Martha McKay was the kind of woman who would rescue a bird, adopt a stranger’s dog, or decide spontaneously to convert a crumbling mansion into a bed-and-breakfast because it just felt like an “adventure.” But her mother’s killer was probably not the best person to be extending her forgiveness to. Martha was an innkeeper in Arkansas. As a Buddhist, she believed in redemption, so she extended grace further than most human beings ever could. Lo and behold, it cost her everything.
Her sister, Katie Hutton, described her to People Magazine as:
“There was something about her that people really loved (…) She had that gift.”
But that pull toward broken people led her back to the man who destroyed her 23 years earlier. In 1996, 16-year-old Travis Lewis broke into the Snowden House. It was Martha’s family’s mansion on Horseshoe Lake. At the time, he murdered Martha’s mother, aka 75-year-old Sally Snowden McKay, and her cousin, renowned Memphis blues guitarist Joseph “Lee” Baker. Prosecutors believed the killer shot them after they interrupted a robbery and then tried to burn down the house.
He pleaded guilty and received 28.5 years. But the alleged killer kept saying that someone else pulled the trigger. Anyone would have spent the rest of their lives cursing their mother’s killer, but not Martha. She wrote him letters and even visited him in prison! She advocated for his parole while her own family begged her to stop, as it was “bad juju.” But she thought of it as a spiritual obligation.
A woman forgave the man who killed her mother and even visited him in prison. After his release, she offered him a job at the same house where he killed her mother. He ended up killing her in the same house. pic.twitter.com/V6V5uk9OUp
— Creepy.org (@creepydotorg) August 23, 2025
When Lewis got out of prison in 2018, Martha was the only family member who supported him. She then went to the extent of hiring her mom’s killer after buying and restoring the Snowden House into a luxurious B&B. Martha gave Lewis a job working on the property and even a place to live. It was the very picture of forgiveness until $10,000 in cash went missing from a chandelier.
According to investigators, Lewis was the only one home the day the cash vanished, so Martha fired him. But had her generosity run dry, or could she simply not ignore the alarm bells anymore? We’ll never know, as that was the beginning of the end.
On March 25, 2020, an alarm signal pinged police from the Snowden House. When officers reached, they found a stabbed and bludgeoned Martha at the top of the staircase. There was a bag of her belongings beside her, so maybe she was trying to run away. But before officers could close in, Lewis bolted out the back door and drowned by jumping into Horseshoe Lake. When they pulled his body from the water, investigators confirmed the killer was the same man Martha spent 23 years trying to heal!
“We are all just in disbelief,” Katie says. One man killed her mother. Her cousin. And now her sister.
