McStays Episode 4: Questions and Answers

In October 2014, nearly four years after the McStay family vanished, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s detectives sat down with Chase Merritt for an interview. He had been Joseph McStay’s best friend, his business partner, the man who spoke to him multiple times a day. But by now, the bodies of Joseph, his wife Summer, and their two young sons had been found buried in the desert. The detectives had spent months digging through old case files and new evidence, and they believed Chase Merritt knew far more than he had ever told police.

The Past Tense and the Wrong Exhaust Pipe

When San Bernardino detectives reviewed the original interviews from 2010, one detail immediately stood out. During those early conversations, Chase had referred to Joseph in the past tense. “He was my best friend,” he said. Detective Ryan Smith found that telling. “People don’t say that,” he noted. At the time, the case was still a missing persons investigation, and the San Diego detectives did not press the point. But now, with four bodies recovered, the choice of words looked like a slip—an indication that Chase may have known, even in the immediate aftermath, that the McStays were already dead.