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What Happened to the McStays? — The Best Friend. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.
Hey, it's Ash and Sing with a quick reminder. You can get episodes of this podcast to add free, and before they appear in our main feed, I subscribing to 2020 True Crime Plus. Click the link in the episode description to learn more. And stands of the Hula Reality Verse. Do you 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. When Kathy Jarvis heard that Joseph McStay was confirmed dead, she says she could hardly believe it. When the news came that they had found Joseph's family,
it was hard. It was hard to process that. It doesn't feel real. You know, just kind of... I can't be them. I know. Like, I even call Joseph's phone or something like, no, this can't be happening. You've got to come back. Kathy had known Joseph for a few years. She said she met him through her partner at the time. I'm Chase Merritt's ex-girlfriend and mother of his three children. Back when the McStays had gone missing, Kathy and Chase were still together. They had one teenager and two kids under 10. And we're living in Rancho Cucamanga, the city on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Kathy says that Joseph would often drive their way to have dinner with Chase, and talk about upcoming projects. She says she got to know Joseph well. After the McStays went missing, she said that Chase wanted to be there for Joseph's extended family.
But after the bodies were found in the desert and the investigation into their murders began, Kathy says people in the McStays in her circle began to look at Chase differently. I feel like, you know, stories changed. Chase was a good guy and then all of a sudden he was somebody that they would think murdered their son or their brother or their family. Kathy says the idea just didn't make sense to her. Why would Chase kill someone who was giving him work? Joseph and Chase were talking about plans for the future. Like, it was lucrative contracts coming. Why would you put that in jeopardy? It just doesn't make any sense. But San Bernardino Sharers detectives had come to think otherwise. They now believe Chase married did have a reason to kill Joseph McStay.
For them, it came down to what investigators believed happened on February 4, 2010. When they said a dangerous confrontation had led to irreversible decisions. But who is Chase married? A man that detectives now felt was capable of killing an entire family. From ABC Audio in 2020, I'm Ash and Singh. And this is what happened to the McStays. Episode 5. The Best Friend. Kathy and Chase met in the early 1990s. And according to Kathy, they were together, off and on, for around 20 years. They've been broken up for over a decade now. But Kathy still remembers Chase as being a good person, even if he's far from perfect.
Chase is a little arrogant. He's creative. He'll tell you he's athletic. He'll boast about how athletic he is. But the first time I saw him be athletic was at a mountain bike race. And he hopped on the mountain bike and he was about to jump over this little curb and he hit it and face planted. And he just jumps up and he's like, oh, you know, he's just like a big dork. He is funny. He's goofy. He has a good sense of humor. We laughed a lot. Kathy said that the day they first saw each other, it was an instant attraction. I actually met Chase at a country western bar. He was there playing pool. I was there to dance. Kathy described Chase wearing a cowboy hat and said that he was in shape.
She said he looked like a big tough cowboy. Who could take care of her? I happened to be sitting near the dance floor by the pool tables when he hit me with his pool cube. And I kind of turned around like, hello, and he just had no clue. He just didn't even acknowledge me. So I was like, what an idiot. So I'm like, I turned back around. I was like, okay, whatever. By the end of the night, I was on the dance floor with somebody else and Chase was standing at the dance floor waiting, just standing and then watching. And when I walked off, he's like, we should go get something to eat. You know, let's talk. And I was like, okay. Not long after they started dating, Kathy said Chase took her to meet his family. They lived east of LA just over the San Gabriel Mountains in the Mojave Desert.
At 3,000 feet elevation, the high desert is dotted with sagebrush and tuner per trees. Small towns are scattered across the landscape. Chase grew up in hisperia, California. At that time, like the 60s, early 70s, it was pretty much the middle nowhere. The next town over from hisperia is Victorville, where the mixed-aste bodies were found, just outside city limits. Kathy says that some of Chase's family still lived in the desert, including a sister, Juanita. When Kathy says he was especially close to, according to Kathy, Chase was from a big family. There were eight brothers and sisters. As Chase grew up, he was kind of the one that his family could lean on. If they needed something, he would be there.
He's just that sibling that I feel like they all could rely on. Over the years, Chase had some troubles with the law. Between 1977 and 2001, he had several convictions for burglary. Kathy says that when they started dating, Chase seemed to focus on pursuing a career in welding. It was the skill his father had taught him. Early in their relationship, Chase set up a metal workshop in Kathy's garage. He started making these metal art wall hangings. And when I saw them, I was like, wow, I mean, that's pretty cool. Soon, she says the couple started their own metalwork business. Chase was making one of a kind waterfalls, and Kathy was helping with designs. But according to Kathy, Chase could be difficult to work with. I would tell him which way I think it should be.
