October 30, 2024 • 24 mins
The report of local businessman Tom Merriman’s death may have been overstated but when officers with the Solana Beach Police Department searched for Tom and couldn’t find him they were sent into high alert. The search for Tom would reveal a long-time betrayal and a motive for his murder for the most unlikely of suspects.
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
The morning of New Year's Day twenty twenty one was
a cool one in Solana Beach, California, with temperatures in
the low sixties and not a cloud in the sky.
The sun was peeking over the trees as officers with
the SVPD were dispatched on a welfare check for a
man named Tom Merriman. What prompted the response was a
(00:36):
strange call to nine one one claiming Tom had been murdered.
What was unusual about this call was that the man
reporting the death had never met Tom and hadn't seen
a body. Seagulls called overhead, and a slight breeze could
be felt off the ocean only half a mile away.
(00:58):
As officers turned onto South Nardo Avenue, an unofficial street
sign that said Happy Place marked the end of the
long driveway. Framed in trees and hedges. The driveway led
to a two car garage and a walkway to the
front door of a modest gray house trimmed in white.
(01:20):
All seemed quiet. Everything seemed normal, except maybe the pile
of trash in front of the garage. The neighbors were close,
but the rust colored fence that skirted the property mostly
hid the home. From their view. They left their patrol
car in the driveway and walked toward the front door.
(01:41):
They passed the pile of cardboard boxes and trash. As
they approached, their boot laden feet resounded on the wooden
walkway leading to the front door. Officers thought that anyone
inside must be able to hear them coming. They swung
open the screen door and knocked with a rap, announcing
themselves SPPDA. Seconds passed and they knocked again, but still
(02:07):
they got no answer. The mystery of the nine one
one call claiming Tom was dead deepened when they got
a search warrant and entered the home that was clean.
There was no sign of a struggle and nothing was
missing except.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Tom.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Welcome to Sword and Scale Nightmares, True Crime for Bedtime,
Where Nightmare begins Now. Tom Merriman was a local business
(03:29):
owner and loved what he did. The owner of Vista Nursery,
he specialized in native plants to southern coastal California, but
his passion was butterflies. In twenty twelve, he co founded
the nonprofit organization Butterfly Farms, dedicated to the education, conservation,
and research of butterflies. They boasted a three thousand square
(03:54):
foot butterfly Bavarium and Sinitas, where they raised and released
about five hundred caterpillars a week during the summer. Between
twenty ten and twenty fifteen, he was part of a
huge effort to repopulate the monarch butterfly, an effort that
really hit its stride after the drought of twenty fifteen.
(04:14):
Water was scarce and many residents, keen on saving money,
converted their yards to native plant gardens consisting of milkweed.
While poisonous to many species of birds and mammals, monarch
butterflies love milkweed. Tom's nursery sold more than fourteen thousand
milkweed plants that summer alone. In the five years after
(04:38):
twenty fifteen, Tom's life made a turn for the worse.
At sixty four, his health was quickly failing. Luckily, he
could rely on his former stepdaughter Jade for help. He
was long since divorced from her mother, and they grew
apart for some time, but by the fall of twenty twenty,
(04:58):
Jade had moved in next door to Tom in Solana Beach.
They reconnected immediately and she became something of a caretaker
for her ailing former stepfather. Tom enjoyed having her close
by and honestly needed her help. She helped him get
to and from doctor's appointments and helped him remember to
(05:19):
take his myriad of medications. By the fall of twenty twenty,
Tom's health was not improving, made worse by his alcoholism.
Tom had a taste for whiskey, which didn't mix well
with his medications and certainly didn't help his failing health.
