Transcript of In the Desert New

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In November 2013, a man named John Bluth took his motorcycle out for an off-road adventure. It was around 7:30 AM on Veterans Day when John rode east up Interstate 15 deep into the Mojave Desert.

At that time of year, the sun doesn't come up very early, so it was kind of getting full light, a little bit cool, nice day, and looked like a good day for a bike ride.

John says that on Veterans Day, he thinks about his two brothers, veterans who have passed away. The day is usually a sad one for him, he says. On that morning, John took off, headed across the scrubby, sparsely populated land between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

So actually what happened was I'm heading west on one of these dirt roads over here towards the mountains that you see behind me there. And I'm looking for the, the Old Spanish Trail.

The Old Spanish Trail is a 200-year-old road a historic trade route that cuts across the southwestern states, used by settlers heading west. It's now little more than a dirt track in some stretches and almost hidden from sight. But John knew where to look. He turned off the highway and started making his way to the trail.

I was looking around because I'm going very slow and I saw what I thought was a what looked kind of like an upside-down turtle shell. And so I stopped because I'm, you know, I'm curious. I took a stick and turned it over and it didn't look like a turtle shell. It looked like part of a skull.

John wondered if it was some kind of historic artifact. He took a closer look. If it was a skull, it was small.

I did turn it over with the stick, but it was no bigger than probably the palm of my hand.

John called the police to report what he'd found.

How can I help you?

Hi, I'm out here on a motorcycle up behind the dump, and I found what looks like a human skull.

Can you give me a location?

Yes. Okay.

The 911 operator sent an officer to check it out. —and John went on with his ride.

I was in suspense. I was wondering, you know, what is that? Is it something ancient? Something new?

It wasn't until a few days later, John said, when he turned on the TV that he learned more. It wasn't ancient, but it wasn't exactly new either.

On the news, they reported that it was the McStay family that they had discovered out there in the desert. That I had discovered.

Nearly 4 years and 100 miles away from where the McStays had disappeared, they were finally found, just not the way their family and friends were hoping for. From ABC Audio in 2020, I'm Ashan Singh, and this is What Happened to the McStays, episode 3. In the Desert. The area where John Bluth found the mysterious object was deep in the Mojave Desert, inland and north of the McStays' home. It was over 150 miles away from where the family's car had been found abandoned at the US-Mexico border. The location of the find put it in the jurisdiction of the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department. San Bernardino is two counties over from where the McStays lived, and the family didn't have any obvious strong connections to the desert. So when a report of possible human remains came in, some didn't immediately think it was connected to the McStay case. San Bernardino Detective Eddie Bachmann said he hadn't even heard of it.

In 2013, I was working with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, assigned to the Specialized Investigations Division on the homicide detail.

Detective Bachmann says the first people on scene were local sheriff's deputies from Victorville, a town a few miles away. They quickly called for reinforcements, a coroner and a forensic anthropologist. The team confirmed that the biker's hunch was right. This wasn't a turtle shell. It was a bone fragment, part of a child's skull. And nearby, more horrors were discovered.

So once we verified that it was human remains that were out there, they went out and they walked the scene a little further and they located two shallow graves a short distance from where the skull was located. Two graves.

And inside those graves were more human remains. That's when Detective Eddie Bachmann's homicide team was called. And Bachmann went out to the gravesites himself. One of the things he says he noticed right away was how close to the main road they were.

And the way that this— the graves were located, it was down inside of almost like a wash area. So if you were standing at the graves, you could see portions of the freeway. And it was probably, I would say, half a mile to a mile away from the exit to the freeway there.

The graves themselves were shallow. Investigators would determine that some bone fragments were buried only 6 inches deep. Investigators collected the bones from what they labeled as Grave A and Grave B and sent them for analysis. Within days, the results came back. This collection of skeletal remains was confirmed to be what was left of the McStay family. The bones in Grave A belonged to Joseph McStay and 3-year-old Joey Jr. In Grave B was Summer and their older son Gianni. According to their report, detectives suspected animals had disturbed the graves. The bone found by the biker was part of Joey Jr.'s skull. And there were other items in the grave, potential clues.

Joseph McStay was wrapped in a woven blanket. He also had an extension cord that was wrapped around his neck and it had gone down to his ankles.

Near Summer's remains, investigators said they found black sweats and the left cup of a bra spattered with paint. Near Gianni, they found a small pair of blue pants, a pull-up diaper, and a kid's backpack.

Inside of the grave with Summer and Gianni, there were some other items, a cell phone holder. And then ultimately, after the victims were removed from there, we located a Stanley sledgehammer underneath where the victims were placed.

Place.

