Criminology - The McStay Family Murders

Episode Date: September 5, 2021

In 2010, Joseph and Summer McStay and their two young children vanished in California. The police had trouble figuring out exactly what happened to the family of four. Over the years, many theories were floated including that a grainy video showed the family fleeing to Mexico. Many theories revolved around Summer having something to do with Joseph's murder and then taking off with the children. But, when the bodies of the family were found years later, those theories were dispelled. In the end, the police pieced together that one of Joseph's business associates was involved. Join Mike and Morf as they discuss the bizarre case of the McStay family murders. Joseph owned a business and there were a number of financial transactions that didn't quite add up. But, the police had an uphill battle. The McStay home had been cleaned up by family members. Eyewitnesses came forward to give a description that police followed up on for yes, only to find out later that it was based on lies. They worked through all of this until they were finally able to pin down one man, Chase Merritt, as the culprit responsible for murdering all four of the McStays. You can help support the show at patreon.com/criminology An Emash Digital production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Subscribe now to moms and mysteries wherever you get your podcast. Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 173 of the criminology podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson. And this is Mike Morford. Morford, what's going on with you, buddy? Not too much. I got a nice full iced coffee here. I'm pumped up. I'm ready to go and record an episode. What's new with you? Are you one of those iced coffee drinkers? I did not know that.

I love ice coffee. Every once in a while, I'll drink a hot. hot pumpkin coffee. I like pumpkin coffee when it's hot, but as far as regular coffee every day, ice coffee 99% of the time. Wow. No, I go hot coffee every day, every morning, can't live without it. Black, no flavor, just regular black coffee. Yeah, I don't know what it is. I just like the ice coffee. I don't like it too strong. I think that's part of it. So the ice sort of melts and dilutes a little bit. I don't like that strong, bitter taste. All right, we learned something today. You're one of those people. I get you. All right. To each. through. Exactly. We got some Patreon shoutouts. Let's go ahead and do those before we jump into the

episode. We had Matt, Kirsten Scott, Lily Martinez, Janine Stiles, Karen, Kathy Whittsle, Janie Adams, Pure Love, E&P, Greg Deloach, and Bob Bravo. So that's a lot of great new support. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks so much. That's a lot of names that are willing to help show out. And of those I also recognize from social media, so they're supporting us there as well. So we can't thank you enough. If anyone would like to help support criminology, you can do so by going to Patreon.com slash criminology. All right, Morp, let's jump into this case. And in this episode, we're talking about the puzzling and frustrating case of the McStay family, who vanished mysteriously in Southern California in February 2010. The family's disappearance stumped investigators for three

years until their bodies were found in the desert. That's when the case shifted from a missing person's case to a murder investigation. Eventually, police would identify and arrest the person responsible for this cold-blooded crime, but the road to justice was not an easy or short one. In February 2010, Joseph and Summer McStay were renovating a home they had just moved into with their two sons, four-year-old Gianni and three-year-old Joey Jr. The home was in Southern California in Fallbrook near Camp Pendleton in California, San Diego County. It's about an hour's drive north of the Mexican border. At the time, Fallbrook had a population of about 30,000 people.

It's nicknamed the friendly village, and the McStays were looking forward to life in the quiet community. They felt it was close enough to get away when they wanted to, within driving distance to Los Angeles and Mexico, near beaches and forest, but it was quiet enough to relax when they wanted to. they needed to. 40-year-old Joseph McStay and his wife, 43-year-old Summer Mix-Day, had moved from an apartment in San Clemente, California, which is right on the coast, to their new home in Fallbrook about 40 minutes inland. They were renovating their new home because they planned to eventually flip it later and move to the East Coast of the United States. But at that time, their goal was to work slowly and enjoy family life together. On February 4th, 2010, McGuiver McCarger, a good friend of Joseph's, and an ex-boyfriend of Summers,

helped them paint at the house. There was going to be new flooring installed soon. So the painting needed to be done before the installation so that there was no chance of ruining or staining the new floor with paint. But I think as many of us know, sometimes when you start house painting, you can run out of steam and the job ends up spanning multiple days. That's what happened with McStays. They didn't finish all of the painting in one shot,

so McGuiver agreed to return later on to help them finish. That same day, Summer called her sister on the phone at around 2 p.m. And then she went shopping at the Ross store in the city of Vista, about an hour south of Fallbrook. While Summer was shopping, Joseph McStay had lunch at Chick-fil-Aid and Rancho Kukamanga, with an employee and business associate, Chase Merritt, who made custom fountains for Joseph's custom waterfall business, earth-inspired products. At 828 that night, Joseph called Chase Merritt, but it went to voicemail.

