On September 10, 1996 Sally Snowden McKay was shot dead at her home on the Snowden estate at Horseshoe Lake, in Crittenden County, Arkansas, with her nephew Joseph Lee Baker, fifty-two, a blues and rock guitarist well known in Memphis. The house was then set on fire. Sources give Sally McKay’s age as seventy-five and as seventy-two.
The investigation reached Travis Santay Lewis, sixteen, who lived on the estate. 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. He was charged as an adult, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to twenty-eight and a half years under a plea agreement requiring him to serve at least seventy per cent.
Martha McKay, Sally’s daughter, moved from San Francisco to Horseshoe Lake after her mother’s death and turned the Snowden House into a bed and breakfast. It is a building with its own small fame: the 1994 film The Client was shot there. Over twenty-three years she visited Lewis in prison and supported his release. Sheriff Allen told Dateline he thought her purpose was to find out what had happened to her mother and whether anyone else had been involved. Lewis was paroled in 2018, and she gave him work and a place to live on the estate.
In March 2020 she found that money had been taken and dismissed him. Days later, on the morning of March 25, an alarm brought deputies to Snowden House. They found the back door open, Martha McKay dead at the top of the staircase, stabbed and beaten, and Lewis inside. He jumped from a second-floor window, drove across the yard until his car stuck, ran to the lake and went into the water. He did not come back up. Arkansas Game and Fish located his body with sonar. He was thirty-nine.
Reporting differs on whether the killing was on March 25 or 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 archive counts three and records that the last one was never tried. What the case is remembered for is not the number. Martha McKay spent two decades extending forgiveness to the person who had killed her mother, and it ended in the same house, at his hands.