(05:40):
Jade had witnessed the depths of his alcoholism in the
short time she had lived next door. When Tom drunkenly
stumbled to her front door, she sent him home, telling
him there was no point in him coming over if
she couldn't even understand what he was saying. Shortly before December,
(06:01):
Tom fell and required hospitalization. The hospital sent him to
an aftercare facility to rehabilitate, so he was gone from
home for most of the month. He missed Christmas, but
was getting out just in time for New Year's. Tom
is excited as he gathers his few belongings in preparation
(06:22):
for finally being discharged from the aftercare facility. He hurries
with the last couple of things, hoping not to make
Jade wait for him as an orderly wheels him down
the hall to the elevator. You make sure to thank
everyone for their help. He waves goodbye. As the elevator
doors close, he cracks a joke, and then the orderly laughs,
(06:45):
and then the door is open. On the ground floor.
On the sidewalk out front, Tom tells the orderly not
to wait. His stepdaughter will arrive soon. Tom stands up
and the orderly wheels the chain back inside. Tom takes
a seat on a nearby bench to wait for Jade.
(07:06):
He faces the sun with his eyes closed and takes
a deep breath of the ocean air. A smile forms
across his face. He's just happy to be free from
his medical captivity. A moment later, Jade arrives her suv,
screeches into the parking lot and pulls up next to Tom.
(07:28):
Jade greets him with her big smile and hops out
to help him with his bags. Tom gets into the
passenger seat and closes the door as Jade puts his
bags in the back and joins him in the front.
Tom thanks her for picking him up. Even though he's
no longer married to her mother, he still considers her
(07:48):
a daughter. He tells her about his stay and the
medications he has to take. He chuckles as she insists
that he take his prescriptions now and always worried about him.
He waits as Jade meters out his medications and swallows
the handful of pills. He's eager to get home, but
(08:09):
Jade tells him she has one stop first. She swings
into a parking lot and hurries inside a store. She
re emerges moments later with a big bottle of whiskey
for Tom. Another chuckle escapes him. She knows me too well,
he thinks. She hops back into the car and hands
(08:30):
him the bottle. He peels the cap off right there
and then then takes a swig. He thanks her and
is grateful for her help. He would be alone otherwise.
He sits back in his seat and closes his eyes.
The palm trees cast periodic shadows across his face. As
(08:52):
they drive home. Finally out of the hospital, Tom feels
a sense of relaxation drift over him and falls asleep,
not realizing it was his last day.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Alive.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
The day prior to police looking for Tom, Maria Bravo
is shopping with her boyfriend Brian, when he gets a
call a friend of his tells him that he has
a job for him and to buy gloves. He doesn't
know what the odd job is. He only has an address.
Maria doesn't care what the job is. She's just happy
(09:55):
to know the father of her children is finally working. Later,
Maria drives down the street and pulls over in front
of the house matching the address. The car has barely
stopped moving when Brian hops out and says he will
call her when he needs her to pick him up.
She watches him disappear down the driveway lined with trees
(10:17):
and hedges, and drives away. Minutes later, she gets a
message from Brian saying to pick him up like now.
She swings the car around and adds back to the address.
When she pulls up, Brian rushes into the car and
slams the door behind him. He exclaims drive. She notices
(10:38):
he looks anxious, nervous even She listens as he explains
the job was not what he expected. Begins to tell
her what transpired. He says, when he arrived, he met
the person with the job. Maria drives, but is hanging
on Brian's every word as he recalls the person with
(11:00):
the job immediately, explaining that they needed him to strangle
a man and move him inside, and that they would
handle the rest. They explain that everything is ready, the
man is incapacitated and a red rope is already around
his neck. Brian confesses to Maria that the whole situation
(11:21):
makes him nervous, especially when he sees they have a gun,
but he pretends to play along. He tells the person
that he needs to call his partner, but really he
just darts down the driveway and texts Maria. Maria scoffs
and begins laughing. She thinks Brian is pranking her. She
(11:43):
simply doesn't believe him. His story is just way too
crazy to believe. Tom's killer didn't know what to do.
