On February 4, 2010, Joseph McE called his father, Patrick, saying he was running late for a lunch appointment with his business partner.
His wife, Summer, had just spoken with her sister.
4-year-old Giani and 3-year-old Joey were playing in the backyard of their home in Fbrook, California.
Everything was so normal that no one thought it was the last day.
After 7:47 pm, a neighbor’s camera recorded a vehicle leaving the house.
Then, silence.
No calls, no messages.
9 days later, Joseph’s brother climbed through a window into the house and found popcorn in bowls, rotten eggs on the counter, two hungry dogs, no signs of violence.
The family of four had vanished without a goodbye.
Their car appeared near the Mexican border.
A blurry video showed four figures walking into Tijuana.
Police concluded the family had left voluntarily and closed the case.
3 years passed in silence.
Then in November 2013, a motorcyclist discovered a small skull in the Mojave Desert, 100 miles north of their home.
Under the sand were four sets of remains in two shallow graves and a sledgehammer.
Joseph 40, Summer 43, Giani 4, Joey 3, all bludgeoned to death.
And the man who had reported them missing, who had cried for them on television, who claimed to be the last person to see Joseph, was the one who held the hammer.
It took four years of investigation and a trial based entirely on circumstantial evidence to bring him to justice.
This is the story of the Mday family and it begins before the sledgehammer was ever swung.
If you want to know not only what happened, but why the man who killed a family of four almost got away with it, you’ve come to the right place.
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To understand why an entire family of four could disappear from a quiet Southern California town without anyone noticing, you have to understand who they were, how they lived, and who was standing right beside them.
Joseph Brian McE was born on November 20, 1969 in Akran, Ohio.
He grew up with his brother Michael in an ordinary family, father Patrick, mother Susan Blake.
There was nothing remarkable about Joseph’s childhood except for one thing.
He was never one to sit still.
From an early age, he loved making things with his hands.
Figuring out how to turn the ideas in his head into real objects.
As an adult, he moved to California, where his ambition found room to grow.
He didn’t work for someone else.
He built his own company, Earth Inspired Products, a small business that designed and sold decorative indoor water fountains, the kind made of natural stone and composite materials you see in hotel lobbies or upscale living rooms.
Joseph ran most of the operation from home, taking orders online, packing them himself, occasionally going out to install them for customers.
The work wasn’t glamorous, but it was steady, and Joseph had ambitions to expand.
He was the kind of hands-on entrepreneur who did everything himself from designing products to calling suppliers to checking inventory.
The flexible schedule let him stay home with his family most of the time.
And that was exactly what he wanted.
Because for Joseph McE, family wasn’t something he built after his career succeeded.
Family was something he built alongside it every day through his presence.
Summer McStay, born Virginia Lisa Aranda on December 27th, 1966 in Los Angeles County, California, had been known as Summer Martelli before marrying Joseph.
Those closest to her described her in three words: protective, devoted, and strong.
Summer was a licensed real estate agent, but her primary role during these years was full-time mother and bookkeeper for Earth Inspired Products.
She was the one who kept the family business running smoothly behind the scenes.
While Joseph designed and sold, Summer tracked cash flow, invoices, and bank accounts.
She had an artistic side, loved decorating the house, and possessed a strong personality that people who knew her said reflected her absolute commitment to her family.
No one doubted that Summer McDeay would do anything to protect her children.
Their first son, Giani Jeppi Martelli Mday, was born on July 9, 2005.
His younger brother, Joseph Mateo Martelli Mday Jr.
, whom everyone called Joey, was born on January 31, 2007.
Giani was four, curious and energetic, always asking why about everything.
Joey was three, more attached to his mother, but also full of affection and liked following his big brother everywhere.
Friends and relatives remembered the two boys as bright, smiling children, often seen playing in the backyard or going to the beach with their parents.
Joseph and Summer used to take the kids surfing and bike riding along the coast when they still lived in San Clemente.
They took lots of photos, shot family videos, and recorded every little milestone of the two boys as if every day was worth remembering.
In the winter of 2009, the Mday family moved to Fbrook, California.
A small town in northern San Diego County known by the nickname the friendly village.
The new house sat on Avocado Vista Lane, a quiet street with homes separated by fences and orchards.
Summer was busy redecorating while Joseph continued growing the business.
A new life was beginning.
Everything was on track.
And this is when Charles Merritt entered the story.
