On February 4, 2010, Joseph McStay called his father, Patrick, to say he would be late for a lunch meeting with his business partner. His wife, Summer, had just spoken with her sister. Their sons, 4-year-old Gianni and 3-year-old Joey, were playing in the yard of their home in Fallbrook, California.
Everything seemed normal. It was the last day anyone would see them alive.
After 7:47 p. m. , a neighbor’s security camera captured a vehicle leaving the McStay driveway.
Then silence. No calls, no texts, no messages. Nine days later, Joseph’s brother Michael climbed through a window and found popcorn still in bowls, spoiled eggs on the counter, and two hungry dogs in the backyard.
There were no signs of violence. The family of four had vanished without a trace.
Their white 1996 Isuzu Trooper was found near the Mexican border in San Ysidro. A grainy surveillance video appeared to show four people walking toward Tijuana. Police concluded the family had left voluntarily and closed the case.
For three years, the investigation sat dormant.
In November 2013, a motorcyclist discovered a small skull protruding from the sand in the Mojave Desert, about 100 miles north of the McStay home. Beneath the surface were two shallow graves containing four sets of remains. Joseph, 40; Summer, 43; Gianni, 4; and Joey, 3, had all been beaten to death with a sledgehammer.
The man who reported them missing, who wept for them on television, and who claimed to be the last person to see Joseph, was the one who held the hammer.
It took four years of investigation and a trial built entirely on circumstantial evidence to bring him to justice.
Joseph McStay was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1969. He grew up in an ordinary family and moved to California as an adult, where he founded Earth Inspired Products, a small company that designed and sold decorative indoor water fountains. He ran most of the business from home, handling orders, packaging, and installations himself.
The flexible schedule allowed him to spend time with his family, which was exactly what he wanted.
Summer McStay, born Virginia Lisa Aranda in 1966, was a licensed real estate agent who worked as a full-time mother and handled the company’s bookkeeping. Friends described her as protective, devoted, and strong. The couple’s first son, Gianni, was born in 2005, followed by Joey in 2007.
The boys were described as smart and smiling, often seen playing in the backyard or going to the beach with their parents.
In the winter of 2009, the family moved to Fallbrook, a quiet town in northern San Diego County. Their new home sat on Avocado Vista Lane, a peaceful street lined with fences and orchards. Summer was busy redecorating while Joseph continued growing his business.
Everything was going well.
That was when Charles Merritt entered the story.
Charles “Chase” Merritt was Joseph’s oldest business partner. A professional welder, Merritt was hired to design and fabricate the metal frames for Earth Inspired Products’ fountains. The relationship went beyond work.
Joseph considered Merritt a close friend. Merritt worked at the McStay home, knew the family well, and knew each child’s name. They had lunch together and spoke regularly by phone.
Joseph trusted Merritt enough to give him access to the company’s financial accounts. He even lent Merritt money to pay gambling debts, money that was never repaid.
What Joseph didn’t know was that Merritt had a criminal record from the 1970s and 1980s, including theft and receiving stolen property. He owed more than $20,000 in unpaid taxes and was in severe financial trouble. He had a serious gambling problem that was getting worse.
By early 2010, Merritt owed Joseph nearly $43,000.
On January 31, 2010, the family celebrated Joey’s third birthday. Four days later, they disappeared.
February 4, 2010, began like any other day. Joseph called his father and said he was in a hurry to meet his partner. Summer spoke with her sister, who had just given birth.
The couple exchanged texts around 5 p. m. Nothing unusual.
Then at 7:47 p. m. , a neighbor’s camera captured the bottom of a vehicle believed to be the McStays’ Trooper leaving the driveway.
After that moment, Joseph stopped answering his phone. Summer stopped communicating with anyone. Four people vanished into the California night.
In the first days, the family wasn’t overly concerned. Patrick called, but no one answered. Michael called too, but calls went to voicemail.
They convinced themselves Joseph was busy or the family had taken a short trip. But Patrick knew his son. Joseph always called back.
He wouldn’t disappear without a word.
On February 13, nine days after the last contact, Michael drove to Fallbrook. The house was still. The front door was locked, no lights were on, and the family car wasn’t in the garage.
Michael found an open window and climbed inside. He found two bowls of uneaten popcorn, eggs left on the kitchen counter that had spoiled, fresh food that hadn’t been put away, and toys scattered on the floor. In the backyard, the family’s two dogs were hungry and thirsty, without food for over a week.