John Bluth, the biker, discovered the skull fragment on a Monday. By Friday, the 15th of November, 2013, investigators were ready to share the news with the world. The McStays would never be coming home. And while their friends and family had searched for them for years, someone out there had known exactly where they were the whole time. Mysteries unravel and stunning truths are revealed when 20/20 Investigates. Follow the clues, the evidence, the breaking new details.

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4 days after the skeletal remains were found, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department held a press conference in a well-lit briefing room. Relatives of the McStays sat at a long table, many of them wearing sunglasses. And periodically wiping away tears from underneath them. Sheriff John McMahon stood at the podium and addressed the room. He told reporters that investigators had found the remains of Joseph and Summer McStay in two shallow graves. They'd also found the remains of two children, the sheriff said. They presumed that it was Joey Jr. and Gianni, but by the day of the press conference, They hadn't confirmed the identities of the children yet.

Their DNA evidence is on file with DOJ, and we will be sending that information to DOJ for positive confirmation.

Investigators said that the autopsies would be completed by the end of the day. And while they weren't yet willing to share details of the cause of death, they did tell reporters that this case was no longer a missing persons investigation. It was a homicide. Michael McStay, Joseph's brother, was invited to speak.

We're going to find this individual or individuals. I know that the sheriffs, the FBI, everybody wants to bring this to justice.

Michael told reporters that his family was grateful for the support they'd received and asked for privacy as they grieved. In footage from the event, he looks exhausted and on the verge of tears.

It's not really the, uh, the, uh, outcome we were looking for, but, um, it gives us courage to know that they're together. They're in a better place.

That was such a hard day to see Michael on the press conference, barely holding it together.

Gina Watson, a friend of Joseph McStay, had been working to help track down where the McStays had gone. She stayed in close contact with Patrick McStay, Joseph's father.

Patrick and I both thought we would just go to our grave never knowing what happened to them. Like, we had kind of given up. I'm not that we gave up searching. Like, for God's sake, we were still probably not every night looking at things, but, you know, going back and forth on things. He was at least able to find out what happened. But what a terrible thing to have found out happened, that all of your fears came true.

Lawrence Hemingway was a surfing friend of Joseph's.

I remember thinking, at least they're going to find who did it.

Soon after the bodies were found, a paddle out was organized in Joseph's honor. It's a surfing tradition where out in the ocean, surfers form a circle on their boards. They often hold hands and remember the dead. Lawrence was there.

Joey's paddle out was probably, from what I remember, about 50 people. It was at the San Clemente Pier. It's perfect weather, perfect day.

In news footage from that day, you can see the surfers sitting out in the ocean wearing floral necklaces in the style of Hawaiian leis. Sometimes in a paddle out, everyone goes around the circle sharing stories about the person who's not there. Just your grief and the ocean.

It was really neat. It was— It was very touching.

The same day as the paddle out, there was also a memorial service at a local church. I mean, I've never—

would have never in a million years ever have thought that they would have disappeared and their lives be ended like that in such a horrific way.

Jesse Silverio, a friend of Summer's, had also waited for news of the mixed days.

There's not a word bad enough to be able to say how devastating it was to find out that information. And then waves of sadness come and waves of devastation come. And us as friends You know, would get together and just cry and sob together over what happened to them.

For some of the friends who'd waited so long for answers, they said there was a sense of almost relief just in knowing something after all this time. But Jesse said that relief was short-lived.

It was the one big answer to all the questions we had for all those years. And then another whole set of new questions and unanswered questions began to happen.

Because how could somebody overtake a family of 4 and do that to all of them? Was it a stranger, or was it somebody that knew them?

Gina Watson again. She'd been trying to help to get to the bottom of the McStays' disappearance since 2010. Back then, the case had been investigated by the San Diego County Sheriff's Office as a missing persons case. Detectives said they had exhausted all possible leads. They later handed the case over to the FBI in March of 2013. But now, 7 months later, San Bernardino investigators had bodies and gravesites to investigate. Detectives started trying to piece it all together.

When you have multiple homicides, it's always going to be a big deal.

Ryan Smith was a homicide detective working in the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department. As the question of what happened to the McStays began to resurface, he was assigned to the same San Bernardino investigation team as Detective Eddie Bachmann. For Detective Smith, the case quickly became personal.

I had young kids at the time, and you know that there's remains of young children in the graves. And so that's something that is just— it's alarming and it's upsetting because, you know, who kills children?

Smith started digging into the reports made by the gravesite investigators. What clues could the bodies, and the items they were found with reveal.

Especially with graves, we're going to want to see what's— what was left over, right? That's the name of the game of any investigation. What— what got left behind that we can try to find to help solve the crime? Now, unfortunately, especially with the McStays in that grave, you know, they were in the ground for 3 years.

