absolutely. Her colleagues, they have so much respect for her. Dakota Black is a woman in her early 30s, and she's working with a lot of male colleagues, some of whom she's in charge of. And she said, you can ask all the guys. They call me a cool dude with long hair because I'm meaner than any of them. And they know to listen to me. And Dakota Black brings her own dog, Haven, to serve as a comfort dog to victims and for herself. If they ever make a TV show about her, here's a detective with a comfort animal in her office. And we have Dakota Black talking about her dog, Haven. She works with victims of homicides.

10:58She also works with victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, and then as well as with children. And she works with a lot of victims every year. Her first year we had her, she worked with over 300 victims. They can cry on her, they can love on her, they can hug her. Sometimes she will lick them, you know, but she just provides comfort for them. And that's what her name represents, which is a safe place. So that's what she does for our victims. and she does a good job. I was really struck by the professionalism and the humanity of this whole team in Pottawatomie County. Dustin Richardson had been working at the sheriff's office for only four years at the time of Michaela's case.

11:39And because of his great work, he was recently promoted to detective. And the undersheriff is Marcus May. He's a terrific guy. And then the sheriff, Freeland Wood, who runs all of this, introduced himself at the shoot and said he was so happy that 48 was covering this story. I'm telling you, the Pottawatomie County Sheriff's Office has a peer support group to help police, first responders, deal with the trauma that they experience on the job. And they told us, we see things that no one should have to see, and that weighs very heavy on them. So it's a tiny sheriff's department with a big heart and a lot of very professional, seasoned investigators because they've got a lot on their hands in this rural county.

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13:38Welcome back. As search efforts were underway with dozens of people turning out to try to find Michaela, there's one person who's absent. It's her husband, Frank Byers. After Michaela had been missing for five days, she was found in a large drainage pipe under a road and she is wrapped in a carpet. Investigators quickly zero in on Frank Byers as the primary suspect. Meanwhile, Frank continues to spin his narrative of being the grieving husband, and he actually goes on TV. So I want to play a clip from a TV interview that he did with a local Fox affiliate, Fox 25. Just take a listen to this. Even today, I called her.

14:25I mean, I know she's not here, but it's just the fact that I have her number still and her phone still on somewheres. And it just it would have been nice to hear her voice. You know, Peter, I was looking to see if I was seeing any real tears coming out of those eyeballs of his. because often, you know, often sometimes people make crying noises, but they're not actually crying. Right. Yeah, this is one heartless, uncaring, phony. This emotion that he had there was all fake. He had crocodile tears that didn't really flow. Frank was so comfortable lying on TV. He says her phone's still on somewhere.

15:13But in reality, he had her phone the whole time before investigators took devices into evidence. So he knew exactly where it was. So, you know, days turn into weeks. There's no arrest. Michaela's family, they are livid. Frank is still walking around. So I'm really curious, what sort of evidence were investigators looking for before they felt comfortable making an arrest? They wanted a piece of forensic evidence that would leave no doubt that Frank was the killer. And Lieutenant Dakota Black told us townspeople knew it was Frank, but investigators needed to find that beyond a reasonable doubt kind of evidence.

15:56So they started digging into Frank's social media, and there was a treasure trove of information there. He had multiple dating profiles and multiple Facebook accounts. They found comments from women with screenshots on text messages with Frank. And one disturbing find, Frank was actually texting other women on the day of Michaela's murder. Even on the day of her funeral, Frank sent a photo of himself to multiple women asking something along the lines of, how do I look in my tuxedo? They also tracked down another girlfriend he had assaulted, and she said he used the same tactic on her with the story of Frank's four daughters being abused.

16:42So they found lots of stuff that really told them about how this man operates. Right. And we see in the hour something else that they found. They recovered footage from a home security camera. And really, I mean, detectives believe that this is sort of the last that anyone would have seen of Michaela. I'm telling you, technology now is solving so many of these cases. Investigators were never able to find the actual physical security camera that recorded these images. But Frank used an app on his phone to view the images. And he thought, according to investigators, that he had deleted them. But when investigators did the forensic extraction on Frank's phone, they were able to find these images.

17:30The first image you see is Michaela coming into his home. And she's there for about 14 minutes. The next image, we see her leaving the home. The last image is Frank standing at his door looking out like he was about to follow Michaela back to the shed where she was living, where investigators believe he confronted her and shot her. Investigators also used a Walmart receipt to track down security camera photos. Frank Byers is seen buying bleach, ammonia, a mop. And according to Dakota Black, all of this looks like a possible toolkit to clean up a crime scene. I mean, go to Walmart and buy all those things.

18:19Frank even called the police while he was at that Walmart buying those cleaning supplies. And then there's also the carpet, right? And what investigators find out is that the carpet that Michaela was wrapped up in, that was a carpet that a neighbor had given to the couple for their dogs. So the evidence is adding up here. But they had hopes that a specific bullet that was found embedded in Michaela's wall would also test positive for her DNA. That's right. And they weren't able to get a genetic confirmation on hair that was stuck to that bullet. But a dark substance that was found on Frank's boots was Michaela's blood.

19:04That's when they went in for the arrest. 38 days after Michaela was reported missing, Frank Byers is arrested and he's charged with first degree murder. His defense, though, negotiates a deal to take the death penalty off the table. Then 15 months later, he agreed to plead guilty and serve life without parole. Michaela's mother really feels like this is a cop-out because he chose to take Michaela's life and then he gets to choose his own punishment. And I understand Barbara's frustration with the death penalty being taken off the table. Moving forward, they have now turned their grief, the family, into a charity.

19:48They have started Michaela's Purple Butterfly nonprofit to fight against domestic violence. And they raise money by selling handmade crafts made by women affected by domestic violence to build transition housing for victims. And once 48 Hours learned of Michaela's case, we really wanted to honor her by telling this story. Well, you absolutely did. What I kept on thinking over and over again was just how remarkable she was in her day-to-day life. She was transforming the lives of his daughters, her own children, the children at school. And I think about all that was lost, the future impact that she would have had because of one selfish person's actions.

20:37She was a guardian angel to those four kids. And when Frank took her life, he really impacted theirs so profoundly. And we wish the best for those children. Yeah. And, you know, once again, just spotlight on domestic violence. Those red flags, that gut feeling, listen to them. It may end up saving, you know, your life or the life of somebody that you love. Peter Van Sen, always lovely having you here. Thank you so much. Thank you, Anne-Marie. and to our listeners if you like this episode please rate and review on apple podcast or spotify