Season 8 - Episode 1 -NEW- The McStay Family Murders: Part One

0:00 Speaker 1: Warning, kind of Murdery contains adult themes, explicit language, and descriptions of violence. It is not suitable for anyone, and we recommend you stop listening. Now.

0:18 Speaker 2: True Crime with a dash of the paranormal, the garish, the strange in the darkly comic, a podcast that's about more than just murder. It's my very own pocket dimension, home to a curated collection of bizarre and compelling stories, the unsolved, the unsettling, and the unbelievable. I cover it all just so long as it's kind of murdery. Hey everybody, it's Zemnodleberg, and I don't blame you if you were starting to wonder when you might hear me say this. But I'm back with a bran spanken new Fresh to Death episode here in twenty twenty six.

0:55 Speaker 2: This is the first episode of season eight, So thanks for hanging in there. Season eight, and we're gonna try something a little bit different than what we've done before. Don't worry, it's still gonna be true crime, it's still gonna be murder mysteries, but I'm gonna go for the uh, the slow burn, the truly mysterious. And here in episode one, I'll be kicking off the story of the murder of a northern San Diego County family, the Mixed Days. It's a tragedy, of course, and it's quite a story, so let's get right to it kind of murders.

1:31 Speaker 2: The Mixed Day Family Murders Part one starts now twenty ten the thirty four hundred block of Avocado Vista Lane, Fallbrook, California, in northern San Diego County. The street ends in a cul de sac and the houses face the curve. The Mixed Day house sits on that term two stories light tan stucco, a white two car garage door dominating the front, and the white paint is clean enough to catch the daylight when the sun hits it. Above the garage, a tall, arched window rises into the second floor. Off to the side.

2:15 Speaker 2: Another upstairs window is framed by dark shutters. The front door sits recessed on the right, beneath a small covered porch, set back from the driveway and partly hidden by the angle of the front wall. The driveway is concrete and slopes up to the garage, and a cement walkway runs from the driveway to the porch. The lawn is green and trimmed. A slender, pale bark tree stands near the walkway, and low plants sit along the base of the porch. From the outside, it looks composed, maintained, a family house that's been lived in long enough to have a rhythm, but not long enough to look worn out.

2:52 Speaker 2: Joseph in Summer Micstay moved here in late two thousand and nine, around Thanksgiving weekend, after living in San Clemente. They brought with them two small boys and two dogs. Joseph McStay was forty years old, Summer was forty three. Their sons were Johnny four and Joseph Junior or Joey three. The dogs were Bear and Digger. In a family photo later released to the press, Joseph's hair is dark and curly, sitting in loose waves that don't flatten into place. Light facial hair shades his jaw and mouth.

3:24 Speaker 2: His expression is steady serious. Summer wears glasses. Her hair is long and dark. She's smiling, an open expression that lifts her cheeks and softens her face. Johnny has curly hair and round cheeks, caught with his mouth slightly open, the way a child's face looks. In the half second between motion and stillness. Joey's hair is lighter light brown, trending toward dark blonde, with bangs across his forehead. The boys are held in close framed by their parents arms San Clemente, where they lived before.

3:56 Speaker 2: Fallbrook was the coastal version of their life. They were in a small apartment near the beach, surfing and biking as part of a regular day. A friend of the family, Jesse Silveria, later described what she saw when she knew them. She said, as their relationship evolved, I saw that both of them really prioritized each other. Number one and then number two prioritized their children, and that it brought them a lot of pleasure living on the coast and by the beach. Fallbrook was the inland version of this idyllic life.

4:27 Speaker 2: They were in a house instead of an apartment, with a garage facing the street and a yard behind the house. The stairs went to a second story where there were separate rooms for the parents and the kids. But the thing about being a homeowner is it means work. And as soon as the Mixtays moved in, renovations began. Painting and remodeling were under way. Now the work didn't announce itself to the street. The stucco looked intact, the garage door was fine, the lawn was a brilliant emerald green. But inside, as anyone who's been through this knows, renovations change the way a home functions.

5:06 Speaker 2: Painting requires clearing space along walls, shifting furniture, setting up supplies, and when you're remodeling, it means that certain areas stay half finished longer than anyone wants them to. Even when the work is planned, it leaves the house in a sort of permanent, temporary state. Some rooms look settled and some don't. Now. Joseph owned his own business, and his work ran alongside all of these renovations. He ran a decorative water feature business called Earth Inspired Products. The company sold fountains and custom water installations, and of course, custom work means more than just online sales and shipping boxes.

5:45 Speaker 2: It means design and fabrication custom parts that need to be built for clients who are paying for something specific. To get this done, Joseph worked with Charles known as Chase Merit on Fabrication. Merit was a welder and fabricator who built the components for Joseph's custom projects. And Joseph had another key business associate named Dan Cavanaugh, who was tied to his company and its online presence. Things were a bit hectic joseph Summer, the boys, the two dogs, Joseph's business, Earth inspired products, all of it happening inside their home space under renovation, trying to move forward with life as normally as possible while everything was in flux.

