48 Hours - Post Mortem | Jade Janks and the Secret Photos

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

Did Jade Janks, stepdaughter and prime suspect in the death of Tom Merriman, kill her stepfather or was his death an accident? Correspondent Tracy Smith and Producer Sarah Prior discuss the hundreds of nude photos of Jade found on her stepfather’s computer, the so-called “fixer” Jade reached out to for help, and the text messages from Jade that tell a bizarre story about what might’ve actually happened to Tom.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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and even your overall well-being. And you can enjoy Audible anytime, while doing household chores, exercising, commuting, you name it. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca. In 2014, Laura Heavlin was in her home in Tennessee when she received a call from California. Her daughter, Erin Corwin, was missing. The young wife of a Marine had moved to the California desert

to a remote base near Joshua Tree National Park. They have to alert the military. And when they do, the NCIS gets involved. From CBS Studios and CBS News, this is 48 Hours NCIS. Listen to 48 Hours NCIS ad-free starting October 29th on Amazon Music. Listen to Postmortem from 48 Hours ad-free with 48 Hours Plus on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today. Welcome to 48 Hours Postmortem. I'm CBS News anchor and 48 Hours correspondent Anne-Marie Green. And it's time to answer your biggest questions from our latest episode

about stepdaughter-turned-murderer Jade Jenks. Joining me today are 48 Hours correspondent Tracy Smith and producer Sarah Pryor, who reported on and produced this episode. Hi. Thanks for having us, Anne-Marie. We have a lot to discuss, but first, here's a quick refresher on the case. It was New Year's Day 2021 when a strange call came into the San Diego Sheriff's Department. The caller said his friend had confessed to murder. She said that she had possibly killed her stepdad. The accused woman was Jade Jenks, an interior decorator. She lived

next door to the alleged victim, Tom Merriman, her stepfather. Assistant District Attorney Jorge Del Portillo said detectives learned more from the caller. He told sheriff's deputies she confessed to drugging him, suffocating him, and strangling him to death. Merriman's dead body was found, and Jenks was arrested and charged with his murder. She said she was innocent, and in December 2022, when the case went to trial, there was a surprise. It turns out that just 10 days before Merriman's death, Jenks had discovered hundreds of her private, explicit photos on his computer. It was the most violating, just awful, gut-wrenching feeling ever.

Jenks still insisted she didn't kill Merriman, but prosecutors said they'd discovered text messages that revealed a plot, a plot to murder. discovered text messages that revealed a plot, a plot to murder. Okay, so we're going to discuss the crime scene, that pile of trash, the so-called fixer who didn't fix, didn't show up. We're going to talk about Jade and Tom and of course those nude photos, those naked photos. But I want to ask you, what was the most asked question that you got about this episode, Tracy? How do you strangle someone and leave no marks? Yeah. The way that Jorge, the prosecutor, explained it to me is, hey, I just shook your hand.

That was 11 pounds of pressure. To strangle someone, you only need four pounds of pressure. It's that light. Yeah, that was a great sort of moment in the piece that really sort of indicated how easy it is for someone to be strangled to death. And I thought a drug overdose could be reasonable, but can people overdose on Ambien? There was some dispute about that. And I don't think even any of the state's witnesses were confident that you could really die from Ambien. You know, it certainly can be toxic like a lot of drugs,

but it's actually kind of hard to kill someone, whether it's drugs or otherwise. So that was, I think, the reason we were so stuck on this idea of a gentle strangling. Because we've, Tracy and I, I think, have both done stories where you really get emphasized with how difficult it is to take someone's life. Right, the body wants to stay alive.

It does. It does. And so I think what they explained to us in the interview is that it wasn't one mechanism. It wasn't just that she lightly, you know, strangled him. He was not doing so well because of all the drugs in his system. Ambien was the predominant one, but there were others, a number of others in varying degrees. And so it was the combination. So we know from the episode that Tom is Jade's stepfather, but they're unusually close to me. What more can you guys tell us about their relationship? What did you learn? Yeah, it's interesting. Tom calls Jade his daughter and she moved in next door to him. So they had this really close but clearly

complicated relationship. One of the things she talked about in her testimony was when they came to know each other. Obviously, Jade's mother was married to Tom Merriman. That's how he became her stepfather and she became his stepdaughter. She was 14 or 15. And Tom and Jade's mom had a baby together around that time. So Jade is a teenager. There is now a baby in the house and this marriage does not last. So the mom leaves? I think Tom left the mom. That's how Jade told it. We don't know for sure. But they formed a bond then and Jade sort of became, you know, stepmom to her half brother and helped raise him. So that's something she talked about in her testimony that Jade sort of became, you know, stepmom to her half brother and helped raise him. So

