After his initial bluntness, Goetz changes tack. He eases back in his chair, dropping the cop-speak and focusing his attention solely on Jennifer, prompting her bleak outlook to appear rosier. He begins by asking about her love of piano, figure skating, and her friends. In response, she almost immediately switches from despondency to a sunnier disposition. However, each time her mother is mentioned, her head bows and she starts to weep again. This affects Goetz little as he trundles on, seemingly unaffected by her emotional outbursts. He does his best to keep the interview light and breezy, many times laughing out loud as they chit-chat about Jennifer’s personality, qualities, and upbringing.
The Reid Technique requires officers to “reinforce sincerity” to ensure the suspect is receptive to their overtures. Hence, Goetz shares with Jennifer his own experiences. When he reminisces about his time playing piano, he inaccurately refers to the ballet Swan Lake as “Swans on the Lake,” prompting a smile from Jennifer. He then asks her if she switched jobs from East Side Mario’s to Boston Pizza for “better tips,” again drawing a smile from Jennifer, who seems to somewhat enjoy the attention being lavished on her. The conversation focuses not only on her achievements but her struggles, as if she’s reminiscing with someone who really understands what she’s been through. The “scheduled” existence she claims to have suffered through as a child and teenager takes centre stage.
During her third police interview, on November 22, 2016, Jennifer opens up to Detective Goetz about her past and admits to deceiving her parents for years. She also often hides her face in her hands or puts her head down on her knees.
Jennifer remarks how little time there was for anything other than school, competitive skating, and piano lessons. Her parents constantly comparing her to her classmates, teammates, and cousins also affected her negatively, she says. And when Goetz suggests that Jennifer never thought of herself as being “as smart” as Hann and Bich imagined, Jennifer agrees. At one point she tells the detective that she was under so much pressure during her teenage years that she was compelled to forge high school report cards to mask her average grades, turning them into exceptional ones. Her lies multiplied from there, she confesses, morphing into a bogus university career after her applications to higher learning were rejected.
But the threat that she’d be caught was ever-present. In a bid to keep her dishonesty from her parents, Jennifer continued to forge report cards and even student loans. “When [my parents] asked for something, I would try and make a document for them,” she says. “It was really hard. I wanted to tell them, but it’s just, they always looked down in disappointment.”
It was more than just her schooling that she’d end up lying about, though. Jennifer tells Goetz she dated Daniel without their knowledge or consent for seven years. “I hid it from my parents at first because they didn’t agree with me having a boyfriend,” she says. “Once they found out, they didn’t like the fact that he was of mixed race and they told me to stop seeing him.” She tried to keep her separation from Daniel permanent, but somehow she’d always end up back in his arms. “He was the person who filled an empty void,” she says. “So [when we broke up], I felt that a part of me was missing.”
Eventually, though, the option to run back to Daniel was wrenched from her grasp. Her parents offered Jennifer an ultimatum after she was caught lying one final time: stay with the family or go with Daniel and never return.
Jennifer chose her family and was subsequently kept at home, rarely let out of her parents’ sights, she contends. This is when Daniel decided to move on with another woman, Katrina Villanueva. “It made me feel that I wasn’t good enough to wait for,” she tells Goetz. The breakup with Daniel, coupled with a life under almost constant supervision, resulted in a dark period in her life, just as she’d faced years before. “I wasn’t happy with any part of my life,” she admits. “I regretted not going to school; my piano wasn’t going as fast as I [would have liked]; my friends were moving on with their lives. It felt like I wasn’t going anywhere. It felt like I was left behind. I didn’t understand why at twenty-one … I had to be at home [for curfew] at nine o’clock.” Jennifer explains how depression eventually led to cutting, and then finally a failed suicide attempt. “I cut myself, on my wrist. I had to hide it, so never twice in the same spot,” she says. She admits to Goetz that she wanted to kill herself.
Her difficult life at home was compounded, she says, by the fact that, although her parents “put on a front,” the reality was that “there was not much of a relationship” between them. She explains that her parents were fighting “every day” and that she was forced to become the “mediator.” This, she claims, became more pronounced after Felix left for school, leaving her without an ally in the home. “They just haven’t really been getting along. [They fight] about my dad being loud and noisy and inconsiderate, my mom nagging, and my dad not doing enough housework and not caring enough. [She believed] he had all these ideas about other people’s houses, but he doesn’t do anything for our house — decorating, upgrading. [She feels] that he doesn’t care about the house, the family.” The exchange is perhaps most interesting because of the dynamic it creates between the two, with Jennifer growing increasingly comfortable and relaxed as she shares countless private details for the first time in her life, while Goetz shrewdly collects information that he’ll soon use against her.
As for how she felt having to remain home under strict guidelines for some eighteen months after she was given the ultimatum, Jennifer says it was difficult, but that it was her choice. “[The choice was] living out on my own with Daniel [or] staying home with my parents,” she says. “[Living like that] was okay. It wasn’t the best feeling in the world because I always felt trapped. But it’s what I chose: to be with my family. Family always comes first.”