The plan was well off the rails. They scrambled to
find help and called a friend they thought they could trust,
Adam Sipliac. Adam is in the middle of getting a
(12:05):
tattoo when his phone rings. He answers, and here's a
friend in need of help. He promises he will be
there as soon as he can. Hours later, after he
finishes his tattoo session, he gets in his car and
drives over to their house. His friend greets him and
doesn't waste any time explaining why they needed help. Adam's
(12:26):
expression goes from pleasant to perplexed as his friend confesses
to a murder. They claim they drugg Tom, put a
bag over his head and strangled him to death. They
just needed him to move the body. He explained that
there is a wheelbarrow he can use Adam. Adamantly refuses
(12:48):
to help and leaves. He isn't even sure they are
telling the truth, but on the off chance that they are,
he doesn't want anything to do with it. At a loss,
Tom's killer look set his lifeless body. Unable to move
him into his home, they left him in the driveway
(13:09):
in the front of the garage. They took boxes and
random trash and piled them on top of his body.
Just after the holidays, it wasn't so unusual to see
a pile of boxes in front of someone's home. Just
in case, Tom's killer went over to the neighbor's house
and knocked on the door. When he answered, they explained
(13:31):
that there was some trash in the driveway, but not
to worry, they would move it soon. The neighbor didn't
notice the trash and actually didn't really even care anyway.
When Adam tried to go to sleep that night, he
found himself tortured by the events of that day. He
didn't want to be a snitch, but he'd seen a
(13:55):
friend spend some time in prison for a crime they
didn't commit. He didn't want to be impl if his
friend was indeed a murderer. He couldn't sleep a wink
that night, and the following morning, he couldn't shake what
happened the day before. He wasn't sure if it was real,
and he knew that his friend seemed pretty serious. Finally,
(14:17):
he picked up the phone and called the police. Adam
told police that when he got a call from his friend,
he thought that he might get lucky. When he arrived
at her house, however, he knew quickly that he was
not getting lucky. He explained he met her over ten
years previously, but only reconnected recently after he and his
(14:40):
girlfriend broke up, and her name was Jade Jenks, none
other than the victim, Tom's former stepdaughter. When Jade picked
Tom up from the rehab facility, she already had a
plan in place. She had planned it for more than
(15:02):
a week while Tom was recovering. She was planning his demise.
She had enlisted a fixer named Alan Roach to help
carry it out. All she had to do was drug Tom,
which was easy. With the amount of medications he was prescribed.
You never noticed when she swapped many of his pills
(15:25):
for multiple ambient. When Tom down that handful of pills,
he unwittingly overdosed himself. She planned to drive his sleeping
body home and have Roach strangle him and move him
to his bed to stage's death like an accidental overdose.
(15:45):
After Tom drifted to sleep, Jade stopped and bought several
terrycloth towels, zip ties, a length of red rope, and gloves.
When she arrived home, she waited for Roach to show up,
but he ever came. She couldn't move Tom by herself,
and when she tried, she dropped him on the ground.
(16:08):
When Roach sent Brian to help, Tom was still alive,
but after he ran away, Jade panicked. By the time
she resorted to calling Adam sipliac, she had already finished
Tom herself. She put a pillowcase over his head and
strangled him. That was easy. With a toxic dose of
(16:30):
ambient in a system. He was so incapacitated, it didn't
take much pressure to cut off his air supply. The
hard part, the part where she really needed help was
with moving his body. She tied the terry cloths together
into a rope and tried to use it as a
sling to carry his body, but it was too heavy.
(16:53):
When officers performed the welfare check and didn't find Tom,
they applied for a search warrant. Warrant wouldn't be approved
until twelve thirty am the next day. Officers begin to
search Tom's home, but he was nowhere to be found.
It wasn't until the sun rose on the morning of
(17:14):
January twod that a detective with the SVPD started to
look a little closer at that pile of trash in
front of the garage. After peeling away empty boxes and
plastic bags, they found the body of Tom. His face
(17:35):
was purple from the pooling of blood after his heart stopped.
