Jade Janks and the Secret Nude Photos

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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 she reports?

It sounds like she killed this guy.

It was the first day of a new year.

The Sheriff's Department received a call from a guy that said she confessed to drugging him, suffocating him, and strangling him to death.

Jade was very cool, very popular.

They could not believe what they were saying that Jade did.

Tom Merriman is Jade's stepdad.

And 100% she loved Tom.

She took care of him.

They lived next door to each other.

She made him dinner.

She was always there for him.

Detectives knew they had a phone call from her good friend that she confessed to murdering Tom Merriman, so they got a search warrant.

We don't have to prove motive, but we want to show a motive.

The photos.

The photos.

She accidentally bumped his computer and the screensaver came out.

The screensaver is a nude photograph of her in the shower.

She was able to find a lot more nude photos of her.

Hundreds.

Hundreds.

It was the most violating, just awful, gut-wrenching feeling ever.

I felt sick.

I couldn't even touch my own skin.

She was beyond freaked out.

She's sleeping with a knife.

She is scared for her life.

Yes.

Did you love Tom?

Yes.

Does Tom love you?

Yes.

I mean, did you want your stepfather dead?

Did you stand over him with a plastic bag and pull tight to keep him from breathing?

No.

Did you wrap a cord around his neck?

No.

And did you strangle him?

No.

So you have this supposed confession of her saying she strangled him, but no evidence of strangulation.

Your own strangulation expert said it's not strangulation.

That's right.

So your big bomb fizzled.

It was gone.

San Diego County, California.

An idyllic place.

Most of the time.

I stewed on this all night.

I barely slept and I'm scared to death.

I don't want to be a part of this.

I didn't have anything to do with her.

That frightened phone call came in New Year's Day, 2021.

The caller said his one-time girlfriend may have committed a murder.

The Sheriff's Department received a call from a guy that said, my friend confessed to me last night that she murdered her stepfather.

San Diego County Deputy DA Jorge Del Portillo.

He told deputies, hey, I don't know if what she's saying is true.

I didn't see see him, but this is something I had to tell the police.

The alleged victim was a 64-year-old man named Tom Merriman.

He lived here.

I liked him.

I thought he was very nice.

Ramona Hamilton and her husband, George, were Tom's neighbors.

Ramona knew him better, and she found out Tom also ran an unusual business.

More milkweed.

More milkweed.

More milkweed.

A butterfly farm.

I'm a gardener, and I love butterflies.

Pat Flanagan also likes butterflies.

He was Tom Merriman's business partner out at the farm.

He was my best friend.

Did he become kind of a butterfly expert?

Oh, he is a butterfly expert.

You say he is.

Yeah.

You still talk about him in the present tense?

Yeah.

I do.

It was right here on December 31st, 2020, that Tom Merriman was last seen alive.

Ramona and George saw him in his stepdaughter's SUV in the driveway.

And he was sitting on this side, the passenger side, with his feet out and this walker out in front of him.

And he looked like hell.

Tom had just spent more than two weeks in the hospital and a rehab center after a bad fall.

He also had heart and liver problems.

He looked awful.

I don't even know if he knew me.

But at the time, it just seemed like maybe he got sent home from the hospital heavily drugged.

Heavily.

That's all we knew.

That's all we knew.

And then George saw Tom's stepdaughter, 37-year-old Jade Janks.

Tom Merriman had come into Jade's life when she was 14, marrying her mom.

Jade and Tom were apparently close.

She lived right next door.

On this day, Jade had just driven him home.

And he called her his daughter.

He called Jade his daughter.

Yes.

They seemed close.

And they seemed very close.

She was fixing dinner for him every night.

She seemed to take care of him.

What did you think of Jade?

I thought she was a very pretty woman.

Jade had done some work in Ramona's apartment.

She was an interior decorator.

That's Jade.

She can be a tomboy and a girly girl all in the same day.

She can get herself dirty for work, carrying rocks and concrete in her pickup truck, and we're dressed up, ready to go to like a nice fancy dinner.

Heather Pierce grew up next door to Jade in San Diego County.

