A Daughter's Deadly Deception

by Jeremy Grimaldi

  L: I don’t even mind making the mission as long as you say you gonna gas me up.

  D: Maybe we can just talk about it like, right now, you know what I mean?

  L: Huh?

  D: I can just talk to you over the — this phone.

  D: My phone, yeah. My phone’s cool, your phone cool?

  L: No.

  D: No, eh?

  D: All right. I — well, I got 20 bucks. That should be good enough for you, right?

  L: Yeah. That’s as good as a smidge.

  L: You have any trees? [Marijuana.]

  D: Ah, I wish, bro. Nothing, man.

  Daniel walks into the Markham police station at 9:30 a.m. on March 23 for what will be a gruelling six-and-a-half-hour interview. It becomes a wide-ranging talk in which he ends up contradicting himself a number of times and does plenty of backpedalling.

  During his sit-down with Detective Cooke, he initially says he doesn’t know Eric or David. When he’s shown pictures of the two men, Daniel, seeming relaxed and chuckling, says David looks like “one of those Tamil guys” and that Eric “looks like Kimbo Slice,” a well-known, and now deceased, mixed martial arts fighter. But then he tells Cooke that the pictures on the table are indeed Lenford’s friends. “I’ve seen these guys

  March 23, 2011, four months after Jennifer’s arrest, Daniel Wong is back for a follow-up interview with police. During questioning, he admits that Jennifer Pan did ask him to kill her parents, but insists that he told her he wanted nothing to do with it.

  before,” he says. “I’m not sure if I saw them at the mechanic shop some time.” But to find out more, Daniel tells Cooke he’ll have to ask Lenford, who Daniel refers to as Roy. Daniel eventually comes around and admits during this interview that Jennifer Pan did ask him to kill her parents, but he told her he wanted nothing to do with it. He ventures a guess that she must have gotten Lenford’s number from him, adding that maybe he even told her to give him a call.

  After the interview is finished at 4:00 p.m., the pair link back up by cell two hours later at 6:02 p.m., with Daniel sharing just how dire the situation has become for them both, especially, he says, for Lenford.

  D: I finished at like, five.

  L: Whoa, wow, wow, it seems like you — you been there all day?

  D: They got pictures of like, everyone, eh?

  L: Wow!

  D: Yeah, and I think the heat’s on you, bro.

  L: There’s no reason to be on — any one of your friends, that’s ridiculous though.

  D: They were showing me how like, the messages and stuff like that.

  L: What kind of message?

  D: Like, “Oh, we — I gotta link up with this person.”

  L: …if they wanna know how much weed I, ah — I get rid of … that’s different. But, anything else like, come on like, am I really supposed to like — you know what I mean?

  D: Don’t believe a word they say.

  L: When they came to my house and my parents already mad at me …

  L: They brought up my girlfriend’s name which … they put me in this situation.

  D: You’re gonna be hot bro, that’s it.

  D: I think they might have got something with me and like, stuff like that, but I’m asking you for car parts, right? So, there’s nothing wrong … they even brought up like, that time you messaged me through like, other people’s phones, how I gotta meet some o’ your brethren’s too, make some paper [money] and shit like that?

  L: They’re just … they’re just jumping overboard.

  D: They’re even gonna say that the kid said something, you know what I mean?

  D: They got like, a lot o’ records. Like, they got a file on me, man.

  D: People like callin,’ who I talk to and messages, exact text words for word messages, yo.

  D: Have you … have you seen a lawyer yet?

  L: No.

  D: If it comes down to it and you don’t wanna answer just dip [leave]…cause, like, it … it’s gonna get … it’s gone be hectic.

  D: They’re like, “I know this.” I’m like, “Oh, man, it’s just car parts guy,” you know what I mean?… Car parts and weed, man, that’s it.

  L: But you know I’m all about modification. You give me something to modify and I’ll do it for you.