Not fifteen minutes after finding Tom's body, Jade was arrested
and she immediately asked for an attorney. Now at the
(18:20):
age of thirty seven, Jade was an experienced and mildly
successful interior designer, complete with active social media accounts and
a website showcasing her work. Having never been married and
without children, Jade still had the looks and vivacious personality
she did in her youth. She was slender and brunette,
(18:43):
with a big smile and expressive eyes. Tom had a
heavy influence on her during her teenage and young adult years.
He had come into her life right in the middle
of that formative time. He became more of a father
to her than her actual father was. On Father's Day,
Tom would get all the social media love rather than
(19:05):
her biological father. On December twenty third, a little more
than a week before Tom's death, Jade went to his
home to clean in preparation for his homecoming. Jade thinks
of Tom fondly as she puts on her cleaning gloves.
She grabs a towel and some cleaning solution and begins
wiping down surfaces. She starts in the kitchen and works
(19:29):
her way to the back of the house. She carefully
wipes down every surface, sneezing here and there, either from
the stirred up dust or from accidentally inhaling some overspray.
She daydreams about Tom coming home and taking her to
dinner like they often did. Before his hospitalization. She makes
(19:49):
her way through the home and reaches the next to
last room, Tom's office. She begins wiping things down. She
wipes down his lange line and laughs that he still
has one. How silly who has a landline. Then she
bumps into his desk. She notices the computer wakes up
(20:11):
and realizes she must have rustled the mouse. That's when
she notices his screensaver. It is a upclose picture of
a woman's breasts. She starts to laugh at the old
horn dog until she notices something about the breasts.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
They have a.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Distinct birthmark, a birthmark that is eerily similar to her birthmark.
Jade nearly falls over when she realizes the breasts on
her stepfather's screen or her own. She clasps a hand
over her gaping mouth. How could this be? She thinks,
(20:58):
how is this possible? Her hand turns into a blur
as she starts typing. Searching his computer, one after another,
Jade finds more and more pictures of herself in various
stages of undress. Her fondness for her stepfather turns very
(21:24):
quickly into hatred as she finds hundreds of nude photos
of herself on this man's computer. A plan starts to
formulate in her mind when she discovers even cropped many
of the photos, sorting them by body part. A sickening
(21:47):
disgust rises inside her when she sees the slide show
he crafted from cropped pictures of her breasts, butt.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
And vagina.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Tears her eyes when she recognizes that she was as
young as sixteen in some of these photos. She racks
her brain trying to figure out where these photos came
from and how Tom got a hold of them. She
certainly never let Tom take these pictures. Her disgust grows
(22:20):
when she realizes that Tom has stolen these photos from her.
They're from her private folder on her laptop and a
digital camera she thought she had lost. She spent the
next week reaching out to Alan Roach and planning Tom's demise.
She thought it would be easy, but her plan completely
(22:42):
fell apart after Jade's arrest. She immediately asked for an attorney.
She hired something of a big shot lawyer and prepared
for trial. During the trial, she would take the stand
and try to explain that it was all a misunderstanding.
Tom accidentally killed himself and she never conspired to kill him.
(23:07):
She cried as she described finding the nude photos of
herself on her stepfather's computer. She claimed that after she
made the discovery, she was so sickened, so disturbed, that
she couldn't bear to be nude or even shower. She
was traumatized. But incriminating text messages to Roach and Adam
(23:30):
Sipliac portrayed a different plan. She tried to say that
they were taken out of context, but the testimony of Maria,
Brian and Adam all contradicted hers. That in the blood
evidence in Jade's car, along with the DNA evidence all
over the Red Rope, combined with the testimony of others,
(23:53):
was enough to convict Jade. When the verdict was finally delivered,
Jade's express of eyes were genuinely shocked. Jade was sentenced
to life in prison and will be eligible for parole
after twenty five years, and that is perhaps the real nightmare.
