20/20 - McStays Episode 2: Missing?

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Weeks into the search for the McStay family, investigators find a promising clue. Family and friends aren't convinced.  To keep listening, follow 'What Happened to the McStays?' for free on ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Amazon Music⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or subscribe to 20/20 True Crime+ to get access to new episodes early and ad-free, plus unlock exclusive bonus content from 20/20 and hundreds of episodes from the 20/20 true crime vault. Visit ⁠apple.co/2020truecrime⁠ to subscribe now. Terms apply. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, this is Ashton Singh, here with episode two of our latest true crime series from 2020 and ABC Audio. What Happened to the Mix Days? Remember, you can get new episodes weekly on Tuesdays if you follow what happened to the mixed days on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening now. You can also get the entire series ad free and early by subscribing to 2020 True Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts. Click the link in the description to start your free trial. Now here's the next episode of what happened to the mixed days. Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this back-to-school season. Save on lunchbox savers like Ziggy's sliced deli-me meat products for always $3.75.

And get life brand pure Vita shampoo or conditioner for $8 each. At Real Canadian Superstore, when you're ready, we're ready, with a whole world and more. Four weeks had passed since the McStay family vanished from their fall brick home. When the investigator assigned to their case, Detective Troy Dugal, asked Joseph McStay's brother to come to the San Diego Sheriff's Department. March 1st, 2010, it's presently 1135. I'm at my office at my computer with Michael McStay. Dugall believed he could have a promising lead to share with Michael.

He pressed play on a silent, blurry, and dimly lit video. I'm about to show Michael the video. That was relayed to me. In the 15-second clip, a group of four calmly crosses the U.S.-Mexica border on foot. Two of the people in the video appear to be adults,

a man and a woman. They have with them two smaller figures who appear to be children. According to police, the individuals are passing from the U.S. side into Tijuana, through the San Isidro Terminal. See them going through a long,

open-air corridor. with metal gates, high sides, and barbed wire on top. They're gonna be walking right here, and they're gonna come right up this sidewalk. Police say that video of this group of four was captured on the very same day that the Mxtaz Azusa Trooper was towed from a shopping center, also near the border.

The footage is blurry, but the shapes of the people in it still told the story. To Detective Dugal, they look like a mother, father, and two children, each parent holding a child's hand. There's the male with a kid. There's the female with a kid. Could this be the mixed days?

Detective Dugal's first impression of the mixed days' disappearance, according to police records, was that something bad had happened to them. He suspected foul play. But this border footage cast new doubt. Maybe the mixed days had left of their own accord. In the weeks following the family's disappearance,

those who knew the mixed days were left scratching their heads. Was the family alive and well in Mexico? Or had something terrible happened to them? From ABC Audio in 2020, I'm Ashen Singh. And this is what happened to the mixed days. Episode two. Missing? When the McStay's vanished, they left behind close family and friends, who all wanted answers.

In 2011, Patrick McStay, Joseph and Michael's father told ABC News that he started looking into the family's disappearance himself. I don't know what happened, okay? I'm looking for answers just like them. Let's look at everything. Patrick enlisted help from Joseph's friend, Gina Watson. It's not like I always liked true crime, but I liked mysteries or like I'll go down a rabbit hole. And I definitely did that in this case because I wanted to be able to make sense of it all, like something that's so incomprehensible.

I will say, yeah, I got a little obsessed. Remember, Gina Watson had met Joseph McStay through work. She says when she learned Joseph and his family had gone missing, she was stunned. wanting to find a way to help. Gina says she reached out to Joseph's family and eventually connected with Patrick, Joseph's dad. Of course, I was more than happy to help him put some things together. Police had executed a search warrant at the McStay's Fallbrook home.

They seized a number of electronic devices and did a forensic analysis of them, looking into the family's finances and bank records. They checked Joseph and some are self-reve. phone records, too. Gina says she and Patrick did what they could to help investigators. According to Gina,

Joseph had given all his email passwords to his dad for safekeeping. So she and Patrick started going through Joseph's emails together. I was conflicted because it's like I'm in my friend's personal email now. Like that felt weird, but I want to help go through

things as quickly as possible and make sure everything's paid attention to that should be. Gina found a couple of messages that raised red flags for her. She says she found one email about a counseling session for Joseph and Summer, a month before they disappeared. Gina wasn't sure what to make of this. A lot of times, like they say, the husband did it, so you have to be open-minded and say,

well, could Joseph have gone mad and done something to his family? I mean, of course, you want to say, no way. And I did think no way, but you want to be open. open-minded and consider everything. Did Summer? Like, did she do something nefarious? But we could never back any of that up. Another discovery that piqued Gina's interest