6:27 Speaker 2: But the work was getting done. And on February third, twenty ten, a friend came to the mixed stay house to help paint. Now, as anyone who's had to do it knows, a paint job does not happen from across the room. It requires moving around in close quarters. It requires clearing wall space and creating room for supplies, drop cloths, paint trays. Everything sits where it can be reached. Tape gets torn and pressed along the edges of walls and doors. Furniture gets shifted away from walls and pushed into corners or moved to the middle of the room.

7:00 Speaker 2: A lamp goes from here to there. Things get put somewhere else and left there until the work is done. It's a bit chaotic, but it's also ordinary. And on February third, the day that the friend came to paint. None of the items that I had mentioned had he yet become evidence. They were simply the contents of a working household. The next day, on February fourth, Joseph spoke with his father by phone, telling his dad that he was in a hurry because he had a lunch meeting. Summer talked to her sister that morning and made plans to visit her sister and her sister's newborn child.

7:35 Speaker 2: It was a regular structured morning. Calls were made, plans were discussed, A meeting was scheduled. Now around noon, Joseph left the Fallbrook house in the family's white Azuzu Trooper and drove to Rancho Kucamonga for a meeting with Charles Chase Merrit. Merritt later said the meeting took place at a Chick fil A. In a recorded interview, Merrit described the purpose of the meeting as financial. We just had to go over all kinds of money stuff, he said. The remainder of that day, February fourth, twenty ten, is not described in memories or in eyewitness accounts.

8:11 Speaker 2: It exists through recorded markers. A call placed, texts exchanged, a vehicle leaving the street captured by a neighbour's camera, A phone pinging off of a cell tower. At four twenty five pm, there was an outgoing call from the Mtay home phone to Joseph's cell phone. Joseph's phone pinged off of Fallbrook cell tower. Between five pm and five forty seven pm, Joseph in summer exchanged text messages. At seven forty seven pm, a neighbour's security camera captured a vehicle leaving Avocado Vista Lane.

8:45 Speaker 2: The footage showed only the bottom portion of the vehicle. The occupants could not be seen. At eight twenty eight pm, Joseph's phone pinged off of Fallbrook tower again. Later that evening, Joseph made a call to an employee in Rancho Cucamonga to talk about work. Those are all the points that remain visible in the sequence of February fourth, a meeting at Chick fil A, calls, texts, a passing vehicle captured by a security camera, A late call about work from outside the house on Avocado Vista Lane would have looked the way it always did.

9:18 Speaker 2: Trimmed lawn stucco, the arch second story window above the garage from the inside. It would have held whatever it held at the end of the day, Furniture moved for painting, renovation, supplies, the things of family with small boys and dogs, accumulates in the course of ordinary life. As for the McStay boys, they would have been in the house that day unless they were somewhere else with Summer Johnny four and Joey three. At that age, boys are not invisible in a home. They leave their trace on everything, every surface, every object, small cups, small socks, toys in corners, food that gets spilled and wiped up.

9:54 Speaker 2: And then there's the dogs. Dog hair on the furniture, dog bowls, a dog collar that jingles when it moves. We can assume that all of this was part of the interior of the Mixtay home on February fourth, twenty ten, but none of those details are documented. What is documented is what the adults did in terms of recorded communications and known movements. But after February fourth, communications and movements stopped. After February fourth, there was no phone activity, internet, email, bank or credit card activity from either Joseph or Summer mixday.

10:33 Speaker 2: Of course, this is a fact that only becomes visible later when there's something to compare it to when the people who knew them realized that their calls were not being answered, that messages were not being returned, and that the family's digital and financial footprint had gone silent. When Joseph did not answer his phone for days, his friends and family began taking steps that were later recorded in summaries. Jase Merritt urged Joseph's mother and brother to contact authorities. Dan Cavanaugh called the police himself, and Merit and Cavanaugh took action because of the silence of February fourth.

11:11 Speaker 2: It was a silence that arrived not as a single moment that forced everyone to stop, but rather because of the failure of a pattern or patterns, the patterns of ordinary life. A call that should have been returned isn't. A phone goes to voicemail again and again until it stops feeling like bad timing and starts to feel like a wall. In the world that Joseph McStay lived in family, business, small children, and schedules, there were too many lines of communication and action that ran through a single day for them all to go quiet at once, And yet days passed with Joseph not answering his phone, and so as I mentioned Merit and Cavanaugh started moving.

11:57 Speaker 2: Merrit urged Joseph's mother to call the authorities. Dan Cavanaugh called the police himself, and then on February eighth, four days after everything went quiet, the family's white nineteen ninety six as Zuzu trooper was found in Sanya Sedro, near the Mexican border. It was treated as an abandoned vehicle and impounded. The children's car seats were still inside. Sanya Siedro is not Fallbrook. It is not Avocado Vista Lane. It is not the tan stucco house at the end of a cul de sac with its recessed porch and arched second story window.