Detective Smith says those years in the ground meant that it was harder to collect evidence. DNA was less likely to be present. The remains were now skeletal. There was no soft tissue left that would normally reveal something about the manner of death. But once the autopsies were complete, San Bernardino investigators were able to determine how the McStays died.

The coroner did their autopsy and they determined the causes of death were blunt force trauma.

According to police, Joseph's skull had a large indentation. A bone in his leg was badly broken. Summer's skull was severely damaged, suggesting that someone had hit her head several times. Investigators were able to compare the injuries to the size and shape of the 3-pound Stanley sledgehammer that they found in Grave B. They thought it was a match. Establishing a murder weapon was a step forward for the investigation. But it only added to the horror of the case for Detective Smith.

You know, this wasn't a drive-by. This wasn't someone who unfortunately got struck or became a victim because they were in the wrong place, wrong time. This was up close and personal.

And the graves had more to say. Smith reviewed the old case files from 2010 and discovered information in them that helped him make sense of the other items found with the remains.

In the graves, we found blue painter's tape. We found woven fabric. And when we reviewed pictures that were taken of the McStays' residence, what we saw is that the house was under construction. There was blue painter's tape.

There were rags. Remember, Summer and Joseph had been in the middle of renovating their house. Right when they went missing, they were painting the walls. Detectives wondered if this meant that the family had been killed at home.

There were no shoes in the graves. Also, you know, you're probably not going out without shoes. You know, there's no wallets. So really led us to believe that the family wasn't out traveling. They weren't doing something and then abducted. You know, they were at home.

The details as they emerged were hard to hear for the people who knew the family, like Gina Watson.

You think about what they possibly saw or feared. You think about, as a mother, wanting to protect those children, and it's heartbreaking.

It really is. Brutality of the murders only added to the confusion around the McStays' deaths. Who would want to kill this young family? Detectives wondered if the answer lay buried in the old case files before them. Was there a person previously questioned that might now have more to say?

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Detective Ryan Smith says that the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department was given over 4,000 pages of case files. Investigators reviewed old interviews that San Diego had done and combed through old documents. But a homicide investigation is different from a missing persons case. San Bernardino wanted to conduct new interviews, some of them with people who had already spoken to San Diego years before.

Now we know this isn't a family that just went on vacation and didn't tell anybody. This is a family that got murdered. So Information they may not have thought was important during a missing persons investigation is very important for us.

Investigators made a list of everyone San Diego had spoken to.

We put them all on a big board, and then we did our research about them, you know, what they did, where they lived, all that stuff. And then we would go out and talk to them.

In the San Bernardino Police report, detectives mentioned 4 people. All of them had been close to the McStays at some point in their lives. First was Michael McFadden. McFadden was married to Joseph McStay's ex-wife and was stepfather to Joseph's oldest son. According to the report, detectives had learned that McFadden and Joseph used to be friends, but Detective Bachmann said that in the months before the family's disappearance, things weren't good between them.

There were some issues between Michael McFadden and the McStays just over some stuff to do with the children.

Detectives met with Michael McFadden. They told him everyone's a suspect until San Bernardino says they aren't.

He was frustrated that he was being looked at as a suspect, I think, which is understandable for anybody. However, he was very open to us when we interviewed him. Provided the records to say, hey, I wasn't in the area.

San Bernardino investigators cleared Michael McFadden of any involvement in what happened to the McStays. Next was Vic Johansen. Police reports say Vic and Summer had dated for around 5 years. As Vic and Summer's relationship was coming to an end, that's when Summer met Joseph. And when Gina searched Joseph's email, She said she found something that concerned her. An email Summer had forwarded to Joseph. A message from Vic to Summer right before the McStays went missing.

It said, "I love you forever. Happy birthday, Summer. Forever and ever." It was just odd.

Vic had a criminal record. He had pleaded no contest to a charge of making criminal threats to a neighbor in 2004. But when detectives interviewed Vic, he said he didn't know where the McStay family were living at the time they went missing. And when detectives pulled his cell records for that period of time, it showed that his phone was out of state. Detective Smith again.

We were able to contact him. We were able to verify his whereabouts, and it excluded him from the list of suspects.

