The defense presented a different version and assured that the 64-year-old man died from an unfortunate overdose, since he had several medical prescriptions.
Courtesy | They blame the designer for providing a cocktail of pills to the victim
Jade Janks, 39, an interior designer, is charged with the murder of her stepfather, Thomas Merriman, 64, which may have been revenge because the man kept nude pictures of her on his computer. , although the defense attorney presented a very different version.
The trial began in San Diego, California, with two conflicting versions, because while the prosecutor tries to prove that the old man’s death was planned, Janks’ defense claims that the death of Thomas Merriman, a man dedicated to the care of butterflies, It was due to physical problems, typical of his advanced age.
According to the San Diego County prosecutor, while Thomas Merriman was in a recovery center following suffering a fall in late 2020, his stepdaughter found the butterfly farmer’s personal computer at home, where they were stored. some photographs of Jade herself.
According to the investigations, these photographs had been taken 10 years earlier by a boyfriend of Jade Janks, in a consensual manner, however, it might not be explained how her stepfather obtained the images.
The defense of the 39-year-old woman assured that she loved the relative.
Died on New Year’s Eve
On New Year’s Eve 2021, Jade came to pick Thomas up to take him home. It was on January 2 when a call alerted the police, who found the old man’s body under a pile of garbage.
Supposedly, she tried to ask a couple of people for help to move the body, however, a man did not want to be an accomplice and called the social assistance control to report the situation.
According to the coroner’s study, Merriman died of acute Zolpidem poisoning, or Ambien, a type of sleeping medication.
In the course of the trial, the district attorney presented as evidence a series of text messages sent from Janks’ phone before the new year, which shows that it was a planned action.
“I just beat him up”, “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 body kicking in my trunk” and “I’m regarding to hit him in the head when he’s waking up”, were Jade’s words to several people to whom she had told of her anger at her stepfather over the subject of the photographs.
According to the prosecutor’s version, the designer provided a cocktail of pills to the victim and her intention was to make it appear as an accidental overdose by the man, and that the authorities would find the body in his room.
For her part, Jade’s defense pointed out that her stepfather came home with several prescriptions for medications, so he himself might have improperly ingested the drugs. “She certainly loved her stepfather, even though he had other forms of love for her stepdaughter,” they said in reference to the photos.
But the district attorney found in the text messages the indications to blame the woman, who would have requested help from a couple of men to handle the body. The first of them refused and the second was the one who called the authorities to give notice.
The man who called police is identified as Adam Siplyak, who testified last Thursday that Janks confessed to his stepfather’s murder and needed help moving the body to his bed to make the scene appear like a drug overdose.
“She said: ‘I killed him, and he’s in the back of my truck,’ according to local media. Afterward he would have refused to provide Jade with any help. “I can’t help you… no way, I’m getting out of here. I have a child to raise.’”
Faced with these testimonies, Janks’ defense team argued that the witness was a recovering drug addict and that his version was due to a romantic interest in her.
The defense attorney denied that she had strangled Merriman to end his life and assured that the autopsy determined that the cause of death was an overdose. He argued that the old man had an unfortunate death from alcohol abuse and a drug overdose.
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