A Daughter's Deadly Deception

by Jeremy Grimaldi

  For Hann and Bich, Daniel was clearly not the ideal match for their daughter. However, the Wongs took just the opposite view. Darwin and Evelyn saw Jennifer as their son’s ideal mate and a positive influence — a partner they credited with Daniel refocusing on his education, getting gainful employment, and altering his group of friends. Dinnertime at the Wong household was likely quite different than meals at the Pan residence, and Jennifer’s relationship with the family progressed with ease. She later explained just how much she relished the experience to interact so intimately with a family so different from her own.

  After staying there for two years, Jennifer was firmly entrenched in Daniel’s family life. Although, in hindsight it might sound naive, Jennifer, by then twenty-one years old, said Daniel’s parents accepted at face value Jennifer’s assurances that Hann and Bich were okay with the new living arrangements. And when they asked for the chance to take Hann and Bich out for dim sum, Jennifer shrugged it off as never the right time. To ensure her own parents didn’t investigate further, Jennifer called them each morning. During these calls, she gushed about the lectures she was attending that day and how well she was performing. A second call was placed promptly each night before bed, explaining to her mother how late she planned to stay up finishing her work or studying for her mid-term exams. The rest of the week, and on weekends, she spent faithfully at home, so as not to raise suspicion.

  During this time, her mother continued to put money in her account to help pay for Jennifer’s portion of Topaz’s rent. These funds remain unaccounted for. One investigator suggests the funds went straight from her bank account into Daniel’s coffers — extra cash to help him in his drug business. Bich’s employment wages were also deposited in Jennifer’s bank account to avoid the government finding out — money Jennifer also had access to. While Bich seemed to harbour no suspicions that anything was amiss during this time, Hann felt something was up. Although he never knew exactly what, certain aspects of Jennifer’s life weren’t right, and he noticed inconsistencies in his daughter’s story and behaviour. Hann was desperate to grill his daughter about his suspicions, but Bich placated him. “I was concerned something was not right … so many times I wanted to ask my daughter,” he says, noting his wife had told him to go easy and stop pushing her so hard. “She’s already grown … just let her be herself. Too much interference is not good for her.”

  Although Jennifer originally said she had long imagined that “a diploma” from Ryerson would have been enough to put off her parents and halt the lies, she eventually realized to her chagrin that it would not. Nearing the end of Jennifer’s two years at Ryerson, Hann began to inquire about how she could best ensure success in the medical field, including bolstering her résumé with pharmacology experience. Despite worrying about signs that her plan was falling apart, Jennifer chose the path of least resistance. “I just thought, well, maybe if I did correspondence this year … I’ll be accepted the year after,” she said. “Honestly, I didn’t really think too far ahead of that.” However, much like her plan to work diligently to get her high school marks up after falsifying her report cards, she took no action to gain her missing calculus credit, powering on unabated.

  It was only after telling her parents she had made the switch to the University of Toronto for her long sought-after pharmacy degree that her relationship with her trusting mother grew strained. This should have been the happiest time in her parents’ lives — enjoying the fruits of their labours — but that was far from the reality. “When I moved over to U of T, it became a little more tense,” Jennifer said, explaining how she told her parents she finished the two-year program at Ryerson and began attending the University of Toronto for pharmacology. “I was conflicted; I was confused. I was not really sure what to do. Part of me did want to come clean, because it was getting so complicated that even I was starting to lose track of every day’s momentum. But on the other side, I knew … it would bring such shame and embarrassment to the friends and extended family. [My parents] would be ostracized from the rest of the family.”

  Despite this, her parents were overjoyed with her marks, considering she was consistently bringing home grades hovering around the ninetieth percentile. It was really quite remarkable, they thought. Out of the forty-two classes she claimed she had taken by the end of her U of T “career,” she gave herself nine A+’s in classes, including statistics and chemistry, thirty-two A’s, and only one A-. Yet, by this point, her problems had spread far beyond her grade-point average. Bich questioned Jennifer’s repeated insistence that she complete her own taxes. This was especially true after Jennifer’s cousin, Michelle, studying to become an accountant and helping with the Pan family’s taxes, said Jennifer refused to allow her parents to claim her tuition credits like the rest of the family did and didn’t let anyone see her tax returns.

  As the pressure mounted, Jennifer fell back into some of her old high school habits, including self-harm. For this, she would use knives taken from her kitchen, preferring serrated instruments, she said. Although the incisions were never very deep, they were painful. She pressed down horizontally, hard enough to “feel release” and cause a trickle of blood. Unlike so many other parts of her life, she shared the details of this behaviour with the people around her, including Felix. It was her badge of honour. When questioned by police, she explained how it helped “relieve inner pain.” Jennifer later explained to a police officer: “When I lose control, the only thing I can control is what I feel.” But she passed off her self-harming as “embarrassing.”