That was the last attempted communication from the McStays. After this, neither Summer nor Joseph McStay made any calls or answered their cell phones again. The last call from the McStay's home phone was later determined to have been earlier, at 425. to Joseph's cell phone. Joseph was a very busy man, running his own business, but he stopped replying to business emails and stopped answering his phone. Eventually, both Joseph and Summer's phones went straight to voicemail. And from all accounts, that wasn't like them. Days went by without a word from the mixed days. Family members of Joseph and Summer, as well as friends and employees began to worry about the family. On February 9th, Chase Merritt showed up at Joseph's mother, Susan Blake's house, to ask her if she had heard from Joseph lately.

Before moving into their Fallbrook home, the McStays had lived with Susan Blake in Corona for a few months. Susan hadn't heard from her son either. As McStay family, friends, and associates began to check with each other, they realized that no one had heard from Joseph or Summer, since the afternoon of February 4th. As we mentioned, Chase Merritt had missed his call that night from Joseph. He said he had been watching a movie with his common-law wife at the time, Catherine Jarvis, and didn't want to take a work call from his talkative boss. Later on, surveillance video from a neighbor, Jennifer Mitchley,

would show that at 7.47 p.m. on the 4th, a vehicle left the McStay residence. Only the bottom 18 inches of the vehicle were visible in the footage. But investigators believed that it was the families of Suzu Trooper. Other members of the mixed-day family found this odd, because the two young children, Gianni and Joey Jr., would have normally been in bed by 8 p.m., not headed out somewhere in the car. Jennifer Mitchley recalled hearing something on the night of the 4th that made her turn on her porch light, but she didn't see anything unusual.

On February 13th, the full nine days after the McStays, were last heard from, Chase Merritt and Joseph's brother Michael, mixed day, went to Joseph and Summers home. Michael went through a back window to get into the locked house while Chase stayed near the sliding glass door at the other end of the home. The home wasn't fully furnished because they had only recently moved in, but Michael could see that all of the family's belongings were still in the home. There was no sign of forced entry and everything.

looked pretty normal. There was still a carton of eggs sitting out on the counter. Boles of popcorn remained in the living room, as if someone had been snacking. There was painting equipment, still wet, left out, and the paint left open. The McStay's Dodge truck was parked in the driveway, unlocked, with valuables inside of it, including a video camera. Summer's glasses were still at the house, too. The two family dogs were in the backyard abandoned, with no one taking care of them, and they had no food or water. One of the dogs was an older, dog that the McStays had loved for many years, and the other was a puppy that they had recently brought home after moving in. Summer and Joseph would never have left their dogs out if they were

going to be gone for long, especially overnight, because they knew that coyotes were well known to roam the foothills around their home. To Michael, it looked like his brother and sister-in-law had simply taken the kids out, maybe to run an errand or go to the store, and just never returned. This was all suspicious, but the only sense. sign of anything truly amiss, like a struggle had occurred at the home, was a lamp, knocked over in the bedroom. Michael told his mother that there was no sign of Joseph or his family, and while they tried not to worry, they knew in their hearts that Summer and Joseph would have never

left this way, but they still hoped they would return. Susan Blake cleaned them to stay home so that wouldn't be gross when the family returned. The house smelled bad. There were dirty diapers left in the trash for days, and dirty dishes were untouched in the sink. Susan took the trash out and did the dishes. She also threw away the food that had been left sitting out. She emptied and cleaned the coffee pot. She cleaned up the paint trays.

She also looked through the home for phone numbers that she needed. Summer's mother, Blanche, joined Susan and helped clean the house doing laundry. McGuiver, Mick Carter, who had been scheduled to come back to help finish the painting. at the home, never received any follow-up text from Summer, but he visited the McStay residence during the cleanup. He felt that things weren't right. There was paint dried in a paint tray, and Susan Blake was scrubbing out paint from the trays. But Summer lined her paint trays with foil, like McCarger had taught her because she hated cleaning out the trays. The futon had no cover on it. And even though Joseph was a very neat person, there were clothes all over the floor

of the master bedroom. It was just not like Joseph. And it was in that moment that McGuiver suggested to Susan and Blanche that they stopped cleaning and not touch anything else. But for some reason, they didn't take his advice. They kept cleaning inadvertently destroying any evidence that may have remained at the home connected to the family's disappearance. Finally, on February 15th, 11 days after the McStays were last seen, they were reported missing, and police became involved. Police did a welfare check, and on February 19th, detectives searched the McStay home. At first, nothing in the home looked out of the ordinary, because of course by this point

it had been cleaned. Detective suspected that something wasn't right, though. The McStay's computers were missing, and police learned that Mike McStay had taken the family computers from the home, but detectives ordered him to return them to the scene. When the police later examined the contents of the computers, they found some suspicious activity. On January 28th, just six days before the family vanished, someone had used the family computer to search for rules about traveling to Mexico with children who didn't have passports. So, Morph, I think we have to take a step back here. examine this timeline. The mixed days were last seen on the fourth. They're not reported missing until the 15th. So that's 11 days right there. Police show up to do a welfare check,