Jade was very cool.

I loved being around her.

Jade was 13 years older.

She's definitely a little more than a big sister and a little less than a mom.

Her energy is just very strong.

Loving and caring and genuine.

And so when you're around her, like you feel good.

She also knew Jade's stepdad, Tom Merriman.

I think she always just loved him and cared about him.

Back at Tom's place in Solana Beach, it was now January 1st, the day after he'd gotten back from the hospital.

The day after George and Ramona had seen him looking so poorly in the driveway.

This time, they only saw Jade in the driveway.

She was standing by a pile of trash and boxes.

I saw her out at the side here with the boxes and cartons.

A little while later, I was a knock on the door, and she'd come to the door to tell me that she'd made a mess down here, but she'd clean it up later.

Where was the pile?

Right about right here.

See where that druid is right there.

Yeah, like right in this area here.

Right there.

It was a few hours later when law enforcement pulled into their driveway.

I'm scared to death.

I don't want to be a part of this.

They came to investigate that strange phone call, the one that claimed Tom Merriman had been murdered.

They were trying to find Tom.

Where is Tom?

They walked by this pile of trash in the driveway.

They knocked on his door.

They went inside.

They didn't find Tom, but they did see his stepdaughter.

When they saw Jade Jenks driving out of her driveway, they pulled her over, brought her in for questioning,

and asked that very question.

Where is Tom?

Jade said she was cold, so they gave her a blanket.

But we're trying to find Tom.

Do you know where Tom is?

No.

His family hasn't seen him for over 48 hours, though.

He just got released from the hospital yesterday.

Okay.

Did you see him yesterday?

Yeah, I picked him up from the hospital.

Okay, do you know where he went?

No.

Well, can you tell me other than he's just missing?

We don't know where he's at.

We're trying to find him.

Eventually, they let Jade go, but there was still no sign of Tom.

Officers spent all night combing through his apartment, looking for clues.

Then, just after the first morning light, one of the officers was walking down the driveway toward Tom's apartment when she saw that pile of trash.

It was just about here.

I have a picture of it here.

There's a wheelbarrow there, some boxes, some bags.

She moved a trash bag from that trash and immediately saw the silhouette of a man.

And there he was, Tom Merriman.

Tom Merriman laid dead and buried.

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Never seen that.

I've never seen a case where a body was buried under a pile of trash in the driveway.

The apparent crime scene was smack in the middle of the driveway of this lush compound, just a mile from the beach.

He was wearing the hospital bracelet that he was just in the hospital, the same t-shirt and the same pajamas that he was discharged.

As soon as they found the body, they knew we have our suspect and they made the arrest.

On the morning of January 2nd, 2021, Jade Janks was arrested and charged with Tom Merriman's murder.

But things were about to get complicated.

She lawyered up and didn't want to answer any more questions.

So authorities continued to work the case, starting with that phone call.

It sounds like she killed this guy.

That call had come from that friend of Jade's, a man named Adam Siplack.

He told police she'd called him to her apartment, and then she asked him for a favor.

And

asked me to move the body with her.

Okay.

I can't help you.

And I never saw the body.

Adam Siplack may not have seen the body that night, but eventually.

He did tell police that Jade confessed to him, that she knocked Tom out with an overdose of medicine and then strangled him.

It was a pretty dramatic story, and authorities were confident that the autopsy would confirm it, that there'd be physical evidence that Tom Merriman was strangled to death.

But that's not what happened.

I was actually there for the autopsy.

Assistant DA Teresa Phamm, who led the investigation, talked to the medical examiner.

So, what they found was, unfortunately, not a lot of physical evidence.

Right.

So, you have this supposed confession of her saying she strangled him, him, but no evidence of strangulation.

That's right.

The final autopsy report created even more of a challenge for the prosecutors.

It said that the cause of Tom Merriman's death was acute Zolpidem intoxication.

Zolpidem is the generic name for the sleeping pill, Ambien.

Is it possible that Tom Merriman died by accident?

He was in poor health.

It's not that many pills that he took.

Certainly it's possible, but the evidence belied that notion.