(24:17):
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Sweet Dreams and good Night
The morning of New Year's Day twenty twenty one was
a cool one in Solana Beach, California, with temperatures in
the low sixties and not a cloud in the sky.
The sun was peeking over the trees as officers with
the SVPD were dispatched on a welfare check for a
man named Tom Merriman. What prompted the response was a
(00:36):
strange call to nine one one claiming Tom had been murdered.
What was unusual about this call was that the man
reporting the death had never met Tom and hadn't seen
a body. Seagulls called overhead, and a slight breeze could
be felt off the ocean only half a mile away.
(00:58):
As officers turned onto South Nardo Avenue, an unofficial street
sign that said Happy Place marked the end of the
long driveway. Framed in trees and hedges. The driveway led
to a two car garage and a walkway to the
front door of a modest gray house trimmed in white.
(01:20):
All seemed quiet. Everything seemed normal, except maybe the pile
of trash in front of the garage. The neighbors were close,
but the rust colored fence that skirted the property mostly
hid the home. From their view. They left their patrol
car in the driveway and walked toward the front door.
(01:41):
They passed the pile of cardboard boxes and trash. As
they approached, their boot laden feet resounded on the wooden
walkway leading to the front door. Officers thought that anyone
inside must be able to hear them coming. They swung
open the screen door and knocked with a rap, announcing
themselves SPPDA. Seconds passed and they knocked again, but still
(02:07):
they got no answer. The mystery of the nine one
one call claiming Tom was dead deepened when they got
a search warrant and entered the home that was clean.
There was no sign of a struggle and nothing was
missing except.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Tom.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Welcome to Sword and Scale Nightmares, True Crime for Bedtime,
Where Nightmare begins Now. Tom Merriman was a local business
(03:29):
owner and loved what he did. The owner of Vista Nursery,
he specialized in native plants to southern coastal California, but
his passion was butterflies. In twenty twelve, he co founded
the nonprofit organization Butterfly Farms, dedicated to the education, conservation,
and research of butterflies. They boasted a three thousand square
(03:54):
foot butterfly Bavarium and Sinitas, where they raised and released
about five hundred caterpillars a week during the summer. Between
twenty ten and twenty fifteen, he was part of a
huge effort to repopulate the monarch butterfly, an effort that
really hit its stride after the drought of twenty fifteen.
(04:14):
Water was scarce and many residents, keen on saving money,
converted their yards to native plant gardens consisting of milkweed.
While poisonous to many species of birds and mammals, monarch
butterflies love milkweed. Tom's nursery sold more than fourteen thousand
milkweed plants that summer alone. In the five years after
(04:38):
twenty fifteen, Tom's life made a turn for the worse.
At sixty four, his health was quickly failing. Luckily, he
could rely on his former stepdaughter Jade for help. He
was long since divorced from her mother, and they grew
apart for some time, but by the fall of twenty twenty,
(04:58):
Jade had moved in next door to Tom in Solana Beach.
They reconnected immediately and she became something of a caretaker
for her ailing former stepfather. Tom enjoyed having her close
by and honestly needed her help. She helped him get
to and from doctor's appointments and helped him remember to
(05:19):
take his myriad of medications. By the fall of twenty twenty,
Tom's health was not improving, made worse by his alcoholism.
Tom had a taste for whiskey, which didn't mix well
with his medications and certainly didn't help his failing health.
(05:40):
Jade had witnessed the depths of his alcoholism in the
short time she had lived next door. When Tom drunkenly
stumbled to her front door, she sent him home, telling
him there was no point in him coming over if
she couldn't even understand what he was saying. Shortly before December,
(06:01):
Tom fell and required hospitalization. The hospital sent him to
an aftercare facility to rehabilitate, so he was gone from
home for most of the month. He missed Christmas, but
was getting out just in time for New Year's. Tom
is excited as he gathers his few belongings in preparation
(06:22):
for finally being discharged from the aftercare facility. He hurries
with the last couple of things, hoping not to make
Jade wait for him as an orderly wheels him down
the hall to the elevator. You make sure to thank
everyone for their help. He waves goodbye. As the elevator
doors close, he cracks a joke, and then the orderly laughs,
(06:45):
and then the door is open. On the ground floor.