but detectives don't enter the home until the 19th. That's over two weeks. And I think you have to ask the question because everyone listening has probably already asked the question. Why did it take so long for friends, family to go to the police. At what point do you start to worry that no one is heard from your family members in quite some time? Yeah, I think you could maybe make an argument that if these were people without family, without many people that really could keep tabs on them, you know, might be longer before they were missed or before neighbors or someone else, you know, noticed that they weren't around, but they seem to have friends and family that were close that communicated with them pretty frequently. So it's a little bit of a surprise to me that it would

take this long. I'd like to think that if my family and I went missing and just weren't heard from for a week and a half that someone would be calling around or thinking it's odd and calling police sooner, because it just seems unusual, I think, to most of us. Unless they had a history of doing it where they would just pick up stakes and take off on a whim. Maybe that's something that we don't know about that they've done in the past. But short of that, I don't know why they would wait so long. There's nothing in the research that indicates the mixed days had gone off for a stretch of time without letting people know where they would be. Yeah, I really think it's key here that, you know, people knew right away something was strange. I mean, first of all,

Joseph runs a business. We said it. He was a very busy guy. You know, anyone that runs a business, there's meetings, there's emails to reply to. And when, you know, those start to go unanswered, when you miss appointments, when you don't show up for work, I mean, who's giving the direction for this business? It just seems so strange. It's a very long time for people not to be more concerned than it seems as though they were. I'll put it that way. Yeah, and I think a couple things sort of come together. It's the length of time that they're missing, but also once police get into the house, the house has been cleaned. So if it's a crime scene, it's potentially a loss of different evidence and clues that they might be able to find. Yeah, now, I get that, right? I get

mothers coming over to the house and, you know, the last thing they're probably thinking is that this is a crime scene. They're just thinking, all right, they left all this stuff out. It smells. I got to clean it up. So, you know, I get that. Now, it's devastating because if it is a crime scene, you're right. They're destroying a bunch of evidence that could be very helpful. Police then dug into the McStay's finances and learn that on February, two days after anyone had last heard from the family, a large amount of money was withdrawn from Joseph McStay's business accounts via PayPal to the tune of $13,000. And we'll break that down a little bit later.

Besides the missing PayPal funds, the family's bank accounts and credit cards showed no unusual activity leading up to the disappearance. So it didn't appear as if they withdrew their safety. and just went on the run, the last purchase on their accounts was Summer's purchase at Ross. $100,000 in their accounts remained untouched. On February 8th, four days after the mixed days were last heard from, someone tried to download QuickBooks Pro on the family computer.

And this QuickBooks software is extremely important, and it will come up again later in the episode, and play a pivotal role in this case. When detectives ran a search on the McStays vehicles, they realized that on February 8th, four days after the McStays were last heard from, the Assizu Trooper was found abandoned in San Ysidro, 60 miles south of the McStays home in Fallbrook.

It was parked at a strip mob about two blocks away from the Mexican border. The Asuzu had been towed because there was no overnight parking there. And this told investigators that whoever parked it there had done it not long before it was towed, because if it was there much earlier, it would have been towed much sooner. The Asusa was locked, an asthma medicine for one of the boys was still inside. Two car seats remained inside of it as well for Gianni and Joey. Detectives found gifts inside the vehicle for Joey's birthday party, which summer was planning to have that weekend. These included gifts that Summer purchased at the Ross store on February 4th. Joey had turned

three years old, just days before the McStays were last heard from. Investigators with the San Diego County Sheriff's Department came to believe that the McStay family may have walked over the border from California into Tijuana, Mexico. On February 8, 2010, there is some very grainy footage from the night of the 8th, from security cameras at the San Ysidro border cross. that shows a man and a woman with two children walking. You can only see the back of the four people in the video, and it's very low resolution.

It's very dark. Some investigators believe that this was Joseph and Summer Mix Day with their two young children, Gianni and Joey. A lot of people that have followed the case online have speculated that this was actually summer mixed day with Gianni, Joey, and an unknown male. Some theorizing that perhaps Joseph had met with foul play at the hands of his wife and that she had fled to Mexico. Due to the belief by authorities that the McStay family had crossed the border into another country, the San Diego police handed the case over to the FBI.

Many people speculated that the McStay family had been entered into the witness protection program, but authorities disputed this and confirmed that they were not protected persons, but instead it was likely they were missing of their own free will, and foul play wasn't suspected. This is further evidence by the fact that police released the video that they believed showed the family heading New Mexico. Despite the stance of law enforcement, Joseph's family never believed that he and Summer had voluntarily disappeared.

