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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. It's just kind of,
“I can't be that man, like I even called 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'd 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 time. We're living in Rancho, Kukumanga, 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 a story's changed. Chase was a good guy and then all of a sudden he was submitted. 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 there was lucrative contracts coming. Why would you put that in jeopardy? It just doesn't make any sense. But San Bernardino shares detectives had come to think otherwise. They now believed Chase married, they had to have a reason to kill Joseph McStays.
For them, it came down to what investigators believed happened on February 4th, 2010. When they said the 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 Austin saying, "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, often 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. He hopped on the mountain bike and he was about to jump over this little curb and he hit it and faced planted. He just jumps up and he's like, "Oh, he's just like a big door." He's 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.
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 was 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 like waiting just standing there watching. And when I walked off, he's like, "We should go get something to eat." And let's talk and I was like, "Uh, okay."
Not long after they started dating, Kathy said Chase took her to meet his family. They lived
east of LA, just over the same Gabriel Mountains in the Mojave Desert. At 3000 feet elevation,
“the high desert is dotted with sagebrush and tuna portrays. Small towns are scattered across”
the landscape. Chase grew up in his area of California. At that time, like the 60s, early 70s was pretty much the middle nowhere. The next town over from his area is Victorville, where the mixed-days bodies were found, just outside the city limits. Kathy says that some of Chase's family still live 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, you know, his family could lean on. If they needed something, like 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. He was a 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 metal work 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 them which way I think it should be. I'm like, I think it'd be more”
markable if you 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. I work. Finance is. 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 the San Bernardino detectives that Joseph was looking for a welder to build a fountain for him. Someone recommended Chase. He said that soon, use 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 likable 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 had been working together for a few years.
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 Homewood Chase, a fathered Kathy, a phone call. She says Chase received. That happened to see the caller ID when it rang. And I told him, just was calling, you know, and it was like, I'll talk to him tomorrow, whatever. So the next day, when he couldn't get a whole 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, you know, overstep the boundaries. But I was getting concerned and I told him,
I told Chase, what if, you know, what if that was Joseph's last. It's called 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, and 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, and Chase had been at home with her on the evening of February 4th. By the time they would call Chase married in for his interview, detectives had come to believe that Chase wasn't at home with Kathy that evening and they said how to prove it. Today I want to tell you about an exciting new deal from our friends at Cozy Earth. Take a moment and close your eyes and think back to the best night of sleep you ever had.
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for 50% off the best bedding you'll ever sleep on. That's ABCSecretSavings.com/2020 The rocket launchers were missed. RJ Decker released Tuesday, September 15th, 10th and 9th central, next day on Hulu. There's a headline every 30 minutes for our show. I'm pretty sure. Welcome to Get Real. I'm your host Amanda Hirsch. This is the show for the reality TV Obsessed. You thought the show was crazy, living it was crazy. By the dripping sweat for
even stars for the stars and stands of the Hulu reality verse. Do we 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 of Thursdays on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. When Chase Merritt sat down with the San Bernardino detectives in October 2014, it had been building a picture of what
“they thought had happened on that night in February 4th, 4 years before. What happened that night?”
Where did you go? I don't think I already know the answer. What I'm asking for you to throw
In the blank and explain to me what happened?
the problem. San Bernardino detectives asked Chase Merritt to describe his meeting with Joseph
“earlier that day. In 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 in 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 Scott thought that Chase got fired that day. In 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. In according to their case reported, A alleged he'd also been forging checks from him. It wasn't 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 table of finances between the two men. But when San Bernardino investigators read this email, it looked to them like a tale of debt that Joseph said Chase owed him. The tune of 42,000 dollars. And investigators believe that Chase had been writing checks to
himself. When the business account that Joseph used, several times in the day is 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 guys want to sit away and ask the person he needs about. He just said you can stay on the phone."
“"You're a gambler. You said all your money gambling. You're not going to work on it. You need to get that."”
"You were stealing money from Joseph for a long time. He might've got to know." 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, police believed. 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 Fallbrook. That he arrived there just after 4 p.m. Joseph's phone made one more call that went through to Chase's 5.48 p.m. The call lasted about three minutes. And then, according to the police report, 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. Detectives thought it was consistent with the phone being turned off. Authority 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 ...
How and when the McStays had died. Investigators believed that Chase followed Joseph McStays
“back to Fallbrook. I believe it was a continuation of that contentious meeting in the beginning.”
So they're down there. They're at Fallbrook and argument occurs. It turns physical where Joseph and Chase get into an altercation. Joseph had Chase 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 Junior. According to the investigators report, Detectives spoke to a friend of
the McStays who had been helping them redecorate their house. The friend told them that he'd been using a sledgehammer to close paint cans in the McStays home. Days before they disappeared.