  She told another police officer the reason for her cutting was distraction. “I was able to feel physical pain, so I didn’t have to think about other pains in my life,” she said. After she was arrested, she wrote to Daniel about her feelings toward herself, those around her, and the act of cutting: “Everyone needs to be wanted and wants to be needed,” she wrote, adding that everyone preferred to believe she was an angel and “perfect.” “They saw the cuts and bruises,” she said, “but [not] one person clued into my self-hatred.”

  “Self-harm is usually a way of coping with or expressing overwhelming emotional distress,” states the United Kingdom’s National Health Service website. “Sometimes when people self-harm, they feel on some level that they intend to die. Over half of people who die by suicide have a history of self-harm. However, the intention is more often to punish themselves, express their distress, or relieve unbearable tension. Sometimes the reason is a mixture of both. Self-harm can also be a cry for help.”

  The intensity with which Jennifer was living her life, always having to be on her toes, ready to either create a new lie or conjure up old ones, found its way into her behaviour in other ways, as well. As her general happiness faded, her determination to succeed at piano morphed into an intensity that worried at least one of her music instructors. Fernando Baldassini, who taught Jennifer music theory, history, and harmony from an early age, recalls her musical ability and determined character as a child and young teenager. “She was one hell of a pianist,” he says. “She won scholarships at school and many thousands of dollars as a result. She was amazing. She wanted a degree in piano so she could do something with it. She could have met any goals she wanted.” He says he saw qualities in her he’d rarely witnessed in his female students. Years before, Jennifer had started working for the conservatory as a judge’s assistant during the annual festival at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus. “She would name the kids as they walked up. She took this role very seriously,” he adds. “I remember the way she walked, with long determined strides…. She was very professional and always focused, even in this atmosphere.”

  Jennifer always loved playing piano. But as she grew older, the joy seemed to seep from her, not only in her mannerisms but in the way she approached her piano playing. Baldassini noticed that her rigidity intensified. He says by the end of her lessons with him, she appeared to have lost much of her zest for the piano and seemed to
be going through the motions, something he’d never seen in her when she was younger.

  “She didn’t show much emotion and, as she got older, she got more stern and strict,” Baldassini recalls. “To me it looked as though she developed a chip on her shoulder. By the end, she wouldn’t engage in eye contact with me and seemed to be saying to me, ‘Okay, teach me,’ then when it was complete, ‘Okay, thanks. I’m off.’”

  At home, Jennifer faced feelings of jealousy and abandonment toward her brother. Felix explains their strong bond, noting that growing up, the two were “very, very close” and “as tight as can be.” He adds that he considered himself, not only her friend, but also her protector. The pair talked about intimate parts of their lives they never shared with anyone else. Both Jennifer and Felix mentioned their “pact” — should their parents ever split, they both said they would go with their mother. This is how Felix describes one particularly memorable conversation between the pair: “I once asked my sister what her plans were for the future because clearly my parents weren’t okay with my sister going out with Daniel, so I asked my sister if she was waiting for my parents to die and then get married with him. She didn’t really say anything. She said that she loved him and … how … your parents raise you, and they’re there for you a lot, but at the end of the day, your parents eventually pass away before you do, so she wanted to find someone she could grow old with….”

  Although Jennifer felt a similar strong bond with Felix, she also talked about how she resented the way her parents treated him. In the Pan home, as in most traditional homes, there remained strict gender roles. As such, Jennifer explained how Felix always seemed to benefit from a separate set of rules. While Jennifer was expected to engage in the activities her father deemed important, Felix was able to forge a semblance of his own path, she said. He went to camp, played team sports like soccer, and took abacus, an ancient Asian form of calculation and accounting. These were all things she was never able to do. Felix was also able to go away to university, a liberty Jennifer said she was never encouraged to strive for. Felix also had a 10:00 p.m. curfew, while Jennifer’s was 9:00. And while Felix explained that he was allowed to engage in these activities because he took the initiative, simply asking his parents if he could, Jennifer saw it as a double standard, in part because he was male.

  Her complaints stretched beyond childhood. Felix was also able to bring his girlfriend around the house, and the couple even lived in the same residence at university. As the years passed and the in-fighting at the Pan home seemed to grow, Felix often just left, preferring his girlfriend’s company and leaving Jennifer to deal with the situation on the home front.

  Felix only partially agrees with Jennifer’s assessment, admitting that the division of labour might have been skewed toward the men. He describes his father as “traditional,” and says Hann often had double standards when it came to men and women. But, while Felix admits that his father rarely cooked and didn’t encourage Felix to, he says that was because his father deemed certain chores more appropriate for males. “If no one is home, my mom’s not home, my dad will do the cooking. But if everyone is home, then he won’t. Just like my mom: if no one’s home, she will do the [snow] shovelling, but on a regular basis she won’t.” He says his father raised him and Jennifer in this fashion as a means to an end — namely, to prepare his children for marriage. “My dad is a little old school by the fact that he doesn’t cook, clean. He’ll do it when he has to, but he doesn’t like it. He tells me, ‘That’s the girls’ job. The girl does that, but you never let the girl do hard [strenuous] work.’ She’ll never have to paint the house.” However, when it’s implied that his father was the “boss” of the house, Felix disagrees, saying this was only the impression. “No, my mom was the boss of the family. My dad just goes to work, comes home, and does whatever,” he says.