Joseph had an older teenage son named Jonah from a previous relationship, who he loved dearly, and family felt he wouldn't have left him behind. It's also been pointed out that there were stacks of expensive flooring in the home just waiting to be installed. So I think that question has been asked by many. Why would the McStays have purchased thousands of dollars of flooring if they knew they would never use it? In fact, why would they have recently purchased that hall? if they planned to disappear not long after. They had moved out of their San Clemente, California apartment and bought the home in

Fallbrook about 30 miles inland in November. If they were planning to disappear, why not do it as they left San Clemente? So more if this is common, right? In a case like this, you're going to have people speculating on what happened. We've already had people theorizing. that Summer had a hand in Joseph's death and then she was with another guy, went to Mexico with this guy and her kids. Law enforcement believed that the family voluntarily went to Mexico. But this question of buying things or getting ready to do things right before someone disappears

comes up in a lot of cases. And I do think you have to look at it. You know, why make all these plans? Why buy all of this stuff to paint and put in new flooring if you have a plan to disappear? You know, that's not to say that it couldn't have come up right in the middle, something that would have caused them to flee. But you have to factor all of that in. I think it's human nature to start wondering and thinking about some of the possibilities. Where did this family go? What happened to them? and sometimes that includes things that might be far-fetched or unlikely,

but, you know, that's the human mind. They start thinking of all the possibilities, you know, including some are having something to do with it and some of that stuff. But I think as far as spending money, it just doesn't make sense to spend a lot of money on stuff that you're going to have at the house that you're never going to use again if your intention is to disappear from the beginning. So a lot of people thinking that seems to make a lot of sense to me as well.

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think police look at in some cases is somebody that just spent, you know, let's say $300 or $400 at the grocery store, right? Their fridge is full. Their cabinets are packed with food and then they disappear. Okay. Why would you spend all that money and time going to the grocery if you disappeared voluntarily? Things like that just don't make sense. At the time of their disappearance, Joseph McStay was suffering from an unknown illness

that his family does confirm knowing about, but no one has ever pinned down exactly what it was. Joseph wasn't in the best of health, so he would have needed money and resources to get medical care. He wouldn't exactly be able to stay off the grid if he needed to buy medicine and supplies, or visit a hospital, or doctor. And Joseph wasn't the only one with medical issues. one of the children had asthma, and their medicine was left behind in the Asuzu. Police took notice of the Asuzu. It seemed to them that whoever parked it knew the mall well and where the cameras were located.

There's no footage of the Asuzu driving around the mall, and it was parked in one of the only, if not the only, parking spots that none of the cameras in the lot covered. Despite these red flags, the general consensus among law enforcement was that the McStay family had simply disappeared on their own. Modas ran from shady drug deals to love triangles, mental illness to the mafia. The disappearance of the young family dominated conversations in the community. And despite the interest to see the mystery solved, the case went cold. On November 13, 2013, almost four years after the mixed days vanished, the remains of four bodies were found by a motorcycle rider in two shallow graves in Victorville, California. 100 miles northeast of the McStay's Fallbrook home.

Skeletal remains have been found in the desert over the years that happens, but four bodies together is not something that happens very often. Despite the passage of four years and the 100 mile distance, many people immediately thought of the McStay family. On November 15th, just two days after the remains were found, it was confirmed that these were the remains, of the four McStay's Joseph, Summer, Gianni, and Joey Jr. Joseph and Joey had been buried together in one grave,

and Summer and Gianni were in a second. A rusty three-pound sledgehammer was found in one of the two shallow graves. It's believed to have been the murder weapon, and it had drops of paint on it that matched the paint the McStays were using at their fall broke home. Joseph McStay was hit in the head at least four times with the sledgehammer, and his leg was broken. A key to the Asuzu trooper was found in Joseph's pocket.

There was a cut extension cord wrapped around Joseph's neck. His body was wrapped in a white futon cover, and tie-down straps were wrapped around the futon cover. Little Gianni was hit at least seven times in the head with a sledgehammer. Paint drops were found on Summer's bra that indicate she was lying on her side when the paint dripped on her. This was evidence that someone had painted the walls of the home, while the McStay family were dead inside the house. before they figured out what to do with the bodies.

Also found in the graves was a small children's animal bathrobe. It was Joey's. As seen in photographs, one of Joey Jr.'s bathrobes had a hood with eyes and whiskers on it. There was also a small black backpack with a paintbrush and some sort of gardening tool inside of it. This backpack was Gianni's, and he can be seen wearing it in many photographs shown online. This was all evidence of a cold-blooded and merciless attack on the McStase. Yeah, I think cold-blooded, absolutely. I mean, you know, just think about it, morph, a sledgehammer to the head.

That is so brutal for anyone. But then you have to add in, you know, two small children. I mean, whoever was capable of doing this was an absolute monster, right? That's what people had to have been thinking. To kill an entire family with two small children had to have been. had to have been carried out by someone extremely depraved. Yeah, I think we talk about it a lot, how bad it is to do this to anyone, let alone children. And what's frightening and just terrifying to think of is if these kids had to watch their parents be murdered

and then knew that something bad was going to happen to them, or even the reverse, if somehow the kids were killed first and their parents had to watch that knowing they were going to be. killed. I just can't even imagine being in that situation that they were in in the last moments of their lives. No, I don't think anybody can. Nobody wants to picture that, but it happened. And you have to talk about it because I think it goes to the point of, you know, what type of individual could do this, who could it be. And I want to go back to the theory that the person then painted the house. You factor that in, right? Murdered an entire family and then thought, well, I need to continue painting or I need to finish this up.