Charles Ray Merritt, whom everyone called Chase, was Joseph’s longest standing business partner.
Merritt was a professional welder hired to design and fabricate the metal frames for earth inspired products as fountains.
The relationship between the two men went far beyond work.
Joseph considered Merritt a close friend.
Merritt sometimes worked right at the McStay home, knew the whole family by face, knew each child’s name.
They had lunch together, talked on the phone regularly, and Joseph trusted Merritt enough to give him access to the company’s financial accounts.
Joseph had even once loaned Merritt money to pay off gambling debts, a loan Merritt never repaid.
But there were things about Merritt that Joseph didn’t know or chose not to see.
Merritt had a criminal record.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he had been sentenced to more than 2 years in prison for theft, receiving stolen property, and violating parole.
Merritt also owed more than $20,000 in unpaid taxes and was in terrible financial shape.
He had a serious gambling problem, the kind that never resolves itself and only gets deeper.
And by early 2010, Merritt owed Joseph nearly $43,000.
Think about that.
A man buried in debt with a criminal record with a gambling problem, completely trusted by his business partner, given access to the financial books, sitting down to lunch with the family he would wipe out.
No one saw it coming.
Not Joseph, not Summer, not Patrick McET, the father who called to check on his son every week.
No one.
Because the deadliest threat never looks like a threat.
It looks like a friend.
On January 31, 2010, the Mday family celebrated Joey’s third birthday.
Cake, candles, the laughter of a three-year-old surrounded by his parents and big brother.
4 days later, they were all gone.
February 4, 2010 began like any other ordinary day in the Mday house.
Joseph called his father, Patrick, saying he was in a hurry to meet his partner.
Nothing unusual in his voice.
Nothing to suggest he was worried, afraid, or planning to leave.
It was just a quick call between father and son, the kind Patrick received every week, and never thought would be the last.
Summer also spoke with her sister that day.
Her sister had just had a baby and Summer explained she was swamped with housework and taking care of the two kids.
Ordinary life, ordinary schedule.
The couple texted each other around 5:00 pm Nothing noteworthy, just short messages between two people juggling work and family.
Then at 7:47 pm, a neighbor’s surveillance camera recorded the lower portion of a vehicle believed to be the Mday family’s white 1996 Isuzu trooper leaving the driveway on Avocado Vista Lane.
After that moment, Joseph McStay stopped answering his cell phone.
Summer McDeay stopped contacting anyone.
No calls, no texts, no emails.
Four people vanished into the California night as if they had never existed.
In the first days, the family wasn’t overly worried.
Patrick called, but no one answered.
Michael, Joseph’s brother, also called, but the phone rang into voicemail.
They told themselves Joseph was probably busy.
Or the family had gone somewhere for a few days and forgotten to say.
With two little kids, life was always chaotic.
But Patrick McE was not the kind of man who easily accepted silence.
He knew his son.
Joseph always called back.
Joseph didn’t disappear without a word.
Every day that passed without news, the worry in Patrick’s heart grew.
He didn’t say it out loud, but a father’s instinct was screaming that something was wrong.
He urged Michael to go check on Joseph’s house.
At first, Michael didn’t think it was serious.
He figured his brother had simply taken the family on a short trip.
But on February 13, 9 days after the last contact, Michael drove to Fbrook.
When he arrived, the house was still, the front door locked, no lights, the family’s car not in the garage.
Michael walked around the house and found an open window.
He climbed in.
Inside, Michael found what investigators would later call signs of a hasty departure.
Two bowls of popcorn still in the living room, uneaten.
Eggs left on the kitchen counter had gone rotten.
Fresh food not put away in the refrigerator, as if someone had just brought it home from the store and left it there.
Giani and Joey’s toys scattered on the floor.
And in the backyard, the family’s two dogs were still there, hungry, thirsty, unfed for more than a week.
No signs of forced entry, no broken doors, no blood, no signs of a struggle.
The house looked as if the family of four had simply stood up in the middle of dinner and walked out, never to return.
But they left the dogs.
And anyone who knew Summer Mcay knew she would never leave the dogs without arranging for someone to care for them.
That was the first detail that didn’t fit, and it wouldn’t be the last.
On February 15, 2010, family members reported the Maxday family missing to the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.
On February 19, investigators from the homicide unit searched the house on Avocado Vista Lane.
Official conclusion, no signs of a struggle, no clear evidence of a crime.
