Hi, I'm ABC News correspondent, Ash and Singh. Today, I want to tell you about a new true crime podcast I'm hosting from 2020 and ABC Audio called What Happens To The Mix Days. It's a story about secrets, betrayal, and the dark underbelly of the American dream. In 2010, a family of four was found missing from their Southern California home, with no signs of a struggle or forced entry. Had the mix days really left on their own?
If they did, where would they have gone in such a hurry? Or had something more sinister happened? Keep listening now to hear the first few minutes of the shocking story of what happened to the mix days. If you like it, you can follow What Happens To The Mix Days for free weekly episodes starting August 11th. Or you can subscribe to 2022 Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts to listen to the first four episodes ad-free right away.
Now here's an exclusive sneak peek at what happened to the mix days. On October 19th, 2025, the Louvre became the backdrop of something straight out of a heist movie. In this series, I'll take you inside the events of that day through the eyes of the people who live them. Then I'll join the International Hunt for the Louvre Jules. Heist at the Louvre, a new series from ABC Audio.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app, or subscribe to 2020 True Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts To Listen ad-free. In November of 2009, Family of Four moved into a palm tree dotted cul-de-sac in the hills of San Diego County. Joseph McStae and his wife Summer were in their early 40s and living a seemingly charmed Southern California life with their two young sons. Their new neighborhood was surrounded by mountains and farmland. Their new house, a large Spanish-style home on Avocado Vista Lane, is around 10 years old, with a stucco exterior and a red terracotta roof.
The mix days home videos from around this time show an active, fun-loving family. In one, Little Joseph Jr. runs around the first floor of their new home. In another video, all four of the mix days bite to the beach. And then there's the video where the two McStae boys, Joseph Jr. and his big brother
Gianni, swing side by side and a playground swing set together. Your mom, Summer, pushes them higher and higher. For a couple of months, these were the types of sounds that filled the McStae residents. But one day in February 2010, the house went quiet. The house station KGTV covered the story.
The outside of the McStae home remains exactly as the family left it. Their shoes and the newspaper both outside. There was a carton of eggs left out on the counter. And one other thing, Summer McStae left her prescription sunglasses behind. Family left their dogs behind and there had been no activity on their phones.
It was as if the McStae's had simply vanished into thin air. Authorities' friends and family were baffled. But how does a vibrant family of four suddenly go missing? From ABC Audio in 2020, I'm Ashin Singh. And this is What Happens To The McStae's.
I said one, 11 days. Joseph McStae or Joey had a weekly ritual with his little brother Michael. In a 2011 interview with ABC News, Michael said that every Friday, Joseph would give him a ring on his way to play pick up soccer. He would call me, we'd touch base. Hey, how's things going? Hey, Mikey, how's your business? What's going on? How are the girls?
I'd ask other boys where and he'd tell me what was going on. But on Friday, February 5, 2010, Michael didn't get that weekly call from his big brother. For Michael, this was unusual, but not alarming. So to miss one Friday, I mean, I didn't think a whole lot of it. But then several days went by without a peep from Joseph, no calls, texts or emails.
It was the same at his work, too. Joseph co-owned a business that sold high-end decorative families. The kind you might see in hotel lobbies. The company was in the middle of a couple of projects. When Joseph's colleagues told the McStae family, they noticed Joseph had gone completely silent.
There was customer emails not being answered, which is not like Joe. He was usually right on top of it. Joseph's friends started reaching out to Michael to ask, Hey, have you heard from Joe? What's going on? He's not answering his phone.
Joseph's wife's summer wasn't returning calls either. So Michael posted to his brother's Facebook page asking friends, If you've seen him, please let the family know. Family and friends got in touch. Michael and Joseph's parents, plus two of Joseph's colleagues, Dan Kavanaugh and Chase Merritt. They shared any relevant information they had.
And Michael pieced together on Thursday, February 4, was likely the last day anyone had seen or heard from his brother. Michael and Joseph's father said he talked to Joseph that morning. And according to Joseph's business, Joseph, he and Joseph met up that afternoon. Love runs were worried about the McStae's, but Michael tried to remain optimistic. He thought it was possible the family left on a trip and just didn't tell anyone.
