McStays Episode 4: Questions and Answers

20/20

In Episode 4 of 'What Happened to the McStays?', detectives from San Bernardino County re-examine the 2010 murder case of the McStay family, focusing

Key takeaways

Chase Merritt used past tense when referring to the McStay family during an early interview, which investigators now interpret as indicative of prior knowledge of their deaths.
Security footage shows a vehicle leaving the McStays' home that does not match their white Isuzu Trooper; instead, it resembles Chase's utility truck with a right-side exhaust pipe.

Main topics

Reinvestigation of the McStay family murders
Chase Merritt as a suspect

Notable quotes

Did you kill the McStays' family? Of course not. He was my best friend.

Conclusion

Despite a lengthy interrogation and overwhelming circumstantial evidence pointing to Chase Merritt as the

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hi, this is Ashan Singh here with another weekly episode of our latest true crime series from 2020 in ABC Audio, What Happened to the Mixed Days? Remember, you can get new episodes weekly on Tuesdays if you follow What Happened to the Mixed Days 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. Speaker 1 (0:26) Click the link in the description to start your free trial today. Now, here's the next episode of What Happened to the Mixed Days. There's a headline every 30 minutes for our show, I'm pretty sure. Welcome to Get Real. I'm your host, Amanda Hirsch. This is the show for the reality TV obsessed. You thought the show was crazy. Living it was crazier. I was dripping sweat before I even started. For the stars and stans of the Hulu reality verse. Do we think she's stirring the pot to secure a place on the show? Find and listen to Get Real wherever you get your podcasts and stream new episodes Thursdays on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. Terms apply. October 22nd, 2014. Almost a year after the bodies of the McStay family were found brutally murdered in the Mojave Desert. Speaker 1 (1:16) The San Bernardino County Sheriff's detectives called Chase Merritt in for an interview. Speaker 1 (1:28) Detective Eddie Bachman 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 four years ago, just days after the mixtapes went missing. Back then, he told San Diego detectives that he and Joseph were friends. Best friends. And four 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. Speaker 1 (2:32) Chase added that Joseph going missing hadn't just been an emotional loss for him. His entire welding business had depended on Joseph. Speaker 1 (2:58) 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. Speaker 1 (3:20) In re-interviewing the McStays' family and friends, digging into old case files, and uncovering new evidence, detectives hadn't 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 Ashton Singh, and this is What Happened to the McStays? Episode 4. Questions and Answers Speaker 1 (4:02) 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. Speaker 1 (4:55) 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 McStay's car, a white Isuzu Trooper, though they couldn't be sure. But when Detective Eddie Bachman and his team reviewed the footage, they spotted something interesting. Speaker 1 (5:57) 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 McStay's 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 Bachman 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 McStay's home wasn't the only place that Chase was suspected to have been during that crucial window of time. Speaker 1 (6:53) Three 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 an 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. Speaker 1 (7:48) Investigators determined that after the mixtapes 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 Bachman as strange. He just stops calling him. That's