The Plot to Kill Alyssa Burkett

Alyssa Burkett, a 24-year-old mother of one, was brutally murdered in a premeditated attack at her workplace parking lot in Carrollton, Texas, in October 2020—shot through the window of her car, then pursued and stabbed 44 times by a masked assailant. What began as a bitter custody battle between Alyssa and her ex-partner, Andrew Beard, quickly spiraled into a chilling conspiracy orchestrated by Beard’s fiancée, Holly Elkins, who manipulated him into committing the murder. Though Beard was the one who carried out the attack—using a black SUV, a fake beard, and dark makeup to disguise himself as a Black man—Elkins was the mastermind, driving the plan from afar. She orchestrated the framing of Alyssa with planted drugs and a gun, pressured Beard to eliminate her, and even demanded graphic details of the murder afterward. After two years of silence, Elkins was arrested at a Miami airport in 2023, charged as a co-conspirator. In a trial that revealed her psychological manipulation and obsession with gaining custody of Willow, she was found guilty and sentenced to two life terms. For Alyssa’s family, justice arrived—but at the cost of a daughter’s life, a mother’s grief, and a daughter’s innocence forever altered by a crime born not of rage, but of a woman’s desperate, destructive ambition. The case exposes how emotional manipulation can weaponize love and custody battles into murder.