A Daughter's Deadly Deception

by Jeremy Grimaldi

  Two of the only assertions Felix agrees with wholeheartedly are that his father used isolation as a tool to gain acquiescence from his children and that, in the lead-up to the murder, Jennifer was isolated beyond just within the family. After a statement Felix made to the police is played, in which he says his parents “locked her in the house” because they didn’t like her boyfriend, he still maintains calling it house arrest is going too far.

  Although Felix starts to break down during a number of discussions surrounding his mother, he always regains his composure quickly, fighting the instinct to surrender to his emotions. It is this inner battle that eventually bubbles to the surface. Despite the hatred that courses through his body for what he thinks his sister has done, he appears to have at least some pity for her. For breaks and legal discussions that need to be held without the witness present, Felix is often excused from the stand. It is during these times, when he passes through Jennifer’s direct sightline, that Felix keeps his eyes on the floor as he walks by. Upon his final exit, clearly against his own desire never to see or interact with his sister again, he glances up at her. When he realizes Jennifer is gazing elsewhere, he averts his eyes, almost as fast as he took the peek, obviously embarrassed for sneaking it in the first place.

  Despite the lengthy trial, many of the questions people ask in the aftermath of the Crown’s theory go unanswered: How could such a seemingly good girl do this? Why didn’t she just move out? Was she pressured into it? Did she really murder them to be with her boyfriend? Was it really all about the money? How could she be so cold-blooded? Is she evil? Was she mentally unstable?

  16

  “Astonishing Testimony”

  After Jennifer’s admissions to Detective Goetz back on November 22, 2010, her defence was always going to be a struggle. It was during that interview that she admitted to a twisted sort of conspiracy in which she hired a man named Homeboy to commit, as she put it, “an assassination of myself.” The version she chooses to tell in court resembles this sequence of events, but with some very major differences. First, instead of Ric giving her Homeboy’s number, a detail she told police, she explains to the court that she accessed his number herself. Second, that up until the moment the men broke into her house, she was doing her best to cancel the plan. Third, Jennifer admits to a murder plot against her father, but insists the plan fizzled after Ricardo Duncan and Andrew Montemayor duped her.

  An intrepid Jennifer takes the stand on August 19, 2014, proceeding to weave what the Toronto Star later refers to as her “astonishing testimony.” During her gruelling seven days before the court, her lawyer, Paul Cooper, fights doggedly to prove her innocence. But will it be enough to change the minds of the country, or the court, for that matter? While on the stand, Jennifer bemoans the fact that everyone seems to have already made up their minds about her before she even opens her mouth.

  Nevertheless, her defence proceeds as she and her lawyer lay bare her demented version of events. After revealing all her lies and deceptions to the world via her intricate testimony throughout the first two days on the stand, Jennifer maintains she grew “furious” at her father when he began

  Courtesy of Marianne Boucher, CityNews.

  neglecting and isolating her in the lead-up to the summer of 2010. It was after they discovered all her dishonesty that Jennifer felt the full force of Hann’s and Felix’s cold shoulders. But it was her father for whom she held the most hatred, she says. Seeking out her friends’ advice, Jennifer eventually stumbled upon Andrew Montemayor, her old elementary school classmate. He’d long had a crush on Jennifer, and she spent hours on the phone with him, seeking a way to get rid of the “stresses” in her life. But soon after she allegedly hatched a plan with Andrew’s roommate, Ricardo “Ric” Duncan, in which he would shoot her father outside his work, it became clear that Ric ripped her off for the $1,500 she paid him. Despite trying to call him countless times, he was no longer answering his phone. “I spoke with him over the phone to see if he’d ever gotten his hands on a gun a few times,” she says, “and he then stopped answering my phone calls. I tried calling Andrew … he said he had moved out of Ric’s home … he kept making excuses for Ric. I knew it was a sham.” Both Andrew and Ric deny under oath that the scheme ever took place.

  Jennifer claims it was this plot that resulted in her withholding the truth from police during her interviews, scared that if investigators discovered proof of it, they’d suspect her in her mother’s murder, too. Eventually, Jennifer says she began to consider suicide and admitted she tried to take her own life. However, when that failed, her focus began to shift to another, less shameful way to achieve death. “I felt that I couldn’t even take my own life,” she says, “I felt that I had failed in every possible way in life.” On top of the shame associated with suicide, Jennifer says taking her own life would have made the insurance policy on herself, for which Felix was the beneficiary, null and void.

  Her new plan began after Daniel gave her his iPhone under the agreement that Jennifer would pass along any messages intended for him. During this time, she started to notice one particular individual named Homeboy was repeatedly texting the phone. At the outset she says she passed on messages mentioning the term Bollywood, leading her to believe the messages were in reference to burnt DVDs. However, she eventually noticed the term Orange, which she knew as the code word for an “ounce” of marijuana. When she realized she was passing drug messages to Daniel, she says an idea dawned on her. “Here I was with a source … someone who could potentially know the street ways and potentially help me in finding a way to commit suicide,” she tells the court. “I inquired about it. I inquired how much it was to kill a person. The person on the line, Homeboy, said … for a friend it would be $10,000 to $15,000. In one conversation, I said … I wanted it for myself, and the person on the other end was quite shocked. They’re like ‘Really? You want to kill yourself?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do want to kill myself.’ They kept inquiring ‘Are you sure you want to kill yourself?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ It took some convincing.”