I think it'd be more marketable if he did this color or that stone or something. And he would just not listen to me and do it his own way. Kathy said there was another reason that she and Chase would butt heads at work. Finances. Oh gosh. Chase was terrible with money. Kathy says Chase was a once what he wants when he wants it kind of guy. We had a boat. We had a couple of boats for a while. We had jet skis. We had things we didn't need. Around 2006, Chase met and started working with Joseph McStay. Chase told San Bernardino detectives that Joseph was looking for a welder to build a fountain for him. Someone recommended Chase. He said that soon, he was the only person that Joseph would turn to for custom work. Kathy says where Chase's stubborn streak had bothered her, Joseph was easy going
enough for both of them. He was likeable and good with people. This just seemed to fit. Like Joseph was really smart. He was great with customers. And they had a great collaboration. Soon Kathy says Chase and Joseph's business relationship blossomed into a personal one. Joseph was his best friend. I mean, he didn't have a whole lot of close contacts. I mean, we didn't have a large friend group. We didn't go out and do things. We didn't hang out with people necessarily. So the fact that he spent time outside of work with Joseph was kind of a big deal because he didn't really do that with many people. Investigators learned that by early 2010, Chase and Joseph have been working together for a few years. And the company had a couple of big contracts coming up. On February 4th, Chase said he had a meeting with Joseph at Chick-fil-A.
Kathy says that afterwards, Chase spent the evening at their home. Looking back, there was a detail about that night at home with Chase that bothered Kathy. A phone call, she says Chase received. I happened to see the caller ID when it rang. And I told him, Joseph's calling. And he was like, I'll talk to him tomorrow, whatever. So the next day, when he couldn't get a hold of Joseph and he told me that, and then the day after, I was concerned. I know he was trying to keep it cool. He didn't want to overstep the boundaries. But I was getting concerned. And I told him, I told Chase, what if that was Joseph's last call to you? Like, what if he needed your help and you didn't answer the phone? Like, it started weighing heavy on me then. Like, if you can't get a hold of him, that's unusual.
And we should do something. You know, you should call the police. You should. And that's when he, like, reached out to the family. The rest of the story we've heard before, Chase spoke with Joseph's brother on the 9th of February and said that he hadn't heard from Joseph for a few days. Kathy was interviewed by San Bernardino Detectives in October 2014. They asked her about the night of February 4th. The investigators asked her if she might have been mistaken about the date of the call she said she saw from Joseph. She admitted to detectives that she could have been. But she insisted, both to San Bernardino Detectives and to ABC News, the chase had been at home with her on the evening of February 4th. By the time they would call Chase Merritt in for his interview, detectives had come to believe that Chase wasn't at home with Kathy that evening.
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Sam Bernardino Detectives asked Chase Merritt to describe his meeting with Joseph earlier that day. According to Detective Smith, Chase implied that it was not a big deal. So the way Chase painted that meeting on February 4th is that it was a great, kind of successful meeting that things are going great. We have these projects. We're moving forward and everything is good. What caught our attention about that is the fact that when you look at the financials and some of the emails going back and forth, they weren't good. Investigators thought that Joseph had met with Chase to confront him. We believed that Joseph and Chase met that morning at Chick-fil-A. There was an interaction between them and that that meeting resulted in Chase being let go of the business. Detective thought that Chase got fired that day. And the reason
he felt that it all came down to money. So when we looked into Chase's finances, we found that he was just horrible with his personal finances. He had a gambling issue where he would go to casinos and spend a lot of money. Investigators believed Chase owed money to Joseph from previous projects that worked on together. According to their case report, they alleged he'd also been forging checks for men. It was an email sent from Joseph to Chase a few days before their Chick-fil-A meeting. Chase had shared it with San Diego detectives back in 2010. This email had several rows of figures. Big ones. Tens of thousands of dollars. Which Chase had told detectives were related to projects he and Joseph were working on together. He said the figures were a running tab of finances between the two men.
