This is a strange tale. Jade Janks, an elegant interior designer from San Diego in California, killed her stepfather while he was being discharged from the hospital. Jade discovered that he had nude photos of her on his computer as she was cleaning up for him at his house. The pictures were reportedly taken when Jade and a former boyfriend were together and were private and consensual. I’m not sure how the stepfather got his hands on them.
“Butterfly Farms,” a nonprofit dedicated to saving butterflies, was co-founded by Janks and her stepfather. Even after he and her mother’s long-ago divorce, Jade continued to support her stepfather even though they had shared a house.
But when she found those photos of herself in her underwear on his computer, everything changed. One of them, it seems, served as his “screensaver.”
The New York Post reported:
Thomas Merriman’s body was found in January 2021, under a pile of trash at the Solana Beach, Calif., home he shared with stepdaughter Jade Janks.
The murder trial of Janks, 39, an interior designer who co-founded the research nonprofit Butterfly Farms, began this week in Vista Superior Court.
She has pleaded not guilty to killing the 64-year-old Merriman, who prosecutors said died of an overdose of sleeping pills Janks gave him after she discovered the photos — one of which he reportedly used as his screensaver.
“This was no accident,” San Diego County Deputy District Attorney Jorge Del Portillo said, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune. “This was murder by design.”
The photos were taken more than a decade ago, consensually, by Janks and her boyfriend, authorities said. It’s unclear how they came into Merriman’s possession.
Janks found the photos while she was cleaning her stepfather’s apartment, who had been hospitalized, Del Portillo added.
She texted another man about giving Merriman the pills, prosecutors contended.
“I just dosed the hell out of him. Stopping for whiskey then at Dixieland to stall. LMK,” Janks allegedly texted the day she picked Merriman up from the hospital, according to Del Portillo.
Janks seems to second guess her plan in another text message the prosecutors shared.
“He’s waking up,” one alleged text read, according to NBC San Diego. “I really don’t want to be the one to do this.”
“I am about to club him on the head as he is waking up,” another read.
Janks eventually called another person for help, said prosecutors. That person called the authorities the next day.
Deputies then searched the home and found Merriman’s body under a pile of boxes, blankets and other trash as they were leaving.
Her attorneys argue Jade didn’t kill him, it was his own cocktail of drugs and his poor health that killed him…
Um, that might be a hard story to sell to a jury after they read those text messages.
Maybe instead of killing him, she could have told him off, smashed his PC, and never spoken to him again. At least then she’d have that perv out of her life, and she wouldn’t be going to prison, likely for the rest of her life.
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