In January 2020, Charles “Chase” Merritt was sentenced to death by a San Bernardino County judge after getting convicted of murder in the bludgeoning deaths of the McStay family: Joseph, 40; wife Summer, 43; and sons Gianni, 4; and Joseph Jr., 3.
The McStays, formerly of San Clemente, where Joseph McStay’s business continued to be based, vanished from their Fallbrook home in February 2010. Their skeletal remains were found buried in the High Desert near Victorville in November 2013.
Merritt, who made waterfalls for Joseph McStay’s business, was arrested a year later. Now 68, he maintains his innocence.
Joseph McStay’s father criticized the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department after it originally investigated the disappearance as a missing-persons case. Accusations of prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective defense dogged the trial.
Caitlin Rother wrote a book about the case, “Down to the Bone, a missing family’s murder and the elusive quest for justice,” by poring over thousands of pages of documents and previously unreleased police reports.
Rother, 62, who will discuss and sign her book at appearances in Southern California starting Saturday, June 28 (Info: caitlinrother.com), talked with the Southern California News Group about her 15th book. The answers were edited for clarity.
Q: Why did you write about this case?
A: I could tell from the start that this was going to be an interesting case, because for an entire family to go missing is incredibly unusual. The state of the house they lived in when they disappeared, it was like they were in the middle of breakfast as if time had almost stopped. This happened with Joseph running a successful waterfall-manufacturing company.
Q: How did you research the book?
A: I went to the preliminary hearings, went through court records, got a court order to review 1,200 exhibits. Four months before deadline, I ended up getting a treasure trove of discovery materials and that sent me into a frenzy reading investigatory reports from both sheriff’s departments (San Diego County’s and San Bernardino County’s) with witness interviews that both agencies uncovered. Basically, I had to rewrite my whole book.
Q: What will readers learn about the case that they didn’t previously know?
A: I was able to learn who was interviewed, who was not interviewed, who was investigated and who wasn’t. To me, it was pretty telling what they overlooked. They would look for things to support their premise, and when they didn’t find evidence, they continued to hold onto their same premise. In the case of Chase Merritt, it was clear they decided it was him pretty early. They arrested him even though a lot of things they were looking for, they never found.
Q: San Diego sheriff’s detectives allowed a McStay relative to take home Joseph’s computer, another relative to clean the house, and let another business partner, Dan Kavanaugh, examine a computer for clues to the disappearance without the detectives having first searched any of those. What do you make of that?
A: The scene was irrevocably altered. There are examples of that throughout the book that I found questionable. (A San Diego sheriff’s spokesperson said in an email: “Detectives work tirelessly to bring justice in every case they are assigned and will continue to make every attempt to bring each case to a resolution.”)
Q: What else should readers take away from the book?
A: I looked at my job in writing this book as being a lawyer in a circumstantial case and connecting the dots. There were questions such as how did Joseph McStay’s gun get into the hands of a convicted felon in Las Vegas? How did somebody get the family out to the desert? The DNA on the remains didn’t match Merritt. There’s all these unanswered questions.
Q: Here’s the million-dollar question: Who killed the McStays?
A: This case was incredibly messy and even after 12 years of research, I still can’t tell you I know who killed this family.