Transcript of 11 Days

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Stassi is back. Most people know me from Vanderpump Rules, but I'm a mom, a wife, a podcaster. I'm traumatized by reality TV, but I can't stay away from it.

It's like if they're not on your payroll, they don't get to be in your life.

Wow.

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I'm not here to ice anyone out, but when you said that—

Don't cut me off.

This time I get to do it on my terms. I showed up for you.

What could go wrong?

Uh.

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In November of 2009, a family of 4 moved into a palm tree-dotted cul-de-sac in the hills of San Diego County. Joseph McStay and his wife Summer were in their early 40s and living a seemingly charmed Southern California life with their two young sons. Their new neighborhood was surrounded by mountains and farmland. Their new house, a large Spanish-style home on Avocado Vista Lane, is around 10 years old with a stucco exterior and a red terracotta roof. The McStay's home videos from around this time show an active fun-loving family. In one, little Joseph Jr. runs around the first floor of their new home. The house over here. In another video, all four of the McStays bike to the beach.

Jay, come here. Oh my God, Cadillac Mama!

And then there's the video where the two McStay boys, Joseph Jr. and his big brother Gianni, swing side by side at a playground swing set together. Their mom, Summer, pushes them higher and higher. "Rawr!" "Oh!" "Yay!" For a couple of months, these were the types of sounds that filled the McStay residence. But one day in February 2010, the house went quiet. Local station KGTV covered the story.

The outside of the McStay home remains exactly as the family left it. Their shoes and the newspaper both outside.

There was a carton of eggs left out on the counter. And one other thing— Summer McStay left her prescription sunglasses behind. Family left their dogs behind, and there had been no activity on their phones.

It was as if the McStays had simply vanished into thin air. Authorities, friends, and family were baffled. But how does a vibrant family of four suddenly go missing? From ABC Audio in 2020, I'm Ashan Singh, and this is What Happened to the McStays? Episode 1. 11 days. Joseph McStay, or Joey, had a weekly ritual with his little brother Michael. In a 2011 interview with ABC News, Michael said that every Friday Joseph would give him a ring on his way to play pickup soccer.

He would call me. We'd touch base. Hey, how's things going? Hey, Mikey, how's your business? What's going on?

How are the girls?

I'd ask how the boys were and he'd tell me what was going on.

But on Friday, February 5th, 2010, Michael didn't get that weekly call from his big brother. For Michael, this was unusual but not alarming.

So to miss one Friday, I mean, I didn't think a whole lot of it.

But then several days went by without a peep from Joseph. No calls, texts, or emails. It was the same at his work too. Joseph co-owned a business that sold high-end decorative fountains, the kind you might see in hotel lobbies. The company was in the middle of a couple of projects when Joseph's colleagues told the McStay family they noticed Joseph had gone completely silent.

There was customer emails not being answered, which is not like Joe. He was usually right on top of it.

Joseph's friends started reaching out to Michael to ask, "Hey, have you heard from Joe? What's going on? He's not answering his phone." Joseph's wife, Summer, wasn't returning calls either. So Michael posted to his brother's Facebook page asking friends, "If you've seen him, please let the family know." Family and friends got in touch. Michael and Joseph's parents, plus two of Joseph's colleagues, Dan Cavanaugh and Chase Merritt. They shared any relevant information they had, and Michael pieced together that Thursday, February 4th, was likely the last day anyone had seen or heard from his brother. Michael and Joseph's father said he talked to Joseph that morning, and according to Joseph's business associate Chase, he and Joseph met up that afternoon. Loved ones were worried about the McStays, but Michael tried to remain optimistic. He thought it was possible the family left on a trip and just didn't tell anyone.

I thought, well, maybe, maybe they're doing a quick vacay, so I didn't want to jump to any conclusions.

A few days after the McStays went quiet, Jose's business partner Dan Cavanaugh called the police for a welfare check. San Diego County Sheriff's deputies came out to the home and knocked on the door. No one was home at the time, but with no signs that anything was amiss, deputies followed procedure and did not go inside. Joseph's business associate, Chase Merritt, also went to the house a couple times that week, he says, to see if he could find Joseph. No luck. And by February 13th, the McStays hadn't been seen or heard from in 9 days. Michael says he decided to check the home himself. He took a trip to Avocado Vista Lane. Chase came along too.

