martha mckay.
In the early morning hours of March 25, 2020, sheriff’s deputies responded to an alarm at the stately, antebellum-style home of Martha McKay on Horseshoe Lake, Ark.
Nothing seemed amiss, so they left.
“Deputies chase the suspect,” says Wakeford. “One of them deploys his taser twice but he is out of reach and he misses the fugitive.”
To the deputies' astonishment, the suspect jumped into the lake, sinking below the surface and drowning.
Inside the house, deputies found the body of Martha McKay, wrapped in a blanket at the top of the stairs.
She had been stabbed and bludgeoned to death.
When the suspect’s body was recovered from the lake, authorities were shocked when they saw who it was: Travis Lewis, who’d been convicted of killing Martha McKay’s mother, Sally Snowden McKay, 75, and her cousin, Joseph “Lee” Baker, 52, in 1996 at another home on the property.
Police said Lewis had killed Martha McKay, the very woman who had befriended him when, as a teenager, he was arrested and charged with the murders of her mother and cousin.
Lewis pleaded guilty to the murders but never confessed, maintaining that another man killed the two, say police.
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Martha McKay felt sorry for Lewis because she wasn’t sure whether he had actually committed the murders and kept in touch with him while he was in prison, helping him to eventually get released, her sister Katie Hutton told PEOPLE.
Family friend Frank Byrd, who’d driven Martha McKay to the state penitentiary to see Lewis, told her he didn’t think it was a good idea, but “she didn’t answer me,” he told PEOPLE.
Her family also warned her to be careful. “We had said, ‘Just stay away from him. It’s a bad juju type of thing.’ But she wouldn’t do it,” said Hutton.
A longtime Buddhist, McKay wrote Lewis letters in prison and supported his early, paroled release.
“We were contacted every time he came up for parole,” said Hutton. “None of us would OK it except for her.”
People Magazine Investigates: A Crimson End, airs tonight at 10 ET/9 CT on Investigation Discovery and streams on discovery+.
source: people.com