12:31 Speaker 2: It's much further south, adjacent to the Mexican border, and the presence of the family's trooper there in Sanya Sidro pulls the story away from the Micstay home and brings it to within walking distance of an international boundary. It also introduced a theory that would survive for years that the Mixstays had gone to Mexico. Someone using the mcstay's computer had searched for information about travel to Mexico and passports for the boys. In late January twenty ten, just a few days before the family stopped communicating.

13:06 Speaker 2: There were also emails indicating interest in obtaining passports to travel to Mexico, and Summer had searched online queries about Mexico and about learning Spanish. And then there was a video. On March fifth, twenty ten, deputies released surveillance footage that appeared to show a family of four walking hand in hand into Mexico through a pedestrian gate. The footage was dated around seven pm on February eighth. San Diego Police Sergeant Roy Frank described what investigators believed they were seeing a family quote casually strolling into Mexico un quote, with each adult holding the hand of one of the toddlers, no obvious signs of distress.

13:47 Speaker 2: But the footage was grainy. It did not provide clean identification, and Joseph's brother, Mike McStay, said he could not make a positive identification because of the video's quality. He wrote that careful reviews showed two or three different families passing by, and that one man in the footage walked nothing like his brother. But in early March twenty ten, for investigators trying to find anything solid, it was a lead. A family of four had indeed, hand in hand crossed into Mexico and the Mixed Day's white Azuzu trooper was found close enough to make the walking distance plausible.

14:27 Speaker 2: Let's go back in time a little bit now to February tenth. The mixed Stay home remained at the end of Avocado Lane. Renovations were underway, Painting had been done. That friend had come to help on February third, and that's when Summer and the boys were last seen as well. Then, on February tenth, a San Diego Sheriff's deputy performed a welfare check at the house. No one answered the door. There were no visible signs of foul play from the outside, and the deputy did not go inside. The house remained closed.

14:59 Speaker 2: Three days later, later, on February thirteenth, Mike mcstaye, Joseph's brother, went to the house. He entered through an open window. The family was not there. Joseph wasn't there, Summer wasn't there, Johnny wasn't there, and Joey wasn't there. The dogs were in the back yard they'd not been fed. Inside the house, a tall lamp was lying on the floor. There were several open suitcases with folded clothing inside. There were rotten eggs in the kitchen and food left out. Two small bowls of popcorn were in the living room.

15:33 Speaker 2: Slightly spilled clothes were tossed on the floor. Summer's prescription sunglasses were in the house. The scene did not show forced injury. Detectives later stated they found no blood and no sign of a struggle in the house. The lack of visible violence became a reoccurring theme in the case. It allowed theories to live longer than they otherwise might have. The walk into Mexico voluntary travel, or a family just leaving and going somewhere without telling anyone. But for the people who knew them, the interior of the Mixday home was not just a set of haphazard objects.

16:09 Speaker 2: It was proof that something had gone terribly wrong. Dogs were unfed, suitcases where open food was rotting, the children's popcorn bowls in the living room. Prescription sunglasses, the kind of thing you would almost certainly take on a vacation to Mexico, were still in the house. On February fifteenth, twenty ten, Joseph's brother, Mike McStay reported the family missing to the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, and once the report was filed, law enforcement began the formal process of searching the house.

16:44 Speaker 2: On February nineteenth, twenty ten, detective searched the mix Stay home, and a search warrant affidavit by San Diego Sheriff Homicide Detective Troy Dougall stated that there was no evidence of foul play in the home, but Dougall also wrote his opinion that the McStay family was the victim of foul play and that some or all of them had been kidnapped or killed. Dougal also described what evidence might exist if the family had been killed in residence, trace evidence, hair tissue, secretions, other forensic material, and he stated that he believed that evidence might eventually be found.

17:25 Speaker 2: An inventory list from the search detailed what investigators seized documents, letters, computers, hard drives, cameras, cell phones, power cords. From the outside, the house remained unchanged, but inside the family that made it a home, the McStay family was gone. The case would grow outward from their absence. The border video, the Mexican vacation, theories, federal involvement, Interpol alerts, and years of waiting, but the first concrete evidence that something was terribly wrong. Wasn't a dramatic public moment.

18:06 Speaker 2: It was Joseph's brother climbing through an open window and finding a house that still held the possessions and the evidence of a life lived by a family with two small boys and two dogs. But there was no family inside the house and the dogs were starving in the backyard. Where did they go? What happened to the Mixed days? To find out more, join me on Thursday, January twenty ninth for part two of the Mixtay Family Murders. And Hey, I'm back with new weekly episodes. So if you like the show, tell your family, tell your friends, tell any true crime fans you know.

18:47 Speaker 2: Hey, I sure would appreciate it. I'm Zevan Odleberg and this has been kind of Murdery.

18:55 Speaker 1: If you like the show, please subscribe, review and tell your friends. You can find us on social media at kinda Murdery or email at Kindamurdery at gmail dot com.