I thought, well, maybe maybe they're doing a quick vacate. So I didn't want to jump to any conclusions. A few days after the McStae's went quiet, Joseph's business partner Dan Kavanaugh called the police for a welfare check. San Diego County Sheriff's deputies came out to the home and knocked on the door. No one was home at the time, but with no signs that anything was a mess, deputies followed procedure and did not go inside.
Joseph's business associate Chase Merritt also went to the house a couple times that week. He says to see if he could find Joseph, no luck. And by February 13th, the McStae's hadn't been seen or heard from in nine days. Michael says he decided to check the home himself. He took a trip to Avocado Vista Lane.
Chase came along too. I went down there, started knocking on doors, asking the neighbors that they seen him. Michael says he let himself into the house through a back window that was cracked open. He started looking through the home. He says it was messy.
Kitchen drawers had been pulled out and placed on countertops. Toys, books and clothes were scattered around. And the house was barely furnished. The family was using air mattresses instead of beds. So Michael, it was like his brother and his family were camping in their own home.
But this was Michael's first time in McStae's new house. They'd only moved in about two months earlier and they were remodeling. Michael says they'd been doing work on the floors and painting cabinets. So to him, this could have been a normal level of untiediness given the circumstances. And given that Joseph and Summer had two young children.
But there was one thing Michael noticed right away that he clocked as being very, very off. The dogs were left outside unattended. It didn't make sense. McStae family dogs were left to sit in the hot California sun. By all accounts, McStae's loved their dogs.
A big achida called mare and a golden retriever puppy called Digger. Friends say they were like second kids to Joseph and Summer. To leave them alone outside for days on end, this just didn't sit right with Michael. He asked an neighbor to keep an eye on the dogs. And then he left, hoping his family would show up soon.
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It's a new workday. One thing about Joseph is he would always talk for hours, and I'm not exaggerating, like, sometimes two hours. Gina Watson was one of Joseph's next day's friends.
It meant because Gina also worked in the decorative fountain industry. She says they'd gotten to know each other well, and according to Gina, Joseph was a talker. I would call him before I'd left for lunch to talk about whatever the problem of the day was, and then it would evolve into just, I don't know, conversation goes from one thing to another, and then I'm like, the phone's getting hot because it's been in your ears so long. Like, can we wrap this up? Gina said that Joseph endured his wife's summer, and they're two boys.
Joseph's kids and his wife were everything to him. Gina says Joseph would share stories about his rambunctious little boys. Like, the time they snuck out of their beds early one morning and started ramaging through their kitchen cabinets. He said one night, Gianni and little Joey had gotten into the flower. I guess they kept it in a lower cabinet, and you're a parent, and you're tired, and your little kid sneaks out of bed, and gets into the flower, and they had it all over themselves, and they had handprints and footprints everywhere, and they recovered head to toe.
Gina describes Joseph as a surfer dude. He had wavy shoulder-length, light, brown hair. In pictures, it looks like he would be more comfortable in shorts than a t-shirt, and a suit and tie. Joseph and summer sons, Gianni and Joseph Jr. were four years old and three, respectively, at the time they vanished.
Photos of the little boys showed their hair down to their shoulders, just like their dad. In one photo, Joey Jr. holds an ice-cream sandwich, chocolate all over his mouth. And Gina says their dad, Joseph Sr. was generous with his friends.
He would buy his friends' laptops just because he was excited about technology, and he wanted them to be as excited as he was. And oh, you got to check out this gaming laptop. Like, oh, you need top of the line. No, that's not good enough. Let me get you this one.
He was just very easy with money. He never was too uptight about it. He was more so than any person I've ever meant to be honest. Joseph and Summer were introduced in the early 2000s, one of his friends set them up, and everyone says they hit it off right away. Summer was a very passionate woman who went after what she wanted.
That's Jesse Silveria, a friend of Summer's. I met Summer around 2006, and I was living in Laguna Beach, and I think both of us were Lagunaites. Jesse and Summer were both photographers at the time, and met while working the same shoot. To me, Summer was exotic. She had dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, really big cute smile.
Jesse says she and Summer would go out together. Two creatives and joined the beachy art scene of Laguna. One summer got pregnant, Jesse says. She scaled back her active social life, stopped working, and became a stay-at-home mom. They were nesting.