was a set of transactions from a business account. I saw that there were withdrawals from the PayPal account. A PayPal account that had been set up for the waterfall company to pay vendors and received payments from customers. But what caught Gina's attention were the withdrawals from the PayPal account in the days immediately after the mixed days went missing. All told, nearly $7,000 had been withdrawn. And so I was like, hmm, if they say they went missing on February 4th,

could they have brought a laptop with him and he's doing business from a hotel somewhere? Is that what happened? Or so we're trying to piece this together. This discovery might have offered a ray of hope that Joseph, and his family were still alive. But Gina says she knew it wasn't Joseph initiating these transactions. It was Dan Kavanaugh. You'll remember from our last episode, Dan was Joseph's business partner.

As a web designer, he ran the retail site for Earth-inspired products, and he was close to the family. So close, Dan says, the McStay kids called him Uncle Dan. Remember, Dan was the first one to call in a welfare check for the family. Hello. Hey, Dan, Troy. Hey, Detective, how are you, dad? How are you doing? Detective Dugal of the San Diego Sheriff's Department asked Dan about the PayPal transactions.

Dan had an explanation for the withdrawals. Let me ask you this, Dan, I know you have access for PayPal and PayPal transfers. I know there was, there's been several. all the way back to like the fifth. You want to do this? Itemize out all the transfers and give you, like, receipt. If you could do that and just shoot me a quick ledger on where the money went, that way my questions are answered.

Dan explained he needed the money to keep the business afloat. He said the website cost money to maintain. I pay internet advertising companies like thousands of dollars and not just to maintain us on the top of Google. And if those guys don't get good, there is no EIP. And that's right. You're telling that to me. I totally understand that. Dan also told investigators he wasn't anywhere near the McStay's house at the time of their disappearance.

He was in Hawaii with his girlfriend. When investigators looked into flight information and Dan's girlfriend, his story checked out. They cleared him from the list of parties potentially involved with the McStay's disappearance. Dan wasn't the only person in the McStays circle that police spoke to. There were a few others that detectives interviewed, hoping to learn something, anything, about where the family had gone. Among the people on that list was Charles Merritt. Better known as Chase, he was a welder who built custom fountains for earth-inspired products.

Joseph and Chase had worked together for around three years. The world of custom water features is small, and Gina Watson had worked in the space for years. She says not everything that she'd heard about Chase was positive. I started hearing more and more of these things, these problems, customer service issues. I did ask Joseph during one of our last conversations, long conversations that I remember, I asked him point blank, like, you're going to use Chase exclusively,

that's your guy. And he was like, yeah, I know I've heard, you know, the things. And I know that he's had trouble in the past, but I'm trying to help him. Authority said what they really wanted to talk to Chase about was his calendar. I saw Joseph Thursday around noon. Thursday, which day? Thursday the 4th. Chase sat down with Detective Troy Dugall and his partner, Suzanne Fisk, for an in-person interview.

Chase said he had a meeting with Joseph the day the McStays went missing to discuss work. Two projects that were in the middle of, we were in the middle of, we had to go over them and make sure all the specs were right, where the different electricals coming out. What did you see? At chick-fil-A. Okay. He met me at Chick-fil-A, and he bought lunch there. At that February 4th meeting, Joseph and Chase spoke about all kinds of months.

money stuff, as Chase put it. Payments to vendors, payments from Joseph to Chase. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the meeting, according to Chase. But during this interview with detectives, Chase said something that caught their attention. Joseph, Joseph was one of my best friends. Joseph was one of my best friends. Detective Suzanne Fisk clocked this choice of words immediately. You said Joe was my best friend?

Oh, I did. You did? Hmm. I don't know. Okay. Did you guys have to falling out at all? Never. No, no.

So it wouldn't be like he was my best friend and now we're just... No, absolutely not. Okay. Okay, still your best friend? No, yeah. Yeah, that's not like. Okay. If Joseph was still Chase's best friend,

why did he use the past tense? You have nothing to do with any, whether it was them going somewhere, you didn't help participate in... No, not in any way, shape or form. Nothing to do with the disappearance, whether it's good or bad. Absolutely not, no. I mean, I don't know of anybody that has anything to gain by Joseph being gone. I think everybody that I know has everything to lose. He told detectives that his whole business depended on Joseph McStay, that he and Joseph were close

and talked almost every day for the last two years. Plus, Chase told him he was one of the first people in the McStay's inner circle to help search for the family. On the day Michael McStay went into his brother's home through a back window, it was Chase who had met him there. Before detectives ended their interview with Chase, he asked to collect his DNA. He agreed to a cheek swab. Ultimately, San Diego police determined there was no crime to charge anyone with.