On February 22, a deputy publicly acknowledged that the disappearance left them baffled.
But then a lead appeared and it changed the entire direction of the investigation in the wrong direction.
On February 8, 4 days after the family disappeared, the Mday family’s white 1996 Isuzu trooper was found near Sanne Cedro, right next to the Mexican border crossing.
The car had been left on the street and was impounded as abandoned.
Sanidedro is the busiest border crossing between the United States and Mexico.
Finding the car there meant something very specific to investigators.
Someone had driven to the border and walked across to the other side.
Then on March 5, 2010, police released surveillance video from the border crossing.
The video showed a blurry, lowquality image of a group of four people, two adults and two small children holding hands, walking through the pedestrian gate into Mexico.
The timestamp on the video matched the day the car was abandoned.
And then investigators found what they believed was the decisive evidence on the McY family’s home computer.
There was a notable search history.
On January 28, 2010, someone had used that computer to look up information about travel to Mexico, passport requirements for children, and how to learn Spanish.
7 days before the family disappeared, someone in that house was researching how to take small children to Mexico.
with the car at the border, the video of four figures, and the computer search history.
The story assembled itself into a neat, dangerous picture.
The Mday family had voluntarily gone to Mexico.
No crime, no victims, just a family that decided to leave without telling anyone.
That was the conclusion the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department accepted.
That was the theory they announced to the media, and that was why they stopped looking.
But there was one person who did not accept that story.
Patrick McE knew his son would never leave the dogs without a word, would never cut off contact with his father, would never take two small children to Mexico without any preparation.
Patrick looked at the evidence the police called compelling and saw something completely different.
Someone had staged it all.
Someone wanted the world to believe the McE family had left and someone had succeeded.
The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department made a decision that would later be criticized as the most serious mistake in the entire case.
They concluded that the Mday family had voluntarily left the country.
Not a crime, not a kidnapping, just a family choosing to disappear.
With that conclusion, the intensity of the investigation dropped sharply.
The case was transferred to the FBI on the grounds that the agency had experience working abroad.
But in reality, the handoff was more like pushing a file to another desk than expanding the investigation.
The FBI chased hundreds of leads related to Mexico, checking airports, bus stations, hotels, tourist centers, all of them dead ends.
On February 23, 2010, detectives notified Interpol to search for the Mday family possibly in Mexico.
On February 25, flyers were distributed along the border.
No results, no trace.
The family of four seemed to have dissolved into thin air on the other side of the border.
And that was exactly what their killer wanted everyone to believe.
While the justice system looked south, Patrick McE looked in every direction.
He had no badge, no authority, no investigative team.
He was just a father looking for his son.
But Patrick had something the police lacked, an absolute refusal to accept the wrong answer.
He began investigating on his own.
He obtained access to Joseph’s email and started reading every message, hundreds of emails, searching for anything unusual, any lead the police might have missed.
He called Joseph’s friends, colleagues, customers, anyone who had been in contact with his son in the weeks before the disappearance, and he found things that kept him awake at night.
In November 2010, Patrick contacted detectives and reported suspicious activity by one of Joseph’s business partners.
He had found mismatched financial transactions, money moving in the company accounts that Joseph could not have approved if he was in Mexico without a phone or computer.
Patrick told police he believed someone was exploiting his son’s absence to drain money from the business.
Police noted it, then did nothing.
The lead was filed under checked, no results, and along with hundreds of other leads, no one had the time or will to pursue fully.
Patrick Mday stood before the wall that every cold case victim’s family knows too well.
He had information.
He had intuition.
He had a persistence no investigative team could match.
But he had no power to make anyone listen.
He later told CBS News that he had a list of three people he suspected might be involved in the family’s disappearance.
I was exhausted and had too much information on three potential suspects, he said.
All of them had motive.
No one listened.
Not yet.
And while Patrick fought alone, the outside world began to forget.
The media moved on to other cases.
The public lost interest.
The blurry border video had given them a sufficiently satisfying answer.
The family went to Mexico, maybe started a new life, maybe had reasons no one knew.
People tend to accept the comfortable answer over the correct one.
And the story of the family left voluntarily was far more comfortable than the alternative.
3 years passed.
From 2010 to 2013, the McStake case sat in the state investigators call cold.
No new leads, no new witnesses, no new developments.
The file sat in a drawer.
Occasionally, a small article would mention the disappearance, usually on an anniversary, but nothing changed.
