Horseshoe Lake

On September 10, 1996, Sally Snowden McKay, 75, and her nephew Lee Baker, a Memphis blues guitarist, were shot during a robbery at Sally’s lakeside home near Snowden House, on Horseshoe Lake in Crittenden County, Arkansas, and the house was set on fire. A local teenager, Travis Lewis, was arrested. He pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 28½ years in prison.

Sally’s daughter, Martha McKay, later came home to restore the antebellum-style Snowden House and open it to guests. Guided by her Buddhist faith and a belief that people can change, she supported Lewis’s release, and after he was paroled in 2018 she hired him to help look after the property. Before long, people close to him warned her that he had gone back to drugs. When about $10,000 in cash disappeared, she fired him and told him not to come back.

On March 25, 2020, Crittenden County deputies answered an alarm at Snowden House and found Martha, 63, dead near the top of the stairs. She had been beaten and stabbed. Lewis climbed out an upstairs window, drove across the yard until the car got stuck, and ran into Horseshoe Lake. Deputies saw him go under, and a search team found his body with sonar. He was 39, and an autopsy found cocaine and methamphetamine in his system.