There were no signs of a break-in, no blood, no signs of a struggle. The house looked as if the family had simply stood up in the middle of dinner and walked out, never to return. But they left the dogs.
Anyone who knew Summer McStay knew she would never leave the dogs without arranging care.
On February 15, family members reported the McStays missing to the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. On February 19, homicide detectives searched the home. Their official conclusion was that there were no signs of a struggle and no clear evidence of a crime.
On February 8, four days after the family disappeared, the McStays’ white Isuzu Trooper was found near San Ysidro, right next to the Mexican border crossing. The car had been parked on the street and was impounded as abandoned. For investigators, finding the car there meant something specific: someone had driven to the border and walked across.
On March 5, police released surveillance footage from the border crossing. The video showed a blurry, low-quality image of four people, two adults and two small children, holding hands and walking through a pedestrian gate into Mexico. The timestamp matched the day the car was abandoned.
Then investigators found what they believed was the decisive clue. On the family’s home computer, there was a search history from January 28, 2010, just seven days before the disappearance. Someone had searched for information about traveling to Mexico, passport requirements for children, and how to learn Spanish.
With the car at the border, the video of four people, and the computer search history, a story took shape. The McStay family had voluntarily gone to Mexico. No crime, no victims, just a family that decided to leave without telling anyone.
That was the conclusion the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department accepted. That was the theory they announced to the media. That was why they stopped searching.
But Patrick McStay refused to accept that narrative. He knew his son wouldn’t leave the dogs without a word, wouldn’t cut off contact with his father, and wouldn’t take two small children to Mexico without preparation. He looked at the evidence police called convincing and saw something different.
Someone had staged it all. Someone wanted the world to believe the McStays had left.
The San Diego Sheriff’s Department concluded the family had voluntarily left the country. The case was handed to the FBI, but the transfer was more of a file move than an expanded investigation. The FBI chased hundreds of leads related to Mexico, all dead ends.
In February 2010, Interpol was notified. Flyers were distributed along the border. Nothing.
While the justice system looked south, Patrick McStay looked in every direction. He had no badge, no authority, no investigative team. He was just a father searching for his son.
He obtained access to Joseph’s email and read hundreds of messages. He called Joseph’s friends, colleagues, and customers. In November 2010, Patrick contacted investigators and reported suspicious activity by one of Joseph’s business partners.
He had found financial transactions that didn’t add up, money moving through company accounts that Joseph couldn’t have approved if he was in Mexico without a phone or computer.
Patrick told police he believed someone was exploiting his son’s absence to drain money from the business. Police logged the tip and did nothing. Patrick later told CBS News he had a list of three people he suspected in the family’s disappearance.
“I was exhausted and I had a lot of information on three potential suspects,” he said. “They all had motive.” No one listened.
Three years passed. From 2010 to 2013, the McStay case remained what investigators call a cold case. No new leads, no new witnesses, no new developments.
The McStays became one of thousands of unsolved missing persons cases across America. But Patrick never forgot. Michael never forgot.
Susan Blake, Joseph’s mother, never forgot.
On November 11, 2013, a motorcyclist was riding through the desolate desert near Victorville, California, about 100 miles north of the McStay home. Victorville sits on the southwestern edge of the Mojave Desert, an arid, scorching region rarely visited by humans except for a reason. Sometimes the reason is burying something no one wants found.
The motorcyclist stopped when he saw something protruding from the sand. Small, round, white. A skull.
A child’s skull.
Investigators were called to the scene immediately. As they began digging, they found not one grave but two shallow graves, each containing multiple sets of remains. Four in total: two adults and two children, buried in the desert sand, covered with rocks and dirt, only a few feet below the surface.
Beside the remains, investigators found a 3-pound sledgehammer buried in the dirt with them.
Patrick McStay was notified of the discovery. On November 15, 2013, the San Bernardino County coroner confirmed the identities of two of the four remains: Joseph McStay, 40, and Summer McStay, 43. The remaining remains were identified as Gianni and Joey.
The cause of death for all four was blunt force trauma to the head. They had all been beaten to death, including 4-year-old Gianni and 3-year-old Joey, the child who had celebrated his third birthday just four days before disappearing.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department took over the investigation, replacing both San Diego and the FBI. The Mexico theory collapsed completely. The McStays had not left voluntarily.
They had not started a new life. They had been lying in the desert 100 miles north of their home for three years while the world looked south.
