McStays Episode 2: Missing?

Hi, this is Ashan Singh, here with episode 2 of our latest True Crime series from 2020 and ABC Audio. What happened to the mixtays? Remember, you can get new episodes weekly on Tuesdays, if you follow what happened to the mixtays on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or whatever you're listening now. You can also get the entire series ad free and early by subscribing to 2020 True Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts. Click the link in the description to start your free trial. Now here's the next episode of what happened to the mixtays. 4 weeks had passed since the mixtays family vanished from their fallbrook home. When the investigator assigned to their case, Detective Troy Dugal asked Joseph mixtays brother to come to the San Diego Sheriff's Department. March 1, 2010, it's presently 11.35. I'm at my office at my computer with Michael McStay. Dugal believed he could have a promising lead to share with Michael. He pressed play on a silent blurry and dimly lit video. In the 15 second clip, a group of four commonly crosses the US Mexico border on foot. Two of the people in the video appear to be adults, a man and a woman. They have with them two smaller figures who appear to be children. According to police, the individuals are passing from the US side into Teoana through the San Isidro terminal. See them going through a long open air corridor with metal gates, high sides and barbed wire on top. They're going to be walking right here. They're going to come right up this sidewalk. Police say that video of this group of four was captured on the very same day that the mixtays a susur trooper was towed from a shopping center, also near the border. The footage is blurry, but the shapes of the people in it still told the story. It's a detective Dugal. They look like a mother, father and two children. Each parent holding a child's hand. There's the male with a kid. There's the female with a kid. Could this be the mixtays? Detective Dugal's first impression of the mixtays disappearance, according to police records, was that something bad had happened to them. He suspected foul play, but this border footage cast new doubt. Maybe the mixtays had left of their own accord. In the weeks following the family's disappearance, those who knew the mixtays were left scratching their heads. Was the family alive and well in Mexico? Or had something terrible happened to them? From ABC Audio in 2020, Amashin Singh, and this is what happened to the mixtays. Episode two. Missing. When the mixtays vanished, they left behind close family and friends, who all wanted answers. In 2011, Patrick mixtay, Joseph and Michael's father, told ABC News that he started looking into the family's disappearance himself. I don't know what happened, okay? I'm looking for answers just like them. Let's look at everything. Patrick enlisted help from Joseph's friend, Gina Watson. It's not like I always liked true crime, but I liked mysteries, or like I'll go down a rabbit hole and I definitely did that in this case because I wanted to be able to make sense of it all, like something that's so incomprehensible. I will say yeah, I got a little obsessed. Remember, Gina Watson had met Joseph mixtay through work. She says when she learned Joseph and his family had gone missing, she was stunned. Wanting to find a way to help, Gina says she reached out to Joseph's family and eventually connected with Patrick, Joseph's dad. Of course, I was more than happy to help him put some things together. Police had executed a search warrant at the mixtays Fallbroke home. They seized a number of electronic devices and did a forensic analysis of them, looking to the family's finances and bank records. They checked Joseph and some were cell phone records, too. Gina says she and Patrick did what they could to help investigators. According to Gina, Joseph had given all his email passwords to his dad for safekeeping, so she and Patrick started going through Joseph's emails together. I was conflicted because it's like I'm in my friend's personal email now. Like that felt weird, but I want to help go through things as quickly as possible, make sure everything's paid attention to that should be. Gina found a couple of messages that raised red flags for her. She says she found one email about a counseling session for Joseph in summer, a month before they disappeared. Gina wasn't sure what to make of this. A lot of times, like they say, the husband did it, so you have to be open-minded and say, well, could Joseph have gone mad and done something to his family? I mean, of course, you want to say no way, and I did think no way, but you want to be open-minded and consider everything. Did summer, like did she do something to various, but we could never back any of that up. Another discovery that Pete Gina's interest was a set of transactions from a business account. I saw that there were withdrawals from the PayPal account. A PayPal account had been set up for the waterfall company to pay vendors and receive payments from customers. But what caught Gina's attention were the withdrawals from the PayPal account and the days immediately after the mixed days went missing. All told, nearly $7,000 had been withdrawn. And so I was like, hmm, if they say they went missing on February 4th, could they have brought a laptop with them and he's doing business from a hotel somewhere? Is that what happened? So we're trying to piece this together. This discovery might have offered a ray of hope that Joseph and his family were still alive. But Gina says she knew it wasn't Joseph initiating these transactions. It was Dan Kavanaugh. You'll remember from our last episode, Dan was Joseph's business partner. As a web designer, he ran the retail site for