Forgiveness is supposed to heal, but for Martha McKay, it turned out fatal. When she opened her heart and home to the man who murdered her mother decades earlier, it turned out to be the most dangerous gamble of all.
In 1996, the quiet town of Horseshoe Lake, Arkansas, was shattered when 17-year-old Travis Lewis broke into the historic Snowden family mansion to rob it. There, he found Sally Snowden McKay, 75, and her nephew, Joseph Lee Baker, a well-known Memphis musician. The robbery spiraled into brutal murders, and both Sally and Lee were shot dead. Lewis was soon arrested, convicted, and sentenced to 28 and a half years in prison.
While most people would have turned their pain into hatred, Sally’s daughter, Martha McKay, chose a different path. She was a spiritual woman influenced by Buddhism and believed in forgiveness and redemption. Over time, she began visiting Lewis in prison, and against all odds, forgave him. Remarkably, when Lewis was paroled in 2018, she offered him a second chance at her own expense.
Kindness turned wrong for Martha, but Lewis couldn’t escape divine justice
McKay invited Lewis to work at the same family mansion where he had once killed her mother. She hired him to help with maintenance and cleaning around the 1,000-acre property, alongside his already-employed mother there. While the act came out of pure compassion, some quietly wondered if it was safe. Tragically, they were right.
On March 25, 2020, 24 years after Lewis murdered Martha’s mother, history repeated itself at the house. Deputies responding to an alarm at the property found McKay’s lifeless body at the foot of the stairs. She had been strangled and stabbed. Moments later, they spotted Lewis fleeing the home in Martha’s car.
But, in what seemed like a biblical justice, the car got stuck near the property, and Lewis ran toward Horseshoe Lake and drowned. Investigators soon confirmed that the same man who killed her mother had now killed Martha, too. Despite all the kindness, both women lost their lives to the same pair of hands.
Why did Travis Lewis kill Martha McKay?
During investigations, authorities found Martha’s diary, which shed light on what had caused the change of heart in Lewis. It turned out that Martha had fired Lewis after $10,000 went missing from her house. Her sister, Katie Hutton, to whom the cash belonged, said, “Martha didn’t deserve to be killed. She didn’t deserve anything that happened to her” (via People).
The story sent shockwaves across the country, both for its brutality and for its moral implications. Martha believed kindness could change a man’s soul and bring him to the right path. But sometimes, it turned out, monsters don’t repent. They just wait for the next open door. Her tragic murder became a chilling reminder that forgiveness may be divine, but blind trust can still cost your life.