The Mday family became one of thousands of unsolved missing person’s cases across America.
Names in a database, photos on a missing person’s website, and nothing more.
But Patrick did not forget.
Michael did not forget.
Susan Blake, Joseph’s mother, did not forget.
They lived every day with the hole left by four loved ones.
And they lived every day with the question no one could answer.
Where are they? Then came November 11, 2013.
An off-road motorcyclist was riding through the desolate desert near Victorville, California, about 100 m north of the McE home in Fbrook.
Victorville sits on the southwestern edge of the Mojave Desert, a dry, scorching landscape where people rarely set foot unless they have a reason.
And sometimes that reason is to bury something they don’t want found.
The motorcyclist stopped when he saw something protruding from the sand.
Small, round, white.
A skull.
a small skull, the skull of a child.
Investigators were called to the scene immediately.
As they began to dig, they found not one but two shallow graves, each containing multiple sets of remains, four in total, two adults and two children, buried in desert sand covered with rocks and dirt, only a few feet below the surface, shallow enough that time and wind had begun to expose them.
And beside the remains, investigators found a three-lb sledgehammer buried in the dirt with them.
Not a knife, not a gun, a sledgehammer, the kind of tool you buy at a hardware store to break concrete.
Patrick Mday was notified of the discovery.
He called Jerry Dean, a missing person’s advocate, to share the news.
In his heart, he already knew.
3 years of waiting, 3 years of hoping his son was alive somewhere, had possibly ended on a desert hillside 100 m from home.
On November 15, 2013, the San Bernardino County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed the identities of two of the four sets of remains.
Joseph McE 40.
Summer MSE, 43.
The remaining remains were identified as Giani and Joey, though official confirmation would take more time.
Cause of death for all four.
Blunt force trauma to the head.
They had been bludgeoned to death.
All four, including four-year-old Giani, including three-year-old Joey, the little boy who had just celebrated his third birthday only 4 days before disappearing.
The boy who clung to his mother and liked following his big brother everywhere, had been struck in the head with a sledgehammer by someone, and buried in the desert.
Stop for a second and think about that.
A three-year-old child, a sledgehammer, a grave in the desert.
That is not murder, that is annihilation.
San Bernardino County Sheriff McMahon declared the manner of death homicide.
The case officially shifted from missing to murder.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department took over the investigation, replacing both San Diego and the FBI.
The Mexico theory collapsed completely.
The Mday family had not left voluntarily.
They had not started a new life.
They were not in Mexico.
They lay 100 m north of home, buried in the sand for 3 years while the whole world looked south.
And the central question of the case changed entirely.
It was no longer where are they? Now it was who killed them.
When the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department took over the case in late 2013, they started from the beginning.
The previous San Diego investigation had focused almost entirely on the Mexico theory, and that theory now lay in the grave with the four victims.
Everything had to be re-examined with new eyes under a new lens.
This was no longer a missing person’s case.
This was a mass murder.
And as the San Bernardino detectives began turning over the old files, one name kept appearing again and again.
Charles Chase Merritt.
Merritt’s name had surfaced in the investigation as early as 2011 while San Diego was still in charge.
He was Joseph’s business partner, the last person contact with Joseph before the family disappeared.
And the one who himself had called police to report the family missing.
But in the context of the Mexico theory, Merritt was treated only as a witness, not a suspect.
No one dug into him.
No one checked his finances.
No one asked why the business partner was the first to notice the family was gone ahead of Joseph’s own parents and siblings.
San Bernardino did not make that mistake a second time.
They started with merit and dug down.
And what they found beneath the surface was more frightening than what they found in the desert.
The starting point was QuickBooks, the online accounting software Joseph McE used to manage earth inspired products finances.
When detectives examined the company’s QuickBooks account history, they discovered a string of transactions that no one could explain if Joseph was truly in Mexico.
After February 4, 2010, the day the family disappeared, someone continued accessing Joseph’s QuickBooks account.
Someone printed checks from the company’s bank account.
Multiple checks for amounts up to thousands of dollars each, all written to the same person, Charles Merritt.
And here is the detail that made the detectives stop and read twice.
Many of those checks were backdated to February 4, 2010, the exact day the family disappeared.
Someone had tried to create the appearance that these payments had been approved by Joseph before he vanished.
That they were normal business transactions, not theft.
