Town note
The town is named after Horseshoe Lake, an oxbow lake at whose eastern tip it sits, in the Mississippi River flood plain.
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Horseshoe Lake is a small town in Crittenden County in north-eastern Arkansas, about forty minutes from Memphis, with a population of 384. It sits on the oxbow lake of the same name, formed when the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 shifted the main channel of the Mississippi eastward. In the twentieth century hunters and lumbermen dammed the lake, raising the water by more than six feet, and floods in 1927 and 1937 led to a drainage canal. By the 1990s the lake was a summer recreation spot for Memphis families, and much of the land around it belonged to the Snowden family, who had been buying it up since the nineteenth century and held about a thousand acres.
Sally McKay was about seventy-five in 1996. She was the daughter of Colonel Robert Snowden, a wealthy farmer from one of the county's oldest families, and of Grace Snowden; her mother later married David McKay, a professional actor from New York. Sally was a certified public accountant and part-time antiques dealer who spent much of her time managing the Snowden property. He lived with his wife Carol and their three sons in a house on the Snowden property about a hundred feet from the Snowden house.
In August 1996 Lee Baker's house was destroyed by an arson fire; the volunteer fire department could not save it, and the heat melted the paint on one of the trucks. On the morning of 10 September 1996 a fire broke out at Sally McKay's house, next door on the property. Firefighters put it out and found the bodies of Sally McKay and Lee Baker inside, both shot to death. Sally's red Toyota Camry was missing. The two men drove to Bonds Marine to identify it, then to the McKay house, where a volunteer firefighter found Lee Baker's truck backed up to the back door with the tailgate open.
The bodies had been deliberately set alight; the fire was limited to the living room and kitchen. A search of the fields with people on horseback, tracking dogs and a helicopter from Memphis found nothing and was called off by three o'clock. In early October the sheriff's department offered a ten thousand dollar reward.
He passed a first polygraph, then failed a second and admitted that he had burgled Lee Baker's house and had been at Sally McKay's house during the killings, but said a friend had shot the two and set the fire. He never named the friend, and no evidence of a second person was found. His hair, DNA and fingerprints were recovered from Sally McKay's abandoned car, including from the driver's side door. A dive team from Shelby County dragged the lake for the murder weapon without success.
Martha McKay, Sally's daughter, born in 1957, had grown up partly on the lake and had moved to the West Coast. After the murders she came back from California to run the property. The death penalty had been on the table. Martha, a Buddhist, publicly forgave him and campaigned for his release. In 2015 Memphis magazine profiled her as the Lady of the Lake. She bought the house from her family, restored it and ran it as a bed and breakfast and wedding venue.
In early 2020 Gladys warned Martha to stay away from her son, saying he was going back to his old ways.
On 25 March 2020 a silent alarm brought deputies to the Snowden house. Deputies then found Martha McKay's body at the top of the stairs. She had been stabbed many times and bludgeoned with a hammer, and was wrapped in blankets beside a bag of her belongings, a bloody kitchen knife and a utility knife. A toxicology screen found cocaine and methamphetamine. Her family said they were in disbelief.