The McStay Family: Here’s What Happened and Why It Won’t Leave Me Alone

A family of four vanishes without explanation. For nearly four years, the official theory is that they simply… left. Then a motorcyclist finds a skull in the Mojave Desert. This is the case I couldn’t stop thinking about after one Red Handed episode.

🎧 Start here: Red Handed — The McStay Family, Parts 1 & 2

I’d never heard of the McStay family until recently, which means some of you haven’t either. Let me fix that.

In February 2010, Joseph and Summer McStay — along with their sons Gianni, 4, and Joseph Jr., 3 — vanished from their home in Fallbrook, California. No forced entry. No signs of struggle. Dogs left behind, food left out, nothing taken. They were just gone.

For nearly four years, the official working theory was that the family had left voluntarily. Their car was found near the Mexico border, and a grainy surveillance video appeared to show a family of four crossing into Mexico on the day it was abandoned. There were computer searches for what documents children need to travel to Mexico. The implication was clear: they left. Chose this.

Their family never believed it for a second. Joseph and Summer would never abandon the dogs. Their bank accounts were untouched. Summer’s passport was expired.

They were right.

In November 2013, a motorcyclist spotted a small skull lying on the desert sand. They’d found them. All four. Buried in shallow graves in the Mojave Desert, over 100 miles from their home. Cause of death: blunt force trauma. A sledgehammer was found buried in the earth alongside them.

The person eventually convicted of their murders was Charles “Chase” Merritt — Joseph’s business associate. A man who had been publicly mourning their disappearance and giving cable news interviews. He’d written himself multiple backdated cheques from the business accounts, owed Joseph over $42,000, and his phone pinged a cell tower near the burial site two days after the family vanished. In June 2019, a jury found him guilty. He was sentenced to death.

“The case is technically solved. Convicted killer, death row, done. And yet.”

The brutality of it refuses to sit right. The two small boys. The staging — someone drove that car to the border and walked back, just to buy time. The fact that for years the official response was essentially they probably just went to Mexico, while a family screamed that something was wrong.

This one bothers me. It’ll bother you too.

🎧 Red Handed — The McStay Family, Parts 1 & 2

Title image credit: The McStay Family / ZUMA Press