  D: You’re my guy for like, souping up my ride. That’s what I told ’em.

  The chat reveals many insights into Daniel and Lenford’s conversation from the night before in Ajax. Daniel repeatedly reminds Lenford to stay on script, speaking to police only about their dealings in marijuana, or “car parts.” At one point Daniel mentions the police might even suggest “the kid” said something. He appears to be telling Lenford that the police might try to catch him out by alleging Daniel himself (“the kid”) rolled over and ratted him out. When he describes police having “pictures of everyone,” he might be talking about the photos of at least seven suspects that were strewn across the table in the interview room, including Eric Carty, David Mylvaganam, and another man, Tim Conte, who comes into the picture later.

  Earlier, before Daniel left the interview, Cooke gave him one last pep talk, imploring him to come clean. “Go home, think hard, talk to your family,” he told him. “If you’re not telling us everything, you hold something back and you want to tell us, you can always call me. You might say, ‘Listen, I don’t want to ruin the rest of my life getting dragged down by these guys and Jen, Al. I’m sorry, but here’s what I didn’t tell ya’ … I think you need to do some soul-searching.”

  When the marathon interview ended, Cooke told Daniel that he “could have left anytime.”

  But Daniel explained that he wanted to make sure there was no doubt about his innocence: “I don’t want it to seem like I’m hiding anything.”

  11

  The Noose Tightens

  Lenford’s interview doesn’t go much better than Daniel’s when he sits down with Detective Goetz three days later. Police will note some significant inconsistencies in his statements. Although he’s always admitted to knowing Eric, Lenford says he doesn’t know Mylvaganam. However, police later locate two of David Mylvaganam’s phone numbers stored in Lenford’s cellphone — one under the heading “Rexfam” (Rexdale Family) and the other under a well-known nickname for David — “Rambo” — which he created as a contact in his phone about a month before on February 11, 2011. This number is for David’s new cellphone, registered under the name of another Canadian politician, “Andrew Thompson.” David purchased that phone the day after Detective MacDonald texted the “Peter Robinson” phone, asking the owner to call police.

  When asked if he knows the name “Rambo,” Lenford only admits that he has “heard that name before.” Although police try to suggest to Lenford that Daniel threw him “under the bus” by suggesting Jennifer might have gotten Lenford’s number from him because he refused to be involved in any scheme himself, Lenford once again refuses to take the bait. “All this is ridiculous to me,” he replies. “I’m not involved in this … I’ve never pulled a trigger in my life … I would never do something like that,” he protests when presented with the police accusations.

  Police also discover that Lenford has Eric Carty’s phone numbers in his contact list under “S-fam” and “Bro.” Another phone that Eric started using just before the murder is under the name “Gully Team.” Lenford’s phone is “Gully G,” and “Gully GS” is the phone Eric Carty began using after the murder, registered under the name of well-known comedian Mike Epps, who plays Day-Day Jones in the film Next Friday. “Gully Side” is registered to someone associated with a woman by the name of Silvia Powell — it remains unknown if this is a reference to her relationship status with Eric (i.e., his “Side Chick”). The term gully is described on the Urban Dictionary website as something from the street or gutter that is “rough, rugged, unpolished and hardcore” or a
“gangster,” used along with terms like hood and street.

  Although Lenford isn’t sure about many details during this interview, he is adamant about one thing: he doesn’t know anyone by the name of “Ric,” bolstering the story Ricardo Duncan told the police and discrediting Jennifer’s.

  Two days before Lenford’s interview, on March 24, police called Demetrius Mables and (in his words) threatened him with arrest if he didn’t come in for an interview that day. By this point, police had disproved his alibi, venturing out to the construction site where Mables had said he was working on the night of the murder. When Mables came in for the interview, he told a fantastical story of his actions on November 8 to his new interrogator, Detective Goetz, giving the police what would amount to the metaphorical finger.

