People | May 8, 2020
Big-hearted, gregarious and always up for an adventure, Martha McKay surrounded herself with friends.
“There was something about her that people really loved,” her sister Katie Hutton tells PEOPLE. “She left an impression on people. She had that gift.”
McKay’s family and friends were devastated when she was killed on March 25, 2020, at Snowden House, the historic antebellum-style home on Horseshoe Lake, Arkansas, she bought from her family in 2004, restored and reopened as a luxury bed-and-breakfast.
McKay, 63, was found stabbed and bludgeoned to death at the top of the stairs, near a bag filled with her belongings, as well as a utility knife.
Authorities were shocked when they pulled the body of her killer out of the lake (he’d jumped in and drowned during a police chase): it was Travis Lewis, who’d been convicted at 17 for the horrific 1996 murders of her mother, Sally Snowden McKay, 75, and her cousin, Joseph “Lee” Baker, 52, a prominent Memphis blues guitarist.
Arkansas has been the “Mississippi Mud” Hole of Public Corruption for decades? From Chicago to Hot Springs in 1923, Al Capone became the Pioneer of it all. And, as Bill Clinton decades later coined it, “The Land of Opportunity”, given the Clintons continued the tradition and created a lot of jobs for organized crime business. I hear Hunter Biden even spent some time in Arkansas too. It’s a creepy place I left a long time ago due to seeing how the interstate drug trafficking on the coattails of Iran-Contra ruined lives, families, and the entire state. Nothing new to see here in this article, but really glad you posted it. I do believe that some good folks back there, like Sarah Sanders and Tom Cotton, are trying to clean it up. May God Bless them in their efforts.