Jurors in murder trial of Charles Merritt hear crucial law enforcement recording

Jurors in the murder trial of Charles “Chase” Merritt  on Thursday finished hearing the recording of a crucial 2010 law enforcement interview with the defendant that took place nearly two weeks after the four members of the McStay family disappeared from their Fallbrook home.

Merritt, 62, has pleaded not guilty to the slayings of former business associate Joseph McStay, 40, his wife, Summer, 43, and their two children, Gianni, 4, and Joseph Jr., 3, in their Fallbrook home on Feb. 4, 2010, then buried their bodies more than 100 miles away — in two shallow graves in the Mojave Desert, north of Victorville and west of the 15 Freeway.

Investigators believe Summer McStay was raped.

The three-pound sledge hammer prosecutors say was used in the slayings was buried along with the bodies, discovered in November 2013. Merritt, who is in custody, was arrested and charged with the slayings a year later.

Prosecutors say Merritt killed the victims for financial gain. He started looting McStay’s QuickBooks business account starting on Feb. 5, 2010, one day after the McStay family was last seen alive, they said.

The family had moved to Fallbrook, 45 miles north of San Diego, in November 2009 from San Clemente. They were in the process of remodeling their four-bedroom, three-bathroom home when they went missing.

McStay and Merritt worked together selling and building custom fountains — referred to as waterfalls — to clients in Saudi Arabia, with a possible lucrative deal for Paul Mitchell salons. That and other financial matters were part of a meeting the two men had on Feb. 4. 2010 at a Chik-fil-A restaurant in Rancho Cucamonga, Merritt said in the interview.

Defense attorneys have pointed to another McStay business associate as a suspect, Daniel Kavanaugh, saying that investigators did not look into evidence such as Kavanaugh’s anger over being bought out of McStay’s business when it was growing.

Kavanaugh has denied the allegations.

In the Feb. 17, 2010 interview in the clubhouse of the Ranch Cucamonga apartment building where Merritt lived, he told San Diego County sheriff’s detectives Troy DuGal and Suzanne Fiske that Joseph McStay “was one of my best friends.”

“Joseph doesn’t have any enemies. Everybody loves Joseph. Everybody,” Merritt told the investigators.

If McStay was gone, “I assume my business is done,” Merritt told the detectives. “I don’t know anybody who has anything to gain by Joseph being gone,” he said. “This business stems almost solely around Joseph. He does all of the sales…I can’t do what Joseph can do…I’m the manufacturer, I can’t sell.”

But toward the end of the interview, Fiske circled back to Merritt’s use of “was” when he referred to Joseph McStay.

“Do you have any knowledge or information that indicates to you that they are dead,” Fiske asked toward the end of the interview. “No,” Merritt answered.

“The reason I ask,” she said, “is because you have used the past tense about Joe a couple of times. You said, ‘Joe was.’ Typically, people don’t do that, if they think people are alive. Any explanation as to why you may have done that?”

“Nah, not really, I just, you know. Nah, I …”

“Do you understand why I am asking?”

“Of course. I completely understand. But no, I’ve never really even thought him as possibly being — well, I can’t say I haven’t thought of him as possibly being dead, because I have, but I don’t like to think of it that way, of course.”

Fiske said families who are notified that loved ones are dead will still refer to them in the present tense. She told Merritt that his referring to McStay in the past tense a couple of times was “real unusual.”

“I don’t know why,” he concluded. He affirmed Fiske’s question that Joseph was still his best friend

Defense attorneys have pointed out that Merritt in the same interview also referred to McStay several times in the present tense, and the interview audio contains phrases from Merritt about McStay, such as, “He does all the sales,” and “He buys the waterfalls from me.”

“It’s ridiculous,” defense attorney Rajan Maline said Thursday, away from court.  “Both detectives used past tense first and more frequently than Chase.  It was natural expression given the circumstances at the time and the way questions were asked.”

The disappearance of the McStay family was initially treated as missing persons case, but in February 2010 DuGal filed a search warrant affidavit in which he said, “It is my opinion the McStay family is the victim of foul play.”

Merritt agreed to talk to the detectives even though he had an outstanding bench warrant for failing to report to serve the remaining 23 days of a 46-day sentence for second-degree commercial burglary.

He told them he had served the first half of the sentence but failed to report for the final part because he suffered a heart attack, but was willing to risk arrest to talk to them about the case.

“Even if you did make the decision to arrest me, it was worth it…this is too important to put off, even if it screws up my life a little bit,” Merritt told the detectives of his decision to meet with them and talk about the McStay case, according to Wednesday testimony recorded for YouTube by Law and Crime Network, which is live-streaming the trial on its website.

The detectives did not arrest him during the interview on the outstanding warrant, but Fiske told him to get it taken care of by March 1 of that year

Other testimony on Thursday reviewed evidence at the desert grave sites with photos presented of the family’s skeletal remains, including those of Joseph McStay.

Trial in the downtown San Bernardino Justice Center, overseen by Judge Michael A. Smith, is set to resume Monday.