True Case Chronicles: Man imprisoned for life in 2021 murder of his wife whose body or remains have never been located

Tamera Lynn Ellison Banks, known to family as Tammy or Elle, was forty-three when she disappeared on November 15, 2021. She was a veteran who kept two horses named Jericho and Shoe and talked with her father, also a veteran, about turning the place into a horse therapy spot for other people who had worn a uniform. She was also a woman who had already decided the marriage was over.

The trouble that preceded her disappearance was not hidden. On October 23, 2021, Muskogee County deputies answered a domestic call at the Banks home. Tamera had run to a neighbor. A deputy later wrote that she was very upset and scared. Court records and later news accounts of the charging affidavit said Dayan Banks had threatened her with a gun and with physical violence.

Dayan Banks

He was charged with domestic assault, feloniously pointing a firearm, and interfering with an emergency telephone call. Two days later, on October 25, Tamera obtained an emergency protective order. She began the work of leaving. She listed the house, stayed with an aunt in Texas, and planned to finish the move. She came back to Haskell anyway. She would not abandon the horses, and she had a court date on November 16 for the protective order.

She never made that hearing.

On November 16 the Muskogee County Sheriff’s Office took a missing person report. Tamera had not been seen or heard from since the day before. Investigators who went through her residence found her vehicle still there, along with her phone and her medications. The dog had been left without food or water.

Those details, small as they look on a report, told family what they already feared. Cousin KaCee Rutz said Tamera would not have cut family ties and would not have left Jericho and Shoe. Thomas Ellison, her father, said the same thing in plainer language. She would not go anywhere without telling somebody something.

The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation joined the case on November 17. What followed was a two year investigation built on phone records, witness statements, a vehicle, and finally a cooperating witness who had been in Dayan Banks’s life as more than a bystander. On December 14, 2021, agents located a 2003 Mitsubishi Galant registered to Lauren Ann Jackson, then thirty-five and living in Broken Arrow.

Investigators believed the car was tied to Tamera’s disappearance. Jackson was Banks’s girlfriend. In statements later summarized in charging papers and news accounts of the affidavit, she described a killing on November 15 and a disposal that began the same day.

According to that account, an argument at the home ended with Tamera being shot. Banks then moved her body to a family property on North 253rd Road in Okmulgee. There, in a metal horse trough, the body was burned.

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Jackson admitted in a federal plea that she assisted in and oversaw the burning, using a shovel to stoke the fire and help dispose of the remains. News reports of the affidavit added that the burning happened in front of Banks’s brother, that remains were later placed in a plastic tote and kept in an abandoned house, and that some remains were burned a second time at a campground.

Tamera’s body has never been recovered. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was part of the later case work, but there was no gravesite and no identification from bone. The prosecution would have to prove a murder without a body.

That proof took time. Banks was not charged with murder in the first weeks after Tamera vanished. He remained the man already facing the October domestic case. Family members, including Thomas Ellison, said Banks never spoke to them after she disappeared.

Ellison, who was living in California during part of the wait, told a reporter he believed Banks knew where Tamera was and would not say. He also said he believed there were other victims. Those suspicions were not what a jury later relied on.

What the state eventually put in a ten-page affidavit were witness statements and records that, prosecutors said, showed Banks killed Tamera on or about November 15, 2021, then burned her body to hide what he had done.

A warrant was issued June 5, 2023. On June 9, the Muskogee County Sheriff’s Office and the OSBI arrested Dayan Banks on first-degree murder and desecration of a human corpse. He appeared by telephone and was held without bond. Assistant District Attorney Shelby Limburg told the court the state considered him a threat and noted that a domestic assault trial involving the same victim had been pending.

Defense attorney Caleb Harlin argued that Jackson, the state’s key witness, was reason enough for bond. Special Judge Roy Tucker denied it.

Jackson’s case moved on a separate track because of jurisdiction. She is a member of a federally recognized tribe, and the burning occurred in Okmulgee County inside the boundaries of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Reservation.

Federal prosecutors charged her with desecration of a human corpse in Indian Country. She pleaded guilty on June 8, 2023. In the plea language later quoted by Law and Crime, she admitted assisting in and overseeing the burning of “T.B., a non-Indian whom D.B. had murdered earlier in the day on November 15, 2021.”

The state case against Banks reached a Muskogee County jury in January 2024. On January 29 the jury convicted him of murder in the first degree with deliberate intent and of desecration of a human corpse. Jurors recommended life in prison without the possibility of parole on the murder count and an additional seven years on the desecration count.

First Assistant District Attorney Mark Collier thanked the OSBI, the Muskogee County Sheriff’s Office, and other agencies after the verdict and said the charges would not have been possible without that investigation. Thomas Ellison later described the outcome in the same numbers the jury had written down: life without parole, plus seven.

Jackson was sentenced in federal court on April 2, 2024, by Chief Judge Ronald A. White. She received twenty three months in prison, a non-paroleable term, and was held for transport to the Bureau of Prisons.

What remains after the verdicts is the absence that started the case. There is still no grave. There is still a house four miles outside Haskell that Thomas Ellison, as executor of his daughter’s estate, fought through court to clear of Banks family members who had been living there.

By late 2024 Thomas Ellison was camping in the living room with a fire for heat, electricity on, water and gas off, Christmas lights unlit. He said he felt her presence in the rooms. He also said he and Tamera had meant the land for horses and for veterans who needed something quieter than a clinic. The VA loan and the mortgage company had not answered him. He did not want the property taken without a fight.

Tamera had already tried to leave once. She had a protective order, a plan for Texas, two

horses she would not abandon, and a court date she treated as a reason to come home.

The people who loved her said that combination was who she was. The people who investigated her death said the same facts, read against phone records and a girlfriend’s confession and a house left as if someone expected to return, were enough to name a killer even when the fire left them nothing to bury.