Jade Janks: Woman accused of killing stepdad opens up on 'gut-wrenching feeling' of finding her nude pics
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA: Jade Janks, a San Diego interior designer accused of killing her stepdad, Thomas Merriman, has opened up about her reaction to finding allegedly stolen nude photographs on his screensaver. She spoke at length during her trial on Friday, December 16. In her testimony, she told the San Diego County court that while she was cleaning his home as he was in a recovery center after a fall, Janks nudged the mouse of his computer by mistake, and that brightened the screen giving her a shocking revelation. 39-year-old Jade Janks is accused of drugging, choking, and strangling 64-year-old Thomas Merriman on New Year's Eve 2020.
"When I went to clean in his office area, I'm wiping things down, I bumped the mouse, and it shook the screen awake. There's a picture of female breasts on the screen. I have a beauty mark on my chest, those are my breasts," she told the court. Janks claimed that there were over 100 photos of herself, as most of them were allegedly cropped photos and divided into photos of the body part. The interior designer alleged some of the photographs were taken when she was just 16 and were allegedly taken from her laptop and a digital camera. Janks believed that he didn't have access to her devices then. She was asked during her testimony, if she ever shared those photographs with Merriman, Janks replied, "No, no, he was my dad," as per toofab.
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Sharing what went inside her mind when she found out about those photographs, she said, "It was the most violating, awful, gut-wrenching feeling ever. I felt sick, I felt I couldn't ... even touch my own skin. I don't know if there [are] words, not even in a movie have I seen something so sick." She confessed in her testimony, "[I] got angry and I poured some of the Jack Daniels, I poured it on his desktop computer and then I took out what I thought was the hard drive and destroyed it," reports toofab. Janks maintained throughout her testimony while being questioned by her defense attorney that Merriman had just ‘passed out after taking prescription pills and drinking whiskey’ once she picked him up from the recovery facility on December 31.
She further told the court in her testimony that when she wasn’t able to move him as no one showed up whom she contacted, she decided to let him sleep off overnight in the car. In the morning, she went out to the car and noticed that he hadn’t moved one bit from where she had left Merriman and she ‘panicked’.
While being cross-questioned on Friday afternoon, Janks said, "I've seen Tom drink a lot more ... I didn't think anything was going to happen to him." She had later admitted under oath that she did try to cover up his death, as she hid him under a pile of trash in the driveway. Janks said she ‘panicked’ and ‘didn’t really know what to do’, as she knew she’d be blamed for his death as being last known acquaintance and what she did to his computer. "I didn't want to get blamed for killing him," she said, reports the San Diego Tribune.
As per the medical examiner, Thomas Merriman died of acute zolpidem intoxication, which is a type of sleeping pill.