  “Originally, you said you were sanding floors at some house at nighttime,” Goetz said to Mables. “We looked into that. You weren’t there. You were [there on] a different night, on a previous week. So right now, you don’t have an alibi for that night.”

  “I know, like, still trying to do my homework on that,” Mables replied.

  “Which is now more concerning than ever,” Goetz said.

  “Ya, I know, I understand that. I must have made a walk somewhere…. I didn’t go into a vehicle still, you know. That day I didn’t see nobody. You know what I think? That day there. I think me and my wife had an argument. And I left. I was on the road walking up Weston [Road]. I was just trying to vent — this is bullshit, the same bullshit, women and all that buck [arguments]. I think I lent somebody my phone then. But to say who I lent it to? I wasn’t really paying attention to the person I lent my phone to.” He would eventually clarify that the person was a tall white man, presumably much like the Caucasian assailant described by Hann as being in the house. But Mables couldn’t hear what he said as he’d had his earphones in. “[I was being] a good Samaritan, not knowin’ that being a good Samaritan was going to get me in this crap,” he added, getting very animated. “Something like that [the murder] I could never do. There’s things I could do and there’s things I would not do. Everybody has mothers, fathers. Hell, no, that’s a no, no, no. That’s evil. That’s crazy. That’s something I could never do. I don’t have the heart to do something like that.”

  Mables is never charged or prosecuted in this crime.

  On March 28, Detectives Courtice and Cooke get another bright idea and, although it may seem like a long shot, it ends up working. Cooke visits the Central East Correctional Centre (a.k.a. Lindsay Jail), located about an hour and a half east of Toronto, to see Jennifer Pan who is being held in remand, languishing until trial four years after the murder. He brings with him a photo lineup, including a picture of Eric Carty. A belligerent Jennifer doesn’t want to be interviewed, but Cooke coaxes her into a room, advising her she can leave any time. She is shown several pictures before Eric’s is displayed. When she sees it, Jennifer responds by turning away and requesting that Cooke take the photo from her sight. She says he resembles Number One, but that she can’t be 100 percent sure.

  It takes police a while, but they eventually manage to get hold of a person by the name of Tim Conte, a Caucasian man and the owner of the first phone the “Peter Robinson” mobile contacted after it was switched back on at 10:46 p.m. while speeding away from the Pan home on November 8. Cell tower records show that when it was contacted, Tim’s phone was close to Lenford’s work, Kik Custom in Rexdale. Police believe this is the case’s second bridge call after Demetrius Mables’s phone called Jennifer’s earlier that day — the idea being that the conspirators wouldn’t want to be seen to be calling one another’s phones; therefore, a third party was used to pick up a call from the hit man and to relay the message that the job was done to Lenford face to face.

  When Conte speaks to police on March 31, he denies this theory. Instead he tells police that at the time he was in the back of his truck watching a movie on a television he had just purchased. He says he was with his then-mistress after going to his gym, which is near Lenford’s workplace. Conte claims that’s why his phone was near that particular tower. He later produces a receipt from Best Buy, explaining that he bought the television at 8:02 p.m. Tim is never charged with any crime nor prosecuted in this case.

  One of the investigation’s most significant interviews occurs two weeks later, on April 12, when police finally get in touch with Denise Brown, the woman who was texting with David Mylvaganam on the night of the murder. She also, it seems, knows “Kimble” and identifies both his and David’s pictures for police. Soon after this interview, Denise recounts how she received a call from David. During that conversation, she got the feeling he was trying to discourage her from saying anything to the courts. “[He was saying] like, if I know anything, don’t say anything type of vibe,” she tells police, adding that he kept denying he was the one who committed the crime. “Nothing happened,” he told her. “I don’t know what’s going on. Are you for me or against me? That’s not my phone.” David later admits it was, indeed, his phone, something Denise knew all along: the police have reams of their text conversations to prove she did. For Eric Carty, who has been ever so careful in the lead-up to and following the murder to avoid detection, it is this tiny detail — the “Kimble” text from David Mylvaganam to Denise Brown — that sinks him. It will remain one of the only shreds of hard evidence against him.

