Transcript of McStays Episode 4: Questions and Answers

Hi, this is Aashan Singh, here with another weekly episode of our latest true crime series from 2020 and ABC Audio, What Happened to the McStays? Remember, you can get new episodes weekly on Tuesdays if you follow What Happened to the McStays on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening now. Or you can hear the entire series right now, ad-free, by subscribing to 2020 True Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts. Click the link in the description to start your free trial today. Now, here's the next episode of What Happened to the McStays?

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October 22nd, 2014, almost a year after the bodies of the McStay family were found brutally murdered in the Mojave Desert.

We're following up on the McStay case.

We've been working this, you know, we've been The San Bernardino County Sheriff's detectives called Chase Merritt in for an interview.

We've been working this case nonstop, you know, trying to follow up on everything.

Detective Eddie Bachmann and his colleague met Chase Merritt in a small interview room at the San Bernardino headquarters. Chase wore a low white baseball cap and sat sideways on a hard chair. He had first been interviewed by police almost 4 years ago, just days after the McStays went missing. Back then, he told San Diego detectives that he and Joseph were friends, best friends. And 4 years later, this story hadn't changed.

We talked every day, sometimes many, many times a day on the phone.

Chase told San Bernardino detectives that he and Joseph often played paintball together, and he had helped the family move into their new house in late 2009.

They had 2 or 3 big containers. I helped them pack them. I helped move all of the potted plants and stuff.

Chase added that Joseph going missing hadn't just been an emotional loss for him. His entire welding business had depended on Joseph.

When he disappeared, my life was just pretty much turned upside down. I mean, it was, you know, we lost everything.

Right.

You know, I've just been trying to make ends meet, trying to figure out, you know, where I was gonna go.

To hear Chase tell it, he had lost his friend and his livelihood in one fell swoop. But unbeknownst to Chase, San Bernardino investigators felt that they had found evidence that told a different story. In reinterviewing the McStays' family and friends, digging into old case files, and uncovering new evidence, detectives had discovered reason to believe there was more to the story Chase was telling. And now they were ready to ask him some difficult questions.

Did you kill the McStays family?

From ABC Audio in 2020, I'm Ashan Singh, and this is What Happened to the McStays? Episode 4, Questions and Answers. Before San Bernardino detectives brought Chase Merritt in for an interview, they dug through the files they'd gotten from San Diego sheriffs, and they began to find new details that they say raised red flags about Chase. Among the things they looked at was the transcript of a 2010 police interview with Chase. And one thing in particular jumped out at San Bernardino Detective Ryan Smith.

When he interviewed with San Diego, he referenced the family in the past tense several times, saying, oh, he was my best friend. Like, that's— people don't say that.

San Diego detectives had questioned Chase about why he used the past tense. Oh, I did? Chase replied. Chase told them that he didn't know why, and the detectives didn't push him on it. Back then, it was a missing persons investigation, but now San Bernardino detectives were investigating multiple homicides. San Bernardino investigators suspected this choice of words could mean that Chase knew, even in the immediate aftermath of their disappearance, that the McStays were already dead. Another key moment that San Bernardino detectives zeroed in on was the day the McStays went missing: February 4th, 2010. A neighbor's security camera had captured a grainy, dark video of a vehicle leaving the driveway of the McStays' house in Fallbrook. A San Diego detective who investigated the missing persons case in 2010 told ABC News that the vehicle had looked like the McStays' car, a white Isuzu Trooper, though they couldn't be sure. But when Detective Eddie Bachmann and his team reviewed the footage, they spotted something interesting.

When we looked, took a deeper dive into the video, we were able to find key markers on that video that it wasn't the trooper.

The exhaust pipe on the McStays' car stuck out on the back left side of the vehicle. But investigators thought that the vehicle in this video had an exhaust pipe on the back right side. To Bachmann and his team of investigators, this looked more like the exhaust pipe of a utility truck. And at that time, Chase Merritt drove such a truck, a boxy white one.

Why would Chase's vehicle be leaving the McStay residence, you know, on the night that they did disappear?

The McStays' home wasn't the only place that Chase was suspected to have been during that crucial window of time. 3 months after the McStays' bodies were found in the desert, detectives pulled Chase's cell records. They showed who he called, when he called them, and the cell towers his phone was pinging off around the time the McStays disappeared.

