The murder trial of Jade Janks began last week in Vista Superior Court, and her lawyers are adamant that she did not kill her stepfather, Thomas Merriman.
However, Deputy District Attorney Jorge Del Portillo and his team point to a series of text messages as evidence and private nude photos as a motive to convict Janks of the crime.
The businesswoman facing the possibility of life in prison has pleaded not guilty to murder. According to court documents and police files, Thomas Merriman, 64, died on New Year’s Eve 2020 in San Diego, California.
Merriman’s body was discovered on January 2nd under a pile of trash near his home on South Nardo Avenue in Solana Beach.
Thomas Merriman was the co-founder of the education and research nonprofit Butterfly Farms.
The 39-year-old interior designer told her associates via text messages that Merriman died of an overdose of sleeping pills.
Jade Sasha Janks also revealed to people that she suffocated Merriman hours after she picked him up from a rehab facility where he was cared for after a fall.
Merriman and Janks’s mother divorced in 2008 after multiple instances of domestic abuse. However, Janks and Merriman maintained a friendly relationship, and she helped him on and off.
In late December 2020, Janks made a shocking discovery while cleaning Merriman’s home. Janks stumbled on Merriman’s computer, which had one of her naked photos as a screensaver.
A quick research on the computer found multiple nude photos she had taken when she was younger. The private photos were taken more than ten years ago by her then-boyfriend.
Janks did give her boyfriend her full consent to snap the intimate pictures. No one knows how Merriman obtained the photographs.
According to Janks’s text messages, she gave the elderly man the pills and strangled him. Here are some of Janks’s text messages that were shown to the jury by the prosecutor:
“I just dosed the hell out of him. Stopping for whiskey at Dixieland to stall. LMK.”
“He’s waking up. I really don’t want to be the one to do this.”
“I can’t carry him alone, and I can’t keep a kicking body in my trunk.”
“I am about to club him on the head as he is waking up.”
“I’m not strong enough. He is very aware now, and I am on my own.”
She also reached up to several friends and asked them to help her in this complex and thorny situation. Most of her friends declined to be an accessory to murder, but one did show up at home.
That person felt uncomfortable by what they witnessed and called the police. Del Portillo said Janks plotted the murder and attempted to make it look like an overdose.
Attorney Marc Carlos, who is representing Janks, told the jury that Merriman died from poor health and “his own cocktail” of drugs.
Carlos claimed: “You will not find any evidence that he was strangled to death.” The trial has sparked a lot of reactions on social media, and the suspect has amassed many defenders.
