My father killed my mother and then killed himself – now I'm turning it into a TikTok story about hope

Kait Granger remembers the last time she told her mother that she loved her.

It was December 8th, In 2019, when Granger ran back to the couple's shared apartment in Chesterfield, Missouri, a suburb outside St. Louis, to get a Diet Coke before her young adult ministry Internship in your church.

“I got to hug her and tell her I love her. 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 suddenly woke up around 2 a.m. and saw a text message from her father, Michael Boal, 59, asking her to watch the dog. She had a funny feeling.

“I woke up to get my mom upstairs, but she wasn't there. I checked her location on my phone and saw she was in the parking lot. I said, 'There's no way she's coming home right now.'”

Granger opened the blinds and saw flashing lights and police cars next to yellow crime scene tape.

“That's when I knew what had happened,” Granger said. She went outside feeling numb and “like I was in a trance.”

“I met a police officer and asked, 'Is my mother dead?'”

While Granger was sleeping, her father shot her mother during an argument in the apartment complex parking lot at around 12:45 a.m.

He then returned to their shared house about eleven kilometers away, set it on fire and shot himself.

The estranged couple were due to appear in court later this week for their first divorce hearing. Granger says she is still haunted that her mother did not get the “true freedom” of divorce that she desperately craved before her death.

“My mother 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 co-worker and said, 'Please take care of Kaitlyn.' I was naive to think that if my mother 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 burning house,” Granger says into the camera.

“As the investigation progressed, we discovered there was a lot of premeditation involved. My father opened a storage shed four days after my mother moved out in August and started moving things from the house there to protect them because he knew he was going to set the house on fire,” she continued, summarizing the most traumatic event of her life in 4 minutes and 19 seconds.

Granger has since amassed 330,000 TikTok followers with the series “Let's Not Rot,” which she launched last year and in which she posted videos of herself completing everyday tasks with voiceovers and poems she wrote about grief.

She said the videos were a commitment she made to herself and her mother to live her life to the best of her ability.

“I had this story inside me that I knew I had to tell, for her and for me,” Granger told the Post. “An important part of that was motivating myself to do things and talk about grief in a more realistic way.”

Bobette and Michael married in Las Vegas in 1992. Granger was born five years later, succeeding her brother Andrew. Michael was fired from his job on the organ transplant team at the University of Chicago Medical Center in 1998 for “ethical reasons,” according to his daughter, and the family moved to the St. Louis suburbs a few years later.

The Post reached out to UChicago Medicine.

Granger, who describes herself as a “shy child,” said her mother was so physically abused by her father that when Granger was three, “my mother ran away with us kids and stayed at friends' houses.”

“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t afraid of my father,” Granger said.

But they eventually returned.

“My mother kind of fell into the trap. 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 questioned everything, and then he would turn on his charm and be romantic. He hid it really well from the public how narcissistic and mentally ill he was.”

Bobette, who worked at an interior design firm in Maryland Heights, became the family's breadwinner, Granger said. Her father, she recalled, was unemployed and “sat at home all day.”

Granger and her brother, who said they were emotionally but not physically abused by their father, walked on frail legs.

“I didn't notice the physical abuse. But I did notice the verbal and emotional manipulation and started to question it. That really affected me. 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 goal was to be as easygoing, quiet and peaceful as possible, because if I wasn't, my mother would punish me.”

One bright spot for her was playing softball, which she started at age seven and continued through college because it got her out of the house with her mother.

“Softball was the best escape. To be honest, I didn't really like the sport, but it was my mother and I. She traveled with me,” Granger recalled. “We didn't have a lot of money, so we traveled, sitting in the trunk of the car before games and eating peanut butter sandwiches. That was really one of the few moments she felt free to be who she really was.”

In August 2019, when Granger was 22 and had just graduated from Missouri State University with a psychology degree, 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 did not calm the waves of unrest.

“It was hell in terms of the fear of what my father did. He showed up to [Bobette’s] “I tried to put tracking devices on her car and follow her,” she said. But in the apartment, “it felt like our safe place.”

Bobette worked as a wish granter at Make-A-Wish Missouri, talking to terminally ill children about their biggest dreams and helping to make them come true.

In her obituary, friends and colleagues described her as “sincere, selfless, positive and full of light.”

Granger remembered her mother secretly going to a friend's house with garbage bags full of clothes before she left her father for good.

“She was afraid that something like this could happen. We were both afraid. She tried to be very careful about 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's death, as she could not stay near where her mother died. (She married in April 2022 and is now going through a divorce.)

Nevertheless, she looks back fondly on the time they spent together in this apartment and is happy that she was able to help her mother for at least a few months without physical abuse.

“It was our first sense of home together. We went to Hobby Lobby and got one of those cheesy signs that said, 'This is our home.' That was so meaningful because it was truly our home and our place where we could be and live without having to worry about laughing too loudly and we could live as who we were,” she said. “We had a couple months of bliss.”

“For us, this home was simply peaceful.”

Now she hopes that telling her family's horrific story while showing hope for the future will help others in similar situations.

“I hope to provide encouragement and strength to others experiencing similar forms of grief, fear, abuse, disability and domestic violence,” Granger said. “Healing comes from vulnerability and I hope my story inspires life-changing vulnerability in others.”