Woman Guilty of Killing Stepfather Over Nude Photos

Prosecutors said Jade Janks killed Robert Merriman days after disturbing find
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 22, 2022 8:56 AM CST

A California woman who testified that she was horrified to find hundreds of nude photos of herself on her stepfather's laptop has been convicted of murdering him. Jade Janks, a 39-year-old interior designer, was found guilty Wednesday of first-degree murder in the death of 64-year-old Robert Merriman, co-founder of a San Diego-area butterfly conservation center, NBC San Diego reports. Prosecutors said Janks, "disturbed to the core" by what she had seen on Merriman's computer days earlier, drugged and suffocated him on New Year's Eve 2020, the day she took him home from a rehab center. His body was found the next day, covered in trash and boxes. Janks denied killing Merriman, saying he was intoxicated when she picked him up and had a large bag of prescription sleeping pills.

Janks testified last week that she was cleaning his apartment while he was in hospital for injuries suffered in a fall at the rehab center when she found the photos."When I went to clean in his office area ... I bumped the mouse and it shook the screen awake," she said, per CBS 8. "There's a picture of female breasts on the screen. I have a beauty mark on my chest, those are my breasts." She said she found more than 100 photos of her on the laptop, arranged in folders for different body parts. Janks testified that some of the photos went back to when she was 16 year old. She said they had been kept in private folders on her own laptop and on camera memory cards she didn't think Merriman had access to. She said he died after she left him in a car overnight, unable to move him into the house, and she hid the body because she was afraid she would be blamed for his death.

The deputy medical examiner for San Diego County said at a hearing earlier this year that Merriman's cause of death was acute intoxication by the sedative zolpidem, better known as Ambien. Prosecutors said Janks planned to kill Merriman after finding the photos and she admitted the murder to a friend who contacted authorities after she asked him to help her, Inside Edition reports. Prosecutors said she told the friend, "I suffocated him with a bag and I choked him." Text messages she sent that day included "I just dosed the hell out of him" and "He’s waking up. I really don’t want to be the one to do this." Janks admitted sending the texts but said they were being taken out of context. (More California stories.)

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