On the sidewalk out front, Tom tells the orderly not
to wait. His stepdaughter will arrive soon. Tom stands up
and the orderly wheels the chain back inside. Tom takes
a seat on a nearby bench to wait for Jade.
(07:06):
He faces the sun with his eyes closed and takes
a deep breath of the ocean air. A smile forms
across his face. He's just happy to be free from
his medical captivity. A moment later, Jade arrives her suv,
screeches into the parking lot and pulls up next to Tom.
(07:28):
Jade greets him with her big smile and hops out
to help him with his bags. Tom gets into the
passenger seat and closes the door as Jade puts his
bags in the back and joins him in the front.
Tom thanks her for picking him up. Even though he's
no longer married to her mother, he still considers her
(07:48):
a daughter. He tells her about his stay and the
medications he has to take. He chuckles as she insists
that he take his prescriptions now and always worried about him.
He waits as Jade meters out his medications and swallows
the handful of pills. He's eager to get home, but
(08:09):
Jade tells him she has one stop first. She swings
into a parking lot and hurries inside a store. She
re emerges moments later with a big bottle of whiskey
for Tom. Another chuckle escapes him. She knows me too well,
he thinks. She hops back into the car and hands
(08:30):
him the bottle. He peels the cap off right there
and then then takes a swig. He thanks her and
is grateful for her help. He would be alone otherwise.
He sits back in his seat and closes his eyes.
The palm trees cast periodic shadows across his face. As
(08:52):
they drive home. Finally out of the hospital, Tom feels
a sense of relaxation drift over him and falls asleep,
not realizing it was his last day.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Alive.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
The day prior to police looking for Tom, Maria Bravo
is shopping with her boyfriend Brian, when he gets a
call a friend of his tells him that he has
a job for him and to buy gloves. He doesn't
know what the odd job is. He only has an address.
Maria doesn't care what the job is. She's just happy
(09:55):
to know the father of her children is finally working. Later,
Maria drives down the street and pulls over in front
of the house matching the address. The car has barely
stopped moving when Brian hops out and says he will
call her when he needs her to pick him up.
She watches him disappear down the driveway lined with trees
(10:17):
and hedges, and drives away. Minutes later, she gets a
message from Brian saying to pick him up like now.
She swings the car around and adds back to the address.
When she pulls up, Brian rushes into the car and
slams the door behind him. He exclaims drive. She notices
(10:38):
he looks anxious, nervous even She listens as he explains
the job was not what he expected. Begins to tell
her what transpired. He says, when he arrived, he met
the person with the job. Maria drives, but is hanging
on Brian's every word as he recalls the person with
(11:00):
the job immediately, explaining that they needed him to strangle
a man and move him inside, and that they would
handle the rest. They explain that everything is ready, the
man is incapacitated and a red rope is already around
his neck. Brian confesses to Maria that the whole situation
(11:21):
makes him nervous, especially when he sees they have a gun,
but he pretends to play along. He tells the person
that he needs to call his partner, but really he
just darts down the driveway and texts Maria. Maria scoffs
and begins laughing. She thinks Brian is pranking her. She
(11:43):
simply doesn't believe him. His story is just way too
crazy to believe. Tom's killer didn't know what to do.
