Sword and Scale Nightmares - Father Figure

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

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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What prompted the response was a strange call to 911 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 the body. Seagulls called overhead and a slight breeze could be felt off the ocean. Only half a mile away 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. 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. 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. SBPD.

Seconds passed and they knocked again but still, they got no answer. The mystery of the 911 call claiming Tom was dead deepened when they got a search warrant and entered the home. It was clean. There was no sign of a struggle, and nothing was missing. Except... Tom. of a struggle and nothing was missing. Except... Tom. Welcome to Sword and Scale Nightmares.

True crime for bedtime. Where nightmare begins now. Lord and scale nightmares, true crime for bedtime. Where nightmare begins now. ["The Nightmare"] Tom Merriman was a local business 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 2012, he co-founded the non-profit organization Butterfly Farms, dedicated to the education, conservation and research of butterflies.

They boasted a 3,000 square foot butterfly vivarium in Encinitas, where they raised and released about 500 caterpillars a week during the summer. Between 2010 and 2015, he was part of a huge effort to repopulate the monarch butterfly. An effort that really hit its stride after the drought of 2015. 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. While poisonous to many species of birds and mammals, monarch butterflies love milkweed. Tom's nursery sold more than 14,000 milkweed plants that summer alone.

In the five years after 2015, Tom's life made a turn for the worse. At 64 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 2020, 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 doctors appointments and helped him remember to take his myriad of medications. By the fall of 2020, 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. 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 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 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, he makes sure to thank everyone for their help. He waves goodbye as the elevator doors close. He cracks a joke and then the orderly laughs and then the doors 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 chair back inside. Tom takes a seat on a nearby bench to wait for Jade. 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. 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 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.

She had 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 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 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 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... alive. 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 to know the father of her children is finally working.

Minutes 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 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 heads back to the address. When she pulls up, Brian rushes into the car and slams the door behind him. He exclaims, Drive!

She notices he looks anxious, nervous even. She listens as he explains the job was not what he expected. He 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 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 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 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 Sipliak. Adam is in the middle of getting a tattoo when his phone rings. He answers and hears 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. His friend greets him and doesn't waste any time explaining why they needed help.

Adam's expression goes from pleasant to perplexed as his friend confesses to a murder. They claim they drugged 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 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 looks at his lifeless body. Unable to move him into his home, they left him in the driveway, 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 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 implicated 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 was a little bit of a wimp, but he was a little bit of a wimp. He was a little bit of a wimp, but he was a little bit of a wimp. He was a little bit of a wimp, but he was a little bit of a wimp. He was a little bit of a wimp, but he 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 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 10 years previously but only reconnected recently after he and his 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 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 for multiple Ambien. When Tom downed 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 his death like an accidental overdose. After Tom drifted to sleep, Jade stopped and bought several terry cloth towels, zip ties, a length of red rope, and gloves. When she arrived home, she waited for Roach to show up, but he never came. She couldn't move Tom by herself, and when she she tried she dropped him on the ground.

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, Siplyak, she had already finished Tom herself. She put a pillowcase over his head and strangled him. It was easy. With the toxic dose of Ambien in his 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. When officers performed the welfare check and didn't find Tom, they applied for a search warrant. Their warrant wouldn't be approved until 1230 AM.m. 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 January 2nd that a detective with the SBPD 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 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 age of 37, 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 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 her biological father.

On December 23rd, 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 walks 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 her way through the home and reaches the next to last room, Tom's office. She begins wiping things down. She wipes down his landline 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 and realizes she must have rustled the mouse. That's when she notices his screen saver. It is an up close picture of a woman's breasts. She starts to laugh at the old horn dog until she notices something about the breasts

they have a 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 were her own, she clasps a hand over her gaping mouth. How could this be? She thinks. 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 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 he even cropped many of the photos, sorting them by body part. A sickening disgust rises inside her when she sees the slideshow he crafted from cropped pictures of her breasts, butt, and vagina. Tears fill her eyes when she recognizes that she was as young as 16 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 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 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. 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 Cipliak 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 and the blood evidence in Jade's car, along with the DNA evidence all over the red rope combined with the testimony of others,

was enough to convict Jade. When the verdict was finally delivered, Jade's expressive eyes were genuinely shocked. Jade was sentenced to life in prison and will be eligible for parole after 25 years. And that is perhaps the real nightmare. If you enjoyed the show, please consider joining PLUS at swordandscale.com at swordandscale.com slash plus. But if you can't, consider leaving us a positive review on your preferred listening platform.

Sweet dreams and good night.