  After dropping that bombshell on the court, Jennifer says the pair then came to an agreement for a $10,000 hit to occur sometime in the following months. She did have further stipulations for Homeboy, though: “I didn’t want it to be at any sort of family event or where my family members would be the first ones to find me,” she says, explaining that it was agreed that prior to the shooting she would “have the money, ready to pass it over.” But for Jennifer — who Cooper continually paints as “immature” and infantile throughout the trial — it didn’t take long before she changed her mind.

  Throughout September and October, Jennifer says her circumstances began to improve after her family travelled to the United States for a wedding and she, her mother, and her aunt went to Montreal for a weekend jaunt. Her spirits were also buoyed by an early acceptance into college and the positive attention it brought with it. “My dad, in my view, was quite ecstatic,” she says, regarding the moment she and her father accepted an offer for her to attend a Centennial College lab technician course. “He finally got to see the proof he’d been waiting for. That was a glimmer of hope that maybe I could reconcile with my father. So we talked about maybe getting a locker there, how I would travel to Centennial College. So we actually had a conversation … in my heart it was very warming. I did feel my father had been different than he had been over the past year and a half, two years … he actually told me that I was finally getting my priorities straight and I thanked him for it because if it wasn’t for him I don’t think I would have applied. He started to communicate with me more. Things at home were less tense. He was almost boasting about my daughter going back to school again.”

  She says it was at this point that she “ceased to want” the “murder-suicide” plan she had devised to go forward. However, it would not be that easy, she tells the court. Although Jennifer communicated her change of heart to Homeboy, she say
s he refused to allow her out of the contract without paying an $8,500 “cancellation fee.” Despite her furiously trying to get the money together, Homeboy refused to let her be, repeatedly badgering her for cash. On Halloween 2010, Homeboy, his cellphone pinging off the towers closest to her house, threatened to come to her home while she handed “out candy to trick-or-treaters” with her mother. “He said he was going to do it tonight,” she tells Cooper. “I was shocked. I was saying to him, kids are in the area, I’m handing out candy, I can’t step out, and where do you want to meet? I don’t have the money. I started to freak out because I thought they were coming … to shoot me and kill me.”

  Jennifer and Cooper then spend hours methodically going through hundreds of texts recovered from her Bell iPhone. Instead of messages seemingly referencing the murder of her parents as the Crown alleges, Jennifer tells the court that many of the communications were attempts to recover enough money to pay Homeboy. She has a more difficult time explaining her multiple text conversations with Daniel. One text from Daniel to Jennifer that says I did everything and lined it all up for you is passed off as one big misunderstanding. But her response to what it exactly meant shows just how convoluted her version of events has become. “I understand that [text] to be that he had talked to Homeboy on my behalf … for the plan that I wanted to abandon,” she explains, remaining unbowed throughout these irrational contradictions.

  It was on the morning of November 8, she says, that she received the Homeboy text: 2 after work OK will be game time. This was not a text between plotters about the murder of her parents, she says. Instead, Jennifer insists that she replied with a phone call, pleading with Homeboy to wait until she had the full cancellation fee. “If you don’t want partial payment, please wait until I can meet you,” she tells the court she begged him. After spending the rest of that day rounding up money from outstanding debts among her friends, Jennifer says she received a phone call, including a three-minute-and-twenty-three-second call with a stranger from David Mylvaganam’s “Peter Robinson” phone. During these phone calls, she says, the following was repeated by the nameless voices: “Where’s the money? We need the money.”

  Jennifer also recants her admission to police that she unlocked her home’s door after receiving a text requesting “VIP” entry. When questions turn to what happened to her iPhone’s SIM card, Jennifer explains how Number One stole the SIM card out of her phone. “He was fidgeting with the phone with one glove off. I don’t know what he was doing,” she says. “The iPhone company gives you a little pick to open the SIM card slot. I had that available nearby … I know he opened the cartridge. I don’t know how … when he was slipping on his glove and coming around I could still see the gun was still pointed at me … [before] quickly slipping the SIM card into his pocket.” When asked why she didn’t tell police this throughout her almost ten hours worth of interviews, she insists that she was afraid no one would believe her.

  “I admit I’m a liar. I admitted I was a liar. I admitted I lied to the police in the police station, but I was scared,” she says. “I was scared of being caught in a concoction, but on November 8 there was nothing, nothing that was supposed to be happening. Yes I lied because I didn’t want to get in trouble for making these plans and plots that I eventually abandoned weeks after because I knew I had blown a lot of my thoughts out of proportion. I am being truthful here.” When her parents were being led to the basement, Jennifer says she felt helpless as her mother cried out for her: “I want to be with my daughter, please bring me my daughter.”