We were fortunate that Chase had a new iPhone. iPhones had just kind of come on the scene in 2010, and he had an iPhone with AT&T service that provided cell sites. A lot of the other cell phones didn't do that. It would give us their city, it would give us a general location, but Chase's cell phone provided us latitude and longitude coordinates of where towers were and where calls were being made.

According to a police report, the phone records backed up Chase's claim that he and Joseph talked on the phone a lot. From February 1st to February 4th, the men spoke more than 15 times a day. Investigators determined that after the McStays went missing, the volume of calls dropped off. Chase only called Joseph 11 times between February 5th and February 9th, and he made no calls to Joseph after that. This struck Detective Bachmann as strange.

He just stops calling him. That's not characteristic, especially if you're as close of friends as what you say. Then you would think that you would be more eager to try to help out and try to find the family. And I think his activity proved otherwise.

According to the detective's report, the location of Chase's phone in the days after their disappearance also revealed something notable. His phone had pinged off a cell tower in Victorville, in the area where the bodies had been buried on February 6th, 2 days after the McStays went missing.

Okay. Is there a reason that he was here? Or, you know, or is he here because he's burying bodies?

The phone records also revealed periods where Chase's phone showed no activity. For detectives, these blackouts were also intriguing. In their report, detectives indicated that on February 8th, 4 days after the McStays went missing, Chase's phone was turned off from 7:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., and detectives developed a possible theory as to why. According to their report, Detectives thought that Chase had driven the McStays' car, their white Isuzu Trooper, to the US-Mexico border. Remember, the McStays' car had been found on February 8th in a shopping center parking lot near the Mexican border.

We have this question, how did the Trooper get down to the San Ysidro border? Well, obviously, we got to answer that question.

In 2010, Chase had insisted to detectives It couldn't have been him.

During San Diego's investigation, Chase told them that he had been in the vehicle one time, but only as a passenger, and had never driven the Trooper.

It was all recorded.

The last time I was in it, we went to Camp Pendleton. Went to— we played paintball at Camp Pendleton.

You're a front passenger? Front passenger.

But never driven it?

Never driven it.

Back in 2010, San Diego investigators had swabbed the car, taking DNA samples from all over the interior. San Bernardino detectives compared those swabs to a sample of Chase's DNA. According to investigative documents, not only was Chase's DNA in the car, but it was found in places they felt the driver was likely to touch, like the steering wheel. And Detective Bachmann and his team did some math. According to their report, they thought that the 6-hour window when Chase's phone was turned off that day would have given him exactly the right amount of time to drive the McStays' Trooper to the border, get his DNA on the steering wheel in the process, and make it back home before turning his phone back on again.

So eventually you get, you know, 4 or 5, 6 things, and it's more than a coincidence. And then you start focusing in on, you know, you realize that Chase had the opportunity to commit the crime.

By the summer of 2014, San Bernardino investigators were getting closer and closer to calling Chase in for an interview to answer their growing number of questions. And then, detectives found something else. Something that they said was a huge red flag.

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In August 2014, San Bernardino detectives got a warrant for a QuickBooks account used by Joseph McStay. Detective Ryan Smith said it showed how the money was flowing through the fountain business.

So to manage Earth Inspired Projects, Joseph used QuickBooks, which is a personal finance management, small business finance management, and he used QuickBooks to process invoice, print checks. It was his ledger to keep track of what had been paid, what was coming in, what was going out.

The detective said when they looked at the QuickBooks account activity, they thought there was something unusual happening around the date of the McStays' disappearance. Checks had been written from Joseph McStay to Charles Merritt, and not for small amounts. There was over $30,000 spread over several checks. Some of them, according to police reports, were written just before Joseph was last seen. But there were others written afterwards. Of particular interest to detectives were several checks that had been created on February 5th, but that someone had then changed the date in the log to February 4th. Someone had then printed those checks and deleted the log entries.

They were backdated to February, February 4th, and then they were deleted from the system. And that's a huge red flag for us, and that's important because we realized that, you know, nobody knew the family was missing yet. So why would someone go in, create a check, and delete it, backdating it to the 4th?

According to detectives, 4 days after the family went missing, a QuickBooks employee got a customer service inquiry.

The person on the other end of the phone identified themselves as Joseph McStay. And then told the employee that they needed to delete all of the QuickBooks records related to the Earth Inspired Products account.