“San Bernardino Detectives noticed that the hammer was missing from crime scene photographs.”
And a pain 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 onto the McStays home computer
and created a $4,000 check made out to himself. Although that check they said was never printed,
it looked to them like further evidence of Chase being inside the Fallbroke house. Chase told San Bernardino Detectives that he and Joseph hadn't argued that day. He hadn't gone to the McStays house that evening, and that he hadn't killed them. Were you on the foot of the night? I did not drive the Fallbroke on the foot. You did drive the Fallbroke on the foot. He was down there in San Bernardino at the foot. It's not going to change, but Einstein definitely is not going to change.
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. A new podcast series from ABC Audio in 2020 goes inside a case that has captivated the nation. So many people, Luigi Mangione, is a modern-day Robin Hood. People were cheering
the demise of this person they'd never met. It was a father of two, and a husband, and had a
life, and was just doing a job. From the manhood, ending in a McDonald's in Al tuna, Pennsylvania, to what authorities are saying about a possible motive, I'm ABC News Legal Analyst Brian Buckmeyer, listen to Burning Up Proof, Luigi Mangione, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm John Favre, we are launching the all-new Star Wars the Mandalorian Groguo official podcast. I'm sorry I can't focus at the moment. We're going behind the scenes,
but the cast and crew sharing stories from the set, creative insights, and a few surprises
“from across the galaxy. I think he's earned a little snack.”
Watch and listen to Star Wars the Mandalorian and Groguo official podcast, now streaming on Disney Plus or wherever you get your podcasts, and catch Star Wars the Mandalorian and Groguo now streaming on Disney Plus, terms apply. When Chase Merit was interviewed by San Bernardino detectives in late October 2014, he denied killing the McStays, and he denied burying them in the desert on February 6.
Why would people put you up and I didn't or don't think he reached it? I don't know. I don't even know if they already denied ever guard on the high desert or my brother, my sister. Detectives claimed that they knew from his cell records, this phone had hanged off a tower in the desert, and they alleged that this particular tower was in an
Area near the McStays graves.
in the desert. In fact, nine days before Chase Merit 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 court-side mountain. On top of the mountain was the cell tower that police said, Chase's phone hanged off in February 6, 2010. So the interesting thing about the court-side tower is it's right on that mountain. On the back side or the west side of that mountain is Juanita Merit's residence. On the north side or north east side is kind of the desert
in the 15th freeway where the McStays bodies were buried. To determine if Chase's phone had hanged 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. He sat outside and talked. We just kind of asked what the relationship was like and then we went into what his
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 he was with Joe and never came up here.
“That's why I was going to ask. Can you remember it all the same? We didn't even hardly visit.”
I can remember one time he visited. About how long before. So I mean five years I hadn't seen him. So that's comfortable 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 asked him what he thinks happens? I asked him plain blank and didn't you know, clue. He was devastated. He lost everything. Juanita told police that Chase hadn't visited her on 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?”
I think they should get killed. So exactly the same way they got killed. What do you mean? I think they should get killed. I think they should be. I think they should be. Actually, they should ask you from off. Well, I could get it. I don't know if they want they should get killed. Because nobody that killed too little kids should be alive.
My opinion. Is that true? Did anyone with the heart that was there on an heart attack? 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 his 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 the 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 Det...
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
receive 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 of stairs for 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 that makes him eligible for the death penalty. Chase Merritt would said he hoped for the death penalty for whoever killed the McStay family. But now face a courtroom and the prospects of capital punishment himself.
“Everyone's made him out to be the monster that he's not.”
But Kathy Jarvis, Chase's ex, says he was being made into a scapegoat. Somebody murdered this family, but it wasn't Chase. Chase Merritt maintained his innocence. And soon, he would have to fight for his life. What happens to the McStays is a production of ABC audio in 2020,
hosted by me, Ashen Singh, produced by Madeline Wood, Vika Arensum, Audrey Mastek, and Kiara Powell, with help from Sabrina Fang and Camille Peterson, edited by Gianna Palmer, our supervising producer is Susie Liu, music by having Viola, scoring by Kiara Powell, mixing by having Viola and Bob Mallory, special thanks to Katie Dendos, Janis Johnson, Chris Donovan, Joseph Rie, Sonny Andrew, Alyssa Stuller, Zenderson Morris, Tom Birmingham,
and Blu Brownie. Josh Cohen is our director of podcast programming. Even McNath 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.
Again and stream you on the ESPN app. series premieres tonight on FX and ULU.
