Michael McStay pulled up to his brother Joseph’s house on Avocado Vista Lane, praying that he wouldn’t have to break in. Joseph McStay, along with his wife and two young boys, had not been heard from in nine diays. Calls and texts went unanswered.
Michael had never even been to his brother’s house, which he had moved into just a few months previous. To find it, Michael had enlisted the help of Joseph’s business partner, Charles “Chase” Merritt, to show him the way. Chase had been the last person to speak with Joseph and the first person to notice that he wasn’t responding. The two met up at a gas station in Fallbrook, where Merritt took the lead.
Michael and Merritt knocked on the front door of the house. No answer. They canvassed nearby neighbors for information. None had seen the family, and none had any idea where they might be.
Michael decided that he had to get inside. Heading around to the back of the house, he saw the family’s two dogs still in the fenced yard, hungry and neglected. From the back yard, he discovered an open window to the home’s office and crawled inside.
The scene that greeted Michael inside the house made no sense, as a carton of eggs sat out on the counter and two child-sized bowls of popcorn sat on the couch. Despite this, there was no note left behind and no sign of struggle.
Joseph McStay, his wife Summer, and their young sons Gianni and Joseph Jr. seemed to have just vanished without a single indication of how or why.
The McStay Family Investigation Begins
Six days after Michael’s visit to the McStay family’s home, a search warrant for the premises was finally approved. The San Diego homicide team that swept through the house found no more sign of struggle than Michael had. One investigator noted that a futon seemed to be missing its cushion cover, but nothing else seemed out of place.
A neighbor’s security camera had recorded the family’s Isuzu leaving the house at 7:47p.m. on the last day they were heard from, but the angle of the camera meant the occupants of the vehicle were not visible. The Isuzu had been towed from a parking lot four days later, in the border city of San Ysidro, 70 miles south. Security guards told detectives that it may have been parked there between 5:30 and 7:00p.m. that night. The vehicle contained no signs of struggle either – no blood, or suspicious items.
Within three days of the search, authorities admitted to being baffled. “Quite frankly, I’ve never seen a case like this before,” said San Diego County Sheriff’s Lt. Dennis Brugos.
The Business Partner
Without many leads to go on, the investigation and the media both centered attention on Chase Merritt. He had been the last person to speak with Joseph the day he disappeared.
In an interview with investigators, Merritt described his three-year relationship with Joseph McStay as business partners who became friends. Merritt was the creative force behind their custom indoor waterfall company, Earth Inspired Products, while Joseph handled the business and sales. In an interview with CNN, Merritt said he would often have dinner with the family, sometimes more than once a week, and had even helped them move into the home they vanished from.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, he confirmed that he and Joseph had met that morning, as they often did, and had spoken on the phone several times that day. He added:
“It has been reported that I spoke to [Joseph] in the evening, but that isn’t true. He did call me at 8.28pm, but I was watching a movie with my girlfriend, looked at the phone and decided not to answer. I didn’t answer that call and I regret it to this day.”
Phone records confirmed his account.
Soon after the disappearance, Lt. Brugos asked Merritt to take a lie detector test. At first Merritt declined, but after consideration, he decided to get it over with “so they can forget about me and focus on something that might actually help find him.”
Merritt passed the test.
Joseph and Michael’s father, Patrick McStay, was conducting his own investigation. He mostly dismissed the notion that Merritt was involved in the disappearance.
“What does Chase have to gain with Joey gone?” Patrick asked one reporter. “Chase isn’t going to get the company. I have to have faith in Chase because I have to have faith in my son. Do I think Chase is involved? I don’t think so and I truly hope not.”
Reason for The McStay Family to Head South of the Border?
On March 5, one month and one day after the McStay family disappeared, deputies announced a new lead in the case: video surveillance footage from a camera facing San Ysidro’s border with Mexico. The video was time-stamped at 7p.m. the night the Isuzu was towed. In the lower left corner of the frame, a man appears to walk hand in hand with a small child toward the Tijuana border, followed closely by a woman holding hands with another child.
Authorities claimed the family was likely Joseph, Summer and their young boys. The rest of the McStay family wasn’t entirely sure what to think. They felt almost certain that Joseph and Summer would not simply abandon their home, business, and more than $100k in the bank to move to Mexico without telling anyone. Some family members seemed to recognize the white jacket worn by the woman in the video as Summer’s, but Michael wasn’t so sure. “It’s very grainy, overshadowed, there’s no definition to shape,” he said.
And there was one was one final piece of the Mexico puzzle to come.
About three weeks after publicizing the border video, deputies finally revealed something they had not previously made public:
McStays Wanted to Go to Mexico
A week before the McStays disappeared they had used their home computer to search the phrase “What documents do children need for traveling in Mexico?”
“It’s significant because it shows us at least there was some sort of planning perhaps for going into Mexico,” said Lt. Dennis Brugos of the San Diego Sheriff’s Department. He added that leaving perishable food out did not point to criminal activity.
