Martha McKay, a beloved host who restored the antebellum Snowden House on Horseshoe Lake and ran it as a luxury bed-and-breakfast and event venue, was found stabbed and bludgeoned at the top of the home’s main staircase on March 25, 2020. The attack stunned the small Hughes, Arkansas, community and reverberated with a tragic irony: the man who killed her had been convicted in the 1996 murders of her mother and cousin.
A life shaped by home and hospitality
Friends remembered McKay, 63, as a warm and energetic presence who loved entertaining beneath the cypress trees and on Snowden House’s ornate veranda. “She lived life to the fullest,” her sister, Katie Hutton, said. After years away, McKay returned to restore the family estate and opened it as a bed-and-breakfast in 2005.
The crimes and the connection
In 1996, Sally Snowden McKay, 75, and their cousin, Memphis blues guitarist Joseph “Lee” Baker, 52, were murdered on the Snowden House grounds. Travis Lewis, then 17, ultimately pleaded guilty to those killings but consistently maintained that someone else was responsible.
Despite the conviction, McKay developed an unusual relationship with Lewis while he was incarcerated. Moved by his youth at the time of the earlier crimes and by his assertions of innocence, she supported efforts that led to his early parole. “She believed him,” Crittenden County Sheriff Mike Allen said.
Parole, employment and a fatal dispute
Lewis was released on parole in 2018, and McKay later employed him to perform work around Snowden House. According to family members, their relationship deteriorated after $10,000 in cash — proceeds from the sale of a chandelier — went missing. McKay, who knew Lewis had been at the house that day, fired him.
On March 25, 2020, responding officers found McKay fatally wounded. Investigators say the attacker jumped from a second-story window as police arrived, ran across the lawn and entered Horseshoe Lake, where he drowned. When authorities recovered the body, they identified him as Travis Lewis.
“We are all just in disbelief,” Hutton said after learning the same man had been responsible for killings at Snowden House 23 years apart. Longtime friend Frank Byrd said he had advised McKay against befriending Lewis; “she didn’t answer me,” he recalled.
Aftermath and unanswered questions
The sequence of events left the family and the community grappling with grief and bitter irony. While Lewis had pleaded guilty to the 1996 murders, his longstanding claims of innocence and the extraordinary decision by McKay to form a bond with him have continued to raise questions about the past and about how such tragedies could collide at the same place decades apart.
McKay’s family and friends remember her as a vibrant host who cherished Snowden House. The estate that became a gathering place for so many also became the setting for three murders spanning 23 years — a legacy that has left loved ones searching for answers and closure.