That really jumped out of me. It's such a strange thing. Yeah, I wonder if that means that perhaps when they killed them, since they think they were killed inside their home, that maybe there was some kind of blood spatter and they wanted to cover that up on the walls. So investigators wouldn't find it and then hopefully wouldn't connect any kind of. murders happening in the house? Yeah, it's got to be something like that because, you know, why would somebody feel the need to finish a job? I'll call it a job, right? If they were painting a house and, you know, something happened, they ended up killing an entire family. I can't imagine that their next thought would be, well, I better finish this job. That's so strange.

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and then transported to the desert. Unfortunately, as we discussed, after the family was discovered missing and their house was thought basically to be abandoned, other family members cleaned up. So by the time police were able to officially walk through the house with a search warrant on the 19th, things were totally different and potential evidence was lost. chairs had been placed back in the dining room at the table where they belonged. Eggs and bananas that had been left on the counter had been thrown away. The plate of food was washed and the food was thrown away.

There had been newspapers on the floor and table on the 15th. But by the 19th, they had been cleaned up. On the 15th, the futon was in the couch position with popcorn bowls on it. and by the 19th, it was in the bed position and the popcorn bowls had been cleaned up. There are bleach stains on the carpet in photographs from the search, but it's not known, whether they were there before the murders from crime scene cleanup or from the house cleaning that was done. Cadaver dogs were never taken inside the home because there was no evidence of remains inside

the house. The dogs did not alert to anything in the yard. Patrick McStay, Joseph's father, had a few ideas about who could be behind the murders. Summer and Joseph both had exes, and in many cases of murder, a love triangle is involved. Joseph had a child long before he was with Summer, and apparently the relationship with that child's mother and stepfather was somewhat rocky. According to Patrick, months before they disappeared, Summer had called CPS to file a complaint about Michael James' of McFadden, who was 17-year-old Jonah McStay's stepfather. McFadden had once been arrested and Joseph thought about trying to get custody of Jonah. Summer had an ex-boyfriend with a criminal

record who Patrick stated swore that summer and no one else would have his children. She was living with this man named Vic when she met Joseph. And Vic was said to have a bad temper, but he apparently didn't do anything police found suspicious around the time of the murders. Dan Kavanaugh, a business associate of Joseph's, received thousands of dollars, about 13,000 from Joseph's company, Earth-inspired products, after Joseph had disappeared. This was the money from Joseph McStay's PayPal account. Kavanaugh was accused of hacking into Joseph McStay's PayPal account and getting his hands on this money. And as much as this screams guilty to some people, Kavanaugh was in Hawaii

when the mixed days were murdered. The details surrounding this $13,000 PayPal transaction are a little murky. So it's hard to know for sure how Kavanaugh obtained the money or if he actually did hack the PayPal account, as some have suggested. What is clear is that Kavanaugh did tell investigators that Joseph McStay was planning to fire Chase Merritt, the last person that Joseph McStay called. This is the same person that Joseph had spent a long lunch with the day he went missing. Kavanaugh mentioned that Merritt had a large gambling debt. This elevated Chase Merritt as a suspect in investigators' eyes and in the eyes of many people following the case. But Patrick McStay said he trusted his son and Joseph trusted Chase. Chase Merritt also had an alibi. By 9.30 p.m.

Chase's phone was pinging near his home, and his wife Catherine, the mother of Chase's three children, has always claimed that she saw the incoming call from Joseph at 8.28 p.m. that night when her husband was home. During an interview in July 2011 with San Diego County Sheriff's Detective Troy Dougal, Chase Merritt claimed that he had been given six pre-signed checks before Joseph disappeared. He eventually admitted that he had forged Joe. Joseph's signature on three of those checks. Chase, as it turns out, was in a lot of debt. Along with owing the IRS over $120,000 for unpaid taxes, Joseph McStay had loaned Chase merit $30,000 to cover a gambling debt, but still Chase stole money from Joseph. On top of these

thefts, he had stopped finishing the work. He was contracted to perform. Clients were angry. that their custom waterfalls weren't finished, many of the fountains that Chase did complete were not satisfactory, and clients did chargebacks and requested refunds. It was due to the shoddy work that Kavanaugh believed that Joseph was planning to or did try to fire Chase before the family was last heard from in 2010. After the McStay family disappeared, it was found that 76 checks were missing.