No arrests were made, and no indictment filed in the McStay's disappearance. But interviewing people wasn't the only avenue detectives pursued. They also chased and combed through potential evidence. Like the family's Azusa Trooper, the one found near the southern border, And something inside the vehicle tell detectors what happened to the mixed days? We make things just for college life, like the Rose and Mando blackout curtains in gray. They say you can't put a price on sleep, but we did for the low low price of $49.99. Why are you in my room?

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Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today. When police located the McStays'Rexam! white as Souser trooper. They took it to the crime lab and processed it. What I remember that they recovered from the vehicle was some, I believe

it was asthma medicine. And I think one of the boys was taking asthma medicine, which it's essentially a red flag when you see someone left medication in a car, especially if, you know, if they were going into another country,

why wasn't his medication taken with him? This is Lieutenant Dennis Brugos, who you heard from last episode, who was Detective Troy Dugall's boss and oversaw the McStay investigation for the San Diego Sheriff's Department. Investigators collected DNA swabs, lifted fingerprints, and searched the SUV. According to authorities, there were no signs of struggle in the vehicle. If the Asuzu Trooper itself offered little information, the investigation around the McStay's home offered more leads.

A police report shows that detectors spoke with the residents of Avocado Vista Lane. There was one neighbor that came forward with a surveillance video. A few doors down from the McStay residence, a neighbor had installed a security camera facing the street. Lieutenant Brugos' team took a look at the footage from February 4th. The day the mxtays went missing, and lo and behold, at 747 p.m. Here to be a vehicle, which looked like it might be there as zoosoo, backing out of the driveway and driving down the street,

but we weren't able to get any kind of license plate number on or anything like that. Detectives also couldn't tell who was inside the car as it drove away. The video was dark and only showed part of the vehicle. But assuming it was the mixed-days-a-susufor trooper leaving their driveway, police say there was a four-day gap before it appeared again at that shopping center near the border. The drive from Fallbrook to the Mexican border takes about one hour. So where had the car been for the rest of the four days? While detectives puzzled over this new information,

Gina Watson, who'd been doing her own digging, found a new potential clue. an email in Joseph's account about purchasing the Spanish language software. I see an email to someone to get Rosetta Stone Spanish. And it was when a Rosetta Stone first came out and everybody was touting it as like, you're going to learn the language. Like you'll be fluent if you just do this Rosetta Stone. So I think Summer was excited in the email. Was it possible the family had been learning Spanish to prepare for a planned trip to Mexico?

It's Mike. Hi, Mike. Troy DeGal. Hey, Troy. In March 2010, a month after the McStays went missing, Detective Dugall called Michael McStay to share another discovery he'd made. Got a little bit of information. Finally got a little bit of a lead.

Oh, that's good. Yeah. He, well, it doesn't tell me where your family's at, but it does tell me which direction they may have went. Ah. Dugal said the forensic analysis of the family. computer had come back. It showed that about a week before the mixed days were last seen, somebody had searched for information about crossing into Mexico with children, including

requirements for children's passports. For Detective Dugal, the theory that the family had gone to Mexico voluntarily was looking more and more viable. It was only possible. I think it's above possible now with that information. Earlier in the month, Detective Dugal asked Michael to his office at the police station and showed him that blurry surveillance video of the four people crossing the border from the U.S. into Tijuana. Police felt that if they could say definitively that the people in the video were Joseph, Summer, and the boys,

then the footage could serve as visual proof that the McStays were alive and well in Mexico. Dugal and Michael watched the video several times, pouring over every detail. Do you recognize that, Jack? The kids, are they the right size for Gianni and Joseph? Yeah, it seems that, well, if I had to guess it, that would be the younger one, Jay, and that would be Gianni. Can I watch it in real time?

I can tell my brother's how he walks, you know? The detective pointed out that the children were wearing beanies, like Gianni and Joseph Jr. often did. and that the height and size of the adults and children seemed to roughly match the mixed days. But Michael said he needed a better shot, a better angle to know for sure. Detective Dugal said that wasn't likely. Here's what I can tell you.

We frequently get cases that involve Mexico. We know where cameras are, and we know what images are good. For people going into the border, This camera is by far the best. It may have been the best footage available, but Michael still wasn't convinced it was, in fact, his family in the video. He said the walk of the female adult wasn't consistent with Summer's walk,

and he didn't recognize the jackets the adults were wearing. Were these four figures on the screen, the McStay family, or not? I can't tell him that at all. Detective Dugall, had his doubts too. I don't know that anyone would be able to tell. If that was my sister walking across her, I don't know if I'd be able to tell. I can't recognize me.

