McStay family murders

Joseph McStay, 40, his wife Summer, 43, and their two young sons, Gianni, 4, and Joseph Jr., 3, disappeared from their home in Fallbrook, California, on or around February 4, 2010. Joseph owned Earth Inspired Products, a company that built decorative fountains, and Summer worked as a licensed real estate agent. At 7:47 p.m. that evening, a neighbor's surveillance camera recorded the lower portion of a vehicle believed to be the family's 1996 Isuzu Trooper, and at 8:28 p.m. a call from Joseph's cellphone to his business associate, Charles "Chase" Merritt, went to voicemail and was not returned.

Relatives who could not reach the family grew concerned over the following days. On February 13, Joseph's brother entered the Fallbrook home through an open window and found no one there, though the family's two dogs remained in the backyard. Two days later, he contacted the San Diego County Sheriff's Department to report the family missing. A search warrant executed on February 19 found no sign of a struggle, but an egg carton left on the counter and two bowls of popcorn on a sofa suggested the family had left in a hurry. Investigators also learned that the family's Trooper had been towed from a strip-mall parking lot in San Ysidro, near the U.S.-Mexico border, on February 8; its whereabouts before that were never established.

For more than three years, investigators weighed the possibility that the family had left the country voluntarily. Computer searches for children's travel documents for Mexico and for Spanish lessons, along with border-crossing video from February 8 appearing to show a similar family entering Mexico, led the San Diego County Sheriff's Department to say in April 2013 that it believed the family had left voluntarily. Relatives disputed this, citing more than $100,000 in untouched bank accounts and the family's stated wariness of the border region.

On November 11, 2013, a motorcyclist discovered four sets of human remains buried in two shallow graves in the desert near Victorville, California. Two days later, two of the sets were identified as Joseph and Summer McStay. San Bernardino County authorities ruled the deaths a homicide and said they believed the family had died of blunt force trauma inside their Fallbrook home, though they declined to discuss further specifics or a motive.

On November 5, 2014, San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department detectives arrested Merritt, Joseph's former business partner, after recovering his DNA from the family's car; the arrest was made public two days later. Merritt was charged with four counts of murder, and prosecutors sought the death penalty. According to arrest warrant affidavits, autopsies found that all four victims had been beaten to death with a blunt object, and investigators believed the weapon was a sledgehammer recovered from one of the graves; they also testified that they believed the victims had been tortured before they were killed. Prosecutors alleged that Merritt, who had a gambling problem, killed the family for financial gain, pointing to more than $21,000 in checks he wrote against Joseph's business account in the days afterward, followed by a gambling spree at nearby casinos.

Merritt's trial, delayed for years after he dismissed a series of attorneys, began on January 7, 2019, in San Bernardino. On June 10, 2019, a jury found him guilty of murdering the McStay family, and on June 24 it recommended a death sentence. A judge upheld that recommendation on January 21, 2020. Merritt is incarcerated at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego and is not eligible for parole; California has had a moratorium on carrying out death sentences since 2019.