The Fixer, the Photos, and the Death of Tom Merriman
In December 2020, a Solana Beach, California woman named Jade Janks drugged and killed the man she'd called her father for over two decades, then spent New Year's Day disguising his body as a pile of trash in their shared driveway. Thomas Merriman was a beloved butterfly conservationist. Jade Janks was the stepdaughter who'd cooked him dinner every night of the pandemic. Somewhere between those two facts sits a discovery on his computer that she said broke something in her permanently, and a string of increasingly desperate text messages to a man she called "the fixer" that ended up telling prosecutors almost the entire story. This is a case where the victim's public image and the killer's private allegations never got to sit in the same room together, because the woman who could have proven her own motive burned the evidence herself, on purpose, the same night he died.
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