Netflix 'What Jennifer Did': Jennifer Pan, the Ontario woman who plotted to kill her parents at 24
"It’s as evil as it gets," the lead investigator in the case says in the new documentary
In November 2010, police were called to a home in Markham, Ont., after then 24-year-old Jennifer Pan called 911, stating that armed intruders barged into her family's home, killing her mother Bich Ha Pan and severely injuring her father Huei Hann Pan. In the new Netflix documentary What Jennifer Did, as details emerged, it was revealed that Jennifer wasn't just a witness, she knew much more than she initially led investigators to believe.
The new documentary, from filmmaker Jenny Popplewell (American Murder: The Family Next Door), uses a combination of police interrogation footage, reenactments, and interviews with investigators and people close to the Pan family to chronicle this case. It led to Jennifer and three accomplices sentenced to life in prison with no parole for 25 years.
"It’s as evil as it gets," Bill Courtice, a York Regional Police detective and lead investigator in the case says in What Jennifer Did.
Forbidden love and history of deceit
As we head into Jennifer's first of three interviews with investigators, Jennifer says three gunmen broke into her home in an attempt to steal money. They tied her hands together and tied her arm up to a banister upstairs, taking her parents downstairs. She recalled hearing multiple "pop" sounds and her mother yelling. Jennifer described these intruders as three Black men, one with a Jamaican accent and one with dreadlocks.
Jennifer's parents immigrated to Canada from Vietnam and lived a "modest" lifestyle. No one knew why anyone would try to rob this family in particular. Investigators also found it odd that some items, like a wallet with cash, were left at the house, which would likely be of interest to the intruders.
Through the investigation, officers find out that Jennifer had an ex-boyfriend, Daniel "Danny" Wong, who worked at a local Boston Pizza and was dealing drugs. Police started thinking that his drug dealing could be linked to why this family was targeted. Both Wong and Jennifer also told officers that they had been receiving threatening anonymous phone calls and text messages just before the attack at the Pan household.
Jennifer and Wong dated for about seven years, but Jennifer's parents did not approve of them together. This forbidden romance continued in secret, until Jennifer was caught. Her parents took away her phone, and insisted on driving Jennifer to school, and anywhere else she needed to go.
There's a pattern that comes up in this case of Jennifer's parents wanting her to be successful, from her education to her award-winning piano studies, which made their parenting style more strict than some.
But Jennifer established a level of deceit to get around these rules, including figuring out how to lie to her parents about being enrolled in the University of Toronto, studying science, and even creating a fake diploma after four years.
Jennifer and Wong remained friends after their breakup, after about seven years of dating, with Wong saying her parents not approving made the relationship too difficult to maintain. But it's clear from the interrogation footage that Jennifer was still very much in love with her ex-boyfriend, even though he started dating someone new.
While Jennifer was being interviewed by investigators, her father remained in a coma at the hospital. But as Jennifer's story starts to unravel with inconsistencies, her father also emerged from the coma.
He claimed that he went to bed early and was woken up by a man who brought him downstairs, where his wife was, who was begging for her life. But then he saw Jennifer walk down the stairs, not tied up at all, have what he described as a "friendly" conversation with another man.
"Use your police techniques to find out what Jennifer did," Jennifer's father told a detective at the hospital.
Jennifer's third interview with police is with detective Bill Goetz, who specifically uses an interrogation method that involves lying to Jennifer to get to a confession, even though by this point, officers got access to Jennifer's phone, which shows that, through Wong, two men were hired to kill her parents, purportedly because Jennifer wanted to be with Wong.
"For her, this is a love story gone wrong," detective Deborah Gladding says in the documentary.
Where is Jennifer Pan now?
Jennifer told Goetz, and eventually jurors after her arrest, that it wasn't a murder-for-hire plot, but rather, she hired men through Wong as a form of suicide.
Jennifer was ultimately found guilty of the first-degree murder of her mother and attempted murder of her father, and in 2015 was sentenced to life in prison, along with Wong and the hired hitmen, Lenford Crawford and David Mylvaganam.
Last year, the Ontario Court of Appeal ordered new trials to re-examine the first-degree murder convictions, but Jennifer is still in prison.