They had been generated from Joseph. Joseph's Quickbook software, but they were unaccounted for. If Joseph McStay had become aware that Chase was stealing money from him, even when he employed him and lent him money, the lunch with Chase that day could have been a perfect time to confront or fire Chase due to the thefts, and the suspect work he had done. Their lunch that day was around two hours, based on their phone activity, placing them in the same area for that long,

which is pretty long for an employee termination. Maybe Joseph was very patient and forgiving, or maybe he hadn't found out about the thefts yet. The pattern of some of Joseph's phone calls really makes it seem that he found out about the thefts on the morning of February 4th and started calling his bank to verify activity and check information. For some reason, Joseph called Chase Merritt almost immediately after their lunch. Joseph may have hinted that he was going to take legal action over the thefts.

Even if Joseph wasn't going to go to the authorities about the fraud, Chase could have thought he would and still acted to prevent that and protect himself. It was clearly motive on the part of Chase Merritt. So Morif, I'll just tell you right now, I have fired a lot of people over the years. It's not fun. I've never enjoyed doing it. But I can tell you one thing for sure, none of them ever took two hours. You know, that process is usually fairly quick, right?

You don't want to draw it out. make it last longer than it really needs to. You have a quick conversation, tell the person why, and that's kind of the end of it. Now, I get it. These two guys were probably friends, much more so than the people that I have fired over the years. But it does seem strange that he would have fired him over this two-hour lunch. What seems more likely to me is that.

that there was a discussion that clued Chase into the fact that Joseph was on to him. That seems much more likely to me. Yeah, I think it's very possible that perhaps he confronted him and Chase tried to explain himself and make excuses and play to Joseph's good side and hopefully he would give him another chance or not try and go to the authorities. We don't know. We're speculating, of course, but it could also be that maybe Joseph was so reluctant to fire him that he put it off as long as he could and prolong that launch. We just don't know. But I think it's clear that after that, Joseph seemed to have some kind of concern about his accounts.

DNA from the steering wheel and gear shift of the Azuzu Trooper matched Chase Merritt, even though he claimed he had only ever been a passenger in the car. Merritt's explanation for his DNA, being in places in the trooper he had never touched, is that after he shook hands with Joseph, Joseph touched the car door handle, the steering wheel, and the gear shift. During interviews with authorities in February 2010, he spoke of the McStays in the past tense, which investigators found odd. He also seemed to have a strong disdain for summer mixed day for some reason, as well as another co-worker of Joseph's, Dan Kavanaugh. At the time of these interviews with police, the mixed days had only been missing for days.

They weren't considered to be dead. They weren't even considered to be victims of foul play at that point. But Chase went as far as to say unprompted that if he would kill anyone, it would be Dan Kavanaugh. One thing that seems worth noting looking back is that police noted that during his February 2010 interview, Chase Merritt had a fresh cut on his hand that he claimed happened when he was cutting sheet metal. So I get it. Not easy to be interviewed by police. A lot of people are rattled. They're scared.

The one advice I would give to people is when you're denying the fact that. that you killed a person or individuals, don't say if I were to kill someone, it would be this person. That seems so odd to me. Why would you be talking about killing anyone? Yeah, that seems like something you wouldn't want to tell police under any circumstance that you're capable of it, just not the person you think that I killed. And again, I'm glad that these guys do make mistakes and it helps them get caught when when it's needed. But I think that's a prime example of why attorneys say don't talk to the police without your attorney present. Yeah, we see it time and time again, you know, people saying things to police, they think they're so smart, right? They

think they're going to outwit detectives. So I'll give them something. It won't be related to the crime that they're talking about. Right. So, So it may be a crime that I've committed in the past that's small. That's going to throw them off this murder. Or I'm going to say, well, I would never have killed them. I tell you who I would kill this Dan Kavanaugh guy. It's just, it's ludicrous. Once the mixed days remains were found, all of the circumstantial evidence against Chase,

the DNA in the Susu, the thefts, the final phone call from Joseph to his phone, backdating checks to the day of the murder, and especially speaking of the McStay's in the past tense, before anyone ever theorized they were dead, all fell into place and seemed damning. A final piece of the puzzle is that Chase Merritt's sister was living in Victorville in 2010, when the McStay family's bodies were buried there. On November 5, 2014, Chase Merritt was arrested by the San Bernardino County Police Department for the murders of the four McStay family members. After he was arrested, Patrick McStay revealed that he had suspected Chase Merritt all along,

causing many to believe that his previously talked about support for Merritt was just an act and that he hoped Chase would let his guard down or slip up somehow. Evidence continued to mount against Merritt. Experts determined that at 7.59 p.m. on February 4, 2010, a check was written in QuickBooks on the McStay's computer and then deleted. This seems to have been some kind of test run, because on February 5th, at 12.06 p.m., Chase Merritt wrote a check to himself using Joseph's QuickBooks account and then deleted it from QuickBooks. He cashed the check at 1238 p.m. If Joseph had changed all of his passwords because of the cloud access to QuickBooks, that allowed the theft in the first, place, maybe Chase had to force him to give up the new password. This could explain why Joseph's leg was broken. There's no log of a password change in QuickBooks, but this doesn't mean that Chase

had the McStay family computer password. The 828 ping from Joseph's phone and Fallbrook that night could have been Chase trying to access his phone, which also had QuickBooks access. In the aftermath of the arrest, many people wondered how multiple people, including authority, were able to walk through the mixed day home and not notice that a family of four had been bludgeoned somewhere inside. Photographs from the crime scene show red spatter of some kind on the kitchen table.