that's something she talked about in her testimony that they sort of went through this experience together and formed a bond there. So then I guess I can imagine just how shocking it must have been for Jade to then knock his computer and see a nude photo of herself as his screensaver. Can you imagine, right? Your dad, essentially, right? She thought of him as her father, right? To find that? Yeah. And she's so horrified that it almost sort of shifts the way she views the world in a way. So Tom kept these photos in a couple of places on his computer desktop and on his laptop. But Jay destroyed the desktop hard drive. That's right. Yeah. So he had two different computers. Her story is that she bumped the

mouse on his desktop while she was cleaning when he was out and sick in the hospital. And then her story is also that she destroyed that hard drive. She took pictures of the monitor and documented what she found. And so police and police never found that hard drive. She took pictures of the monitor and documented what she found. And so police, police never found that hard drive. And in those pictures, you can see the desktop and the photos. Exactly. See the monitor. You see the folder names. You see the pictures. Now I am characterizing what I understand happened at trial. We never saw these. They were shown in court in a redacted version and not released publicly because obviously these, you know, compromised privacy. Yeah, they are. I mean, I know it's not their job as a prosecution to figure out how he got access to these. But did anybody kind of dig into that?

One thing to clarify is that Tom didn't take these photos. These are photos taken by Jade or by her, you know, old boyfriends or her old partners. Consensually taken photographs. Yeah. That Tom got a hold of. Exactly. And the defense, the defense says that he blew up these pictures. He had files of these pictures, according to her body parts. It's incredibly disturbing. I mean, she was rocked by this. She said that she was vomiting. She said, you know, she couldn't shower because she had those images in her head. She devised this plan where she would actually sleep on a tarp so that if someone stepped into the room in the middle of the night, stepped on that tarp, it would wake her up. The noise of it would wake her up. You know, it clearly rocked her world. Let us talk about the crime scene now. Tom's remains, they're found in a pile of trash.

Tracy, you were actually in the neighborhood. We saw you there. You're walking around. You're on the driveway. Can you kind of describe the area? Sure. It's an idyllic little place. This is a beautiful, the driveway kind of goes back through these trees into this little open spot. The

neighbor has this gorgeous little garden back there. It's just a pristine little spot. And that's why it's shocking that in the middle of this, there was a pile of trash that the police didn't notice because it wasn't like this place was, you know, overrun with junk and trash. It was very beautifully manicured and kept. And the other thing was when I looked at that pile of trash, you know, the shopping bags, and I thought to myself, this looks like me, like a bad day at the mall. When I come home and I just like dump a bunch of stuff at the front door, how is a whole body in there that no one notices? is a whole body in there that no one notices when the undercover detective she you know is off camera when she testifies but when she noticed this pile of garbage and said did anyone check this let me

look she picks up literally one item and then she can tell it wasn't it it's an entire human body is not so small he's a grown man yeah Yeah. In their defense, it was night. It was dark. They were looking inside the house initially, looking for blood, those things that you would typically look for if someone's missing. So I think it didn't necessarily cross their radar until the sun came up. And when the sun came up, then she discovered it. So, you know, Tom's remains are found out in the open. Obviously, you know something's gone terribly wrong here.

I couldn't help but to think that if Jade was able to get Tom back in that bed, which is what she was, you know, trying to do. She didn't really plan it out all that well. Perhaps she could have gotten away with murder. The prosecutors in the hour say, yeah, if he had gotten in that bad, the assumption would have been like, oh, he fell asleep, he had a bad reaction, and that would have been it. Remember, he was just released from the medical facility the day prior.

Yeah, or that day, depending. Yeah. And then I guess with no physical proof of any sort of strangulation, if she had never even mentioned strangulation and was successful in moving him, that might have been sort of case closed, Tracy. Oh, yeah. They would. Chances are they would have seen it as an overdose. And she almost I mean, even think about where he was in where he where his body was in the driveway there. I mean, she got him to that point.

She just couldn't get him past that point. And I think she covered him up thinking she could maybe come back and move him. You know, I don't think the plan was to leave him in the driveway. I think the plan was still to get him in the house. So according to Jade's ex-boyfriend, Adam, she calls him to help her move Tom's body and then he calls 911.

