I think everyone has at least one case that sticks with them that they can rehash in their head at 2 am. For me, it’s the McStay family. Their story haunts me and won’t let me forget about them.

The McStays — Joseph (40), Summer (43), Gianni (4), and Joseph Jr. (3) — disappeared from their home in Fallbrook, California on February 4th, 2010. Their bodies were found in November 2013, buried in two shallow graves in the Mojave Desert. Charles “Chase” Merritt, Joseph’s business partner, was convicted of all four murders in 2019 and sentenced to death in 2020.

I’m not going to write about whether the jury got it right. The jury heard sworn testimony and saw exhibits I have not seen. But there are things I just can’t stop thinking about. Major details of the story that have me both boggled and bothered.

The Disappearance

The McStays lived in Fallbrook, which is near San Diego, about fifty miles north of the Mexican border. Joseph ran Earth Inspired Products, a small but growing business that built custom decorative water fountains. Summer was a real estate agent and mother to 2 young boys. They had recently moved into a new house and were still fixing it up, painting walls and making the house a home.

February 4th, 2010 starts as a normal day. Joseph calls his father Patrick around lunchtime and mentions he is running late for a business meeting. He then drives to Rancho Cucamonga and meets Merritt, his business partner and welder, at a Chick-fil-A restaurant. Merritt would later tell investigators they spent about an hour going over what he called “money stuff.”

At 7:47 p.m., a neighbor’s camera captures a vehicle leaving the McStays’ driveway. The angle is so low you can only see the bottom of the bumper, and the resolution is so bad that the prosecution and defense would later disagree about whose vehicle it even was. At 8:28 p.m., Joseph’s cell phone places a call to Merritt that goes to voicemail. Merritt would say he ignored it because he was watching a movie and figured he would just talk to Joseph the next day.

That is the last activity on Joseph’s phone. And nobody hears from any of the McStays again.

For almost two weeks, the family is MIA. Patrick McStay tries to call his son and gets nothing. Other relatives assume Joseph and Summer are just busy, maybe taking the kids somewhere fun, doing family activities together. After numerous requests from Patrick to see if everything was ok, Mike, Joseph’s brother, eventually drives up to the house on February 13th. He finds everything locked up, the car missing, and no answer at the door. So he climbs in through an open back window.

He walked around inside and nothing seemed obviously wrong. There were two bowls of popcorn on the futon, as though the boys had been watching television. A carton of eggs was sitting on the kitchen counter. But no signs of any struggle — no overturned furniture, no broken glass, no blood. The family’s two dogs, Bear and Digger, were in the backyard. It just looked like the family up and left to go somewhere and would be right back.

But they didn’t come back.

The Mexico Theory

On February 8th, four days after the disappearance, the family’s white Isuzu Trooper turned up in a parking lot just north of the San Ysidro border crossing.

On March 5th, nearly one month later, the San Diego Sheriff’s Department released surveillance footage from the pedestrian gate at the border. The footage showed what appeared to be a family of four (two adults and two small children holding hands) walking into Tijuana on the evening of February 8th. It sort of resembled the McStays…maybe. The footage is hazy and not very useful to make a reliable identification. The people crossing were not carrying any bags to indicate that they were planning on staying in Mexico for any length of time.

According to family and friends, it would not be completely out of character for the family to up and go on a spontaneous trip without telling anyone else. But these were short trips and they always came back. And they would never have left their beloved dogs behind without anyone to care for them.

[Side note about the dogs: soon after the family disappeared, a neighbor noticed the dogs barking incessantly and called animal control for an animal welfare check. An officer came out and as it didn’t look like there was any available water for them, turned a water spigot on so that they at least had something to drink, and then also left a notice on the front door. A couple of the neighbors began feeding the dogs in the backyard as they assumed that there was some emergency that prevented the McStays from caring for their dogs. The dogs eventually ended up with some of their relatives.]

By April 2013, the San Diego Sheriff’s Department had concluded officially that the McStays had left for Mexico voluntarily. The family kept pointing out holes in the theory: the McStays had more than $100,000 in bank accounts that were never touched, Summer’s passport had expired, and Joseph had told several people he avoided Mexico because of cartel violence. Why in the world would they just run off to Mexico? But for investigators, the surveillance footage seemed to be indisputable proof that they had gone, even though there was nothing concrete that verified it was even them.

