Designer ‘killed stepfather after she saw nude picture of herself on his computer’
A CALIFORNIA interior designer has been accused of drugging and strangling her stepfather after catching him using a naked picture of her as his screensaver.
Jade Janks, 39, is on trial for the murder of Thomas Merriman, 64, with whom she founded Butterfly Farms, a non-profit research institution.
According to Jorge Del Portillo, the deputy district attorney, Ms Banks stumbled on the nude screensaver while tidying the home they shared in Solana Beach, San Diego, California.
Ms Janks found more images when she searched the computer and was left “beyond freaked out”, Mr Del Portillo told the jury. How the photographs, which were taken with consent by Ms Janks’s boyfriend a decade ago, ended up on Merriman’s computer is unclear.
Incensed by the discovery Ms Janks plotted her revenge, the prosecuting attorney alleged. “This was no accident. This was murder by design,” Mr Del Portillo told the court.
Ms Janks planned to kill Merriman, but make it appear as if he had taken an overdose, he added.
He died on New Year’s Eve in 2020, hours after Janks had collected him from a rehabilitation facility where he had been recovering from a fall. Even though Merriman had divorced Ms Janks’s mother, she still looked after him.
The prosecution alleged that Ms
Janks had told her friends she had drugged Merriman and attempted to suffocate him.
Jurors were shown a series of incriminating texts she had sent to various contacts. “I just dosed the hell out of him,” she wrote in one. “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.”
Ms Janks eventually called her friend Adam Siplyak for help, the prosecutors said. Mr Siplyak told jurors in Vista, California, that Ms Janks asked him to help move the body. “She said, ‘I killed him, and he’s in the back of my [Toyota] 4Runner,’” Mr Siplyak recalled. “I said, ‘I can’t help you … no way, I’m out of here. I have a son to raise.’”
Mr Siplyak said he refused to look inside the car fearing that doing so would incriminate himself.
Instead, he called the police the following day, who searched Merriman’s home and found his body beneath a pile of boxes and rubbish on Jan 2.
Prosecutors said he died of a sleeping pill overdose.
Marc Carlos, the defending attorney, told jurors that Mr Merriman’s death was because of his poor health and the cocktail of pills he had been taking.
“The medical examiner will not tell you it was strangulation. The science does not support strangulation,” Mr Carlos added.
Ms Janks has pleaded not guilty to murder. She could face life in prison if convicted.
‘I don’t want to be the one to do this. I can’t carry him and I can’t keep a kicking body in my trunk’