The McKay family seemed to be a magnet for tragedy.

In the 1990s, violence tore through their home and left them shattered.

Two members of their family were brutally murdered and nothing was ever the same.

But what seemed to be, a totally random, tragic event, wasn't so random after all. In fact, history was just waiting to

repeat itself in that very same house of horrors decades later.

Hello and welcome to Outlaw podcast. I'm Eleanor Neal and in today's episode, we're in Arkansas in 1996,

where a little old woman is sitting in a lakeside cabin on what she doesn't yet realize

would be the very last day of her life. An intruder was about to bust through the door

and scare her half to death before

finishing the job and trying to destroy the crime scene. And would you believe me if I said that

that was only the beginning of the horrors that would take place on the grand estate of Snowden

House? Before we get into today's case, I just want to give my usual disclaimer

that I mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone we talk about in this episode. We will be covering

some very, very sensitive topics including violent assault, the slave trade, racism and murder.

So as always, viewer discretion is advised. The family at the centre of today's case are the McKay's.

They came from a long line of rich, powerful individuals who fought in wars and owned acres of land.

To put it bluntly, these guys were filthy, rich, and they had been for hundreds of years, for generations.

They had generational wealth and power spanning all the way back to the slave trade and beyond, which is horrendous.

After the First World War, a patriarch of the family had purchased a cotton plantation in Arkansas.

And by this point, the US had officially abolished slavery with

the 13th Amendment in 1865, so there were no enslaved people working on the land while it

was owned by the McKays. But they were about to take this tainted land, up until very recently

...