Catrina McGhaw’s Home Hid A Terrible Secret. She Learned It From TV, And Her Landlord Wouldn’t Let Her Out
Catrina McGhaw signed a rental lease in March on what looked like a cozy little home in Ferguson, Missouri, a small community in St. Louis County. Everything seemed fine. The landlord, Sandy Travis, even threw in a nice dining room table with the deal.
But McGhaw says there was one little detail that Travis left out when she showed her the house — a detail that she didn’t find out until a family member alerted her to watch an A&E documentary program. When she viewed the show, McGhaw, to her surprise and as it turned out, great horror, saw her own house on the TV screen.
The one minor detail that Travis didn’t tell her was that the house was once occupied by her son, Maury Travis.
And who was Maury Travis?
Well, Maury Travis was serial killer who, police believe, murdered as many as 20 young women between 2000 and 2002. Travis himself acknowledged killing 17 women.
After one murder in 2001, he taunted police by anonymously mailing a map to the St. Louis Post Dispatch newspaper showing the location of the victim’s body. But his arrogance backfired on him as investigators traced the mailing back to Travis and busted him.
Knowing that she now lived in the same house once occupied by a vile serial killer was horrifying enough on its own. But that wasn’t even the worst part for Catrina McGhaw. She also discovered from the episode of A&E’s Cold Case Files that Maury Travis sadistically tortured and finally killed his victims in the basement of the house where she now lived.
In at least one known case, Travis videotaped himself tormenting his victim upstairs in the house, then taking the young woman down to the basement where he tortured and murdered her, all on tape. In a brief excerpt of that tape shown on TV, Catrina McGhaw saw the same dining room table that now sat in her own home, gifted to her by her landlord, the serial killer’s mother.
“This whole basement was his torture chamber and it’s not okay,” said McGhaw.
And here’s where the story goes from horrifying to just plain maddening. When McGhaw told Sandra Travis what she’d found out and pleaded to get out of her lease, the killer’s mom refused.
“She said ‘no you signed a lease you need to stay there until the lease is up,”’ McGhaw told KMOV Channel 4 News.
Even when KMOV ran a story and pressured Sandra Travis, she wouldn’t back down. She claimed that she told McGhaw what had happened in the house in 2001 and 2002. But McGhaw says that’s nonsense. She doesn’t think the part about women being tortured and brutally murdered in her basement somehow got past her.
Missouri has no law requiring landlords or sellers to disclose past events in a dwelling. Only physical defects must be disclosed.
Finally, the St. Louis Housing Authority stepped in and negotiated McGhaw’s way out of the lease. She will be leaving the macabre home by the end of this month. In the meantime, she looks back on her short stay in the house and remembers some strange occurrences. Once, a two-year-old family member visited and was playing down in the basement.
“She looked over and she was like she’s scared like she saw somebody scared and crying and nobody was there, nobody there,” McGhaw says, with chills.
The true number of Maury Travis victims will never be known. He hanged himself in his jail cell at age 36, before he could be tried. But Catrina McGhaw is just relieved knowing she won’t have to live in his house of horrors anymore.
[Image: KMOV-TV Screen Grab]