When investigators began reviewing old files, one name kept appearing: Charles “Chase” Merritt. He was Joseph’s business partner, the last person to call Joseph before the family disappeared, and the one who had reported the family missing. In the context of the Mexico theory, Merritt was treated only as a witness, not a suspect.
No one investigated his background. No one reviewed his finances. No one asked why the business partner was the first to notice the family’s disappearance, before Joseph’s parents and siblings.
The San Bernardino investigators started with Merritt. What they found beneath the surface was more horrifying than what they found in the desert.
The starting point was QuickBooks, the online accounting program Joseph used to manage Earth Inspired Products. When investigators examined the company’s QuickBooks account, they discovered a series of transactions no one could explain if Joseph was actually in Mexico. After February 4, 2010, the day the family disappeared, someone continued to access Joseph’s QuickBooks account.
Someone printed checks from the company’s bank account. Several checks for thousands of dollars each, all written to the same person: Charles Merritt.
Many of those checks were backdated to February 4, 2010, the same day the family disappeared. Someone had tried to create the impression that these payments were approved by Joseph before his disappearance, that they were normal business transactions rather than theft. But Joseph McStay wasn’t there on February 4 to approve anything.
He was dying or already dead.
Then came the evidence prosecutors would later describe as one of Merritt’s biggest mistakes. A QuickBooks customer service employee remembered an unusual call. A man called, identified himself as Joseph McStay, and demanded the account be deleted entirely, all information erased without a trace.
The employee asked for the security password. The caller didn’t have it. The request was denied.
The account was not deleted. All the information, the forged checks, the fraudulent transactions, the login history, remained intact in the system.
When investigators traced the phone number used to call QuickBooks customer service, it didn’t belong to Joseph McStay. It belonged to Charles Merritt. He had called impersonating a dead man in an attempt to erase evidence of his own theft and failed.
Investigators continued digging into the finances. They found an email from Joseph dated February 1, 2010, three days before the family disappeared, in which Joseph clearly stated that Merritt owed him about $43,000. When investigators examined Merritt’s personal finances, the $43,000 was nowhere to be found.
The money had likely gone to the casinos Merritt frequented. Merritt also owed more than $20,000 in unpaid federal taxes. He was drowning in debt from every direction, and by early 2010, his main source of income, working with Earth Inspired Products, was threatened.
A third business partner, Daniel Kavanaugh, told investigators that Joseph was planning to fire Merritt. The prosecutor later explained their theory: Joseph had discovered unauthorized withdrawals, and on February 4, Joseph met Merritt at a Chick-fil-A restaurant, not for lunch, but to fire him. “A man who owes $43,000, is addicted to gambling, and is about to lose his only source of income, and has just been caught stealing from his partner,” the prosecutor said.
“That was the motive.”
The next evidence showed Merritt not only had motive but opportunity. Cell phone records showed Merritt’s phone connecting to towers near the desert area where the bodies were buried, just two days after the family disappeared. His phone was in Victorville, not at his home in Homeland, not anywhere he had a legitimate reason to be, but in the desert near the same place where a motorcyclist would find a small skull protruding from the sand three years later.
When investigators collected DNA samples from inside the McStays’ Isuzu Trooper, the car found near the Mexican border, they found Merritt’s DNA inside. This directly contradicted Merritt’s own statement. In a February 2010 interview with San Diego investigators, Merritt said he had never driven that car, never sat in it, never touched it.
But his DNA said otherwise.
In 2014, after the bodies were found but before anyone was arrested, Chase Merritt appeared on a television news program. He sat before the camera and expressed sadness over the loss of the McStay family. Then he said a sentence investigators would replay dozens of times: “I’m pretty sure I was the last person to see him.”
Not the last person to speak with him, not the last person to communicate with him, but the last person to see him. He also spoke about Joseph in the past tense. Not “Joseph is,” but “Joseph was.”
A small slip, the kind ordinary people don’t notice, but investigators are trained to hear. You don’t speak about someone in the past tense unless you’re certain they’re dead. At that point, no one knew for certain the McStays were dead.
Except the person who killed them.
Then came the detail that seemed too strange for fiction. Chase Merritt was writing a book about the McStay family’s disappearance. The killer was writing a book about his victims.
He had called Patrick McStay, Joseph’s father, to suggest they collaborate. “He wanted me to read what he was writing,” Patrick recalled. “He started reading it to me.