You don't know, good or bad. Unfortunately, neither can I. And I'll tell you what, this whole case has been a lot like that. A mystery that was feeling impossible to make sense of, a dark, blurry image offering nothing recognizable. After weeks of looking for evidence of foul play, Detective Dugal hadn't found any. In fact, to him, all the available evidence was pointing in the same direction,

that the mixed days had left the country voluntarily. Michael, I currently can convince somebody who has nothing to do with this case that there's a stronger likelihood that they're alive. and south, then I can commend somebody that they were abducted or being held. There's no ransom, no law enforcement has come across any suspicious circumstances, persons, people who have been killed. And then we have things like this. Things like this, as in this border crossing video,

but was there more to the story of what happened to this family? Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this, back to school, season. Save on lunchbox savers like Ziggy's sliced deli me products for always 375. And get life brand pure Vita shampoo or conditioner for $8 each. At Real Canadian Superstore, when you're ready, we're ready with a whole world and more. When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want. Like all

the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha-chings from every channel, right in one spot and turn real-time reporting into big-time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today. I started or not in 2013 and we make bike apparel. The best part of Shopify for me is our ability to run the business as essentially

non-technical people. We're able to admin everything on the back end, front end, and sell things online easily. If Shopify were a bike accessory, I think it would actually be the bicycle. It's the thing that you do the thing on. We run the business on Shopify. Start your free trial on Shopify.com. When Joseph's father, Patrick McStade, saw the surveillance footage from the San Jacidro Border Crossing, he wasn't convinced it was his family.

It's blurry. You can't see it. It's a jerky motion, and the man does not have long hair. That's not Joey. Summer doesn't own a coat like that. That's not summer. Also, Patrick wondered, what about the surveillance cameras

on route from the car to the border terminal? Weren't there any? And wouldn't they have caught a clearer picture of the mixed days? They had two little boys, three and four years old. Daddy, I got to go to the bathroom. Daddy, I'm hungry. And I know I had two little boys. I know.

what they do. And you mean to tell me that they didn't go to a restroom. They weren't in and out of stores. They didn't go to a restaurant. In his interview with ABC News, Patrick was clearly upset, and his message to investigators was clear. Get off your rear end, get out there, and find them. Gina Watson also wanted investigators to do more. Lieutenant Brugos, one of the statements I remember him making, is that it's not a crime to go missing. And I remember being so angry when I heard that because I'm like, well, of course it's not a crime to like, you know,

go sit on the beach in Mexico and sit mitas. But that's not what they're doing. Like, I know Joseph. I know he loved his kids. Like, if I disappeared and my kids were gone with me, I get emotional because it's like I would want somebody to do something and not just say, well, it's not a crime. While detectives worked on the case, the media seized on the story, both local and national.

The McStay's disappearance was featured on Nancy Grace's headline news. An entire family vanishes, including these small children. What do we know? America's Most Wanted covered it too. Tonight, you could help solve this agony. Joseph's family brought attention to the case, giving interviews to news outlets, and sending missing flyers down to Mexico. Websites and Facebook pages soliciting tips went up to, and Michael McState told ABC News in 2011, the public did reach out, the suggestions from across the country

about where his family could be. Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, Tennessee, North, Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Montana. The San Diego Sheriff's Department followed up on tips that came in. Detectives notified Interpol to be on the lookout for a missing family that might be in Mexico. Local authorities worked with Mexican authorities to check hospitals and airports. But according to San Diego police, detectives eventually exhausted all their leads. police ultimately put out a statement saying the family left home of their own free will and turned the case over to the FBI.

If there were any sightings of the mixed days in Mexico, the FBI had the resources to follow up. Early on, Joseph's family hoped that the four missing mixtays would turn up safe and sound. But months, even years in, The hope of a return was giving way to fearing the worst. Something's not right. Someone needs to come forward. Someone saw something.

Someone knows something. I'm suspecting the worst. I'm suspecting foul play. And the worst would come. What happened to the mixed days is a production of ABC Audio in 2020, hosted by me, Ashton Singh, produced by Madeline Wood, Vika Aronson, Audrey Mastek, and Kiara Powell. With help from Sabrina Fang and Camille Peterson, edited by Gianna Palmer.

Our supervising producer is Susie Liu. Music by Heaven Viola, Mixing by Heaven Viola, and Bob Mallory. Special thanks to Katie Dendos, Janice Johnson, Chris Donovan, Joseph Re, Sunny Antrim, Alyssa Stoller, Zander Samaris, Tom Berman, Indra, Inde, Saha'h and Blue Browning. Josh Cohen is our director of podcast programming. Emin McNef is our executive producer. Can't wait for more.

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