  Jennifer weeps in court as she recalls her response. “‘I’m upstairs. Mom. I’m upstairs.’ I begged my [captor] to untie me so I [could] go with them. All I could hear is my mom’s fading voice going down the stairs, yelling for me. In response, I kept yelling back and telling [the] intruder ‘Please just let me go with my mom.’ I don’t know why they were separating us.” A distraught Jennifer describes how she managed to hear her mother’s last gasp for breath. “I heard two gunshots and my mom scream,” she testifies, whimpering. “I heard another gunshot. I heard my mom. It was almost like an exhale. It was like her last breath. But I had a feeling in my heart that that was the last breath I heard.”

  When she is asked why anyone would believe a woman so entrenched in deceit, Jennifer reiterates that this time she is telling the truth. “I know a lot of people have already judged me. The whole world has judged me,” she tells the jury. “[I’m facing] twenty-five years to life here, I understand that. My point being is I have nothing to lie about today. Even if I get sentenced and this jury finds me guilty, at least I can rest knowing that I know that my mother was never a target in my life, never, and I know that November 8 was just a shock to everyone else as it was to me.”

  Although Cooper delves deep into Jennifer’s upbringing, her scheduled youth, and her belief that her parents favoured her brother over her, there is nothing close to the tortured existence growing up that some expect to hear from her defence. One lawyer later says: “I was waiting to hear how she’d been locked in a closet, hit with a ruler, berated by her father, but there was none of that.”

  When it is Rob Scott’s turn, it is an open question just how catastrophic his cross-examination is going to be. After all, Jennifer is an admitted liar and the evidence and her testimony leave her vulnerable on so many fronts. Scott’s sarcastic style can sometimes land him in trouble with judges; but he’s wily enough to use it only when he has a jury firmly on his side. By this juncture, he feels secure that most people in the room want him to confront Jennifer’s past, her lies, and her conflicting statements head-on. And she certainly appears confident enough on the stand to be able to handle it.

  Much of Scott’s questioning centres on the simple yet supremely effective point that, despite being given hours of opportunity to tell the police exactly what happened in her house that night, she waited until the trial to unveil this version of events. Is the court to believe that Jennifer waited three-and-a-half years to reveal the actual events of that night, wasting the opportunity for the police to catch those actually responsible? If so, it is clear, Scott argues, that these aren’t the actions of a loving daughter.

  Courtesy of Marianne Boucher, CityNews.

  Jennifer can do little to refute this line of inquiry, largely because it is true. So instead, Jennifer blames the police, insisting she was too tired, frightened, and frazzled to tell the “real story” during the police interviews: “I had told them my descriptions, the events that happened in the house, besides the SIM card, which I had not thought of at that point, but it had been such a long interview. I had just buried my mother. I was not in the mood to be there … I was exhausted at that time.”

  But even without this stirring line of questioning, it wouldn’t have taken much time for Scott to punch holes in Jennifer’s new version of events. The prosecution questions her statement that she discovered Homeboy’s name when he texted the iPhone. Scott insists that the entire premise of her story is faulty, considering there were no texts from Lenford’s phone to the iPhone prior to Jennifer’s first text to him in mid-August. “There are no phone calls, there are no text messages from Homeboy to that Bell phone before August 18,” Scott states. “Therefore, when you told this jury that you learned about Homeboy [from] all the messages and texts he sent about Bollywood and Orange, that was a complete lie. There weren’t any.”

  Jennifer says she can’t remember “what happened during what phone call four years ago.”

  Scott doesn’t relent. “The reason that you lied and said you got his name from messages he had left or texts that he had sent is because … you feel the need to protect the love of your life, Daniel Wong. [He] gave you [Homeboy’s] name.” Scott then gets to the heart of the matter. “What you did early on in the police investigation is really try to save Daniel Wong and keep him out of all this by saying, ‘Oh, I got the name, number for Homeboy from Ric Duncan, scary murder guy,�
�” he says. “You tried to frame an innocent man in some kind of home-invasion murder in order to save Daniel Wong.”

  Faced with this accusation, Jennifer doesn’t wilt; unlike during her police interviews, she remains upright, trying to provide plausible answers to each question. Some who were present that day say they had the impression she was very well coached for her testimony. However, as the day wears on, she comes under increased pressure.

  “Your mother is brutally murdered in your basement twenty metres below you,” Scott continues, “and what you do is go into the police station twice in the following week and lie to them. And there’s only one reason you lie to the police the day after your mother is shot in the head — to keep Jennifer Pan from getting into trouble.”

  “I was scared to get in trouble, yes,” Jennifer responds without blinking.

  “Right, because it’s more important to you in your world that you stay out of trouble than the police find your mother’s killers,” Scott snaps. “That’s your thought process. Jennifer Pan is about Jennifer Pan.”

  “Disagree,” she retorts.

  “Then why don’t you sacrifice yourself as the good daughter so that they can find the real killers of your mother?” he asks.

  “That’s why I am here.”

  “Why weren’t you there in November 2010?” he shoots back.