I'd went down there, started knocking on doors, asking the neighbors had they seen them.

Michael says he let himself into the house through a back window that was cracked open. He started looking through the home. He says it was messy. Kitchen drawers had been pulled out and placed on countertops. Toys, books, and clothes were scattered around, and the house was barely furnished. The family was using air mattresses instead of beds. To Michael, it was like his brother and his family were camping in their own home. But this was Michael's first time in the McStays' new house. They'd only moved in about 2 months earlier, and they were remodeling. Michael says they'd been doing work on the floors and painting cabinets. So to him, this could have been a normal level of untidiness given the circumstances, and given that Joseph and Summer had two young children But there was one thing Michael noticed right away that he clocked as being very, very off.

The dogs were left outside unattended. It didn't make sense.

The McStay family dogs were left to sit in the hot California sun. By all accounts, the McStays loved their dogs. A big Akita called Bear and a golden retriever puppy called Digger. Friends say they were like second kids to Joseph and Summer. To leave them alone outside for days on end, this just didn't sit right with Michael. He asked a neighbor to keep an eye on the dogs, and then he left, hoping his family would show up soon. But the McStays had disappeared. Leaving a puzzle that would soon mystify their friends and family. Mysteries unravel and stunning truths are revealed when 20/20 Investigates. Follow the clues, the evidence, the breaking new details.

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One thing about Joseph is he would always talk for hours, and I'm not exaggerating. Sometimes 2 hours.

Gina Watson was one of Joseph McStay's friends. They'd met because Gina also worked in the decorative fountain industry. She says they'd gotten to know each other well, and according to Gina, Joseph was a talker.

I would call him before I'd left for lunch to, like, talk about whatever the problem of the day was, and then it would evolve into just, I don't know, like conversation goes from one thing to another, and then I'm like, the phone's getting hot because it's been in your ear so long, like, can we wrap this up?

Gina said that Joseph adored his wife Summer and their two boys.

Joseph's kids and his wife were everything to him.

Gina says Joseph would share stories about his rambunctious little boys, like the time they snuck out of their beds early one morning and started rummaging through their kitchen cabinets He said one night Gianni and little Joey had gotten into the flour.

I guess they kept it in a lower cabinet. And you're a parent and you're tired and your, your little kid sneaks out of bed and gets into the flour. And they had it all over themselves and they had, like, handprints and footprints everywhere and they were covered head to toe.

Gina describes Joseph as a surfer dude. He had wavy shoulder-length light brown hair. In pictures, he looks like he would be more comfortable in shorts and a t-shirt than a suit and tie. Joseph and Summer's sons, Gianni and Joseph Jr., were 4 years old and 3 respectively at the time they vanished. Photos of the little boys show their hair down to their shoulders, just like their dad. In one photo, Joey Jr. holds an ice cream sandwich Chocolate all over his mouth. And Gina says their dad, Joseph Sr., was generous with his friends.

He would buy his friends laptops just because he was excited about technology and he wanted them to be as excited as he was. And, oh, you got to check out this gaming laptop. Like, oh, you need top of the line. No, that's not good enough. Let me get you this one. He was just very easy with money. He never was too uptight about it. He was more so than any person I've ever met, to be honest.

Joseph and Summer were introduced in the early 2000s. One of his friends set them up, and everyone says they hit it off right away.

Summer was a very passionate woman who went after what she wanted.

That's Jesse Silveria, a friend of Summer's.

I met Summer around 2006. And I was living in Laguna Beach, and I think both of us were Laguna-ites.

Jesse and Summer were both photographers at the time and met while working the same shoot.

To me, Summer was exotic, you know. She had dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, really big, cute smile.

Jesse says she and Summer would go out together, two creatives enjoying the beachy art scene of Laguna. Once Summer got pregnant, Jesse says, she scaled back her active social life, stopped working, and became a stay-at-home mom.

They were nesting. That phase in her life was nesting.

Friends and family say Joseph and Summer loved the beach. For a time, the couple and their sons lived in San Clemente. Their apartment was on top of a cliff overlooking the ocean. With world-class surfing right outside their door.