  Data detection also uncovers the following texts from Denise’s phone. Weeks before Christmas and a mere month and a half after the murder, David travelled to Montreal for the birthday of one of his children. In a bind for cash, he repeatedly texts the same unknown male seeking money.

  DM: Low on funds.

  DM: Need some bread.

  UM: Wat r u doin wit ur doe?

  DM: Paying bills, taking care of my sons, put money on a car.

  Denise Brown, who later recants many of her initial statements to police, adds that none of David’s above protestations about where his money was going are true. And when police discover that the unknown male in this conversation is the same male in the conversation with David when he spoke about Francine — one Eric Carty — it leaves them wondering: Why is David asking Eric Carty for money? Was he still owed payment for the contract killing of Bich? It doesn’t appear that David ever got his cash.

  Two days after speaking with Denise Brown, Detective Courtice gives the order to take David down. As he is already under surveillance, police wait until he is in a confined area — the notorious Jane Finch Mall. David is arrested without incident and charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit, and attempted murder. The following day, police descend on Maplehurst Correctional Complex just west of Toronto, where Eric Carty is being held, and charge him with the same.

  “It’s the belief of the investigation that … two of these individuals did enter the residence and commit these horrendous crimes,” Detective Larry Wilson is quoted as saying in a CBC news story that runs alongside a bail-hearing sketch of Eric sporting a trimmed beard and with his hair in cornrows. “The investigation is continuing, and we are looking for some more individuals involved in this. So I’m not going to get into too much detail. But we do have a connection between all the individuals that we are investigating.”

  It is Wilson’s last comment that most frightens Daniel Wong and Lenford Crawford. These latest arrests, as they often do, spark more conversation over the wires between the two. On April 17 at 1:44 p.m. an unknown male calls Lenford on behalf of Daniel, who is no longer calling Lenford himself.

  UM: Yo, what’s good.

  L: Just here, what are you saying?

  UM: Everything good?

  L: Everything is good.

  UM: Ya? I heard a couple of mans got in trouble down there … the kid told me.

  L: That’s what I’m hearing still but …

  UM: You’re good though eh?

  L: Ya.

  UM: Wicked, wicked.
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  The “couple of mans” refers to Eric and David; the “trouble,” their murder-one charges.

  Their fears aren’t unfounded; the heat is now so firmly on them, it’s searing their ankles. But it isn’t just their daily movements and phone calls that police are looking into. After getting the cell tower records for Lenford’s and Daniel’s phones on April 26, Detective Courtice has his curiosity piqued by the two men’s movements in the hours following the press conference announcing Jennifer Pan’s arrest. Surveillance teams that have been watching Lenford for weeks, report his movements as routine-oriented — largely involving travel to and from his family home, his girlfriend’s place, Tim Hortons coffee shops, and work. However, phone data show that after Jennifer’s arrest, Lenford drove east.

  A mere six hours after the press conference, just after midnight on November 23, Eric called Lenford. This call sparked action. Records reveal that when Lenford finished his shift at midnight, hours after word of Jennifer’s arrest hit the street, he ventured to Mississauga before heading to Daniel’s house in Ajax, a city forty-five minutes east of Toronto. When he arrived, around 2:00 a.m., his phone and Daniel’s phone were in the same location for about forty minutes. About twelve hours later, phone records show Lenford went back to Ajax at 2:23 p.m. Daniel’s phone was using the same tower. Then, just before 11:00 p.m., Lenford’s phone was in London, Ontario. Lawyers later wonder openly whether Lenford drove to Ajax after the press conference for an emergency meeting to discuss a “wrinkle” in the plans, namely, Jennifer’s arrest: Would Jennifer give them up? Who was next? Who would pay them now that there would be no insurance money?