San Bernardino investigators were also taking a close look at Joseph's business associates. Dan Kavanaugh and Chase Merritt. Dan, again, was Joseph's business partner in their decorative waterfall business. He was the company's webmaster, responsible for their company's website and online marketing. Chase, remember, was a welder who worked with the company. He was the one who built the towering structures made of glass and steel. At the time Joseph went missing, He and Chase were in the middle of some lucrative custom projects, including one in Saudi Arabia. San Diego investigators had interviewed Dan Kavanaugh back in 2010, soon after the family disappeared. They had questioned why he'd removed funds from the company PayPal account after the family went missing. Dan had explained that the money, around $7,000, was for keeping the business afloat. The detectives were satisfied. There was no evidence tying him to the family's disappearance. San Bernardino detectives were interested in Dan and Joseph's business and an instance of some seemingly bad blood between them. There was a string of messages between the two men months before the family went missing. Messages show an angry Dan threatening retaliation against the business. Gina Watson, who had access to Joseph's emails came across the back and forth between the two men.

Oh yeah, here's the big part.

It will be about 30 days from today that your site is gone from the search engines if you just want to ignore me. Joseph says, why is that? Why not? You treat me like a kid, like I'm dumb or something. One, your site will be gone from the engines. Two, I'll make my own fountain site. And three, I don't need it anyway. I'm killing it on other shit. Joseph says, I, Summer, and kids know the real you and what you would potentially do to harm me and my family. You're a great guy, Dan. Effing sad.

That just sounded like a fake answer to me. That was not, not being accountable, and that was just dodging accountability. That was, that was not being real, you know. All I'm saying is that I can stop the marketing to the site.

This is Dan Kavanaugh. In an interview with ABC News, he admitted that it did sound like a threat, but he said Joseph left him no other choice.

That's like— that's all I could do at that point to make him take it seriously.

Detective Ryan Smith: As you read the messages, you see that he's threatening to remove the site, and that's Joseph's livelihood.

Dan Kavanaugh says that the interaction with Joseph didn't come out of the blue. As business partners, he and Joseph had an agreed split of profits and responsibilities. Customers would order through the fountain website, which Dan maintained and promoted. Joseph would handle customer communication, and when necessary, Joseph would contract Chase Merritt to fabricate custom fountain orders. But around this time, Dan said he started to notice something strange happening. He said their website's rankings were up, but their online sales numbers weren't.

I had a new girlfriend that I got, and I was like, I need more money to support this hot girl. And so I'm like, but I thought I already created a business that should be making me enough money to support this. And so then I was like, I started putting two and two together. I'm like, maybe I do have that company, but it's just I'm not getting the money from it.

Dan said that he could see in shared company spreadsheets that there were other customer orders, ones not made through the website. It looked to Dan like Joseph had contacted potential customers who had made inquiries through the website and backchanneled with them. Dan accused Joseph of trying to exclude him from the profits and keep it all a secret. Dan said that's what his heated messages to Joseph were about. He thought Joseph was withholding money from him, and the website was Dan's leverage.

I had ways that I could deal with it. They weren't violent ways, and I put them out in the open. I'm like, hey dude, I'm going to do something about this and I'm going to do it related to the business.

Dan said the situation affected his friendship with Joseph, but it didn't go further than that.

It's like demoralizing for me to see that, you know what I mean? But I'm not like, I'm going to kill someone or something like that. I just, I think more like nonviolently. My grandpa taught me to use my brain and he didn't teach me to use violence to solve things.

Dan told detectives in 2014 that after he confronted Joseph, Joseph had agreed to pay him back. He said that even after this disagreement, he and Joseph had a good relationship, that they still talked every day. Dan also told detectives that he had wondered while the McStays were missing if Joseph had been killed. He said he could see Joseph treating another person the way he treated Dan.

Maybe someone, quote, "who wasn't as nice as me." So Dan was adamant that he was not anywhere in the area at the time the family went missing.

Detective Bachmann confirmed Dan's alibi. The window of time when the McStays went missing.

During the investigation, we ended up interviewing Dan's ex-girlfriend, who had a strained relationship with Dan, but she was able to corroborate the fact that he was out in Hawaii with him at the time that the family, uh, went missing.

In the end, San Bernardino investigators cleared Dan Kavanaugh of any involvement in the McStay murders. As detectives ran down their list of names, all of them could be cleared, all except one.

As you So if you exclude people, you know, there's only one person left. Well, where's Chase?

Chase Merritt, the man who welded the fountains for Joseph and Dan's business, the man who said he'd seen Joseph the day the family went missing. As investigators did a deep dive on the timeline of the McStays' disappearance, Chase Merritt looked increasingly suspicious. It looks bad, Chase. It looks very bad for you right now that you're lying about this stuff.

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

Ashin Singh. Produced by Madeleine Wood, Vika Aronson, Audrey Masteck, 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, Sonny Antrim, Alyssa Stoller, Xander Samaras, Tom Berman, Indra Dalesakhia, 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.

Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers, and on my podcast The Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice. Because these stories deserve to be heard, and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to The Deck now wherever you get your podcasts.

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