In response, Goetz empathizes with Jennifer, at one point even giggling at her deceit. Justifying her behaviour, he even labels Hann and Bich’s treatment of their daughter “abuse,” suggesting their expectations were just too high. “I get that feeling: it’s pretty tough to live up to their expectations,” he notes after Jennifer tells him that if she could, she’d become a piano teacher. “Your dad would ultimately like you to be a doctor, that type of thing, but maybe you can’t do it. Those are pretty high standards for anybody … few people would be able to reach that expectation. Not everybody can be a doctor, but they may have acted like you could have done it no problem.”
But his empathy doesn’t last. Now that he’s gained the personal knowledge required to implement his technique, the conversation slowly shifts back to her behaviour in the lead-up to and the night of the murder. Goetz asks Jennifer if she told a family member that the intruders “liked her” and that’s why they kept her alive.
“I didn’t say that,” she insists after a moment. “I asked them [the intruders] why I couldn’t be with them [her parents], and they’re just, like, ‘You co-operated. Keep co-operating.’”
Goetz then asks Jennifer to list the African-Canadian males she knows, explaining that the police have a photo of her speaking with a black man in a café. She names only two men, identifying the male she met in a café months before the murder only as “Ric.”
“He’s not really a friend. He’s more of a friend of mine’s roommate,” Jennifer contends. “But I did meet up with him once.” It’s at this point that she admits to lending “Ric” $1,100 because he and his roommate, Andrew Montemayor, were having rent problems.
Goetz asks if this was the same Andrew she spoke with the night of the murder.
Jennifer says that it was.
These two admissions signal an interlude as Goetz shifts his tactics anew, heaping further pressure on Jennifer. Suddenly, he sheds his friendly and engaging demeanour and begins to sow strife between them. Step One of the Reid Technique: direct confrontation.
“Would it make sense for someone that was going to kill somebody to leave a wit
ness behind that could describe them? Does that make … sense, for killers?” he asks. “Do you think that was a mistake they made then? You must think about this.”
“I still do, and I’ve spoken to a therapist about it,” Jennifer responds before repeating her well-worn line that she “co-operated” and that the men kept saying it was “taking too long,” implying they had no time to shoot her because they were forced to flee. To Jennifer’s dismay, Goetz then recounts the sequence of events once more. “I don’t want to go through this again,” she tells him, weeping.
When Goetz gets up and leaves to get some water, Jennifer curls back up into the fetal position, gripping her head tightly. As silence fills the room, she begins to make noises that sound like squeals. When he returns, Goetz asks her to recount the denominations of the bills that made up the $2,500 she handed over to Number One. How long was the cash in her night table? How big was the stack? These probing questions continue until Goetz enters the penultimate phase of the interview: “In my experience as a police officer, no matter what the case is, people make mistakes, as in they don’t always tell the truth,” he says as she strokes her braid, repeatedly winding the tip between her fingers. “They may tell some of the truth, but they don’t always tell all of the truth. You’re well aware of what half-truths mean, right? Withholding information is not telling the truth. It’s purposeful deception.”
During the speech that follows, Goetz uses the trickery that Jennifer has honed for so many years against her. In this case, Goetz goes at her whole hog. “We have computer programs,” he says. “We feed everything into the computer and it analyzes what a person has said. It will tell us where the areas of deception are, areas of concern, and areas that are flat out not truthful; you come back with a result that says, ‘Not possible.’ Do you watch CSI at all?” he suddenly asks her, his questions turning the interview into one long monologue peppered with only occasional responses from Jennifer.
“A little,” she replies quietly.
“[The police] are going over that house with a fine-tooth comb. They’re going over every hair fibre, every skin cell, every bit of blood. You know what DNA is, right? A person cannot go in or out of anywhere without leaving a part of themselves behind. [Your] doorknob is very important. We’re looking for who was the last one who touched that door lock. We would get fingerprints of one person locking it and then overlapped by the person that unlocked it.” He swiftly moves on to just how high-tech murder investigations have become since the old days. “We have to reach out to modern technology, so another thing we utilize is satellites. The satellite is a twenty-four-hour video that’s going on. It’s recording information … the military uses it for precision bombing. We’re able to go back and review that. It’s like an X-ray. We’re able to tell … are the people in the positions that the witness is telling us they were in or are they different? Another thing we do is talk to a lot of people … we don’t leave any rock unturned. You’ve heard of Crime Stoppers, right? When you get a case like this, people want to help. It’s in the papers; it’s everywhere. So people end up coming to us to help us out with the case. Three people are inside the house. Somebody always tells somebody else. Suddenly, we get people calling in. They want to help. You don’t know how many people call in on their friends … they want that money. They get greedy.”