Honestly, it seems as though the police spent more time treating this case as a voluntary departure than they ever spent treating it as a homicide, until the bodies were found. And that had a direct bearing on what evidence got collected, what got logged, what got prioritized — and what got, as I’ll come back to later, cleaned.

The Graves

On November 11th, 2013, an off-road motorcyclist riding behind a landfill near Victorville, California found what looked like a piece of human skull. He called the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. Within forty-eight hours, investigators had excavated two shallow graves and identified four sets of remains using dental records. It was all four members of the McStay family.

In one of the graves, beside Summer, investigators recovered a rusty, three-pound sledgehammer that was identified as the murder weapon.

The case became a homicide and was transferred from San Diego County to San Bernardino County. The official cause of death for all four McStays was blunt-force trauma to the head. Joseph Jr., only three years old, had been struck repeatedly. And Joseph Sr. was found with an electrical cord around his neck.

A year later, in November 2014, San Bernardino investigators arrested Chase Merritt on four counts of murder.

What the Prosecution Had

The case at trial was mostly circumstantial. There was only so much evidence and nothing that irrefutably tied Merrit to the murders, gravesite, or home. Here is what the jury heard:

Financial motive

Merritt had access to Joseph’s QuickBooks account. In the days after the family disappeared, someone used Joseph’s checking account to write nine checks totaling over $20,000, most of them made out to Merritt or to people Merritt owed money. It was argued that all of those checks were related to work Merritt did and money owed to vendors as part of the fountain business. It was also mentioned that someone called QuickBooks customer service from a phone associated with Merritt and tried to delete Joseph’s account entirely. The caller didn’t have the right password and couldn’t complete the request, which is a good thing because it left the records intact.

Odd behavior

Merritt told CNN in 2013 that he had “definitely” been the last person to see Joseph alive, which was weird phrasing. Investigators noticed he referred to Joseph in the past tense before the bodies were found. He also had prior felony convictions for burglary and stolen property. And after Joseph’s disappearance, he went on a casino gambling spree.

Forensic evidence

Merritt’s DNA was identified as a minor contributor on the steering wheel and gear shift of the McStay family’s abandoned Isuzu Trooper. The defense argued that it could have been transferred when Joseph shook Merritt’s hand at the business meeting at Chik-Fil-A.

The cell tower

Prosecutors argued that Merritt’s cell phone pinged on a tower near the Victorville gravesite around the time the bodies would have been buried. Merritt’s defense claimed that the reason his phone pinged on that particular tower was because his sister, Juanita, lived within that area and he had been visiting her at the time, which his sister testified to.

The prosecution then brought up a 2010 interview in which Juanita had told investigators she hadn’t seen her brother in about five years. The defense’s answer to that contradiction was a family-history one: they did not trust cops. Merritt’s brother Bennett had once been falsely suspected years prior of being the Hillside Strangler (a different story for a different day), and the defense argued she had lied to investigators in 2010 because lying to investigators was, by then, what the family did.

The jury convicted Merritt on all four counts and was sentenced to death (though California has a moratorium currently on death sentences). He is incarcerated at Donovan State Prison and is pursuing appeals.

What I Keep Coming Back To

Caitlin Rother covered the McStays from before their bodies were ever discovered. In 2025, she published a book called Down to the Bone that walks back through the evidence with a fine-toothed comb. Rother is not arguing Merritt is innocent. She is documenting the unresolved pieces that seem to not quite fit the puzzle:

1. The sledgehammer

The three-pound sledgehammer recovered next to Summer McStay’s body was identified by the prosecution as the murder weapon. It is the single most physically intimate piece of evidence in the case — the literal instrument of the killings, found buried with the victims.

There was supposedly no blood, hair, or DNA recovered on the sledgehammer. Not Merritt’s. Not anyone’s. Nothing to connect a suspect to the murder or gravesite.

2. The McStay home

There was no blood found at the McStay home. The defense made this a central pillar of its case at trial. The prosecution’s theory was that the family was killed inside the home and then transported to the desert somehow and buried. But as defense attorney Rajan Maline pointed out in opening statements, the home had been searched and no blood evidence was recovered tying any of the four killings to that location. Detective Troy DuGal, who conducted the initial welfare check in February 2010, testified that he found no evidence of foul play inside the house. Rother calls this “the bigger hole in the case” — the absence of any forensic link between Merritt and the location where prosecutors said he killed four people.

