The case
Thomas Merriman, 64, co-founded Butterfly Farms in Encinitas, California, and lived in Solana Beach. Jade Janks, an interior designer in her late thirties, was his former stepdaughter. In December 2020, while Merriman was in the hospital after a fall, Janks said she was cleaning his house and found more than a hundred nude photos of herself on his computer.
On New Year’s Eve she picked him up from the hospital. Prosecutors said she drugged him with the sleep medication zolpidem, then strangled and suffocated him in her car. On New Year’s Day 2021, after a friend she had asked for help went to police, officers doing a welfare check found his body under cardboard and trash in his own driveway. The autopsy found toxic levels of zolpidem. Texts she exchanged with a man named Adam Roach talked about a “plan” for when Merriman left the hospital, and on December 31 she wrote that she had “dosed the hell out of him.” A red cord in her car carried Merriman’s DNA, and store records showed cord and gloves bought that day in Solana Beach.
Janks testified that she found him dead and panicked. On December 21, 2022, a Vista jury convicted her of first-degree murder. On March 6, 2023, she was sentenced to 25 years to life. An appeals court upheld the conviction in October 2024.
Case photographs
Where it happened
Solana Beach, where Tom Merriman’s body was found in his driveway