He said, ‘Why don’t we collaborate on a book?’” Patrick played along, hoping to gather information. He hid his disgust and listened to the man he increasingly believed had killed his son read aloud a draft about the very murder.
In November 2014, nearly a year after the bodies were found, Charles “Chase” Merritt was arrested and charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Joseph McStay, 40; Summer McStay, 43; Gianni, 4; and Joey, 3. The charges included the special circumstance of multiple murders, making Merritt eligible for the death penalty. Merritt, 57 at the time of his arrest, pleaded not guilty to all four charges.
He was held without bail.
From the moment he stood before the judge, Merritt insisted on one thing: he was innocent. Between Merritt’s denial and the start of the actual trial, nearly five years passed. Five years of delays, motions, legal arguments, changes of attorneys, and preparations.
The preliminary hearing took place in 2015, where a judge determined there was enough evidence to bring Merritt to trial. The evidence included the QuickBooks checks, the DNA in the family’s Trooper, and cell phone location data near the graves. There was no direct physical evidence linking Merritt to the sledgehammer or to the crime scene inside the Fallbrook home.
No fingerprints on the murder weapon. No DNA at the burial site. No eyewitness who saw him commit the crime.
The prosecution’s entire case was built from beginning to end on circumstantial evidence.
The actual trial began in January 2019 in San Bernardino Superior Court. It lasted more than four months, becoming one of the most closely watched criminal cases in Southern California that decade.
The prosecution opened with the statement they would spend four months proving: all four McStay family members were killed by severe head injuries. Then they built the picture of motive, means, and opportunity. Motive: Merritt owed Joseph $43,000, was addicted to gambling, owed more than $20,000 in taxes, and was about to be fired from his only source of income.
Means: a 3-pound sledgehammer found in the grave, the type of tool a welder like Merritt used every day. Opportunity: Merritt himself claimed to be the last person to see Joseph on February 4 at Chick-fil-A, and no one else witnessed that meeting.
Prosecutors presented the financial evidence: the backdated QuickBooks checks, the call impersonating Joseph to delete the account, the flow of money from Earth Inspired Products into Merritt’s hands after the family’s death. They presented cell phone data placing Merritt near the desert graves two days after the disappearance. They presented the DNA in the Trooper contradicting Merritt’s claim he never sat in the car.
They presented the computer search history about travel to Mexico, arguing it wasn’t Joseph or Summer who made those searches, but Merritt, who had access to the family computer and created a false trail for investigators.
Piece by piece, the prosecution assembled the story: Merritt killed the entire family inside their Fallbrook home on the night of February 4, repainted the walls to hide blood evidence, placed the bodies in the car, drove to the Mojave Desert, dug two graves, buried the four people with the sledgehammer, then drove the Trooper to the San Ysidro border to create the illusion the family had gone to Mexico. Then he returned home and began draining money from the dead man’s accounts.
The defense attacked every piece of evidence. If Merritt had killed four people with a sledgehammer inside the Fallbrook home, where was the blood? Blunt force trauma to the head with a sledgehammer would produce an enormous amount of blood, splattered on walls, ceiling, floor, and the killer’s clothing.
But when investigators searched the home, they found not a single drop of blood. Even with the repainting the prosecution alleged, modern forensic technology could detect blood through multiple layers of paint. They found nothing.
The defense also attacked the DNA evidence. Merritt’s DNA in the Trooper only proved he had been in the car, which any close business partner could explain. There was no Merritt DNA on the sledgehammer, no hair, no skin, no blood at the burial site.
Then the defense presented what many observers considered their strongest argument: “The two graves alone tell you this was the work of two people. If you’re one person killing four people and burying them, you dig one hole, not two.” A single man alone in the dark desert night digging two separate graves, burying four bodies, then driving back home.
Was that even possible? The defense said no.
They also pointed to an alternative suspect, another business partner with his own motive to want the family gone. They presented evidence about Summer McStay’s clothing found at the burial site, suggesting she may have been sexually assaulted before being killed, a pattern of behavior that didn’t match Merritt’s profile.
The trial lasted more than four months with dozens of witnesses, hundreds of exhibits, and thousands of pages of documents. Finally, on June 10, 2019, after about a week of deliberations, the jury returned its verdict: guilty. On all four counts of first-degree murder, Charles “Chase” Merritt, 62, was convicted of killing his business partner Joseph McStay, Joseph’s wife Summer, and their two young sons, Gianni and Joey, using a sledgehammer.