Just thinking of the logistics of murdering multiple people and then transporting them in a vehicle to another place raises so many issues. Bludgeoning leaves a LOT of blood. There would be cast-off and pooling. And there would also be hair or brain matter. It’s extremely messy. And would be nearly impossible to hide. There would also be a large amount of blood evidence left in any transport vehicle. Dragging bodies from the home and loading them into a vehicle without anyone noticing would be no small feat either.

The prosecution had answers for the fact that no blood was found. The house had been entered repeatedly between February 4th and the search warrant being served — by Mike McStay, other family members, and even some neighbors. And Susan Blake, Joseph’s mother, had cleaned the house before investigators served a warrant. We’re talking heavy-duty cleaning with bleach and scrubbing. She has been open about this and has said that she wanted the family to come home to a clean house. Susan was not trying to obstruct an investigation. She was a mother in shock who did not yet know her son was dead. And she definitely didn’t mention any large, unusual stains she came across that could be blood.

The cleaning happened. What evidence might have been removed during it is one of the things we will never know. But even with people traipsing around the house or giving things the most rigorous cleaning, it’s virtually impossible to eliminate all traces of blood.

3. Dan Kavanaugh

Dan Kavanaugh was a web designer who worked with Joseph McStay on the Earth Inspired Products website. The defense at trial argued that Kavanaugh had a motive to hurt the family. He claimed to be a full partner of Joseph that was entitled to half of any job proceeds that came from leads obtained by the website he created. And he had threatened Joseph that if he did not receive the amounts he insisted he was owed, he would tank the website, crippling Joseph’s business. He even hacked into Joseph’s PayPal account and withdrew money before the family’s disappearance had been reported (honestly, he seems pretty skeazy per the interview done during the Two Shallow Graves documentary. He did not seem to care about the family being murdered and seemed almost proud of himself for stealing money. In my opinion, that’s suspicious as heck.)

Investigators cleared Kavanaugh without adequately verifying his alibi, which was that he had been in Hawaii with a girlfriend at the time of the murders. Investigators were also never able to confirm the Hawaii alibi through a flight manifest, which is curious. They relied instead on photos that had been uploaded to Facebook of the couple during their trip. Kavanaugh has repeatedly denied any involvement and has never been charged. The defense’s argument was not that he did it but that the investigators had dismissed him as a suspect too early in the investigation and instead only focused on Merritt.

4. The polygraph

According to Merritt, he passed a polygraph during the investigation, though there were some reported inconsistencies with his answers. Polygraph results are not admissible in California courts and were not part of the trial record. Was he telling the truth?

5. Unidentified DNA at the gravesite

Biological material was recovered at the burial site that was not Merritt’s and was not the McStays’. Three separate samples of unknown DNA were found on Summer’s bra, the electric cord around Joseph’s neck, and ratchet ties. According to the defense, the DNA profiles were CODIS-ready but as of conviction, none of them had been run through state or national databases (only someone in law enforcement can order that). The conclusion is that no one has bothered to check who the unknown DNA belongs to. And if those profiles ever do get run and hit someone connected to the case, we’re squarely in habeas territory under newly discovered evidence.

The prosecution’s theory required only that Merritt acted as the killer. It did not need to rule out the presence of other people. But a complete body of evidence and evidence sufficient for prosecution are not the same thing. Unidentified DNA at the scene of a quadruple homicide feels like it shouldn’t just go back in the file marked unresolved, right?

Could there have been another person or persons involved in the killings? Possibly Dan Kavanaugh or someone else in the family’s social sphere?

After the Trial

There are clearly a lot of questions still left unanswered in this case. And finding definite answers to those questions may just lead to an overturned conviction.

Since Merritt’s incarceration, he’s been actively shaping the public narrative around his case, granting interviews with the media and currently working on a book proclaiming his innocence. He’s also been working with various counsel toward a direct appeal and an eventual habeas petition.

One last curious thing to note: According to a 2014 interview with The Daily Mail, Merritt had been working on a book about the McStays before he was ever arrested. In 2014, he spoke to Patrick McStay over the phone to discuss with him the possibility of collaborating on a book about the family’s disappearance and murder. Merritt claimed that Joseph had confided in him that just before their disappearance, Joseph thought Summer was poisoning him. Joseph’s mother Susan confirmed that her son had been dealing with an unusual illness that made him feel woozy and sick to his stomach. But Merritt is the only one that the poisoning claim can be traced back to.