Take a listen. Sheriff's communication dispatcher 5538. Well, I've got a situation. Last night, a friend of mine asked me to come over. She said that she had possibly killed her stepdad. I don't know if she really did this. What exactly are your reports it sounds like she killed this guy so he is me like when i listen to this call he sounds genuinely frightened but also

a little uncertain you know sometimes people second guess whether they should be calling the police or not but none of this and you could hear all of that coming out in his voice. And he actually starts the ball rolling because I don't even think, you know, no one would have been looking for him if if the ex-boyfriend did not call. Was this kind of one of the strongest bits of evidence? Oh, you're so right. And think about you were just saying she could have gotten away with murder. If Adam didn't make that call, that brought on the welfare check. She could have gotten away with it. And he's the one that sort of I don't think we played this, but he he's the one that says, listen, she confessed.

Yeah, it's not all in the 911 call. He then goes and talks to police and comes to testify at trial. But that's his story yeah yeah exactly that she had told him everything or enough that he you know felt compelled and you know this remember this was new year's eve that he saw jade of 2020 so it's you know the evening after dark he'd been getting a tattoo all day and he goes over um here's this story and then he doesn't call police until the next morning and so he was sitting with this you know kind of tossing and turning you know uh talking to his friend talking to you know other people before he makes a decision to call i'm just curious because

he sounded so authentically concerned in that 9-1 And it didn't even sound like officers were really taking him all that seriously. It took a minute for it to escalate because he calls at, let's say, 9, maybe it's 930, on the morning of New Year's Day. And the police are calling around trying to figure out if Tom Merriman's alive, where he may be. They go to his house eventually by the afternoon to find him and they don't. And they don't get the warrant to investigate, I think, until midnight. So it's it's quite a bit of time passes, you know, really that whole day of New Year's Day. And do we know anything about the nature of the relationship that he had with Jade? I mean, she felt confident enough to call him.

There was a bit in trial about a jealous girlfriend that he had after he with Jade. I mean, she felt confident enough to call him. There was a bit in trial about a jealous girlfriend that he had after he and Jade. He and Jade were exes from a long time past. And then I think he had a more recent relationship and there was a lot of jealousy. And so Jade was not actively in his life until, you know, pretty close to the time of Tom Merriman's death. And I think it goes to her desperation that she's just trying to get someone to help her move Tom, to help her continue this plan, carry out this plan. So it seems like Jade was very close to getting away

with the murder of her stepfather. But when it came to actually executing her plan, everything sort of fell apart. When we get back, we're going to talk about Jade's side of the story when she takes the stand in her defense. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The best idea yet.

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Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify and listen to more Exhibit C true crime shows early and ad free right now. All right, welcome back, everyone. So Jade's plan was unraveling. She couldn't move Tom's body. She called her ex-boyfriend. And then the guy prosecutors have called the fixer. And I got it in like quotation marks. Who is the fixer, Tracy? Okay. So if you're a fan of Quentin Tarantino, as I am, in the movie Pulp Fiction, there's the fixer played by Harvey Keitel.

And he's kind of the guy who comes in and cleans up the messes, fixes your problems. So that's why I think the prosecutors dubbed this guy, Alan Roach, The Fixer. He was going to come in and fix Jade's problem. Now, Jade will tell you that the problem was simply that she wanted to keep Tom at bay. She wanted a big guy to protect her and to help her confront Tom with these naked photos that she discovered. Of course, the prosecutors say that the fixer was there for another purpose. I mean, fixers don't typically, you know, list themselves on the Internet. How does she even meet this guy? Through Facebook, some friend of hers, I think from high school. And so the first couple of messages actually between Alan Roach and

Jay Jenks are on Facebook. And I think that's where he says, if you have a problem, I can fix it for you. So it was, yeah, he sort of almost named himself. So she meets him through a friend of a friend. Yeah. I presume he doesn't come with references. How does she know she can trust this guy? Or why does she trust this guy? She doesn't. I mean, she doesn't know that she can trust him. And she's desperate. She's desperate. And remember, we talked about her state of mind after finding these photos. You know, this drove her a little bit around the bend. So she's I think she's just trying to figure out what to do next. Um, so she's, I think she's just trying to figure out what to do next. Um, but then, you know, she says, listen, as you guys point out, I just needed someone to protect myself from Tom. Um, but there's a series of text messages that suggest otherwise, and they become really important evidence. I want to play some of the sound from the hour.

At 3 p.m., you texted Alan, he's waking up, and I'm not sure how much longer I can control my temper. Is that right? Yes, we lost to Alan. You texted Alan, he's waking up and getting way more aggressive, so it's way more real. True? True. I think, again, I was just panicking and trying to urge Alan to come over. You would agree with me that this looks very suspicious, this text message?