This was no accident.

But even if the autopsy didn't point to strangulation, investigators say other evidence clearly pointed to murder.

Jade's cell phone was a gold mine.

It was a gold mine.

Jade's phone was full of texts.

How would you categorize those text messages?

Suspicious?

Incriminating?

A plan?

According to prosecutors, that plan was to get rid of Tom Merriman one way or another.

Investigators say it all started on December 23rd.

That's about a week before Tom's body was found.

Tom was in the hospital after that bad fall.

Jade says she was cleaning up his apartment when she found something.

So she's at Tom's apartment and his laptop, I guess it must have been in sleep mode or something like that, but she knocked into it.

and it woke up and on the screensaver is a nude photograph of her in the shower.

And there was more, much more.

She must have had his password.

So once she was able to get into his laptop was when she was able to find a lot more nude photos of her.

Hundreds, hundreds.

These were photos that she took willingly with her partner at the time.

Some were of her in the shower, naked.

Authorities don't know how Merriman got those pictures, but Jade says she never gave them to him.

And prosecutors say she panicked.

In her words, she was beyond freaked out.

That's what she wrote to a friend that she couldn't shower alone.

She was vomiting at just the idea of looking at a shower based on what she had discovered.

She's sleeping with a knife on the nightstand just in case he comes early home from the hospital.

According to prosecutors, that's when Jade launches her plan.

How?

One of her friends connects her with a guy, a guy the prosecutors call the fixer.

There's a text message where he tells Jade, if you have a problem, I can fix it for you.

And that's how we came up with the label the fixer.

The so-called fixer was a man named Alan Roach.

Who is Alan Roach?

Alan Roach is a guy.

He's a security guard.

That's what he does.

But I think he makes himself.

out to be someone else that he's not.

We were thinking Jade views him as the character in pulp fiction, someone that you reach out to when you want one of your problems fixed.

And that's what he was.

He was the fixer.

He was the fixer.

Is Alan a hitman?

He is not a hitman.

What's important is what does Jade think Alan is?

Prosecutors say Jade wanted her fixer to help her get rid of Tom.

She had a plan that she stuck to.

The plan was murder.

The plan was murder.

It was December 2022, two years after Tom Merriman's body was found under that pile of garbage, and Jade Janks was about to stand trial for his murder.

And let me just ask you flat out: did Jade Jenks murder her stepfather, Tom Merriman?

Jade has maintained her innocence throughout this entire incident.

Jade's attorney, Mark Carlos, he insists this was not a murder and says Jade had no reason to kill her stepfather.

Finding nude photos of yourself on a stepfather's computer would make you angry, you know, might make you break off relationships with him.

But enough to kill somebody?

I don't think so.

He says Tom's death was an unfortunate accident brought on by his poor health and self-administered prescription drugs.

I think he took the medication himself.

He had multiple substances in his system.

I think he made a cocktail of the drugs that he had with him and had a bad reaction to it and caused

his death.

At trial, Jade was supported by family and friends, including her biological father, Steve Jenks, and her longtime friend, Heather Pierce.

Tom was a mess, an absolute mess, for a long time.

There's no that she had like a plan and first degree and all of that.

I was like, there's no way because that's not Jade.

Prosecutors Jorge Del Portillo and Teresa Pham were worried the jury might feel that Jade herself was the victim.

She's a sympathetic defendant.

She is.

I mean, she found naked photos of herself on her stepdad's computer.

Call Jade Janks.

Jade takes the stand to tell the jury what happened in her own words.

My name's Jade Jenks.

Jade says that ever since she met Tom when she was a teenager, they maintained a strong bond.

It's hard to come by somebody you just feel that you can trust completely, and I did feel that way.

I referred to him as my father, and he could call me his daughter.

Which is why Jade tells the jury it was so devastating to find those photos on December 23rd while Tom was in the hospital and she was cleaning his apartment.

I felt the mouse on his desktop computer and

it shook the screen awake.

And I looked at and there's a picture of female breasts on the screen.

And

I look, I thought,

those are my breasts.

I just, I couldn't believe it.