The Reid Technique clearly states that an interrogator must try to discourage the suspect from denying his or her guilt. True to form, Goetz refuses to let Jennifer get a word in edgewise — she speaks little for the following sixty minutes — but he eventually offers her a way out. “Nothing surprises me in this job. I am well aware that anyone on this Earth is capable of making a mistake,” he tells her as she bows her head. “I don’t care if they’re a priest or a schoolteacher. One thing that you have to remember is that your dad was there and your dad had a front-row seat to all of this. Your dad’s a very smart man and he has a very clear perception of what’s going on. A lot of the things you told the police didn’t happen. It doesn’t match at all …”
After alleging guilt and implying that police have proof of such guilt, Goetz now seamlessly shifts his attention to Step Two of the Reid Technique: shifting the blame away from the suspect, justifying her behaviour, and excusing the crime. “You’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the past seven years telling half-truths, and I can understand why. You’ve had a tough life. What’s happened to you, to me, equates to abuse. Now you’re under a tremendous amount of stress. You’re involved in this. I know that. You’ve lived your whole life trying to live up to expectations that you can’t make. You’re a twenty-four-year-old woman being treated like a fifteen-year-old. You’re not the first person [to lie about] dating a guy, because in your culture they don’t accept it.” Then he offers her a chance to confess. “Who else is involved in this?”
“I don’t know,” Jennifer manages to say, still stroking her hair but listening intently.
Using Hann’s description of a white male in the house, Goetz accuses Jennifer of falsifying Number One’s description entirely. He then moves back into the accusatory stage, treating her guilt as a fact they’ve already established before justifying it. “We know that you were involved, but we also know that you’re a good person that’s made a mistake here,” he adds. “You got involved with the wrong people. You don’t want to keep living this lie. Everyone knows, and you’re getting that feeling. Nobody is surprised here. You were a prisoner in your own house. You were living someone else’s expectations. No matter how much they love you, they’re taking away Jen. The Jen that just wanted to be a piano teacher. Why is that not good enough? Why not just be a lab technician? Why a doctor? Why does it always have to be something bigger?”
For the first time Jennifer appears calm. But there’s a storm on the horizon. At this point she seems to have made a decision about her next steps. Sitting with her hands in her lap and staring at Goetz, she bows her head and weeps.
“The tension built up to a point … it’s like an animal that gets cornered,” Goetz continues. “At some point even the nicest dog when it’s cornered bites back. It’s called self-preservation. Eighteen months ago you chose your family over Daniel, but you gave up Jen. Jen was in a state of depression, backed into a corner. Why you froze there on your bed was because the plan was in motion, there was no turning back. And I know right now you wish you could turn it back, right?
“It was a form of abuse,” he continues. “You can’t do that to a person. This is Canada. We’re in the twenty-first century here. It’s like your dad fixing everybody else’s home but not his own. It’s the same with you. He was trying to make a future for you bigger than it should have been. In the process of his love for you, he made the mistake of actually pushing you away. All his good intentions went the other way. The good thing is that you didn’t shoot anyone here. You couldn’t do that. You’re not that type of person, right?”
As part of the Reid Technique, the investigator must be seated in a wheeled chair and the suspect in a fixed one. This is so that the interrogator can wheel close, either to show sympathy or make the suspect feel she is cornered. As Goetz begins to accuse Jennifer, he inches his chair closer and closer to her until the pair are almost touching, his burly stature bearing down on her. “You’re involved in this. I know that,” he tells her as she continues to fiddle with her hair. “There’s no question about it. The only question right now is: Are you going to keep making mistakes?” Just before the three-hour mark, after about forty-five minutes of Goetz droning on in this vein, Jennifer finally starts to crack. After barely a peep for so long, she utters a muffled, inaudible sentence. She repeats it, this time loud enough for Goetz and the audio system to pick up.
“What happens to me?”
8
“It Was for Me”
Police in Canada might be allowed to lie to suspects about the evidence they have collected, but they’re not able to speak on behalf o
f the judicial system or the courts and are strictly prohibited from making threats, deals, or promises in regard to how a suspect will be treated. Only the judicial arm of the province, the Crown, can do that. This becomes a problem for Detective Goetz when Jennifer openly wonders what kind of fate awaits her should she confess to her involvement in the murder. Although Jennifer repeats the same question multiple times — “What happens to me?” — the officer’s hands are tied, so he puts her off. “I don’t know the details, so I can’t even say,” he repeats on three separate occasions. “We’re going to have to deal with this one step at a time. You’ve got to be honest with me and then you and I are going to work through this together. But I need to hear it.”
Jennifer eventually relents and moves forward with a new version of events. “I wanted it to stop,” she says.
“I know you did … but once they came in you couldn’t stop it, could ya?” Goetz responds in a comforting tone.
“I didn’t know who they were,” she says, giving a window into her eventual defence.
“Are you sorry for what happened?” Goetz asks. “Do you wish you could take it back?”
Jennifer, her head clenched tightly between her knees, finally says yes.
Goetz, leaning forward in his chair, thinks he’s finally getting somewhere. “That’s good, that’s positive. You wish it didn’t happen. He places a hand on her back and rubs her shoulder, sensing a full confession is coming. “I know this has been hell for you … all you were looking for is a break, a chance to be on your own, to make your own decisions. How did it start? What was your plan? We know you were involved from the start. Over three hundred kids in North America every year are involved in their parents’ deaths. And when we look into those cases, there’s always a common factor. In those cases, those kids [had] to live up to expectations. The house rules were just so out of whack.”
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