If Joseph McStay had called QuickBooks on February 8th, that would mean he was still alive at the time. Why would he need to edit and delete the records of his own account? The investigators spoke to the QuickBooks employee who'd taken that call. According to the detective's report, the employee remembered specifically how much urgency the person at the other end of the phone spoke with. Investigators had reason to believe that the person who made that call wasn't Joseph McStay.

We determined that the phone call that was made into QuickBooks actually came from Charles Merritt's phone number.

Charles Merritt. It was a name that kept appearing on DNA results, on mysterious checks, and whose phone had pinged off a cell tower in the desert. But even though detectives thought the evidence was building against Chase, they didn't think it was conclusive. When they called Chase Merritt in for a voluntary interview in October 2014, It had been almost a year since the McStays' bodies were discovered. Detectives wanted to see if he'd had an explanation for some of the evidence they'd found. In the first part of their long interview, they talked with Chase about his health, his new job, his recent trip to the McStays' gravesite in the desert. He said it was for a project he was working on about the family.

I had decided that I was going to write a book.

Okay.

And I was going to do the COVID of the book with me standing next to Joseph's cross.

When Chase mentioned something about the day the McStays disappeared, February 4th, 2010, detectives began to narrow their line of questioning.

Okay, you, you started mentioning about the 4th. Do you think they were from the 4th?

Detectives asked Chase to tell them. From the morning of the 4th onwards, where he was and what he did. Chase said he got up and called Joseph to plan a meeting that day.

Sometime midday, I met him at Chick-fil-A.

Okay.

And we ate and talked about all of the stuff. After the meeting, he went his way, I went mine.

The next few days after that, Chase said, weren't notable. But by the following week, he said he was so worried about Joseph that he decided to contact his family and visit the McStay home.

So February 4th was the last time you see Joseph. In the week after that, is there any reason that anyone would have seen you or your vehicle up in the high desert area?

Vickersville?

Vickersville, yeah.

Not that I know of. Um, unless I went to my sister's.

Chase wasn't in the high desert in that time period, he said. But if he was, he might have been visiting some of his family in the area. Detectives knew from Chase's phone records that his phone had been in this area. But detectives didn't reveal this. Not yet. They asked Chase about his access to the QuickBooks account that Joseph used for the business. Without being asked, Chase offered an explanation, saying that Joseph had asked him to switch the QuickBooks account. He claimed that Joseph wanted a new account that Summer couldn't access.

She would constantly go on his computer, see how much money he was making. And his finances were— he tried to keep them away from his wife. And it was a big thing.

And as for making checks that looked like they were from Joseph to Chase, he said he'd written checks from Joseph's account, quote, dozens and dozens of times. He said he would do this to pay both himself and other suppliers on behalf of the company. Again, the detectives gave no indication that they had any further questions to ask Chase about the checks. They moved on, this time to find out if Chase had an explanation for why his DNA was on the steering wheel of the McStay's Trooper.

So at that time, Detective Pitts asked you if you'd ever driven The Trooper. And you said no, you had only been a passenger in the Trooper when you went paintballing. I just want to clarify that with you. Actually, that isn't what I said, because I remember the conversation. The last time I had driven the Trooper was when we went paintballing.

Chase denied telling San Diego detectives that he'd only ever been a passenger in the McStays' car. Which, remember, was all caught on tape.

But never have driven it?

Never driven it.

And Chase told San Bernardino detectives, actually, he had driven the car when he and Joseph went paintballing. Detective Ryan Smith says that Chase's timeline didn't make any sense.

The DNA was processed or collected from the trooper in I want to say February 2010. They went paintballing in January.

After the date Chase said he'd driven the car, it would have seen over a month of other use, other journeys, potentially other drivers. Smith claims that it would be very unlikely that Chase's DNA would have still been there for San Diego detectives to collect in February.

You wouldn't expect any if they had driven the car a month ago.

The amount of Chase's DNA that was found in the car, Smith says, was consistent with more recent use. If Chase had driven the car to the Mexican border, it would have been just a few days before the DNA was collected from it. That's what San Bernardino detectives believed had happened. Over the course of several hours, The detectives asked Chase about these key pieces of evidence that had stood out to them, and they told him his answers didn't match what they'd found in their investigation. Now it was time for the detectives to show their hand and reveal that they knew more, much more, than they'd been letting on.

