The trial for a San Diego interior designer accused of murdering her 64-year-old stepdad started on Wednesday in a Vista Superior Court.
Jade Janks, 39, allegedly murdered her stepfather, Thomas Merriman, 64, after finding stolen nude photos of herself on his computer. He was drugged, strangled, and suffocated in his San Diego home on December 31, 2020.
Prosecutors say that Janks, who used to run a successful interior design business, was beyond freaked out when she found several naked pictures of herself on Merriman’s computer and was even using one as his screensaver.
Jorge Del Portillo, the Deputy District Attorney, said that the murder was not an accident and was “murder by design.”
Janks’ attorney, however, dispelled the accusation, saying that the 64-year-old man died from taking a cocktail of his pills and his poor health. Another one of her attorneys, Marc Carlos, told the court that the medical examiner could not testify that the man died from strangulation because he did not die from strangulation, and she did not kill him.
Janks entered a not-guilty plea for the murder of Merriman, the co-founder of an education and research NGO called Butterfly Farms in Encinitas, California.
Records show that Merriman and Janks’ mother divorced in 2008 after several domestic violence incidents. Janks still maintained a relationship with her stepfather.
Police found Merriman’s body on January 2, 2021, hidden underneath a pile of trash and boxes in a driveway near his home in Solana Beach when they visited the home to conduct a welfare check.
The Deputy District Attorney Del Portillo told the court that Merriman’s cause of death was severe intoxication from sleeping pills, but that Janks confided in her friends that she had drugged the man and tried to suffocate him.
Del Portillo said that the man died just hours after Janks picked him up from a hospital where he was recovering following a fall. According to the prosecution, Janks found the pictures while cleaning Merriman’s home. She saw his computer and opened it, and that’s when she saw a naked picture of herself as the computer’s screen saver. She decided to search the computer and eventually found more nude pictures of herself.
Attorneys on both sides did not indicate where Merriman could have gotten the pictures, but Janks said she took the photos consensually more than ten years earlier with her boyfriend at the time.
The prosecutor showed the court numerous text messages between Janks and several people as she sought help dealing with her stepfather the day after she picked him up from the facility.
The text messages included her saying she had “dosed the hell out of the man.” Another text said that he was waking up, and she didn’t want to be the one to do this. In another, she said that she couldn’t carry him alone and couldn’t keep a kicking body in the trunk of her car.
One of the people she called for help went over but backed out of the plan. He called the police to do a welfare check on the 64-year-old the next day.
Police did not find Merriman in his house, but as they were leaving, they searched a pile of trash in the driveway and found his body under it.
Janks’ attorney suggested that Merriman had taken a concoction of sleeping pills on his own as he was a known alcoholic who abused drugs.
The jury will decide what to believe.