The plan was well off the rails. They scrambled to
find help and called a friend they thought they could trust,
Adam Sipliac. Adam is in the middle of getting a
(12:05):
tattoo when his phone rings. He answers, and here's a
friend in need of help. He promises he will be
there as soon as he can. Hours later, after he
finishes his tattoo session, he gets in his car and
drives over to their house. His friend greets him and
doesn't waste any time explaining why they needed help. Adam's
(12:26):
expression goes from pleasant to perplexed as his friend confesses
to a murder. They claim they drugg Tom, put a
bag over his head and strangled him to death. They
just needed him to move the body. He explained that
there is a wheelbarrow he can use Adam. Adamantly refuses
(12:48):
to help and leaves. He isn't even sure they are
telling the truth, but on the off chance that they are,
he doesn't want anything to do with it. At a loss,
Tom's killer look set his lifeless body. Unable to move
him into his home, they left him in the driveway
(13:09):
in the front of the garage. They took boxes and
random trash and piled them on top of his body.
Just after the holidays, it wasn't so unusual to see
a pile of boxes in front of someone's home. Just
in case, Tom's killer went over to the neighbor's house
and knocked on the door. When he answered, they explained
(13:31):
that there was some trash in the driveway, but not
to worry, they would move it soon. The neighbor didn't
notice the trash and actually didn't really even care anyway.
When Adam tried to go to sleep that night, he
found himself tortured by the events of that day. He
didn't want to be a snitch, but he'd seen a
(13:55):
friend spend some time in prison for a crime they
didn't commit. He didn't want to be impl if his
friend was indeed a murderer. He couldn't sleep a wink
that night, and the following morning, he couldn't shake what
happened the day before. He wasn't sure if it was real,
and he knew that his friend seemed pretty serious. Finally,
(14:17):
he picked up the phone and called the police. Adam
told police that when he got a call from his friend,
he thought that he might get lucky. When he arrived
at her house, however, he knew quickly that he was
not getting lucky. He explained he met her over ten
years previously, but only reconnected recently after he and his
(14:40):
girlfriend broke up, and her name was Jade Jenks, none
other than the victim, Tom's former stepdaughter. When Jade picked
Tom up from the rehab facility, she already had a
plan in place. She had planned it for more than
(15:02):
a week while Tom was recovering. She was planning his demise.
She had enlisted a fixer named Alan Roach to help
carry it out. All she had to do was drug Tom,
which was easy. With the amount of medications he was prescribed.
You never noticed when she swapped many of his pills
(15:25):
for multiple ambient. When Tom down that handful of pills,
he unwittingly overdosed himself. She planned to drive his sleeping
body home and have Roach strangle him and move him
to his bed to stage's death like an accidental overdose.
(15:45):
After Tom drifted to sleep, Jade stopped and bought several
terrycloth towels, zip ties, a length of red rope, and gloves.
When she arrived home, she waited for Roach to show up,
but he ever came. She couldn't move Tom by herself,
and when she tried, she dropped him on the ground.
(16:08):
When Roach sent Brian to help, Tom was still alive,
but after he ran away, Jade panicked. By the time
she resorted to calling Adam sipliac, she had already finished
Tom herself. She put a pillowcase over his head and
strangled him. That was easy. With a toxic dose of
(16:30):
ambient in a system. He was so incapacitated, it didn't
take much pressure to cut off his air supply. The
hard part, the part where she really needed help was
with moving his body. She tied the terry cloths together
into a rope and tried to use it as a
sling to carry his body, but it was too heavy.
(16:53):
When officers performed the welfare check and didn't find Tom,
they applied for a search warrant. Warrant wouldn't be approved
until twelve thirty am the next day. Officers begin to
search Tom's home, but he was nowhere to be found.
It wasn't until the sun rose on the morning of
(17:14):
January twod that a detective with the SVPD started to
look a little closer at that pile of trash in
front of the garage. After peeling away empty boxes and
plastic bags, they found the body of Tom. His face
(17:35):
was purple from the pooling of blood after his heart stopped.