I was in complete shock.

Jade describes finding even more on Tom's computer after that.

There was a rolling screen,

like a slideshow of pictures of me that I've taken over the years.

What type of pictures were they?

They were naked photos.

Did you ever give naked photos to

your stepfather?

No.

Did you ever show him naked photos of yourself?

No.

How did he get these photos?

Jay doesn't know.

These were photos that Jade had taken of herself.

Jade and various boyfriends.

Have you ever made any

sexual overtures toward your stepfather?

No.

No.

Did you tell him that you had lead photos of yourself?

No.

And you never showed him anything similar to those, correct?

No, you my dad.

Tom was still in the hospital, but Jade says she didn't feel safe.

And you were afraid that he was going to come back and find out that you had found the photos?

Yes.

Yes.

And you were worried about how he might react toward you.

Yes.

And he

lived next door to you.

Yes.

And that's why Jade says she got in touch with Alan Roach, who worked in security the day she found those photos.

So why did you think that you needed somebody like Alan Roach?

I was scared.

I mean when I first saw the photos I

couldn't even use the bathroom.

I just felt so disgusting.

I couldn't shower either.

I was just

scared.

I was scared of being nude and vulnerable.

And

I wanted somebody to just look out for me and make sure that I was safe.

Over the next few days, Tom was moved from the hospital to a rehab center.

And Jade felt she had to act.

I can't continue just living next door to him and not feeling safe or feeling like this.

I mean, you have to do something.

When you say I needed to do something, I mean, did you need to kill him?

No, I wanted Tom to just go away and leave me alone.

According to Jade, Alan was planning to come over after she brought Tom home to help her confront him.

I wanted Alan to basically,

you know,

explain to him

this is not okay, or I can explain it, but Alan, just be there just in case.

Your plan was to...

Jade says that on December 31st, in spite of her feelings, she was doing everything she could to help Tom, who she says seemed preoccupied with finding medication.

He started calling at about 6.45 in the morning and he's asking me to get him codeine, which I don't really understand.

He says that he hasn't, I think, slept and he wants to rest.

Jade took Tom out of the rehab at a little after 11 a.m.

He had a bag of medication with him, including ambiene.

And remember, the autopsy says ambiene is what killed him.

Jade says almost as soon as Tom got into her car, he also helped himself to her prescription medicines.

He kept saying, did you get any pain colours?

Like, is this it?

Oh, here.

And then he just kind of took it.

Jade says Top seemed fine when she stopped at this shopping plaza and texted Alan Roach to come meet her.

She went into a couple of stores while she waited to hear back.

I was just getting started on

a house project, so I just went to go figure, get supplies and kind of shop around.

Jade bought gloves, towels, and a nylon cord, and some spray paint.

She says these items were for a painting project.

Typically, I lay plastic down and kind of enclose it so that I'm not getting paint on all the foliage.

Jade still hadn't heard back from Alan and took Tom home.

She says Tom was now too groggy to walk on his own and she couldn't get him out of her car.

I parked in the parking lot, but she says she was worried about him and drove him back to the rehab for help.

I just explained, you know, my dad's just been released and something's wrong.

He need to bring him back.

They wouldn't let me inside though.

They're pretty adamant with COVID.

I couldn't go inside.

Jade returned home with Tom, but says she was still not able to get him out of her car.

Alan had finally texted back to say he couldn't make it over after all, but sent his friend, a man named Brian Solomon, to help her get Tom inside.

Have you ever met Brian Solomon before?

No.

Jade says Brian wouldn't help her with Tom and left right away.

So Jade reached out to her friend Adam Siplack and asked him to come over.

Adam arrived later that evening.

I just said, I mean,

I was just in tears.

I said that, you know, I want to get him into my house or into his house.

Jade says Adam quickly got upset and left without helping her.

And this is where Jade's story doesn't line up with Adam's.

Remember, Adam was the person who called police on New Year's Day.

She

said that she had

possibly killed her stepdad.

Jade says she didn't confess to anything.

She says Adam was distressed by how sick Tom looked and that's why he wouldn't help her.