That book was never published. Merritt was arrested late in 2014. And it’s unclear if the new book he is reportedly working on will address those poisoning claims.

There’s so much to think about with this case. And at the heart of it all, there is a family that deserves justice. But has it been delivered?

That got me wondering about why bathrooms seem to be the ideal place to commit or stage a murder. Which then led me down a crazy rabbit hole that I will attempt to condense into something hopefully non-rambling.

So, why are bathrooms so handy when committing a murder?

Appearance of Accidental Death (aka, the Oopsie Daisy Explanation)

Though murders are generally committed in more popular rooms of the house like bedrooms or living rooms (these are hot spots for arguments or fights), bathrooms can present a unique opportunity to make a murder appear like an accident.

How common are bathroom accidents? A slippery surface, lots of water, soapy suds...honestly, it sounds like a recipe for a disaster—which is why it’s no wonder that bathroom accidents result in over 230,000 trips to the emergency room per year for people over the age of 15 (about 40,000 injuries per year alone are related to toilets, which is just an entirely bizarre stat I needed to cram in here).

People can also drown in bathtubs. While the majority of drownings are comprised of young, primarily unsupervised children, adults who have medical issues or are under the influence of drugs or alcohol are more susceptible to accidental drownings. Hot water can make a person drowsy, so some have passed out or fallen asleep in the bath and drowned. This is also one reason why there are recommended time limits on hot tub use.

Destruction of Evidence

Water can wash away crucial forensic evidence such as fingerprints, hair, and skin cells. It can also dilute or remove bodily fluids and blood spatter, making it harder for investigators to find conclusive DNA evidence of foul play. Turn the temperature up and water over 100F will cause significant damage to DNA, resulting in the strands separating. If left for prolonged amounts of time at 140F or higher, the DNA could become irreversibly destroyed.

The non-porous surfaces in bathrooms, like glazed tiles and porcelain, are also less likely to retain fingerprints since there aren’t as many little grooves and imperfections like porous surfaces have. For example, wood is very porous and will absorb oils, like those that naturally occur on skin.

So, picture it—you’ve got a lot of shiny surfaces that can easily be hosed down with hot water to try and get rid of any possible evidence. Throw some chemicals in the mix and it will be extremely difficult for usable evidence to survive (though don’t try this at home because as anyone who’s ever watch Dateline knows, something always survives).

Speaking of water...

The Impact of Water Temperature on Estimating Time of Death

When medical examiners want to pinpoint a time of death, there are several factors to consider. The first is the temperature of the liver (preferable) or rectum. Both of those areas are protected parts of the body, which means that they retain heat the longest once a body starts to cool.

Side note: liver health can affect temperature reading accuracy. Chronic conditions like cirrhosis or fatty liver disease can alter cooling rates. There could even be different temperatures in various parts of the liver.

Warm water can delay postmortem cooling, leading to an overestimation of the time of death if investigators rely solely on body temperature. This complicates the forensic analysis and can mislead the investigation.

Conversely, cold water can cause the body to cool more rapidly, resulting in an underestimation of the time of death. This also presents challenges for forensic pathologists who need to consider various environmental factors.

But trying to throw investigators off by attempting to change a body’s temperature won’t derail things entirely. Forensic pathologists use a combination of methods to estimate time of death and do not rely solely on temperature. They will also measure rigor mortis (stiffening of muscles), and livor mortis (settling of blood), alongside temperature readings, to form a more accurate picture.

You Just Can’t Not Use the Bathroom

At the end of the day, we can’t get away from using the bathroom. It’s estimated that the average person spends 1.5 to 2 years of their life there. And it’s a vulnerable spot to be in (which is one reason dogs will follow us into the bathroom — they’re protecting us while we’re so “exposed” to predators).

For a long time, murderers were able to get away with bathroom shenanigans. But forensic science is evolving to make bathrooms a little less convenient, and a lot more likely to tell the full story.