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4 hours into their interview with Chase Merritt in October 2014, Detectives were ready to step things up a notch.

There's a big dynamic shift throughout the interview when you transition from interview to interrogation.

Detective Eddie Bachmann was in the room that day.

At the point where Chase continued to lie, and we knew— we knew that there were certain portions of the interview that he was lying with, at that point, we transitioned into interrogation to confront him with some of the facts The facts that we knew that there were things that Chase did that he wasn't being honest about.

The problem I have here is what this tells me from QuickBooks is not the same story you're giving.

I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say. I sat down in this room today And every single thing that I've told you today is, as far as my recollection goes, the absolute truth. Okay, so when you called QuickBooks on the 8th, did you say, this is Chase Merritt and I need to order QuickBooks, or did you represent yourself as Joseph Smith? I didn't. I don't think I represented myself as Joseph.

I don't think I represented myself as Joseph, he said. The detectives pushed Chase. They told him that his story about writing dozens of checks from Joseph's account, they didn't believe it. They claimed that Chase didn't write checks on behalf of Joseph on a regular basis. And the checks police found from the days right before and after Joseph went missing, they said those checks were written by Chase without Joseph's knowledge.

So it looks bad, Chase. It looks very bad for you right now that you're lying about this stuff, okay?

And that's what we need to get— we gave you an opportunity, we gave it your chance, okay? So that's why we need you to be honest with us here, because this is a murder investigation.

Chase kept saying that he knew how important the case was, but that he just didn't have another answer to offer. Detectives showed him the check created on February 6th that was then backdated to the 4th? I have no clue, Chase said, and I can't remember. Detectives pressed Chase further. They asked him about the vehicle seen in the neighbor's video, the one leaving the McStays' home on February 4th, 2010, that detectives now believed Belonged to Chase.

I'm telling you, I'm telling you straight up, and we're not lying to you. I know you were in Fallbrook on February 4th, okay? All I want to know is what was the reason for it? February 4th?

I don't think I was down there.

Detectives told Chase, your phone records showed you were in the desert 2 days after this family went missing.

Why would your phone show you At the gravesite on February 6th?

Not possible. I wasn't there.

These are either some crazy coincidences, or you just have terrible luck. One of the two.

It was just him denying. Like, he was gonna deny— he was just gonna deny it all the way.

The detectives spent hours confronting Chase with their claims about his role in the McStays' murders. But Chase kept saying he didn't know or denying their allegations.

Did you kill the McVeigh family?

Of course not. Of course not. He was my best friend, you know, and I don't have very many friends. So, no, of course not. I would never hurt him.

So what I need you to do is figure out what happened February 4th, okay? This is— this isn't some little BS case or anything like that.

Trust me, I know.

It's the homicide of 4 people.

I know.

4 people, okay?

I understand.

People that were very close to you. Your self-proclaimed best friend and his family, okay? 2 little boys, all right?

I know.

This has gone on for 4 years, okay? I need to know what happened that night, Chase. Something happened.

But Chase's story didn't change. If investigators were hoping for a confession, they didn't get one. And after 7 hours of interviewing, they let him go. But this wasn't the last time that detectives would talk to Chase Merritt, because with or without answers from Chase, They believed they knew what actually happened on February 4th, 2010, and about why the McStays had been murdered to begin with. What Happened to the Mixed Days is a production of ABC Audio in 2020, hosted by me, Ashan Singh, produced by Madeline Wood, Vika Aronson, Audrey Mostek, and Kiara Powell, with help from Sabrina Fang and Camille Peterson, edited by Gianna Palmer. Our supervising producer is Susie Lu. Music by Evan Viola. Mixing by Evan Viola and Bob Mallory. Thanks to Katie Dendas, Janice Johnson, Camille Peterson, Sabrina Fang, Chris Donovan, Joseph Rhee, Sonny Antrim, Alyssa Stoller, Xander Samaras, Tom Berman, Indra Dallisakham, and Blue Browning. Josh Cohen is our director of podcast programming. Eamon McNiff is our executive Can't wait for more? Listen to the next episode ahead of everyone else, ad-free. Subscribe now to 20/20 True Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts. Click the link in the description to start your free trial today.

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