Kait Granger remembers telling her mom she loved her one last time.
It was December 8, 2019, when Granger ran back to the apartment the two shared in Chesterfield, Missouri, a suburb outside St. Louis. internship at her church.
“I have to hug him and tell him I love him. It was a sweet little moment,” Granger told The Post.
Later that night, her mother, Bobette Everhart-Boal, 59, went to a Christmas party. Granger randomly woke up around 2am to see a text her father, Michael Boal, 59, had at around 12.45am asking her to take care of the dog. She had a strange feeling.
“I woke up to go get my mom upstairs and she wasn’t there. I pulled up her location on my phone and saw she was in the parking lot. I said, ‘There’s no way she’s coming home.'”
Granger opened the blinds and saw flashing lights and police cars near the yellow crime scene tape.
“That’s when I realized what happened,” Granger said. She walked out, feeling numb and “like I was in a trance.
“I met a policeman and asked, ‘Is my mother dead?’
While Granger slept, her father shot and killed her mother during an argument in the parking lot of the apartment complex around 12:45 p.m.
He then returned to the house they had previously shared, about seven miles away, set fire to it and shot himself.
The estranged couple had appeared in court later that week for the first date of their divorce proceedings. Granger says it still haunts her that her mother didn’t get the “real freedom” of divorce she desperately wanted before her death.
“My mom knew he was capable of really dark things,” Granger said of her father. “Even to the point where, at the end of her life, she told one of her friends that he was going to kill her. She turned to her colleague and said: ‘Please take care of Kaitlyn.’ I was naive to think that if my mom left [him] she would be safe.”
Granger, 27, first told her story in a TikTok titled “The Story”, giving viewers a “trigger warning” before detailing the horrific crime.
“They found the murder weapon in the house on fire,” Granger tells the camera.
“As the investigation unfolded, we learned that there was a lot of premeditation. My father opened a storage unit four days after my mother left in August and started moving things from the house there to protect them because he knew he would set the house on fire,” she continued, summing up the most traumatic event of her life in 4 minutes and 19 seconds.
Granger has since amassed 330,000 TikTok followers with the Let’s Not Rot series, which she started last year, posting videos of herself going through daily tasks with voices and poems she’s written about grief.
She said the videos are a commitment she made to herself and her mother to live her best life.
“I had this story inside me and I knew I had to tell it, for him and for me,” Granger told The Post. “A big aspect of that was motivating me to do things and talk about grief in a way that’s more real.”
Bobette and Michael were married in 1992 in Las Vegas. Granger was born five years later, after her brother Andrew. Michael, according to his daughter, was fired from his job at the University of Chicago Medical Center’s organ transplant team around 1998 for “ethical reasons,” and the family moved to suburban St. Louis. Louis a few years later.
The Post has contacted UChicago Medicine.
Granger, a self-described “shy kid,” said her mother experienced physical abuse at the hands of her father that was so intense that, when Granger was 3, “My mom took our kids and ran away and went and stayed with friends”.
“I don’t have a memory of my father where I wasn’t afraid of him,” Granger said.
But they eventually returned.
“My mom kind of got stuck. She believed in the good parts of him,” Granger said. “My father was a very charming man. He had this really manipulative pattern of being horrible and abusive to the point where she would question everything, and more then he would turn on the charm and become romantic. He hid very well from the public how narcissistic and mentally ill he was.”
Bobette, who worked at an interior design company in Maryland Heights, became the breadwinner, Granger said. Her father, she remembers, was unemployed and “sat all day at home”.
Granger and her brother, who she says were emotionally but not physically abused by her father, were walking on eggshells.
“I did not see the physical abuse. But I began to see the verbal and emotional manipulation and began to question it. It really started to form who I was. I was very small, very quiet. “I didn’t have many friends growing up,” she said. “It made me very small as a child. My goal was to be as nice and as calm and peaceful as possible, because if I wasn’t, then my mother would be punished.”
A silver lining was playing softball from age 7 through college because it got her and her mother out of the house.
“Softball was the biggest escape. If I’m honest, I didn’t really like sports, but it was something that was my mom’s and mine. She would come and travel with me,” Granger recalled. “We didn’t have a lot of money, so we would travel and sit in the trunk before games and eat peanut butter sandwiches. It was really one of the only times she felt she could be free to be who she really was.”
In August 2019, when Granger was 22 and recently graduated from Missouri State University with a degree in psychology, Bobette, then 59, filed for divorce from Michael. She also began telling friends about the abuse, Granger said.
She moved in with Granger, but the distance didn’t calm the waves of turmoil.
“It was hell in terms of anxiety about what my dad was doing. He appeared in [Bobette’s] was working to put trackers on her car and was following her,” she said. But inside the apartment “it felt like our safe space.”
Bobette worked as a wish granter at Make-A-Wish Missouri, talking to terminally ill children about their biggest dreams and helping them come true.
She was described as “genuine, selfless, positive and full of light” by friends and associates in her obituary.
Granger remembered her mother making secret trips to a friend’s house with garbage bags of clothes before she left her father for good.
“She was afraid that something like this would happen. We both did. She tried to be very careful with what she did or said. She knew what she was doing was dangerous,” Granger said.
Granger immediately moved in with a family friend after Bobette was killed, unable to stay near the scene of her mother’s death. (She married in April 2022 and is now in the process of a divorce.)
Still, she looks back fondly on their time together in that apartment, glad she was able to help her mother have even a few months of freedom from physical abuse.
“It was our first sense of home together. We went to Hobby Lobby and got one of those cute “This is our house” signs. It was so meaningful because it really was our home and our place that we could exist and not worry about laughing too loud and being able to exist as we were,” she said. “We had a few months of happiness.
“In that house it was just peace for us.”
Now, she hopes that telling her family’s horrific story while also showing hope for the future will help others in similar situations.
“I hope I can encourage and empower other people who are experiencing similar forms of grief, fear, abuse, worthlessness and domestic violence,” Granger said. “Healing comes from vulnerability, and I hope my story will inspire life-changing vulnerability in others.”
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Image Source : nypost.com