HENRYETTA, Okla. (NewsNation) — Janette Mayo’s daughter and three grandchildren were among the seven bodies found in rural Oklahoma on Monday.
Mayo, 59, of Westville, Oklahoma, was the first to say publicly that her daughter and three teenage grandchildren were among the dead.
Her daughter was married to Jesse McFadden, a sex offender who Okmulgee County Sheriff Eddy Rice said Monday had also died and linked to two other teenagers reported missing this week.
“I can’t get any information. They’re not releasing any information to me at all,” Mayo said during an exclusive interview Tuesday on NewsNation’s “Banfield.” “All they told me at first was that the girls that he (McFadden) supposedly kidnapped were missing. Nothing about my daughter or my grandchildren. I had to find out from Facebook that they found seven bodies. Nobody told me anything.”
The Okmulgee County Sheriff’s Office eventually notified Mayo late Monday that the victims were her daughter, Holly Guess, 35, and her grandchildren, Rylee Elizabeth Allen, 17, Michael James Mayo, 15, and Tiffany Dore Guess, 13.
According to Mayo, Holly Guess did not know the full extent of McFadden’s past sex crimes and that he apparently hired an actress to impersonate the victim of his crime to tell her daughter it was a misunderstanding.
Lynn Wyatt, the aunt of Holly Guess, told “Banfield” that the woman who impersonated McFadden’s rape victim recently reached out to her, explaining that she was sorry and was paid to lie for him.
Two of the kids found dead in Oklahoma were not the biological children of Joe Guess, but he told “Banfield” that he had always been in their lives and was even trying to adopt them, despite the fact that he and their mother had divorced.
He believed that McFadden had a “clean past.”
Guess was unaware that McFadden was a sex offender and said that if he had known, she wouldn’t have been living at the home.
“They were taken from me too soon. The best moments of my life,” Guess said on “Banfield.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.