A woman found out that a serial killer who committed suicide in jail over a decade ago used to live in her Missouri home- while watching TV.
Catrina McGhaw, who apparently bought the house from the serial killer's mother, was at her home in Ferguson, Missouri, when she received a call from a friend telling her to watch a TV documentary about serial killers, KMOV-TV reported.
The A&E channel documentary revealed that McGhaw was living in the same home that the late Maury Travis not only lived in, but tortured and killed nearly 20 women in the basement.
Police said they found videos that Travis recorded of him abusing his victims, which he reportedly started doing when he was only 19.
"This whole basement was his torture chamber and it's not okay," McGhaw told the station.
A dining room table McGhaw received with the house appears in crime scene photos. McGhaw also remembers when a two two-year-old family member recently played around a wooden pole in the basement, the same pole where Travis tied his victims to.
To make matters worse, McGhaw said the landlord, Sandra Travis, did not tell her about the horrors carried out by her son when she signed the lease for the home in March.
When she found out, McGhaw pleaded with Sandra to let her break the lease, but the landlord refused.
"She said 'no you signed a lease you need to stay there until the lease is up,' " McGhaw told KMOV-TV.
Sandra Travis said she told McGhaw about the home's chilling past, a claim McGhaw refutes. Some states require disclosure of murders, suicides and other violent crimes. However Missouri is not one of them.
It was only after the St. Louis Housing Authority intervened that the landlord gave in.
"We talked with her and eventually the landlord agreed to rescind the lease," Cheryl Lovell, executive director of the housing authority, told ABC News.
Maury Travis, 36, hung himself at the St. Louis County jail in 2002 before any charges were filed against him.
McGhaw said she will be moving out at the end of this month.
