Kate Granger remembers telling her mother she loved her for the last time.
It was December 8th., In 2019, Granger ran back to the couple’s apartment in Chesterfield, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, to buy a Diet Coke before a youth ministry outing. an internship at her church;
“I got to hold her and tell her I love her. It was a beautiful moment,” Granger told the Post.
Later that night, her mother, Bobette Everhart Ball, 59, was out at a Christmas party when Granger woke up around 2 a.m. and saw a text from her father, Michael Ball, 59, at about 12:45 a.m., telling her to look after the dog. She had a strange feeling.
“I woke up, went upstairs to get my mom, and she wasn’t there. I checked my phone to find her, and she was in the parking lot. I said, ‘There’s no way she’s just coming home.'”
Granger opened the blinds and saw flashing lights and a police car next to yellow crime scene tape.
“At that moment I realized what had happened,” Granger said, adding that she felt numb and “like I was in a trance” before walking outside.
“I saw the policeman and I asked him, ‘Is my mother dead?'”
While Granger was sleeping, her father He shot his mother. during an argument in the parking lot of an apartment complex at about 12:45 a.m.
He then returned to the home they previously shared, about seven miles away, set it on fire, and shot himself.
The estranged couple were due to appear in court later in the week for the first meeting of their divorce proceedings, and Granger said she still regrets not having the “real freedom” that a divorce could give her mother, something she had craved before her death.
“My mother knew my father was capable of doing really evil things,” Granger said of her father. “So much so that at the end of his life, my mother told one of his friends that my father was going to kill himself. She turned to a co-worker and said, ‘Take care of Caitlin.’ When she left, [him] She will be safe.”
Granger, 27, first told her story In a TikTok titled “The Story,” he detailed the horrific crime, after giving viewers a “trigger warning.”
“The murder weapon was found inside the house that was on fire,” Granger tells the camera.
“As the investigation progressed, we found that there was a lot of planning. My father opened the warehouse four days after my mother left in August and began removing items from the warehouse to protect the belongings in the house because he intended to set the house on fire,” she continued, summarizing the most shocking event of her life in just 4 minutes and 19 seconds.
Granger started her “Let’s Not Rot” series last year, posting videos of herself going about her daily tasks with narrated narration and poetry about grief, which has earned her 330,000 followers on TikTok.
She said the video represents her and her mother’s determination to live their best lives.
“There was a story in my heart that needed to be told, for her and for myself,” Granger told The Washington Post. “The larger purpose was to talk about grief in a more practical way and to motivate me to take action.”
Bobette and Michael married in Las Vegas in 1992. Granger was born five years later, following her brother Andrew. According to his daughter, Michael was fired from his job on the organ transplant team at the University of Chicago Medical Center around 1998 for “ethical reasons,” and the family moved to the suburbs of St. Louis a few years later.
The Post contacted the University of Chicago Medicine.
Granger, who describes herself as a “shy child,” said her mother was subjected to severe physical abuse by her father, so when she was three years old, “my mother took us kids and ran away to live with a friend.”
“I don’t remember not feeling scared for my father,” Granger said.
But eventually they came back.
“My mother was trapped. She only believed the good in my father,” Granger says. “My father was a very charming man. He had a really manipulative pattern of being horrible and abusive to the point that she questioned everything, and then he would charm her and become romantic. He did a good job of hiding from the world how narcissistic and mentally ill he was.”
Ms. Bobette, who worked for an interior design firm in Maryland Heights, became the family’s breadwinner, Ms. Granger said. Her father was unemployed and “was home all day,” she recalled.
Granger and her brother said that while their father was not physically abusive, he was mentally abusive, leading to frayed nerves.
“I didn’t see any physical abuse, but I noticed and began to question the verbal and emotional manipulation. It started to shape my personality. I was very small, very quiet. I didn’t have many friends growing up,” she said. “That made me very small as a child. My aim was to be as submissive, calm and peaceful as possible, because if I didn’t, my mother would be punished.”
The only saving grace was that she played softball from age 7 through college, which got her and her mother out of the house.
“Softball was the best escape. To be honest, I didn’t really like the sport, but it was my mom and I. My mom would come on trips with me,” Granger recalled. “We didn’t have a lot of money, so we’d go on trips and we’d sit in the trunk before the games and eat peanut butter sandwiches. Those were really the few times my mom felt like she could be her true self.”
In August 2019, when Granger was 22 and had just graduated from Missouri State University with a degree in psychology, Bobette, who was 59 at the time, filed for divorce from Michael. She also began telling friends about the abuse, Granger said.
She had moved in with Granger, but the distance hadn’t subsided the waves of anxiety.
“I was scared of what my father was doing and it was hellish. [Bobette’s] “They were trying to put a tracking device on her car and were stalking her,” she said, but inside the apartment “felt like a safe place for us.”
Bobette worked as a wish grantor with Make-A-Wish Missouri, speaking to terminally ill children about their biggest dreams and helping them come true.
She was described by friends and colleagues as “genuine, selfless, positive and full of light.” Her Obituary.
Granger recalled her mother sneaking off to a friend’s house with a garbage bag full of clothes before she left her father for good.
“She was terrified something like this would happen, and so were we. She was very careful about what she said and did. She knew what she was doing was dangerous,” Granger said.
Granger was unable to live near the scene of her mother’s death after Bobette’s murder and quickly moved into the home of a family friend (who she married in April 2022 and is currently in the process of divorcing).
Still, she looks back fondly on their time together in the apartment, and is glad she was able to help her mother find relief from the physical abuse, even if just for a few months.
“It was our first moment of home together. We went to Hobby Lobby and got a cheesy sign that said, ‘This is our home.’ It meant so much because it really was our home, our place, a place where we could just be ourselves and not have to worry about laughing out loud,” she says. “We stayed there for two blissful months.
“That house was just peace for us.”
Now she hopes that by sharing her family’s harrowing experience and offering hope for the future, she can help others in a similar situation.
“I hope to encourage and empower others who are experiencing the same grief, fear, abuse, invalidation and domestic violence,” Granger said. “Healing comes from vulnerability, and I hope my story inspires life-changing vulnerability in others.”