About the surveillance video, Lt. Brugos now said, “There’s a very high probability it’s them.”
Despite the national media attention that surrounded the case, leads just never seemed to pan out. This included a feature story on America’s Most Wanted and the most extensive missing-person search in San Diego history.
More than three years passed before the San Diego Sheriff’s Department officially announced that the McStay family left for Mexico voluntarily. They would be proven wrong seven months later.
They Fled to Mexico or so we Thought
On November 11, 2013, motorcyclist John Bluth was riding alone on his Kawasaki in the desert north of Victorville, CA, looking for a specific trail. He thought perhaps he’d missed it, and circled back off-road when something on the ground caught his attention. He stopped the motorcycle and stood over a smooth white object. Using a nearby stick, he turned it over, and decided it was almost certainly bone. Bluth called 911.
Within 24 hours, investigators were unearthing two shallow graves, each containing two members of the McStay family.
The remains of Joseph McStay were found wrapped in the white futon cover missing from the home, secured by red tie-down straps and an extension cord tied in a knot around his neck.
Summer’s pants and panties had been removed, and were found in the grave near her head, appearing to have been pulled off together, and there were incisions in her bra that made investigators believe it had been cut off.
Three-year-old Joseph Jr. had been mostly carried off by predators; the only parts that remained were three bones, four bone fragments, and the top of his skull, which had been spotted by Bluth.
The McStay family had all been savagely beaten to death with a three pound sledgehammer. Four-year-old Gianni had suffered seven blows to the head. Along with the sledgehammer, investigators unearthed a child’s backpack and a pull-up diaper.
Michael McStay tried to maintain his composure at the news, asking the media and the public for time to grieve as investigators tried to identify a brutal murderer.
The Arrest of the Brutal Killer
One year later, in November of 2014, Charles Merritt was arrested for the McStay family murders. While investigators said there was no smoking gun, they planned to introduce a motive and evidence at trial that would make Merritt eligible for the death penalty.
Joseph’s father, Patrick McStay, had grown increasingly suspicious of Merritt since January of 2014, when he gave another interview to the Daily Mail in which he claimed to be writing a book about the family. Merritt said the book would detail the strained relationship between the McStay couple, claiming that Joseph suspected Summer of poisoning him, resulting in a mysterious, undiagnosable illness that had been afflicting him in the months preceding his disappearance.
Patrick knew that his son had indeed been strangely ill. However, the bizarre accusation put the former business partner high on his radar. Here again, Merritt was inserting himself into the case and apparently trying to profit from salacious insider knowledge.
When he called to ask about the book, Merritt asked Patrick to collaborate with him on the project. Patrick played along to keep his potential suspect close.
When asked about his response to the news that Merritt had been arrested for the murder of his son’s family, Patrick McStay said, “I don’t know how to describe it. It was shock, but not shock.”
The Prosecution of Chase Merritt
The trial began in January of 2019. It was not difficult for the prosecution to make Merritt look suspicious to the jury. Evidence was presented that Merritt owed Joseph McStay about $40,000, and that in the days leading up to the family’s disappearance, Merritt had been embezzling from the business and using the money to gamble.
On February 6th, 2010, two days after the disappearance, five calls made by Merritt pinged to a cell tower in Victorville, near the McStay family graves.
He had lived — and even been convicted of a burglary — in the area previously.
Chase Merritt’s DNA was found on the gearshift and steering wheel of the Isuzu, though an expert testified that the amount was so small that it could have been transferred there by Joseph’s hands, and that he would have expected to see much more after a 90-minute drive. The defense pointed out that Chase had been in the car many times with Joseph, but that certainly did not implicate him in the murders.
The prosecution claimed that grainy, indistinct video showed Merritt’s truck leaving the McStay home the night they disappeared. This was seen as an echo of the Tijuana border video. The defense contrasted the video with high-resolution photos of Merritt’s truck, claiming the vehicles were clearly different.
The most neglected aspect of the crime at trial was the location of the murders. Prosecutors told the jury that Merritt had killed the family in their home, then managed to clean up the mess.
Conviction of Charles Ray Merritt
In defense attorney James McGee’s closing arguments, he said to the jury, “The idea this was done here is just ridiculous. What evidence did they show you that it was cleaned up?”
After 85 days of a live-streamed trial, a jury found Charles Ray Merritt guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. The jury deliberated for six days. On January 21st 2020, Merritt was sentenced to death.
At that sentencing, Joseph McStay’s mother took the stand to publicly attack Merritt. “This despicable, evil monster,” she said. “You beat two precious little babies. Charles, you are a low-life coward and a baby killer.”
Upon hearing his fate, Merritt sobbed his way through prepared comments, vowing to prove his innocence:
“I loved Joseph. He was a big part of my life and my family’s life. I would never have hurt him in any way. I would never raise my hand to a woman or child. I did not do this thing. I know you do not believe this.”