That phase in her life was nesting. Friends and families say Joseph and Summer loved the beach. Over the time, the couple and their sons lived in St. Clemente. Their apartment was on top of a cliff overlooking the ocean, with world-class surfing right outside their door.
The kids, they were growing up to be surfer dudes too. They definitely took after Joey, wanting to be close to the ocean. Another big part of the McStays lives was Joseph's work. Earth-inspired products. It sold elaborate custom, decorative waterfalls.
These were large-scale standalone objects, often six feet tall. Water would be pumped invisibly to the top of tall glass panes, and then cascade down into pools that sparkled with hidden-like fixtures. Earth-inspired products also had an online retail side, where they sold pre-manufactured water features. Gina Watson worked for one of Joseph's manufacturing partners, and saw the two men and became friends. She says Joseph was a designer at heart.
He actually started his business, I think, in his garage, designing his own features by hand. Gina says Joseph was taking on more and more custom work, and the business was doing really well. According to people familiar with the company, Earth-inspired products have gotten big contracts. The car wasch chain with 150 locations, a huge custom job for the Palmit Show hair salon brand, and even our project in Saudi Arabia. In late 2009, the McStay family moved from their small beachside apartment in St. Clevverne,
to their house on that palm tree-lined cul-de-sac. Their new town of Fallbrook is better known for its avocado orchards than its proximity to the coast. It's a 30-minute drive to the beach, a trade-off for the surf-loving McStays. But it was big, five bedrooms with a backyard. Here's Summer's friend, Jessie again.
All the outside was completely populated with kids' toys and trucks and boy stuff, and she was growing flowers and gardens. Again, they had plans to remodel the home in my early 2010s, so one of the renovations were underway. Joseph would fill his mother Michael in on the progress. Okay, they're remodeling the house, and it's kind of crazy. The furniture's still in storage.
By February of 2010, Joseph was doing well professionally. The couple was working on upgrading their new house. Family scene settled. It doesn't invest, you know, like $30,000 into a house to renovate it because he's going to leave tomorrow. That just doesn't jive.
He doesn't walk out on his friends and his family. And yet, at that house in Fallbrook, no one was home. And for over a week, there had only been silence from the family who lived there. He didn't add up. Michael McStays says he decided that if his brother and family were, as he'd hoped, just on an extended vacation.
They should be backed by February 15th. He says as he told himself that if by 9am he still hadn't heard from Joseph, he'd file a missing person's report. That's exactly what Michael did. What? The procedure is causing travelling physical changes.
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On who though? In the morning of February 15th, 2010, Michael McStae had reached his personal deadline to sound the alarm. No one had heard from Joseph for summer in 11 days. Michael called the police. He asked for a welfare check.
And the troll deputies came out and checked the house. Lieutenant Dennis Proogos from the San Diego Sheriff's Department oversaw the investigation. According to police at 1032 a.m., Michael, along with officers from the San Diego Sheriff's Department, arrived at the McStae's Fallbrook House. They knocked on the door and checked the exterior for signs of forced entry. When they got into no response, they entered the residence and started a search.
They began by looking for people, either people in distress or bodies. They found neither. But they did encounter the dogs. They were still in the backyard alone, with some water and food left out for them. That raised red flags because by all accounts, they took very good care of their dogs.
And when police heard from Michael that the McStae's had left without notifying any friends or family, that raised immediate alarm bells, too. What the deputy initially learned was this was really a nice family. And they never made plans to leave. And so that raised the suspicion level to the point where he said, you know what? We should probably call it homosizing.
Let them know what's going on up here. Lieutenant Proogos says suspicious circumstances cases like this one are handled by the homicide unit. Whether there's a dead body or not. Police say that when homicide detectives joined the search of the McStae residents, they checked again for any signs of foul play. Any clue as to what may have happened to the McStae's.
Officers looked all over the home, inside the kitchen pantry, in the den, the garage, in a recycling bin outside, and the trunk parked in the driveway. As detectives searched, they noticed a few curious things. To start, it was the food that was left out. According to police and court documents, downstairs in the living room, there were two small bowls of popcorn. Half eaten, left on a futon.
Bananas had started to rot, and the carton of eggs were sitting out on the kitchen counter. You don't need perishable food out if you're going to be gone for extended period time, generally. It seemed like the family may have left the house suddenly, even unexpectedly. And then it was the mess. Police documented.