Earth-inspired products, and he was close to the family. So close, Dan says the McStaykins called him Uncle Dan. Remember, Dan was the first one to call on a welfare check for the family. Detective Dougal of the San Diego Sheriff's Department asked Dan about the PayPal transactions. Dan had an explanation for the withdrawals. Let me ask you this. Dan, I know you have access for PayPal and PayPal transfers. I know there was there's been several all the way back to like the 5th. Well, indeed, I don't mind that I'm a transfer and give you like the fee. If you could do that and just shoot me a quick ledger on what where the money went, that way my questions are answered. Dan explained he needed the money to keep the business afloat. He said the website cost money to maintain. "I pay internet advertising companies, like thousands that I have and not get the maintenance on the top of Google, and so if you guys don't get good, there's no UID and that site. Yeah, I totally understand that." Dan also told investigators he wasn't anywhere near the McStay's house at the time of their disappearance. He was in Hawaii with his girlfriend. When investigators looked into flight information and Dan's girlfriend, his story checked out. They cleared him from the list of parties, potentially involved with the McStay's disappearance. Dan wasn't the only person in the McStay's circle that police spoke to. There were a few others that detectives interviewed, hoping to learn something, anything, while where the family had gone. Among the people on that list was Charles Merritt. Better known as Chase, he was a welder who built custom fountains for earth-inspired products. Joseph and Chase had worked together for around three years. The world of custom water Our features are small. And Gina Watson had worked in the space for years. She says not everything that she'd heard about Chase was positive. I started hearing more and more of these things, these problems, customer service issues. I did ask Joseph during one of our last conversations, long conversations that I remember. I asked him point blank, like, you're going to use Chase, like exclusively, that's your guy. And he was like, yeah. I know I've heard, you know, the things, and I know that he's had trouble in the past, but I'm trying to help him. Authorities said what they really wanted to talk to Chase about was his calendar. I thought Joseph Thursday around him, Thursday, which day, Thursday the fourth. Chase sat down with Detective Troy Dugal and his partner Suzanne Fisk for an in-person interview. Chase said he had a meeting with Joseph the day the McStay's went missing to discuss work. Two projects we're in the middle, we're in the middle. We had to go over them and get, make sure all the specs were right, where the different electricals coming out. Or Chase is going at Chick-fil-A, okay. All right. He met me at Chick-fil-A and he bought lunch there. At that February 4th meeting, Joseph and Chase spoke about all kinds of money stuff as Chase put it. Payments to vendors, payments from Joseph to Chase. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the meeting, according to Chase, but during this interview with Detectives, Chase said something that caught their attention. Joseph was one of my best friends. Joseph Suzanne Fisk locked this choice of words immediately. Joseph was still Chase's best friend. Why did he use the past tense? I have nothing to do, any whether it was then going somewhere you didn't help participate in, not in any way, shape or form, nothing to do with the disappearance whether it's good or bad. Absolutely not. I mean, I don't know of anybody that has anything to gain by Joseph being gone. I think everybody that I know has everything to lose. Chase told Detectives that his whole business depended on Joseph McStay that he and Joseph were close and talked almost every day for the last two years. Plus, Chase told them he was one of the first people in the McStay's inner circle to help search for the family. On the day Michael McStay went into his brother's home through a back window, it was Chase who had met him there. Before Detectives ended their interview with Chase, asked to collect his DNA. He agreed to a cheek swab. Ultimately, San Diego police determined there was no crime to charge anyone with. No arrests were made, and no indictment filed in the McStay's disappearance. But interviewing people wasn't the only avenue Detectives pursued. They also chased and combed through potential evidence, like the families of Susan Trooper. The one found near the southern border, but something inside the vehicle told Detectives what happened to the McStays. The McStays were called to the McStays, and the police were called to the McStays. The McStays were called to the McStays, and no indictment filed in the McStays, and no indictment filed in the McStays. A police report shows that detectives spoke with the residents of Avocado Vista Lane. There was one neighborhood that came forward with a surveillance video. A few doors down from the McStay residents, a neighborhood that came forward with a surveillance video. A neighborhood that came forward with a surveillance video. The detectives also couldn't tell who was inside the car as it drove away. The video was dark, and only showed part of the vehicle. But assuming it was the McStays, a suzer trooper, leaving their driveway. Police say there was a four-day gap before it appeared again at that shopping center near the border. The drive from Fallbrook to the Mexican border takes about one hour. So where had the car been for the rest of the four days? While detectives puzzled over this new information, Gina Watson, who'd been doing her own digging, found a new potential clue. An email in Joseph's account about purchasing the Spanish language software. I see an email to someone to get Rosetta Stone Spanish, and it was when Rosetta Stone first came out, and everybody was touting it as like, "You're going to learn the language, like you'll be fluent if you just do this Rosetta Stone." So I think Summer was excited in the email. Was it possible the family had been learning Spanish to prepare for a plan trip to Mexico? On March 2010, a month after the McStays went missing, Detective Dougal called Michael McStay to share another discovery he'd made. Got a little bit of information. Finally got a little bit of a lead. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Well, it doesn't tell me where your family's at, but it does tell me which direction they may have went. Dougal said the forensic analysis of the family computer had come back. It showed that about a week before the McStays were last seen, somebody had searched for information about crossing into Mexico with children, including requirements for children's passports. For Detective Dougal, the theory that the family had gone to Mexico voluntarily was looking more and more viable. It was only possible. I think it's above possible now with that. information. Earlier in the month, Detective Dougal asked Michael to his office at the police station and showed him that blurry surveillance video of the four people crossing the border from the US into Thioana. Police felt that if they could say definitively that the people in the video were Joseph, Summer, and the Boys, then the footage could serve as visual proof that the mixed days were alive and well in Mexico. Dougal and Michael watched the video several times, pouring over every detail. The detective pointed out that the children were wearing beanie like Gianni and Joseph Jr. often did, and that the height and size of the adults and children seemed to roughly match the mixed days. But Michael said he needed a better shot, a better angle to know for sure. Detective Dougal said that wasn't likely. Here's what I can tell you. We frequently get cases that involve Mexico, and we know where cameras are, and we know what images are good. For people going into the border, this camera is by part of the best. It may have been the best footage available, but Michael still wasn't convinced it was, in fact, his family in the video. He said the walk of the female adult wasn't consistent with Summer's walk, and he didn't recognize the jackets the adults were wearing. Were these four figures on the screen, the McStay family, or not? I can't talk to him that, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I don't know that anyone can be able to tell. That was my sister walking across from her, I don't know if I'd be able to tell. You know, no good or bad, it's just, unfortunately, neither can I, and I'll tell you what, this whole case has been a lot like that. A mystery that was feeling impossible to make sense of, a dark blurry image offering nothing recognizable. After weeks of looking for evidence of foul play, Detective Jugal hadn't found any. In fact, to him, all the available evidence was pointing in the same direction that the McStays had left the country voluntarily. Michael, I currently can convince somebody who has nothing to do with this case that there's a stronger likelihood that they're alive and sound. Then I can convince somebody that they were abducted or being held. There's no ransom, no law enforcement has come across any suspicious circumstances, persons, people who have been killed, and then we have things like this. Things like this as in this border crossing video, but was there more to the story of what happened to this family? There's a lot of stuff going on here, and we have a lot of stuff going on in the shopping mall. There's a lot of stuff going on in the shopping mall, shopping mall, and a lot of stuff going on in the shopping mall. The news has been coming to an end for almost two or three years, and the news has been coming to an end for the shopping mall, and the news has been coming to an end for the shopping mall, and the news has been coming to an end for the shopping mall, It was a very difficult time to get rid of it, so it was very difficult to get rid of it. It was very difficult to get rid of it. While detectives worked on the case, while detectives worked on the case, went up to, and Michael McState told ABC News in 2011, the public did reach out. The suggestions from across the country from across the country about where his family could be. Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Montana. The San Diego Sheriff's Department followed up on tips that came in. Something's not right. Someone needs to come forward. Someone's saw something. Someone knows something. I'm suspecting the worst. I'm suspecting foul play. And the worst would come. What happens to the mixed days is a production of ABC audio in 2020, hosted by me, Ashan Singh, produced by Madeleine Wood, Vika Aronson, Audrey Mostek, and Chiara Powell, with help from Sabrina Fang and Camille Peterson, edited by Gianna Palmer, a supervising producer and Susie Lu, music by having Viola, mixing by having Viola and Bob Mallory, Special thanks for watching! special thanks to Katie Dendas, Janice Johnson, Chris Donovan, Joseph Rees, Sonny Andrew, Melissa Stoller, Zander Samaris, Tom Burmian, Indra Dallisahum, and Blue Browning. Gosh Cohen is our Director of Podcast Programming. Kevin McNaff is our Executive Producer. Can't wait for more. Listen to the next episode. In the early morning of the year, the company was able to start a new year in 2013. The first day of the year, the company was able to start a new year in the early morning of the year. The first day of the year was able to start a new year in the early morning of the year.