But Joseph McE was not there on February 4 to approve anything.
Joseph McE was dying or already dead on February 4.
Then came the lead that prosecutors would later call one of Merritt’s biggest mistakes.
A QuickBooks customer service employee clearly remembered an unusual call.
A man called identified himself as Joseph McE and demanded that the entire account and all related information be completely deleted, wiped clean, leave no trace.
The employee asked for the security password.
The caller did not have it.
The request was denied.
The account was not deleted and all the information, the forged checks, the fraudulent transactions, the access history remained intact in the system waiting for someone to find it.
When investigators traced the phone number used to call QuickBooks customer service, it did not belong to Joseph McE.
It belonged to Charles Merritt.
He had called impersonating a dead man, trying to erase evidence of his own theft and failed.
If the QuickBooks employee that day had accepted the request without the password, the entire chain of financial evidence could have disappeared forever.
A simple security procedure at a software company had saved the case.
Detectives continued digging into the finances.
They found an email from Joseph dated February 1, 2010, just 3 days before the family disappeared, in which Joseph clearly stated that Merritt owed him nearly $43,000.
not a vague debt, a specific amount recorded in the company’s books.
And when investigators examined Merritt’s personal finances, they found no $43,000 anywhere.
The money had disappeared, most likely into the casinos Meritt frequented.
Merritt also owed more than $20,000 in unpaid federal taxes.
He was drowning in debt from every side.
And by early 2010, his primary source of income, the work with Earth Inspired Products, was under threat.
A third business partner, Daniel Kavanaaugh, told investigators that Joseph was planning to fire Merritt.
Prosecutor Britt Imes later explained their theory.
Joseph had discovered the unauthorized withdrawals, and on February 4th, Joseph met Merritt at Chick-fil-A, not for lunch, but to fire him.
We developed the theory that if there was a meeting, it was a very quick termination, said a man who owed $43,000, addicted to gambling, about to lose his only source of income, and just caught stealing from his partner.
That was motive.
And the next evidence showed Merritt not only had motive, he had opportunity.
Cell phone records showed Merritt’s phone pinging off towers near the desert area where the bodies were buried, just 2 days after the family disappeared.
His phone was in Victorville, not at his home in Homeland, not anywhere he had a reasonable reason to be, but in the desert near the exact spot where 3 years later a motorcyclist would find a small skull protruding from the sand.
And more.
When investigators collected DNA samples from inside the Mday family’s Isuzu trooper, the car found near the Mexican border, they found Merritt’s DNA inside.
This directly contradicted Merritt’s own statement.
In an interview with San Diego detectives in February 2010, Merritt had clearly said he had never driven that car, never sat in it, never touched it.
His DNA said otherwise.
But perhaps the most shocking detail was not in the financial records or the phone data.
It was on television.
In 2014, after the Mday family’s bodies had been found, but before anyone was arrested, Chase Merritt appeared on a cable news program.
He sat in front of the camera and expressed his grief over the loss of the Mday family.
He appeared worried, sad, full of sorrow.
And then he said a sentence that investigators would replay dozens of times.
I’m sure I was the last person he saw.
Merritt said about Joseph, not the last person he spoke with, not the last person he contacted, the last person he saw.
And he spoke about Joseph in the past tense.
Not Joseph is, but Joseph was a small slip in language.
The kind of slip ordinary people don’t notice, but investigators are trained to hear.
You only speak about someone in the past tense when you know for certain they are dead.
And at that point, no one yet knew for certain that the Mday family was dead, except the person who killed them.
Then came the detail that if you read it in a novel, you would say the author was making it up.
Chase Merritt was writing a book about the disappearance of the Mday family.
The killer was writing a book about his victims and he called Patrick McDeay, Joseph’s father, the man who had spent four years searching for his son to propose collaborating.
He wanted me to read what he was writing, Patrick recalled.
He started reading it to me.
He said, “Why don’t we collaborate on writing a book?” Patrick McAe said he played along in hopes of gathering information.
He hid his disgust, hid the suspicion boiling inside him, and listened to the man he increasingly believed had killed his son, read aloud a draft about the very murder.
Think about that.
A father sitting listening to the man who killed his son tell the story of the loss, pretending to grieve, pretending to search for the truth while the truth was sitting on the other end of the line.
That is not courage.
That is the kind of self-control most people never have to test.
And that was when Patrick McAe knew the final pieces were falling into place.