The kids, they were growing up to be surfer dudes too. They definitely took after Joey, you know, wanting to be close to the ocean.

Another big part of the McStays' lives was Joseph's work, Earth Inspired Products. It sold elaborate custom decorative waterfalls. These were large-scale standalone objects, often 6 feet tall. Water would be pumped invisibly to the top of tall glass panes and then cascade down into pools that sparkled with hidden light fixtures. Earth Inspired Products also had an online retail side where they sold pre-manufactured water features. Gina Watson worked for one of Joseph's manufacturing partners. That's how the two met and became friends. She says Joseph was a designer at heart.

He actually started his business, I think, like in his garage, designing his own features by hand.

Gina says Joseph was taking on more and more custom work and the business was doing really well. According to people familiar with the company, Earth Inspired Products had gotten big contracts: a car wash chain with 150 locations, a huge custom job for the Paul Mitchell hair salon brand, and even a project in Saudi Arabia. In late 2009, the McStay family moved from their small beachside apartment in San Clemente to their house on that palm tree-lined cul-de-sac. Their new town of Fallbrook is better known for its avocado orchards than its proximity to the coast. It's a 30-minute drive to the beach, a trade-off for the surf-loving McStays. But it was big. 5 bedrooms with a backyard. Here's Summer's friend Jessie again.

All the outside was completely populated with kids' toys and trucks and boy stuff. And she was growing flowers and gardens.

Again, they had plans to remodel the home. By early 2010, some of the renovations were underway. Joseph would fill his brother Michael in on the progress.

Okay, they're remodeling the house and it's kind of crazy. You know, the furniture is still in storage.

By February of 2010, Joseph was doing well professionally. The couple was working on upgrading their new house. The family seemed settled.

Joe doesn't invest, you know, like $30,000 into a house to renovate it because he's going to leave tomorrow. That just doesn't jive. He doesn't walk out on his friends and his family.

And yet, at that house in Fallbrook, no one was home. And for over a week, there had only been silence from the family who lived there. It didn't add up. Michael McStay says he decided that if his brother and family were, as he'd hoped, just on an extended vacation, They should be back by February 15th. He says he told himself that if by 9:00 AM he still hadn't heard from Joseph, he'd file a missing persons report. That's exactly what Michael did.

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By the morning of February 15th, 2010, Michael McStay had reached his personal deadline to sound the alarm. No one had heard from Joseph or Summer in 11 days. Michael called the police.

He asked for a welfare check, and the patrol deputies came out and checked the house.

Lieutenant Dennis Brugos from the San Diego Sheriff's Department oversaw the investigation. According to police, at 10:32 a.m., Michael, along with officers from the San Diego Sheriff's Department, arrived at the McStays' Fallbrook house. They knocked on the door and checked the exterior for signs of forced entry. When they got no response, they entered the residence and started a search. They began by looking for people, either people in distress or bodies. They found neither. But they did encounter the dogs, who were still in the backyard, alone, with some water and food left out for them.

That raised red flags because by all accounts, they took very good care of their dogs.

And when police heard from Michael that the McStays had left without notifying any friends or family, that raised immediate alarm bells too.

What the deputy initially learned was this is really a nice family and they never made plans to leave. And so that raised the suspicion level to the point where he said, you know what, I should probably call homicide and let them know what's going on out here.

Lieutenant Brugos says suspicious circumstances cases like this one are handled by the homicide unit, whether there's a dead body or not. Police say that when homicide detectives joined the search at the McStay residence, they checked again for any signs of foul play, any clue as to what may have happened to the McStays. Officers looked all over the home, inside the kitchen pantry, in the den, the garage, in a recycling bin outside, in the truck parked in the driveway. As detectives searched, they noticed a few curious things. To start, it was the food that was left out. According to police and court documents, downstairs in the living room, there were two small bowls of popcorn, half eaten, left on a futon. Bananas that had started to rot and a carton of eggs were sitting out on the kitchen counter.

You don't leave perishable food out if you're going to be gone for an extended period of time, generally.