The jury also found true the special circumstance of multiple murders.
The courtroom erupted. The McStay family wept. Merritt’s family sat in silence.
The same jury then moved to the penalty phase. On June 24, 2019, the jury issued its recommendation: three death sentences for the murders of Summer, Gianni, and Joey, and life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murder of Joseph McStay. This inconsistent verdict, death for three victims and life for the fourth, would later become a subject of legal controversy.
Sentencing was scheduled for January 2020. Before the judge pronounced the sentence, those whose lives Merritt had taken were given the right to speak.
Susan Blake, Joseph’s mother, went first. She walked to the witness stand, looked directly at Merritt, and began: “It was like a nightmare. It felt like a rock hit my chest when they told me they found my son in the desert.”
Then she called Merritt the name she had waited more than nine years to say: “You are a vile, evil monster and child killer who destroyed my family.”
Michael McStay, Joseph’s brother, the man who had climbed through the window into the empty house on Avocado Vista Lane on February 13, 2010, fought back tears as he told Merritt he had stolen four beautiful lives from this world. Summer’s sister wept as she read her statement: “Our children will never grow up together. They will never grow old together.
After seeing and hearing what you did to them, I feel an anger that cannot be described in words. There is no way to describe this pain.”
Summer’s ex-husband looked at Merritt and delivered a single sentence: “I don’t forgive you. On the contrary, I want to destroy you psychologically.”
Patrick McStay, the father who had spent more than four years investigating on his own, reading his son’s emails, contacting investigators, enduring the silence of the justice system, and sitting through the killer reading a book draft over the phone, read a victim impact statement. He didn’t dwell on the pain. He didn’t need to.
Everyone in the courtroom already knew.
Then came Merritt’s turn, and he did what he had been doing since the day of his arrest: he insisted he was innocent. “I loved Joseph,” Merritt said in a trembling voice. “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 have raised my hand to a woman or children.” He claimed he had been framed, that prosecutors and witnesses had lied, that the judge had allowed it to happen.
On January 21, 2020, Judge Michael Smith pronounced the sentence: death. The judge upheld the jury’s recommendation: three death sentences for the murders of Summer, Gianni, and Joey, plus life in prison without parole for the murder of Joseph. The judge described the killings with two carefully chosen words: horrific and inhumane.
He emphasized the brutality inflicted on the two small children beside their parents, Gianni, 4, and Joey, 3, killed with a sledgehammer and buried in the desert by a man their father considered a friend.
Merritt was led out of the courtroom and taken to death row at San Quentin State Prison. He remains there today, pursuing appeals from Donovan State Prison. However, California has not executed anyone since 2006, and with Governor Gavin Newsom’s moratorium on executions in 2019, Merritt will almost certainly never face lethal injection.
He will die in prison, not because of the sentence, but because of time.
The McStay family case left more than just a verdict and sentence. It left a lesson about systemic failure. The Mexico theory, built on a single blurry video, a few computer searches likely made by the killer himself to mislead, and an abandoned car near the border, wasted more than three precious years.
Three years during which forensic evidence could have been lost, witnesses forgotten, and memories faded. The San Diego Sheriff’s Department accepted the easy answer instead of the correct one. The price of that intellectual comfort was nearly half a decade of delayed justice.
The case also left a lesson about the power of victims’ families. Patrick McStay never stopped searching. When police said the family left voluntarily, he said they were wrong.
When the FBI said there were no new leads, he found leads himself. When Merritt called offering to write a book, Patrick swallowed his disgust and played along. Not because he was brave in the way Hollywood movies portray, but because he was a father, and fathers don’t stop searching for their children.
And the case left its greatest lesson: the lesson of betrayed trust. Charles Merritt was not a stranger. He was not a thief who broke in at midnight.
He was not a random deranged killer. He was Joseph’s closest friend and business partner, the man invited into the home, introduced to the wife and children, and entrusted with bank accounts and accounting records. Joseph lent him money to pay gambling debts.
Joseph worked with him every day. Joseph called him a friend.
Merritt used that trust as a weapon. He knew the family’s schedule. He knew how to enter the house.
He knew the account passwords. He knew the road to the desert. He used everything Joseph gave him to erase Joseph and everything Joseph loved.
Then he wept on television. Then he wrote a book. Then he called the victim’s father and offered to collaborate on telling the story.
Sometimes the most deadly threat doesn’t knock on your door at midnight. It sits across from you at lunch and calls you friend.