After he left, Jade says she didn't know what else to do and tried to get Tom situated in her car for the night so he could sleep off whatever he had taken.

I made sure he was comfortable.

Yeah, he had pillows and a china over.

Yeah, I mean, he had a blanket.

The next morning, in the cold light of New Year's Day, Jade says Tom was still in her car when she realized the worst had happened.

Did you touch Miss Merriman?

Yes.

What did you feel?

Ms.

Janks?

Did you think Tom Merriman was dead at that point?

I knew he was.

How do you think Tom died?

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After Jade told the jury how she found Tom's body, her own attorney challenged her.

Did you think about calling 911?

Um, I was scared too.

Why were you scared?

I don't want to get plain.

I mean, I just...

I was the one that picked him up.

I didn't want to get blamed for

killing him.

And she tried to explain what she did with his body.

I continued to

follow him out.

I still wanted to get him into his house.

I mean,

I didn't know what else to do.

I panicked.

I put the blanket over him.

I got empty boxes and just kind of

stacked it, made it look like just like a pile of debris.

Jade may have left Tom's body in the driveway, but she says she'd never meant him harm.

I mean, did you want your stepfather dead?

Oh, James, did you grab him with your own two hands and did you strangle him?

No.

Would you ever have done that to Tom Error?

I'm doing that to anything.

And then the prosecutors told their version of the story.

We lied to the police about where Tom was.

I didn't, so I just asked for an attorney and I kept asking for one.

You didn't want the police to know that Tom died in your car.

I wasn't trying to hide it, but I didn't want to go alone and tell them that.

Prosecutors said Jade was lying to cover up her plan.

The plan was to drug him, suffocate him, and

stage it to look like an overdose.

Del Portillo says after she picked Tom up from the rehab, Jade used his own prescription sleeping pills to knock him out.

And he says he has proof Jade's DNA is on those packs of pills.

The package of Zolpidem, which is the ambient sleeping pills, that had the defendant's DNA on it, but not Tom's.

And I think it's important that the jury heard that, that it was Jade Jenks' Jenks' DNA on that Sulpodim pack.

And according to prosecutors, there's much more evidence too.

Jade, they say, left a real-time trail of clues that day.

Remember her cell phone, the one they called a gold mine?

Turns out it was packed with texts.

Messages that they say outlined her plan to kill.

We're talking 11, 12 minutes after being discharged, she sends a text message to Alan, the fixer, saying, I just dosed the hell out of him.

When someone says, I dosed the hell out of them,

you would agree with me that that means

someone gave another person a whole lot of drugs, right?

I guess it's a poor phrase thing.

Del Portillo thinks Jade's explanation is nonsense.

He says, first she drugged Tom, and then she needed to stall for a bit.

And her texts even say that.

Stopping at Dixieland Dixieland to stall.

So she was stalling for the drugs to really kick in and make him asleep and unaware of what she was about to do.

She's stalling to see if this guy, Alan Roach, can come by and help her commit the murder.

And remember those supplies Jade said she picked up for a painting project?

According to the prosecutors, they were actually Jade's murder kit.

She goes to the store and buys this murder kit.

Zip ties, gloves, gloves, rope, and towels.

Prosecutors say up to that point, Jade's plan was on track.

But by a little afternoon, things started to go wrong.

You can see from the text messages that she was in a panic.

She writes, he's waking up.

Jade's texting her so-called fixer, Alan Roach, and she adds, can you come over?

But the fixer is not responding.

This plot was a total mess, and it fell apart right away.

Finally, the fixer texts her back.

He says he can't come, but he's sending someone he knows, that guy named Brian Solomon.

Okay, so the plan is Brian will bring Tom into the house.

Brian Solomon later told us that when he went over to help Jade, that she told him something that he'll never forget.

I want you to bring him inside, strangle him, and I'll take care of the rest.

Brian Solomon quickly left the house without doing anything.

And soon, Jade is back texting the missing fixer again.

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, it goes 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.

Jade texts Alan again.

I can't keep a kicking body in my truck.

Now that we know Tom was found dead in his driveway under a pile of trash that you put together,

that this text message looks very suspicious.