It seemed like the family may have left the house suddenly, even unexpectedly. And then there was the mess. Police documented clothes piled up on the bathroom counter, suitcases left open with clothes spilling out into piles, a tall lamp that looked like it had been knocked over. If the McStays had gone on vacation, like Michael so hoped was the case, why would they have left suitcases full of clothing behind? And detectives also uncovered something else. Lieutenant Brugos again.

We knew that one of the vehicles was parked here in the driveway and the other one wasn't here.

The McStays' 1996 white Isuzu Trooper was missing. If police could find the vehicle, maybe they could find the McStays. They ran a search on the Isuzu Trooper and immediately came up with a hit. According to police records, the check revealed that the vehicle was recently towed from a parking lot about 60 miles from the McStays' home near the US-Mexico border. So near, in fact, that it was walking distance to the border terminal. According to police, the car had been towed from that lot on February 8th, 4 days after the McStays vanished. Now police had to find out what did this clue mean. Did the McStays leave for Mexico altogether? And if so, did they go voluntarily or by force? Were they hiding, kidnapped, Police couldn't yet say. The search of the McStay residence took all day, and in the end, police determined there was no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle or act of violence, no blood. In other words, no apparent signs of foul play, no clear crime. But that didn't mean that detectives were confident that all was well with the McStays. The abandoned dogs, the spoiled food left out, the family car found at the Mexican border.

As Lieutenant Brugos puts it, "When you put the whole picture together, it raises the level of suspicion that something's not right." Once officers wrapped up the search of the home, A couple of the detectives, Troy Dugall and Suzanne Fisk, pulled Michael aside for an interview in their police car. In the tape from this interview, Michael still hopes that his big brother's family could be perfectly fine.

What's the percentages of these, like, being in a situation like this and then, uh, it just being something totally innocent?

I can tell you that I've never had one like this where a family is just totally missing ever. So I can't give you a, I can't give you a good statistic.

Detective Dugal asked Michael for more information about the missing family. How was Joseph and Summer's relationship? Who are their closest friends? Did he have problems with anyone or money trouble?

Do you know if there's any money involvement with your brother owing someone money, or would somebody try to take advantage of your brother?

I don't know enough about what's going on with his business-wise. I have no idea.

They dug deeper, asking about Joseph's finances.

How much is your brother worth? Oh, I don't know. I have no idea.

You know what his yearly income is?

No.

Dugall asked if Joseph might have been involved in narcotics.

My brother doesn't even do drugs, so That's it. Out.

Detectives also asked about the Isuzu Trooper. Did Michael have any idea what Joseph and his family might be doing walking distance from Tijuana?

I don't know. I don't know what he's doing down there. I have no idea. I don't think he knows anybody down there.

The whole situation still didn't sit right with Michael or the detectives.

This thing has just got me scratching my head.

Well, we don't know any more than you know. What do you think as a brother? Where are they?

What do you hope?

And they went down and they just went to Mexico and they took a 2-week vacation. I mean, that's a, that's a pipe dream at this point. I don't know.

I would hope that too, but what did you see in the house that would indicate that that's probably not true?

I just walked through, but I didn't get it. I mean, I didn't—

well, let me help you out. Inside the walk-in closet, there's suitcases and there's little kids' suitcases with suitcase flaps open with folded little kid laundry, clean laundry in the suitcases. Yeah, if they went on vacation, the kids' suitcases would have been with them.

In his official account of the day, Detective Dugal concluded that there had been no apparent sign of a crime, but he also said this: It is my opinion that McStay family is the victim of foul play. The police knew this wasn't over. There was more work to be done. Now the race was on to find out what had actually happened to the family of four before it was too late. 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, scoring by Kiara Powell. Mixing by Evan Viola and Bob Mallory. Special thanks to Katie Dendas, Janice Johnson, Chris Donovan, Joseph Reed, Sunny Antrim, Alyssa Stoller, Xander Samaras, Tom Berman, Indra Dalesakhem, and Blue Browning. Josh Cohen is our director of podcast programming. Eamon McNiff is our executive producer. Can't wait for more? Listen to the next episode ahead of everyone else, ad-free. Subscribe now to 2020 True Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts. Click the link in the description to start your free trial today.

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