One detective testified that he didn't notice this when he was at the scene. The table was never tested. So it's not known whether this was blood or something you might expect to find on a kitchen table, something like ketchup or spaghetti sauce. One sad result of all the attention this case brought was that Summer Mix Day was really dragged through the mud on social media and in many theories surrounding the case.

After the remains were found, an author named Rick Baker, who had published a book with a theory that Summer had been involved in something nefarious and was responsible for her family's disappearance, offered people who had purchased the book refunds and demanded the Amazon stopped selling the book. So I found this very interesting more. You know, this guy writes a book in the three years between, you know, the family going missing and there remains being found. One of his theories, or maybe the main theory, I didn't read the book, was that Summer was involved, right? At the very least in Joseph's death.

And then obviously when the remains of all four members of the McState, family are found, that theory is no longer plausible. I guess the question I have is how do you write a book on a theory and how do you back up your claims? I mean, how do you back up something that didn't happen? Again, not having read the book, I'm just kind of trying to figure that out in my mind. Well, I think that's the problem with writing books about unsolved cases, because since it's not solve, you could say almost anything. And unless someone can prove you wrong, your theory or what you're writing in the book could be accurate. And you don't know. I look at something like the Zodiac case, for example, there's 10 different books by people claiming to know who the Zodiac was

naming different suspects. But they're not all right. If the case is ever solved, some people are going to have some backtracking to do. And I think that's sort of what happened. here. Yeah, but even in those books, don't they at least kind of offer up why they think it was this person doesn't mean that it's factual. I'm just wondering what kind of backed up his theory. Again, like I said, I didn't read the book. I'm not going to read the book. Probably can't read the book at this point. It's just very interesting that it happened that way. But it's also sad when you think about this woman being dragged through the mud on social media, we mentioned it, right?

There were a lot of people, not just this guy who wrote the book. There were a lot of people who offered up theories that the man seen in the video was not Joseph, but the woman was summer. And it was another man. And so therefore, she must have had a hand in Joseph's death. that couldn't have been easy for her family to have to see, read, hear about all of these people kind of dragging her down. Yeah, unfortunately, we see that a lot.

It's common with these cases where people's minds just start going to all these different places and coming up with different ideas. And sadly, sometimes that includes sort of victim blaming. In this case, it's definitely the case. But I do give the author Rick Baker some credit, you know, He realized he made a mistake and he did the right thing by trying to correct it and get the book off the shelves and refund people that have bought the book. Yeah, I think that's a good point. That's a very good point.

But Rick Baker wasn't the only person who wrote books on this case. Chase Merritt claimed that he was writing a book about the McStay family and their disappearance. He told investigators that he had written seven chapters and then stopped writing the book. In this book, he was going to tell all. about how Summer McStay was poisoning Joseph, and that was the cause of his sudden bouts of illness that would leave him bedridden. Online commenters found some are suspicious because she had changed her name before, and she may not have had the best relationship with Joseph's family and friends. Others found the $13,000 PayPal transaction connected to Dan Cavanall to be suspicious,

receiving a lot of money after the McStays were missing. But he didn't try and make any of the transactions he was involved with look like they were done before the family went missing. Chase Merritt, on the other hand, backdated his checks. Chase's backdating points to him knowing that the family was dead, and there was a need to backdate the checks to before they went missing. At Merritt's trial, the defense tried to point the blame at Kavanaugh, which is likely what Chase was trying to do in his initial interviews with police. in the end, the jury focused on the evidence and found Chase Merritt guilty and recommended he be sentenced to death.

And that's exactly what the judge went with. Merritt received the death penalty sentence on January 21st, 2020. There will definitely be appeals. We'll probably never know the full details surrounding the cold-blooded murders of the McStay family or the horrible thoughts that they experienced at the end of the their lives, perhaps the parents having to see their children bludgeoned to death, or morph as you talked about, the other way around. You know, the children frightened as they watched their mom and dad killed. No matter what, it's a nightmarish ending for the family, one that really demonstrates the evil in this world and an age old motive, greed, which is often at the center of these kinds of cases.