You'd agree with me, right?

I mean, I will.

Yes.

It's now around 4 p.m.

Alan has disappeared.

At 4:08 p.m., you texted Alan.

He's up.

I guess I'm on my own.

True?

True.

How do you think she killed Tom?

We believe that the evidence shows that she put a bag over his head.

When the bag's not working fast enough, she has to strangle him.

And she has no other choice.

It's too late to back out now.

Investigators even even found a plastic bag in Jade's car.

It had her DNA on the outside and Tom's on the inside.

But there's a huge problem with the prosecution's case, and that's the autopsy.

The autopsy never said Tom was strangled.

There weren't any marks on his neck.

So what happened?

How could Jade possibly have strangled him to death?

That presented a big difficulty for us strategically of of going forward in trial.

Right.

So you have this supposed confession of her saying she strangled him, but no evidence of strangulation.

Right.

Turns out the prosecutors had an answer for that.

They say it's totally possible to strangle someone to death without leaving marks if the victim is already knocked out.

I think that is part of the plan is to dose him just enough to where he's incapacitated.

So if you're unconscious, your breathing is already depressed.

When someone is already unconscious, it does not require that much pressure and would not leave bruising.

It would not leave breakage of the cartilage that's inside the throat.

It would not leave physical evidence.

It only takes four pounds of pressure to kill, to cut off the blood supply to your head.

And when you and I shook hands earlier today, that was about 11 pounds of pressure.

So it's less than a handshake to kill.

After she murdered Tom, prosecutors say she left his body in her car overnight.

And the next morning, Jade had to do something about it.

In a story full of strange twists, this may be the oddest.

Prosecutors say Tom's body was still in Jade's car, and she wanted to make his death look like an accident, like he'd overdosed on his own medicine, but she couldn't get his 180-pound body out of her car and into his apartment, and no one would help her.

So they say she drove to a hospital with Tom dead in the back of her car, picked up a wheelchair, put it in her car, and drove back to Tom's place.

How'd you get the wheelchair in your car if Tom was still in there?

It's big.

The trunk was up.

Tom was kind of, you know, his legs were akimbo when he was laying down.

And I kind of hoisted it up and so the back window of the forerunner can roll down.

When you were doing this, at this point, did you know Tom was dead?

I did, but I didn't want to know it yet.

So you suspected Tom was dead, and you're at Scripps Hospital, and you don't tell anyone at the hospital that Tom might need some help.

And there was just one more thing.

On the day the cops came by looking for Tom, they didn't know anything yet, just that Tom might be missing.

Jade jumped into her car.

4.30 when she was pulling out of her driveway when when they were getting ready to do the welfare check, she was pulling out of her driveway and she was getting detained after being pulled over.

The very last text message on her cell phone was to Alan Roach saying, lose my number.

What does that say to you?

Get rid of the evidence.

What do you make of Jade's text messages?

See more evidence from the case at 48hours.com.

That was the biggest hurdle in our case, we feel

the jury might dislike Tom Arriman so much that they would vote to either acquit or reduce the murder to something else.

As Jade's trial is drawing to a close, prosecutor Jorge Del Portillo wants to make sure the jury's attention is on what Jade Janks has done and not on Tom.

Tom was not on trial.

This wasn't his trial.

He didn't get a trial.

She was his judge, jury, and executioner.

And so it all comes back to Jade.

Mr.

Carlos, you wish she made a quote.

In his closing argument to the jury, Mark Carlos emphasizes what he says are the weaknesses of the prosecution's case.

What type of evidence do we have?

We have a lot of speculation.

It's speculation upon speculation upon speculation.

He argues Adam Siplack's story that Jade confessed is a lie.

Mr.

Siplack, no credibility.

He wants to get out of something that he thinks might have happened.

And he says Brian Solomon, who also claimed Jade confessed to him that day, can't be telling the truth.

He claims that immediately, and this was his testimony, immediately upon entering, she says, he's in the car, go strangled.

This is somebody that Jenks has never met before.