Clothes piled up on the bathroom counter. Suitcases left open with clothes spilling out into piles. A tall lamp that looked like it had been knocked over. If the McStae's had gone on vacation, like Michael so hoped was the case, why would they have left suitcases full of clothing behind? And detectives also uncovered something else.
Lieutenant Bruegos again. We knew that one of the vehicles was parked here in the driveway and the other one wasn't here. The McStae's 1996 white asusu trooper wasn't missing. If police could find the vehicle, maybe they could find the McStae's. They ran a search on the asusu trooper, and immediately came up with a hit.
According to police records, the check revealed that the vehicle was recently towed from a parking lot about 60 miles from the McStae's home, near the U.S.-Mexico border. So near, in fact, it was walking distance to the border terminal. According to police, the car had been towed from that lot on February 8, four days after the McStae's vanished. Now police had to find out, what did this clue mean? Did the McStae's leave for Mexico altogether?
If so, did they go voluntarily or by force? Were they hiding? Kidnapped? Police couldn't yet say. The search of the McStae residents took all day, and in the end police determined it was no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle or act of violence, no blood.
In other words, no apparent signs of foul play, no clear crime. But that didn't mean that detectives were confident that all was well with McStae's. The abandoned dogs, the spoiled food left out. The family car found at the Mexican border, as Lieutenant Bruego spuds it. When you put the whole picture together, it raises the level of suspicion that something's not right.
Once officers wrapped up the search of the home, a couple of the detectives, Troy Dugal and Suzanne Fisk, hold Michael aside for an interview in their police car. In the tape from this interview, Michael still hopes that his big brother's family could be perfectly fine. We're just like this, and then it just being something totally innocent. I can tell you that I've never had one like this. We're a family that's just totally missing, ever.
So I can't give you a good statistic. Detective Dugal asked Michael for more information about the missing family. How was Joseph and Summer's relationship? Who were their closest friends? Did he have problems with anyone? Or money trouble?
Do you know if there's any money involvement with your brother or someone money or would somebody try to take advantage of your brother? I don't know enough about what's going on with his business. Why? I have no idea. They dug deeper, asking about Joseph's finances.
How much did you rather work? I have no idea. Do you know what a hearing can come in? Dugal asked if Joseph might have been involved in narcotics. My brother doesn't even do drugs.
Detectives also asked about the Asusu trooper. Did Michael have any idea what Joseph and his family might be doing walking distance from Theoana? I have no idea. I don't think he knows anybody knows. The whole situation still didn't sit right with Michael or the detectives.
Just got me scratching my head. We don't know any more than you know. What do you think? Where's the brother? Where are they?
I'm hoping they went down and they just went to Mexico and took a two-week walk. I would hope that too. But what did you see in the house that would indicate that that's probably not true? I just walked through it. I didn't get it. I mean, I didn't.
Well, let me help you out. Inside the walking closet, there's suitcases and there's little kids' suitcases with suitcases, laps open with folded little kid laundry. Clean laundry in the suitcases. If they want a vacation, the kids' suitcases will be with them. In his official account of the day, Detective Dugal concluded that there had been no apparent sign of a crime.
But he also said this. It is my opinion that McStae family is the victim of foul play. The police knew this wasn't over. It was more work to be done. Now the race was on to find out what had actually happened to the family of four.
Before it was too late. What happened to the McStae is a production of ABC Audio in 2020, hosted by me, Ash and Singh, produced by Madeline Wood, Vika Aronson, Audrey Mostak, and Chiara Powell, with help from Sabrina Fang and Camille Peterson, edited by Gianna Palmer, or supervising producer as Susie Luke, music by having Viola, scoring by Chiara Powell, mixing by having Viola and Bob Malady. Special thanks to Katie Dendos, Janice Johnson, Kristina Mee, Joseph Reed, Sonny Antrim, Alyssa Stuller, Zendra Samaris, Tom Burmese, Indra Della Sakham, and Blue Brownie. Gosh Cohen is our Director of Podcast Programming.
And when McMiff is our Executive Producer. Can't wait for more. Listen to the next episode ahead of everyone else, ad-free. Subscribe now to 2020 True Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts. Click the link in the description to start your free trial today.
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