On September 10, 1996, Sally Snowden McKay was shot dead at her home on the Snowden estate at Horseshoe Lake, in Crittenden County, Arkansas, along with her nephew Joseph Lee Baker, fifty-two, a blues and rock guitarist well known in Memphis. The house, which stood near the family's big colonial-style Snowden House, was then set on fire. Sources give Sally McKay's age as seventy-five and as seventy-two. The Snowdens had deep and prominent roots in Memphis.
The investigation reached Travis Santay Lewis, sixteen, who lived at Horseshoe Lake; his parents lived on the Snowden property, and his mother, Gladys, was for many years a housekeeper at Snowden House. He denied it and passed a polygraph, then failed a second one and confessed when he was shown forensic evidence placing him at the scene. Crittenden County Sheriff Mike Allen said it was believed he shot the pair because they came upon him while he was robbing the house. At the time he was using drugs and stealing. He was charged as an adult, and members of the family opposed a death sentence. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to twenty-eight and a half years under a plea agreement requiring him to serve at least seventy percent. One television report later dated the killings to 1995.
Martha McKay, Sally's daughter, moved from San Francisco to Horseshoe Lake after her mother's death and restored Snowden House as a bed and breakfast and event venue. It is a building with its own small fame: the 1994 film The Client was shot there, and in 2012 Memphis Magazine ran a feature on it. Locally she was known as the Lady of the Lake. She was a Buddhist and believed he deserved a second chance. Over twenty-three years she wrote to Lewis and visited him in prison. The family was notified each time he came up for parole, and all of them opposed it except her; her testimony is credited with his release. Sheriff Allen told Dateline he thought her purpose was also to find out what had happened to her mother and whether anyone else had been involved. Lewis was paroled in 2018, and she hired him to help look after the estate.
It went wrong. By one account his own mother cut ties with him and warned Martha, "Stay away from Travis, because he's going back to his old ways." In early 2020 Martha accused him of stealing, by one report ten thousand dollars in cash, fired him and banned him from the property.
Early on the morning of Wednesday, March 25, 2020, she set off the alarm installed in the house. Deputies found the back door open, and as they searched for an intruder they saw a man jump from an upstairs window. He ran to a car and tried to drive off, but it stuck in the yard, and he ran to the lake and went into the water. "He was observed going under the water and never came back up," the sheriff said. Arkansas Game and Fish located his body with sonar, and Crittenden County Search and Rescue brought it up. He was thirty-nine, and an autopsy found cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana in his system. Inside the house Martha McKay, sixty-three, lay dead at the top of the staircase, stabbed and beaten. Near her body police found a bag of valuables and a bloody kitchen knife, and a blanket that may have been meant to feed a fire, as he had set one in 1996. Investigators could not say whether she had caught him stealing or he had come to kill her. Some reports put the killing on March 26; the sheriff's statement gives the 25th as the day she was found.
He stands convicted of two murders and was never charged with the third, because he was dead before he could be. The sheriff named him as the only suspect. Martha McKay spent two decades extending forgiveness to the man who had killed her mother, and it ended in the same place, at his hands.