Neither Adam Siplack, Brian Solomon, nor Alan Roach was charged with any crime in this case.

And Mark Carlos urges the jury to stick to what he calls the truth.

And the truth is, they have zero, zero evidence to support a murder.

Her DNA was on the blister pack.

But Jorge del Portillo gets to make the last argument the jury will hear.

It starts with, I just dosed the hell out of him.

The plan is starting.

And with Alan, it ends

with, lose my number.

I'm getting pulled over.

And buried in between all of those text messages is a murder plot.

Find her guilty of murder.

Because the evidence proves it, the law requires it, and justice demands it.

The jury went out that afternoon and was back the next morning to continue their deliberations.

Jury comes in at 9 a.m.

We get the call at 9.30 a.m.

We have a verdict.

We were shocked.

We were a little bit nervous.

The quickest verdict I've ever had was 15 minutes and it was a not guilty.

So I don't put a lot of stock in quick verdicts.

Tom's business partner, Pat Flanagan, got a text about it.

I was very anxious.

My hands were sweating.

I was nervous.

We have your own.

We, the jury, in the above entitled Cause, find the defendant, Jade Sasha Jenks, guilty of the crime of murder in violation of penal code sections.

Guilty of first-degree murder.

Subsection A, a felony as charged.

Jade appears stunned.

Jury number one.

Yes.

Number two.

Yes.

Number three.

Yes.

Number four.

Yes.

Number five?

Yes.

Number six?

Yes.

Number seven?

Yes.

Number eight?

Yes.

It was a huge relief.

It was an absolute relief.

And when you heard that word, guilty?

It felt right.

Guilty of the.

Pat Flanagan says he saw Jade's reaction to the verdict later online.

I still go back and watch that sometimes.

Why?

Because I feel bad for Tom.

He died buried in trash.

Now she gets to feel a little of that pain that we've all been feeling for years.

But there's still the matter of those photos.

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.

Yeah.

Tom's hard drive was not recovered after his body was found, but prosecutors who spent two years investigating this case believe Jade is telling the truth, at least about this.

Did you have any doubt that these photos actually existed?

We talked about that, but we had no doubt.

We found that photo on Tom's laptop showing that it had been used as a wallpaper, showing that it had been on his laptop since August of 2019.

So we had no doubt that these photos existed.

In March of 2023, three months after she was convicted of Tom's murder, Jade was in court for her sentencing and listened as a local pastor shared his memories of Tom and the butterfly farm.

I still remember Tom and wish I could drop by for a smile.

To ask a question about plants or butterflies or just to recharge those batteries that keep seeming to wear down as I get older.

I believe my life is richer because I knew Tom,

Stephen Jaggs.

Jade's biological father, who had not spoken publicly since she was charged, put the focus back on Tom's betrayal.

Firstly, I can only imagine what she went through when she found out that Tom, her stepfather, a person she trusted, that she called dad, was a sick, perverted individual.

All I can say is this fight is not over.

I truly believe that an injustice has taken place.

Jade Janks spoke that day, too.

Tom came into my life when I was just a little girl and exerted influence during that early stage of development when I was still figuring things out.

Unfortunately, that influence manifested itself into appropriate touch, coercion, reckless behavior, and complete violation of what I now realize is years of psychological manipulation.

All of this came crashing down on me when I found hundreds of naked photos of myself and his computer.

It's all chattered.

Jade did not tell this story during trial, and we can't verify it.

Jade still insists she didn't kill Tom and only admits to covering up his dead body.

I'm still picking up the pieces, and my sincerest hope that over the next few years, I can put the pieces back and heal from this trauma.

I'm sorry I didn't act the way I was supposed to that day.

I think about it every day since.

She will be committed to the Department of Corrections.

The judge sentenced Jade to serve 25 years to life.

And as the prosecution looks back on a difficult and emotional case, they say it could have easily turned out very differently.

She could have gotten away with murder.

Had she carried out her plan and the police did a welfare check and found Tom laying in his bed, she would have got away with murder.

Join me Tuesday for post-mortem from 48 Hours, where we'll dive even deeper into today's episode and answer your questions about the case.

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