About a year ago, Patrick said, “The pieces started fitting together and Merritt climbed to the top of my radar list”.
In November 2014, nearly one year after the bodies of the McStay family were found in the desert, Charles Chase Merritt was arrested and charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Joseph Mcay, 40, his wife, Summer, 43, and their two sons, Giani, 4, and Joseph Jr.
, three.
The charges included the special circumstance of multiple murders, making Merritt eligible for the death penalty.
Merritt, 57 at the time of his arrest and a resident of Homeland California, appeared in court in Victorville, wearing a shirt and tie and pleaded not guilty to all four counts.
He was held without bail.
And from the first moment he stood before the judge, Merritt insisted on one thing, he would never stop insisting.
He was innocent.
But between Meritt’s denial and the day the actual trial began stretched nearly 5 years of waiting, 5 years of delays, motions, legal arguments, changes of counsel, and preparation.
The preliminary hearing took place in 2015, during which Judge Michael Smith ruled that there was sufficient evidence to put Merritt on trial.
The evidence included the QuickBooks checks, DNA in the family’s Isuzu trooper, and cell phone location data near the graves.
There was no direct physical evidence linking Merritt to the sledgehammer or to the murder scene inside the Fbrook house.
No fingerprints of his on the weapon.
No DNA of his at the burial site.
No eyewitness who saw him commit the crime.
The entire prosecution case from beginning to end was built on circumstantial evidence.
Circumstantial evidence.
That was the phrase both sides would repeat throughout the trial, but with completely opposite meanings.
For the prosecution, circumstantial evidence, when sufficiently plentiful and consistent, was stronger than direct evidence because individual pieces could be explained by coincidence.
But all of them pointing to one person could not.
For the defense, circumstantial evidence was the definition of reasonable doubt.
You cannot convict a person of killing four people on inferences and theories.
The actual trial opened in January 2019 at San Bernardino Superior Court.
It would last more than 4 months and become one of the most closely watched criminal trials in Southern California that decade.
Prosecutors opened with a statement they would spend 4 months proving.
All four members of the Mday family were killed by blunt force trauma to the head.
Prosecutor Dar told the jury.
Then he built the picture of motive, means, and opportunity.
Motive.
Merritt owed Joseph $43,000, was addicted to gambling, owed more than $20,000 in taxes, and was about to be fired from his only source of income.
Greed and self-interest drove a man to kill an entire family of four, the prosecutor said, means the three-PB sledgehammer found in the grave, the kind of tool a welder like Merritt would use every day.
opportunity.
Merritt himself claimed to be the last person to see Joseph on February 4 at Chick-fil-A, and no one else witnessed that meeting.
Prosecutors then presented the chain of financial evidence, the backdated QuickBooks checks, the call impersonating Joseph to delete the account, the money flowing from Earth inspired products into Meritt’s hands after the family was already dead.
They presented the cell phone data.
Merritt near the desert graves 2 days after the family disappeared.
Merritt calling QuickBooks from his own phone while pretending to be Joseph.
They presented the DNA in the Isuzu contradicting Merritt’s statement that he had never driven or sat in that vehicle.
They presented an enlarged photo of Merritt’s white Plymouth Valiant compared with the description from the surveillance camera on the night of February 4.
and they presented the search history on the McStay home computer.
Travel to Mexico, children’s passports, learning Spanish, arguing that it was not Joseph or Summer who had searched those things, but Merritt, who had accessed the family computer to create a false trail for investigators.
Piece by piece, the prosecution assembled the story.
Merritt killed the entire family inside the Fbrook house on the night of February 4, repainted the walls to hide blood evidence, put the bodies in the vehicle, drove to the Mojave Desert, dug two graves, buried the four people along with the sledgehammer, drove the Isuzu trooper to the Sanidro border to create the illusion that the family had gone to Mexico, then returned home and began draining money from the dead man’s accounts.
A brutal systematic plan carried out by one person who had access to everything.
The house, the car, the bank accounts, the accounting books.
Because the victims trusted him, the defense did not sit silent.
Attorneys Rajan Molen and James McGee attacked every piece of the prosecution’s evidence with methodical aggression.
“This is not an ordinary murder case,” McGee told the jury.
“This is a case in which someone wanted this entire family to disappear”.
And then he asked the question the prosecution did not want the jury thinking about.
