A new documentary delves into the chilling case of a Canadian woman who orchestrated her parents’ murders after they unraveled her decade-long ruse.
Jennifer Pan, her boyfriend Daniel Wong and his associates David Mylvaganam and Lenford Crawford were sentenced to two life prison terms in 2015 for the 2010 murder of Pan’s mother, Bich Ha Pan, and the attempted murder of her father, Huei Hann Pan, who managed to escape alive.
Pan initially told police she was an unwitting survivor of the November 2010 home invasion, when three intruders broke in and shot Pan’s parents. The investigation that unraveled her claims of innocence and the circumstances that led her to plot the terrifying ordeal are explored in “What Jennifer Did,” which first aired on Netflix Wednesday.
Pan concocted the plan in part to collect $500,000 from her parents’ estate, according to Toronto Life.
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Jennifer Pan is pictured after her 2010 arrest for first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. (York Regional Police)
“Then I heard two pops. My mom screamed. I yelled out for her. Then a couple more pops,” Pan told police in interrogation footage seen in the documentary. “I heard my dad yelling on the street. I told him to come in. He just wouldn’t come in.”
But incriminating text messages and conversations with detectives exposed Pan’s claims.
“It’s a situation I never could have imagined. There are more questions than there are answers,” one detective said in the documentary.
Initially, the Pan family seemed to be victims of a random home invasion. But detectives became suspicious of Pan’s story from the get-go after seeing the three men enter the Toronto-area home with no sign of forced entry on a neighbor’s security footage. Valuables were left inside the home, and Pan was able to dial 911 without her hands bound.
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Daniel Wong is pictured during his interrogation with York Regional Police. He and Pan met in 11th grade and dated on and off despite her parents’ disapproval. (York Regional Police)
“Why leave a surviving witness?” director Jenny Popplewell said. “If you’re going to shoot two people, you would shoot the third.”
Although Pan was a star pianist, her grades were average in high school, the documentary detailed. She began forging report cards using old cards, scissors, glue and a copy machine to convince her parents she was meeting their high expectations with straight A’s.
In her senior year, she was accepted to Ryerson University, but the school rescinded her early admission after she failed a calculus class. It was then that her deception reached new levels.
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Jennifer Pan, pictured in an undated photo, excelled before high school but said she stopped putting in effort after she was “snubbed” for the title of valedictorian in 8th grade. (Netflix)
Unwilling to be perceived a failure, Pan told her parents she had won scholarships to attend school and later claimed she’d accepted an offer to the University of Toronto’s pharmacology program.
In reality, Pan sat in cafés, taught piano lessons and worked in a restaurant. Pan told her parents she was staying with a friend during the week to be closer to her school. But she was actually staying with Wong, her high school boyfriend. Wong managed a Boston Pizza and sold marijuana.
Pan’s parents finally grew suspicious when she told them she was volunteering for The Hospital for Sick Children. They noticed she didn’t have a uniform or a badge. Her web of lies unfurled when Bich followed her daughter to “work” and discovered she did not work there at all.
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“What Jennifer Did” aired on Netflix Wednesday. (Netflix)
Pan’s father wanted to kick her out of the family home, but her mother persuaded him to let her stay. However, she was forbidden to contact Wong or go anywhere other than her piano teaching job while she worked to finish her high school degree.
Meanwhile, Wong was tiring of their on-and-off relationship, during which Pan would only visit him in secret.
Pan became so depressed she began cutting herself, according to the documentary, and told police she hired the hitmen to kill her when it was revealed she summoned them to the home.
“I needed them to kill me,” she said in interrogation footage in the documentary. “I didn’t want to live anymore … because I was such a disappointment.”
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But an interrogating officer falsely told Pan he had computer software that could determine whether she was being truthful, eliciting her confession. In Canada, police are legally allowed to lie to those they are interrogating, reporter Jeremy Grimaldi told filmmakers.
Police obtained text messages from Wong to Pan telling her he had lined up a hitman named “homeboy.” Detectives also discovered that Pan had tried to pay another man to kill them and sought out another through Wong when those plans fell through.
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Pan’s father, who fell into a coma due to a head injury, told detectives he recalled seeing Pan whispering to one of the hitmen in a friendly manner when he awoke, according to the documentary.
Police involved in the investigation told filmmakers they believed Wong got involved in the scheme because he hoped to benefit from the home and life insurance Pan would come into.
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Pan, Wong and the two men she hired to kill her parents won an appeal in their case. The jury in their initial court case wasn’t given the option of second-degree murder in Pan’s mother’s death. Canada’s Supreme Court will decide whether there is another trial, according to the documentary.
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