Want to read about a few well-documented bathroom murders? Here’s a short list for you to investigate yourself:

• Cynthia Hrisco, South Barrington, Illinois, February 2000. Husband claimed he woke to find her drowned in the bathtub. Manner of death was originally undetermined. A decade later, an officer reopened the case, ran a full reconstruction in the actual tub with water death experts, and the ruling was changed to homicide. Buschauer was convicted of first degree murder in 2019. Daily Herald
  

• Faylene Grant, Gilbert, Arizona, September 2001. Husband said wife drowned after taking sleeping pills. Police and the medical examiner initially ruled it accidental. Her family pressed for a homicide investigation after he married his much younger girlfriend three weeks later. Convicted of manslaughter in 2009. ABC News 20/20
  

• Kathleen Savio, Bolingbrook, Illinois, March 2004. The ex-wife of a police sergeant was found in a dry bathtub with a scalp gash. Ruled accidental drowning. The case was reopened in 2007 after his fourth wife disappeared. The body was exhumed, the ruling changed to homicide, and he was convicted in 2012. CNN
  

• Michele MacNeill, Pleasant Grove, Utah, April 2007. Former beauty queen found unresponsive in bathtub days after a facelift her physician husband had pressured her into. Original ruling was natural causes from cardiovascular disease. Her daughters pushed for a toxicology review and federal prosecutors started investigating the husband separately for fraud. The cause was reclassified and husband was convicted of murder in 2013. CBS News
  

• Travis Alexander, Mesa, Arizona, June 2008. He was found in his shower with 27 stab wounds, a slit throat, and a gunshot wound to the head. Deleted camera photos recovered by police showed him alive moments before the attack and then bleeding on the bathroom floor. His girlfriend, Jodi Arias, was convicted of first-degree murder in 2013 and sentenced to life without parole in 2015. ABC News
  

• Shele Covlin, Manhattan, New York City, December 2009. Found by her 9 year old daughter face down in the bathtub on New Year’s Eve, one day before she was scheduled to cut her estranged husband out of her $5 million will. Police initially called it an accidental fall. She was buried within 24 hours under Orthodox Jewish custom with no autopsy. Her family pushed for an exhumation, the medical examiner found a broken hyoid bone, and the husband was convicted of second degree murder in 2019. The New York Times
  

• Lanny Horwitz, Jupiter, Florida, September 2011. Wife shot husband 10 times while he took a shower. A phone receiver lay near his hand, indicating he had been trying to call for help. Wife convicted in 2013, retried in 2017 after the first verdict was thrown out, and ultimately sentenced to 32 years. CBS News
  

• Shanti Cooper Tronnes, Orlando, Florida, April 2018. Husband called 911 saying his wife slipped in the bathtub. Responding officers noted the tub was dry, the floor was dry, and her skin was dry. The autopsy found blunt force trauma and strangulation, and the death was ruled a homicide. Convicted of first degree murder in October 2023, sentenced to life. Global News (Canadian Press wire)

What I get asked the most when I tell someone that I like to explore true crime

The question I get asked most when people find out I write about true crime is some version of "isn't that depressing?" Honest answer, sometimes. But mostly no. What hooks me isn't the sensational details or gruesome murders — it's the puzzle of how anyone figures these things out at all.

Welcome to Whispers of Evidence. The plan here is simple. I’m going to write about true crime cases that genuinely interest me, the ones where something about the investigation, the forensics, or the trial stuck with me long after the verdict was in. Cases where I read the public record and thought “wait, what?!” The cases that I noodle on ‘til the wee hours of the morning.

What I am here for is the work behind the verdict. How was the evidence collected? What got tested, what didn’t, and why not? Did investigators follow the right thread or just go with the most convenient one? When the case got to trial, did the prosecution’s story hold together, or did it hold together just enough to get a conviction? Those questions land harder for me than the crimes themselves.

Quick note on where I’m coming from: I don’t think the system is rigged and I don’t think most convictions are wrong. My belief is that it mostly works and the specific places it doesn’t work are what get my attention. Like an admitted procedural mistake. Or a piece of evidence nobody bothered to test until it was too late. A suspect nobody questioned hard enough. Those are the things that pull me in.

So, that’s my project. I’m fascinated with learning how crimes are solved and I want to share what I learn as I go. Some pieces will agree that “justice was served.” Some won’t. And more than a few will probably leave us both with more questions than we started with.

And that’s fine by me. I’m glad you’re here.