But when San Bernardino investigators read this email, it looked to them like a tally of debt that Joseph said Chase owed him the tune of $42,000. And investigators believed that Chase had been writing checks to himself from the business account that Joseph used several times in the days leading up to their meeting. They also came to believe that Joseph had noticed Chase moving money around. Even as Joseph is driving up to meet Chase, he's on the phone with Union Bank. Now we don't know what the context of those calls were, but we know he's checking, he called at least twice Union Bank as he's driving up to meet Chase. When detectives interviewed Chase in late October of 2014, they told him what they believed. You were gambler, you spent all your money gambling and you were still money from Joseph's call.
He let it go. No. No, Chase told detectives. Chase was adamant that he and Joseph were on good terms and that his gambling wasn't an issue. He told detectives that he wasn't stealing from Joseph, that he wasn't fired by him. Continued to insist that the meeting at the Chick-fil-A wasn't anything out of the ordinary. But investigators suspected that the working relationship between the two men had deteriorated to the point where Joseph was ready to sever their partnership. And, please believe it, there had been some kind of argument between them. Investigators thought that after the Chick-fil-A meeting, Chase had something dangerous, a motive. According to phone records, after the two men met that day, Joseph's phone began to move. Pinging off a series of cell towers near the highway, investigators believed that Joseph was going south,
back to his home in Fulbrook, that he arrived there just after 4pm. Joseph's phone made one more call that went through to Chase's 5.48 pm. The call lasted about three minutes. Then, according to the police report, it appeared that Chase's phone shut off for three and a half hours. According to authorities, during this window, several calls came into Chase's phone when it made no contact with any cell towers. Detective thought it was consistent with the phone being turned off. Authorities suspected that Chase's phone was purposefully turned off, or put in an airplane mode. Detectives had theorized about what they believed had happened in this three and a half hour period. How and when the mixed days had died.
Investigators believed that Chase followed Joseph McStay back to Fulbrook. I believe it was a continuation of that contentious meeting in the beginning. So, they're down there, they're at Fulbrook, an argument occurs. It turns physical where Joseph and Chase get into an altercation. Joseph and Chase are either fighting or Chase murders him right there. And then at that point, Chase is committed and follows through with the rest of the family. Detectives believed that Chase killed Joseph, Summer, Gianni, and Joey Jr. According to the Investigators report, detective spoke to a friend of the McStays who'd been helping them redecorate their house. The friend told them that he'd been using a sledgehammer to close paint cans in the McStay's home days before they disappeared. San Bernardino detectives noticed that the hammer was missing from crime scene photographs. And a paint splattered sledgehammer had later been found in one of the graves.
Investigators believed that Chase had used it to murder the McStays in their own home. Investigators said that after killing the family, Chase logged on to the McStays home computer and created a $4,000 check made out to himself. Although that check was never printed, it looked to them like further evidence of Chase being inside the fallbrook house. Chase told San Bernardino detectives that he and Joseph hadn't argued that day. And he hadn't gone to the McStays house that evening and that he hadn't killed them. While detectives did not have physical evidence tying Chase to the murders or the alleged crime
scene at the McStays home, they believed they could place him close to where the bodies were buried in the desert. And to investigate that, they spoke to someone who knew him well. There is so much NFL on ESPN right now. Monday night football plus pregame and postgame. NFL live NFL prime time. Everything you need to stay on top of every game every week. And now NFL network is on the ESPN app. More football, more coverage, more ways to watch. Football's on all season long on ESPN and streaming on the ESPN app. This is the way. Hi, I'm John Favreau. We are launching the all-new Star Wars, the Mandalorian and Grogu official podcast. I'm sorry I can't focus at the moment. We're going behind the scenes with the cast and crew
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Why would people put you up in the high desert on February 6th? My sister. Detectives claimed that they knew from his cell records this phone had pinged off a tower in the desert and they alleged that this particular tower was in an area near the McStays graves. San Bernardino detective Ryan Smith was aware of Chase's family in the desert. In fact, nine days before Chase Merritt was interviewed, Smith had gone to speak to Chase's sister, Juanita. Juanita lived a few miles from where the bodies were buried. Here the base of Courtside Mountain. On top of the mountain was the cell tower that police set. Chase's phone pinged off on February 6th, 2010. So the interesting thing about the Courtside Tower is it's right on that mountain.
