LOS ANGELES _ A jury Monday found a man guilty of bludgeoning the McStay family and burying their bodies in shallow graves in the Mojave Desert.
Charles "Chase" Merritt, 62, of Rancho Cucamonga, was convicted of four counts of first degree murder in the deaths of Joseph and Summer McStay and their two boys. After a five-month trial, jurors deliberated for about a week before reaching their verdict.
Prosecutors argued that Merritt was motivated by greed and self-interest. He owed Joseph McStay $42,845 and, after the family's disappearance, forged checks to himself from McStay's QuickBooks account.
Merritt's defense team said that he had been wrongfully accused, arguing that prosecutors relied entirely on motive to build their case with no direct evidence.
"If they admit they made a mistake and arrested the wrong guy how's that gonna look?" his attorney James McGee told jurors during his closing arguments. "How do you go back to that family now and say we might've messed up?"
The verdict capped nearly a decade of tragedy in a case that drew national attention and has been the subject of documentaries and a book. The trial was live streamed by the website Law & Crime.
The McStay family vanished from their Fallbrook home in February 2010. At the time, their disappearance transfixed the nation and puzzled police. The home showed signs of a swift departure: uneaten bowls of popcorn on the futon, vegetables left out to rot.
From the start, the case baffled detectives, who initially believed the family may have ventured out on their own and planned to return. There were no signs of a struggle or forced entry. Within days, the family's Isuzu Trooper was towed from the parking lot of a strip mall near the Mexican border.
A check of the family's computer revealed searches suggesting an international trip, including "What documents do children need for traveling to Mexico?" But friends and family insisted the couple would never travel there with their children. San Diego County sheriff's investigators eventually handed off the case to the FBI, saying they believed the family was out of the country.
But in the fall of 2013, an off-road motorcyclist discovered parts of a skull in the desert off Interstate 15 in Victorville, about an hour north of the family's home. The remains of McStay, 40, were found buried with Joey Jr., 3. A second grave contained the remains of Summer McStay, 43, and Gianni, 4, along with a rusty sledgehammer.
Joseph McStay's skull was shattered; his wife sustained a blow to the jaw. Both boys had skull fractures. Prosecutors believe the children were collateral damage, killed presumably because they could have identified Merritt as the killer in what San Bernardino County Deputy District Attorney Britt Imes called "senseless" slayings.
Prosecutors acknowledged that their case was built on circumstantial evidence. Without a bloody crime scene, they couldn't prove definitively where and when the family was killed.
"You can have a murder case without answering those questions," Imes told jurors during his closing arguments. He later added, "Something happened in that house ... What exactly happened in that house? Only one person knows. The killer."
The defense team pointed to another of McStay's business associates, who they said siphoned money from McStay's accounts after he went missing. Prosecutors said that associate had traveled to Hawaii at the time, but defense attorneys said no boarding pass or ticket verified that.