Not fifteen minutes after finding Tom's body, Jade was arrested
and she immediately asked for an attorney. Now at the
(18:20):
age of thirty seven, Jade was an experienced and mildly
successful interior designer, complete with active social media accounts and
a website showcasing her work. Having never been married and
without children, Jade still had the looks and vivacious personality
she did in her youth. She was slender and brunette,
(18:43):
with a big smile and expressive eyes. Tom had a
heavy influence on her during her teenage and young adult years.
He had come into her life right in the middle
of that formative time. He became more of a father
to her than her actual father was. On Father's Day,
Tom would get all the social media love rather than
(19:05):
her biological father. On December twenty third, a little more
than a week before Tom's death, Jade went to his
home to clean in preparation for his homecoming. Jade thinks
of Tom fondly as she puts on her cleaning gloves.
She grabs a towel and some cleaning solution and begins
wiping down surfaces. She starts in the kitchen and works
(19:29):
her way to the back of the house. She carefully
wipes down every surface, sneezing here and there, either from
the stirred up dust or from accidentally inhaling some overspray.
She daydreams about Tom coming home and taking her to
dinner like they often did. Before his hospitalization. She makes
(19:49):
her way through the home and reaches the next to
last room, Tom's office. She begins wiping things down. She
wipes down his lange line and laughs that he still
has one. How silly who has a landline. Then she
bumps into his desk. She notices the computer wakes up
(20:11):
and realizes she must have rustled the mouse. That's when
she notices his screensaver. It is a upclose picture of
a woman's breasts. She starts to laugh at the old
horn dog until she notices something about the breasts.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
They have a.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Distinct birthmark, a birthmark that is eerily similar to her birthmark.
Jade nearly falls over when she realizes the breasts on
her stepfather's screen or her own. She clasps a hand
over her gaping mouth. How could this be? She thinks,
(20:58):
how is this possible? Her hand turns into a blur
as she starts typing. Searching his computer, one after another,
Jade finds more and more pictures of herself in various
stages of undress. Her fondness for her stepfather turns very
(21:24):
quickly into hatred as she finds hundreds of nude photos
of herself on this man's computer. A plan starts to
formulate in her mind when she discovers even cropped many
of the photos, sorting them by body part. A sickening
(21:47):
disgust rises inside her when she sees the slide show
he crafted from cropped pictures of her breasts, butt.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
And vagina.
Speaker 1 (21:59):
Tears her eyes when she recognizes that she was as
young as sixteen in some of these photos. She racks
her brain trying to figure out where these photos came
from and how Tom got a hold of them. She
certainly never let Tom take these pictures. Her disgust grows
(22:20):
when she realizes that Tom has stolen these photos from her.
They're from her private folder on her laptop and a
digital camera she thought she had lost. She spent the
next week reaching out to Alan Roach and planning Tom's demise.
She thought it would be easy, but her plan completely
(22:42):
fell apart after Jade's arrest. She immediately asked for an attorney.
She hired something of a big shot lawyer and prepared
for trial. During the trial, she would take the stand
and try to explain that it was all a misunderstanding.
Tom accidentally killed himself and she never conspired to kill him.
(23:07):
She cried as she described finding the nude photos of
herself on her stepfather's computer. She claimed that after she
made the discovery, she was so sickened, so disturbed, that
she couldn't bear to be nude or even shower. She
was traumatized. But incriminating text messages to Roach and Adam
(23:30):
Sipliac portrayed a different plan. She tried to say that
they were taken out of context, but the testimony of Maria,
Brian and Adam all contradicted hers. That in the blood
evidence in Jade's car, along with the DNA evidence all
over the Red Rope, combined with the testimony of others,
(23:53):
was enough to convict Jade. When the verdict was finally delivered,
Jade's express of eyes were genuinely shocked. Jade was sentenced
to life in prison and will be eligible for parole
after twenty five years, and that is perhaps the real nightmare.
(24:17):
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Sweet Dreams and good Night
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