On the back side or the west side of that mountain is Juanita Merritt's residence. On the north side or northeast side is kind of the desert in the 15 freeway where the McStays bodies are buried. To determine if Chase's phone had pinged off that cell tower because he was visiting his sister, detective Ryan Smith went to investigate. He drove up to visit Juanita. By then it had been over four and a half years since the McStays weren't missing. Smith met Juanita at her home. It sat outside and talked. We just kind of asked what what the relationship was like and then we went into what is her relationship with Chase. Does Chase come to visit? When was the last time he came to visit? Smith recorded their conversation. Asked Juanita if she'd seen Chase up in the desert around
February 2010. Juanita said no. Chase at that time when he was with Joe never came up here. That's why I was going to ask. Can you remember it all? You didn't even hardly visit. I can remember one time he visited. What about how long before? So I mean five years I hadn't seen him. So that's considerable. He didn't come up to the desert because he works 24-7. Smith asked Juanita if she and Chase had talked about the McStays. Did you guys ever have that conversation? Ask him what he thinks happens? I asked him blind blank. He said no clue. He was devastated. He lost everything. Juanita told police that Chase hadn't visited her around the time of the McStays disappearance. So a little over a week later when he offered that as his only possible explanation for why his phone had pinged in the desert. The detectives were skeptical. In fact, five hours into their
interview, Chase had been unable to give the detectives any new explanations that might have eased their suspicions about him. There was no explanation as to why he was there. We believed we had enough to prove that he was the only person who had the means, the motive and the opportunity to commit this crime. What even should happen to the person that killed McStays family? I think they should get killed. Exactly the same way they got killed. What do you mean? I think they should get killed. I think they should be executed somehow. When I concluded how they want they should get killed. Because nobody that kills, see little kids, shouldn't be alive. My family.
Is that trouble you? Of course it does. You do even with the heart that was carrying an heart, right? That's crazy. A little boy. By this point, the detectives sitting across from him, though confident it was Chase who killed this family. Chase left the interview room a free man, but he wouldn't stay that way for long. About two weeks later, he got some visitors at this place of work. The police. They'd come to arrest him for the murders of the McStay family. Now police finally felt they had an answer to the question of what happened to the McStays. Good morning. We'd like to get started. Is everyone ready? Two days after Chase's arrest, the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department called a press conference.
Charles Chase Merritt was identified as the suspect responsible for the death of Joseph, Summer, Gianni, and Joseph McStay. There's no information to suggest there were any other suspects involved in this crime. Merritt was arrested on Wednesday, November 5th, without incident, transported and booked at our West Valley Detention Center where he is currently being held. Susan Blake, Joseph McStay's mother, was in the briefing room that day. She stood to say a few words to the gathered press. Small and blonde, she was a head shorter than the sheriff's deputies behind her. Good morning. My son and his family was a beautiful family that did not deserve this. Joey was so generous and kind to so many people. I always kept hope we'd find him and then I received the phone call. And now there's a little more charge journey. I need justice from the law and the
courts and get to talk to the judge. And most of all, justice upstairs, the my lovely family. Thank you. For the family that had waited so long, the wheels of justice could now finally turn. The San Bernardino District Attorney told the press that Chase Merritt was facing four murder charges and that the brutality of the case hadn't gone unnoticed by prosecutors. I don't need to tell you that this is a cold and callous murder of an entire family. We filed a special circumstance of multiple murders. We'll make him eligible for the death penalty. Chase Merritt would said he hoped for the death penalty for whoever killed the McStay family. Would now face a courtroom in the prospect of capital punishment himself.
Everyone's made him out to be this monster that he's not. But Kathy Jarvis, Chase's ex, says he was being made into escape goat. Somebody murdered this family, but it wasn't a chase. Chase Merritt maintained his innocence. And soon, you would have to fight. For his life. What happened to the McStays is a production of ABC audio in 2020, hosted by me, Ashin Singh, produced by Madeline Wood, Vika Aronson, Audrey Mostek, and Kiar 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 Kiar Powell, mixing by Evan Viola and Bob Mallory. Special thanks to Katie Dendas, Janice Johnson, Chris Donovan, Joseph Free, Sonny Andrew,
Alyssa Stolar, Zander Samaris, Tom Burman, Indra D'Alessaahum, and Blue Browning. Garsh Cohen is our director of podcast programming. Evan McNaff is our executive producer. Can't wait for more. Listen to the next episode ahead of everyone else, add free. Subscribe now to 2020 True Crime Plus on Apple podcasts. Click the link in the description to start your free trial today. For more on Amazon, visit our website at www.cicolour.com. Follow every detail streaming live daily on ABC News Live, wherever you stream, and for the burden of proof daily wherever you get your podcasts. On Reddit, True Crime doesn't come from journalists. It comes from the victims, the witnesses, and sometimes the suspects themselves. Every Tuesday on Crimes of Reddit, we read these posts out loud.
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