So morph as we wrap up this case, I think there's a few things to talk about. You know, let's start off talking about greed. It's true, right? It is the root of maybe not all evil, but the root of a lot of it. You know, how many cases have we done or how many cases have you seen over the years where greed is involved, the money is involved? You know, obviously this guy chased merit. he had a gambling problem he had a number of different problems it sounds like he wasn't a very good

employee he had money issues and that can happen to a lot of people right some people get addicted to gambling some people just don't know how to manage their finances and they get in debt up to their eyeballs but to murder a family of four including two young children to try to dig your way out of debt. That is unbelievable to me. This is not a case where, you know, someone found their wife in the arms of another man. You know, this is not a crime of passion, not to say that those are any better, but to me, this is you're in a tight spot with money and you consciously make the decision that my best way out of this is to kill my friend, his wife, and their two young children. How do you come to that decision? What's going through your mind as you're trying to figure

your next steps that you come to that? I think most of us have a hard time placing ourselves in that position because we don't think like someone like that thinks. We're not going to deal with a situation like that. I mean, there's other options if you find yourself in financial debt. You know, there's bankruptcy or credit counseling. There's ways that you can deal with a situation where you're having financial problems instead of resorting to murder and not just one murder, but four murders, and then going through great lengths to hide the car and cover up the crime scene, even paint the walls. There's just no sign of any remorse or any second thoughts here. he went through with it and then just did everything he could to cover his ass.

Yeah, I mean, you said it, right? There's other ways out of the situation. Hell, get a second job. Get a third job. I have to imagine the majority of people listening right now, whether it's when they were younger or maybe not that long ago, have found themselves in some sort of financial difficulty. And I guarantee that the first thought,

was not, who can I kill to get me some money? I think, you know, that's reserved for a very certain type of person, someone who doesn't care about other people at all, really only cares about their situation and how to get out of it. Yeah, a couple takeaways this case demonstrates for me is a couple old things that are known in the policing world. The first being that if you can find the motive, most times you'll find the person responsible. And then the second thing being that most of the time, it's someone close to the victim.

And I think finding that motive in this case, which was greed, and then finding someone close to the victim, they both came together. And most of the time that is the case here when you have these kinds of things happen. and it's someone close to the victims. And there's usually a motive there that involves, you know,

whether it's greed or jealousy or love triangles. There's something there that sets them off. Most of the time, these people aren't killed by strangers just out of the blue. Yeah, it's interesting because a lot of the cases that you and I do actually do involve stranger on stranger murders, right? When you think about serial killers and people, like that, they are often choosing their victims randomly. Those are much tougher cases to solve, but that's not the majority of crime. It's not the majority of murders. Like you said,

I think more often than not, murders are committed by people that are known to the victims. And that's obviously exactly what happened in this case. I do think it was sad as we talked about that summer was dragged through the mud the way that she was. I get it. Okay, she didn't have the greatest relationship maybe with her in-laws, but to kind of go right to that, that she must have been involved, she likely killed her husband. You know, it's rough. It's rough. But, you know, I get it with these unsolved cases while they are unsolved. theories are going to fly. People are going to come up with all kinds of things. I do want to kind of go back to that video, the video, which was obviously grainy, you can only see the backs of the individuals, four people crossing the border

into Mexico. I think that played a big part in some of the speculation and the rumors surrounding summer. I think people naturally went to, these four people must be the mixed stays. And, And okay, we can make a case that the man is not Joseph because Joseph's already been killed. Summer was involved. She got involved with another man. And that's what happened. But in the end, more if the video had nothing to do with this case. And we have no idea who those four people are that walked into Mexico.

The most frightening part of this case to me is had that motorcycle rider not found their body. where would this case be today? Would it be solved at all? You know, because even if the police somehow had come back to suspect Chase Merritt, would they have enough to make an arrest? This case could very well be unsolved right now. Yeah, I mean, I think everyone knows, right, that it's not impossible to get a murder conviction without a body, but it's definitely tougher because the defense is always going to argue, you know, well, how can you convict on murder when you don't know for sure that these people are dead? There's the video. How do we know that that's not them voluntarily walking into Mexico and wanting to get lost and live off the grid? And you see that in a lot of

cases. They seem to turn on a dime when, let's say, the bodies are found or, you know, this one piece of information comes out that starts to kind of unravel the entire mystery. I'm just happy that the family was found and there was some kind of justice here and their remaining family has some answers and aren't wondering for the rest of their lives what happened to the family. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the sad thing in a lot of the unsolved cases is that you get 20, 30, 40 years. on and family members still don't know what happened to their loved ones and it's very sad.

Thanks goes out to Sunny Landon for writing and research assistance in this episode. As always, if you love the show but haven't done so yet, take a minute, go out, give us a five-star rating, you can leave a review, but keep telling your friends. Word of mouth about the criminology podcast really goes a long way. If you want to find us on social media, we're on Twitter at the handle at Criminology Pod. You can also find us on Facebook by searching for criminology podcast or by joining our Facebook discussion group, criminology podcast discussion and fans. So Morph, that is it for our episode on the McStay family murders and another episode of criminology. But we'll be back

with everyone next Saturday night with an all new episode. So until then for Mike and Morf. We'll talk to you next week. Take care, everyone.