If Merritt killed all four people with a sledgehammer inside the Fbrook house, where was the blood? Blunt force trauma to the head with a sledgehammer would produce an enormous amount of blood.
Blood would spatter onto the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the killer’s clothing.
There would be blood everywhere, McGee said.
But when investigators searched the house, they found not a single drop of blood.
Not on the walls, not on the floor, not anywhere.
Even with the repainting, the prosecution alleged modern forensic technology can detect blood through multiple layers of paint.
They found nothing.
The defense also attacked the DNA evidence.
Merritt’s DNA in the Isuzu did not prove he killed anyone.
It only proved he had been in the vehicle, something any close business partner could explain.
There was no DNA of Meritts on the sledgehammer.
No hair, no skin, no blood of merits at the grave site.
Then McGee offered the argument that many following the case considered the defense’s strongest.
The two graves alone tell you this was two teams.
He said, “If you are one person who kills four people and then buries them, you dig one hole, not two.
One man alone in the dark desert night digging two separate graves, burying four bodies, then driving home.
Was that even feasible?” The defense said no.
They also pointed to an alternative suspect, another of Joseph’s business partners, who had his own motive for wanting the family gone.
And they presented evidence about how Summer McStay’s clothing was found at the grave site, suggesting she may have been sexually assaulted before being killed.
A pattern of behavior that did not match Merritt’s profile.
“From our perspective, the prosecution’s case is based on speculation, rumor, and circumstantial evidence,” Molen said.
and then he closed with the line he wanted the jury to carry into the deliberation room.
From the very beginning, this case has screamed reasonable doubt.
The trial lasted more than 4 months.
Dozens of witnesses, hundreds of exhibits, thousands of pages of documents.
And finally, on June 10, 2019, after roughly a week of deliberation, the jury in San Bernardino returned to the courtroom with its verdict.
Guilty.
On all four counts of firstdegree murder, Charles Chase Merritt, 62, was convicted of the sledgehammer deaths of his business partner, Joseph McE, Joseph’s wife, Summer, and their two young sons, Giani and Joey.
The jury also found true the special circumstance of multiple murders.
The courtroom erupted.
The Mday family wept.
The Merritt family sat silent.
And then that same jury moved into the next phase, the phase that would decide the punishment.
On June 24, 2019, the jury issued its recommendation.
Three death sentences for the three murders of Summer, Giani, and Joey, and life without parole for the murder of Joseph McE.
The inconsistent verdict, death for three victims, but life for the fourth, would later become the subject of legal controversy.
But at that moment, the only thing the Mday family heard was the word guilty repeated four times.
Once for Joseph, once for Summer, once for Giani, once for Joey.
Sentencing was set for January 2020, more than half a year after the guilty verdict.
But before Judge Michael A.
Smith read the sentence, the people from whom Merritt had taken everything were given the right to speak.
Susan Blake, Joseph McE’s mother, went first.
She walked to the witness stand, looked straight at Merritt, and began with one simple sentence.
It was like a nightmare.
I felt like a rock hit my chest when they told me they found my son in the desert.
Then she called Merritt by the exact name she had waited more than 9 years to say.
You are a despicable evil monster.
A child killer who destroyed my family.
No hesitation, no trembling.
The rage of a mother who had lost her child compressed for nearly a decade.
Now allowed to explode within the bounds of the law.
Michael McTay, Joseph’s brother, the man who had climbed through the window into the empty house on Avocado Vista Lane on February 13, 2010, fought back tears as he told Merritt that he had stolen four beautiful souls from the world.
Michael had been the first to see the signs that something was wrong.
The popcorn in the bowls, the hungry dogs, the open window, and now 10 years later, he stood before the man who had created that scene.
the man who had turned his brother’s house into a crime scene and then played the worried friend for years afterward.
Summer’s sister stood next.
She cried as she read her statement, her voice shaking, but every word clear.
Our children will not grow up together.
They will not grow old together.
After seeing and hearing what you did to them, it makes me furious beyond words.
There is no way to describe the pain.
You took their lives violently.
She was speaking of Giani and Joey, the two nephews she would never see go to school, never see graduate, never see grow up alongside her own children.
Summer had just spoken with her about being busy taking care of the kids.
That was the last conversation.
Summer’s ex-husband was also given the right to speak.
He looked at Merritt and delivered one sentence that contained no forgiveness, no reconciliation, only hatred controlled just enough to be spoken aloud.
I do not forgive you.