Oh, yeah. So she says, oh, yeah, like pretty casually, right? So what is her side of the story? Jade's story is that she's totally innocent. That she, you know, all of these texts were innocent. They were taken out of context. She says, you know, Tom was, you know, incapacitated. She tried to get him home. She couldn't do it. She let him sleep it off overnight in her car. She goes there on New

Year's Day morning and finds his body. She can't quite accept the truth. She realizes he's probably dead. And when she does, in fact, you know, come to that understanding, she panics. That's her story that she absolutely panicked and covered him up thinking she would be blamed because she had been the one who picked him up the day before. So the fixer, Alan Roach, never came to help Jade, but did he ever come to trial? Did he ever testify? He did not. No, Alan Roach. He was, I think what the prosecutors told us was the jury heard that he was legally unavailable. Did you guys try to get in contact with him? Our best information showed him in Mexico.

And I actually sent him a text through Facebook, just like how Jade met him. And he just said, I don't want to talk about it. I only knew her for a week, which is accurate. She was introduced to him on December 23rd on that first Facebook exchange. And Tom Merriman died on December 31st. So. So who does show up, though, is the second guy, the fixer's friend or the fixer's fixer, so to speak. He that person goes to trial. Solomon. Brian Solomon. Yep. And I just want to point out that Alan Roach and Brian Solomon were never charged in connection with Tom's murder. But what does Brian Solomon say at trial? His story is basically that he shows up

and Jade says, help me strangle this dude. And he's like, I don't know you and I'll be right back. I have to make a phone call. And he is not right back. He is gone. And his girlfriend came to testify and corroborated that story. She dropped him off at Solana Beach. She drove. It's a block literally from the ocean. It's such a lovely space. She basically gets to the water and has to turn back around and get him. So he goes right out. Completely freaked out, of course, by what has just transpired. Right. And remember, these two guys don't know each other. Going back to the ex-boyfriend, Adam. Yeah. So that same term comes from Brian Solomon, who's only knows Alan Roach, who doesn't know Jade,

and Adam Ziplak, who does know Jade and is there at a totally different time. And yet they have similar stories. You know, she wanted me to strangle him. She told me she strangled him. So how does that happen? As I was watching it periodically, I would say, but this is a secondhand confession. Why would they pin so much to this? But I guess if you hear it over and over again, well, at least twice, then it starts to pique your interest if you're a prosecutor. Well, and I think, you know, my impression of the prosecutors, you know, it's they will often tell you this. We've met many prosecutors over the years that their mission is to find the truth, whatever it is. I think they believe this is really what happened. I think it is a complicated and not ideal story for them, but I think they thought it was true.

Yeah. So you guys, you're talking a little bit about the prosecutors. They had kind of an interesting dynamic between the two of them. What was it like talking to them? Oh, wow. They really did. They really played to each other's strengths and knew each other really well. I mean, so much so that Jorge kind of said, you know, I'm a little aggressive at times and Teresa has to rein me in. And she jumped in and said, well, actually, what I do is I pass him post-it notes and say, hey, tone it down or hey, move on when he starts to get a little overexcited to the point where he can get a little physical. He gets a little fidgety when he gets really excited about something. And they did not want him to be that way when he was talking to Jade on the stand. And so the detective and Teresa sat on either side of Jorge and kind of pinned him in. They called it boxing him in so that he couldn't get too fidgety and too aggressive with her. And clearly it worked. Because they didn't want to make her look like more of a victim, because the weird thing about

this case is both are victims in some way or another. Yeah, they said outright, they said she's a sympathetic defendant. You know, they understood that about Jade, about her situation. And it's really when you go into a courtroom, it's about a story and the jury is getting an impression of people and a story, you know. So if they see a story where Jade's the victim, that that goes against their conclusion, which they want a conviction you know and i don't think again they told us straight out they believe that tom had these pictures so they they understand that and they have some sympathy for jade too but i think they also believed she

murdered tom merriman so talk about a sympathetic character i wondered if that was part of the reason her defense attorney put her on the stand. It's sort of a shocking decision. Yeah, although she had to explain those texts. The prosecutor said they weren't surprised at all that she took the stand because she had to explain those texts. And I think you're right. I think he was looking to make her sympathetic. And maybe that's why her own attorney was so tough on her.