Instead, I want to psychologically destroy you.
Patrick McStay, the father who had spent more than four years investigating on his own, combing through his son’s emails, calling detectives, enduring the silence of the justice system, and sitting listening to the man who killed his son read a book draft over the phone, also read a victim impact statement.
Patrick did not recount the pain.
He did not need to.
Everyone in the courtroom already knew.
He simply stood there, a father 10 years later, and his presence said more than any words.
Then it was Merritt’s turn, and he did what he had done from the day of his arrest.
He insisted he was innocent.
“I loved Joseph,” Merritt said, his voice trembling.
“He was a huge part of my life and my family’s life.
I would never harm him in any way.
I would never raise a hand against a woman or children.
I did not do this,” he said.
He claimed he had been framed, that the prosecutors and witnesses had lied, that the judge had allowed it to happen.
He spoke with emotion, his voice sometimes breaking, his eyes sometimes red, and the question everyone in the courtroom asked themselves was the question no one could answer with certainty.
Was he telling the truth or was he giving the final performance on the stage he had occupied for 10 years? On January 21, 2020, Judge Michael A.
Smith pronounced the sentence.
But before that, Merritt unleashed a flurry of lastminute motions.
He tried to fire his defense attorney, Raj John Molen, right in the middle of the sentencing hearing.
After the lunch break, the defense had spent the entire morning presenting motions about new cell phone evidence and alleging prosecutorial misconduct.
Merritt interrupted everything with a request to fire his lawyer.
The judge denied it.
The defense asked for a reduction from death to a lesser sentence.
The judge denied it.
The defense asked to disqualify the judge for bias.
The judge denied it.
Every motion, every attempt at delay, every lastminute legal tactic was crushed.
And then Judge Smith read the sentence.
Death.
The judge upheld the jury’s recommendation.
Three death sentences for the three murders of Summer, Giani, and Joey, plus life without parole for the murder of Joseph.
In pronouncing the sentence, the judge described the killings with two carefully chosen words, horrific and inhumane.
He particularly emphasized the brutality inflicted on the two small children beside their parents.
Giani four, Joey, three, bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer and buried in the desert by a man their father called a friend.
Merritt was led out of the courtroom and transferred to death row at California’s San Quinton State Prison.
As of the present time, he remains there pursuing appeals from Donovan State Prison.
However, California has not carried out any executions since 2006.
And with the moratorium on the death penalty issued by Governor Gavin Newsome in 2019.
In practical terms, Merritt is almost certain never to sit in the lethal injection chair.
He will die in prison, but not by the sentence.
He will die by time.
The Mday family case left behind more than a verdict and a sentence.
It left a lesson about the failure of the system.
The Mexico theory built on one blurry video, a few computer searches that the killer himself very likely performed to mislead, and a car abandoned near the border, wasted more than three precious years.
3 years during which forensic evidence could have been lost, witnesses could have forgotten, and memories could have faded.
The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department accepted the easy answer instead of the correct one.
And the price of that intellectual comfort was nearly half a decade of delayed justice.
It left a lesson about the power of victim’s families.
Patrick Mday never stopped searching.
When the police said left voluntarily, he said wrong.
When the FBI said no new leads, he found leads himself.
When Merritt called offering to write a book, he swallowed his disgust and played along.
Not because he was brave in the way Hollywood movies portray, but because he was a father and fathers do not stop looking for their children.
And the case left its greatest lesson.
The lesson about betrayed trust.
Charles Merritt was not a stranger, not a robber who forced his way into the house in the middle of the night.
Not a random psychotic killer.
He was Joseph’s close friend, business partner.
The man invited into the home, introduced to the wife and children, trusted with the bank accounts and the accounting books.
Joseph loaned him money to pay gambling debts.
Joseph worked with him every day.
Joseph called him a friend, and Merritt used that trust as a weapon.
He knew the family’s schedule, knew how to get into the house, knew the account passwords, knew the road to the desert.
He used everything Joseph had given him to erase Joseph and everything Joseph loved.
Then he cried on television.
Then he wrote a book.
Then he called the victim’s father and offered to collaborate on telling the story.
If this case teaches us anything, it is this.
Sometimes the deadliest threat does not knock on the door at midnight.
It sits across from you at Chick-fil-A and calls you a friend.
This is Cold Case Reopened.
We tell the stories of the forgotten victims and the people who refuse to let them stay forgotten forever.
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