That that was his strategy was that would somehow make her look more sympathetic. But it seemed like he was tougher on her than the prosecutor was on her. was asking her the question that I had to rewind because I wasn't sure if she was being grilled by the prosecution or asked a question by the defense. And you're right. It seemed like her own attorney was much harder on her and she was falling apart on the stand under his questioning. Yeah, we tried to leave clues when we were putting together the broadcast for exactly that reason, because we had that impression, too. Like he you know, did you kill him and she's like oh you know that's that's her attorney he does need to ask her that question right so that i mean i think as a defense attorney it makes sense to me better to say that that he would ask her that question so it would come from you know friendly fire but it was it was aggressive and the other that I observed, maybe no one else observed this,

you know, we see all these like gorgeous pictures of her. She's beautiful. But in court, she looks nothing like that. That she sort of like, you know, came from a cell and she was going back to a cell. I don't know. Did anybody else observe that? It's just... She was not in jail at the time of trial, she was out on bond until she was convicted but she did have kind of a wretched demeanor i think that's a word that came to mind as you were talking and i was remembering that the tape of her testimony see i didn't even know she was i assumed that she had been behind bars because she just looks so much different in her sort of social media posts. Did you guys try to talk to Jade? How did that go? We did not have success.

Now, she has appealed the verdict, you know, and probably wants to protect that legal process. Everyone is free to decline, but we worked so hard to talk to her or friends, family members. You know, we had a lot of casual conversations and in the end weren't able to get anyone. Well, yeah, that's not fair. We had a friend of hers who did talk to us, but, you know, there were a lot of people in court supporting her. But wouldn't talk to 48.

You know, they might have had their reasons that they didn't share with us. It's always, you always want to talk to everyone, you know, because I think, you know, part of this conversation, I think what we're bringing out about this case, and it's true of many of them, is that the truth is just multifaceted. You know, there's not one right and wrong. It's, there's a lot of layers to it.

And there's a lot more to Jade and her life that I think we'd be really curious about. And to hear from her, just period, to hear from her. And that kind of comes to almost sort of the crux of this case. And we talked about this earlier that we have two victims and two perpetrators, sort of. Neither of them are easy to like once you hear about their behavior. They're easy to like sort of on the surface, you know, this beautiful girl, successful, creative. He raises butterflies. I mean,

who couldn't like that? And then this underbelly, this other behavior that makes them unlikable. That's got to be a challenge when it comes to storytelling. Yeah, it's true. I mean, when you hear about those photos, finding those naked photos on his computer, how could you not sympathize with her? I mean, of course, we all put ourselves in her shoes and say, oh, my goodness, that would be horrifying. Yes. So she she is a victim. You feel for her. But as the prosecutor said to us, no matter what Tom did, Jade can't be the judge, jury and executioner. Yeah. Yeah. You don't get to do that. Right. So and yeah, Tom's friend talked to Tracy about this. Tom was buried under garbage. I think that stings. You know, there is sympathy for Tom. I think, you know, we all felt it at the same time. No one has disputed what he did with those pictures and to his family member. So it's a complicated case. Hey, you know, just because you just said that, I want to circle back to Tom's friends. Tracy, I want to play a clip from your conversation with Tom's friend, Pat Flanagan.

Jade said that she found nude photos of herself on Tom's computer. Do you believe that? I can't disprove it. I find it, I don't want to believe it. It's interesting you say you don't want to believe it. It's interesting you say you don't want to believe it. Yeah. Pat kind of refuses to believe it at this point. He just, yeah, he can't reconcile.

At least that's what he seemed when we spoke with him. Perhaps he's changed his mind since then, but he just couldn't, couldn't, he was in denial about that actually being a fact. I think he, we're talking about complications. Pat Flanagan is grieving the loss of his friend and business partner. He had to shut down the butterfly farm. But at the same time, you know, he's got this set of facts about Tom's actions that I think are really hard to reconcile. And maybe he just can't. Yeah.

You do so many of these was there anything that was a takeaway from this episode you know i think the thing that comes up you know every set of facts is different but at the end i think what the viewers are responding to and the reason that i'm so interested and engaged with my job is it's the human condition. And it's not a simple story of this innocent person and, you know, this guilty one. We want that. I think we all as humans want nice binary right and wrong. And we also know as grownups, it's not true. For me, it just just this is something where the justice system could have worked so well if she just would have reached out to the to the right people gone to the police, you know, talk to somebody about this instead of trying to take action, you know, take it into her own hands. I mean, it's just it's this is vigilante justice, I guess you could say, at its worst. And it just shows you that, you know, you can't take it into your own hands like this is how it works out. You know, no matter what this guy did, no one deserves to be murdered and thrown away like trash. Tracy, Sarah, this has been great. So glad you guys made time to talk to us about this

hour. Another spectacular hour of 48 hours. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Be sure to join us next Tuesday for another Postmortem. Watch 48 Hours, Saturdays, 10, 9 Central on CBS and streaming on Paramount+. And be sure to follow 48 Hours wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. If you like this podcast, you can listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a quick survey at wondery.com slash survey. As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch.

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