  Bich also took exception to her husband’s views on housework. Jennifer said that especially after Felix left the house to attend Hamilton’s McMaster University, she was often left to referee her parents’ “bickering,” which, she said, often revolved around domestic issues. “I missed him [Felix] a lot because we were very close … it put a strain on me because of the dynamics within my family there was a lot of tension between my mother and my father. And that burden went on to [me], and I didn’t have anyone to really share it with, because I didn’t want to burden my brother at school.” She said that while her father, a jack-of-all-trades, was always willing to help other family members in need of assistance, he let chores at home slip. “My mother took on a lot of responsibilities, doing everything,” she said. “Paying the bills, cleaning the house. She was just fed up doing it by herself.”

  But not all fights revolved around household habits. Jennifer said that, after her lies were discovered, it was often her own behaviour that sparked the arguments. “It divided the family … I felt like part of it was my fault. It started with my lies…. The fights between my parents were usually about me, what to do with me, how to get me back on track.”

  As Jennifer’s U of T graduation approached and Hann started questioning her about buying tickets, Jennifer knew she would have to come up with a whopper of a lie to weather the coming storm. And she certainly did. With Daniel’s help, the couple paid $500 for a phony U of T degree, which they purchased on the Internet. But that was only half the battle. “That was a real crunch-time lie,” she said. “Obviously, parents want to go see their kids graduate. My parents started to inquire when and where grad day would be. When would I have my grad pictures taken? How much to order one? At that time I was [trying] to figure out ways to fake it and lie.” In the end, she decided to tell them that because there were so many people graduating at once, families were only able to buy one ticket. And because she didn’t want to choose which parent attended, Jennifer gave her ticket to a classmate. “I told them spillage tickets cost a lot of money, [and I] didn’t want just one parent there, and so I gave it away.”

  “Maybe I can stand outside looking in. Okay by me,” Hann proclaimed. But Jennifer insisted and got her way, explaining that her parents were more likely to accept the lie because the degree had gone a long way toward proving that she had, in fact, graduated. When Jennifer got home from her supposed graduation, Hann requested any photos she had taken at the ceremony. In reply, Jennifer explained her friend had taken all the photos but was on a plane back to Hong Kong. Although Hann seemed resigned that one of his life’s dreams — to witness his daughter walk across that U of T stage and grasp her pharmacy degree — wouldn’t come true, he was still intent on seeing her succeed in the field. He immediately began advising Jennifer on how to best prepare for her eventual career, gaining experience and crafting her résumé to appeal to companies. Her curriculum vitae listed all her skills and abilities. However, there were two significant omissions: there was no mention of attending Ryerson University or her lack of a high school diploma. After sending out the document multiple times, she landed an interview with Walmart, but never got a callback. So instead of getting a real job, she created one.

  Jennifer told her father that she’d been taken on as a volunteer at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), Canada’s foremost hospital for children. Conveniently, this work, supposedly in the blood-testing laboratory, took place on Friday nights and weekends. To her parents, she sold it as an endeavour during which she could do good things while collecting hours. Once her time sheet was full, she said university officials would verify them before she’d be given a practical test to prepare her for her career. This lie turned out to be a bridge too far. For Hann, something wasn’t right — Where was her hospital uniform, scrubs, and swipe key? He might have kept quiet, but coupled with a number of worrying aspects of his daughter’s life, he decided to find out the truth for himself.

  One day as Jennifer was about to leave for work he demanded to drive her downtown and invited Bich to join them. Jennifer protested, but her father was insistent. �
��He noticed it in my behaviour,” she said. “It wasn’t like me to be so dysfunctional, disorganized. My head wasn’t on straight about how I would be able to get into SickKids without actually being an employee there, having [swipe] cards. On the way, I’m pretty much sweating buckets. When we get there, my father instructs my mother to follow me out because I am trying to get out of the car quickly, so I could hide somewhere. I got through the emergency doors. I was just paranoid, so I stayed in the emergency waiting room for a few hours.” And so, just as easily as Jennifer eased into her new reality, she came crashing back down to earth.

  Bright and early the next morning Bich called a “groggy” Topaz and demanded to know where her daughter was. Forgetting that Jennifer was now supposed to be staying with her on weekends, too, Topaz said she wasn’t there. “It started to unravel,” noted Jennifer, now twenty-two. Bich then rang Jennifer and ordered her home immediately.

  When Jennifer arrived home, she saw the fury in Hann’s eyes. “I thought I would be disowned,” she said. Hann initially threatened to kick her out of the house, but Bich quickly put a stop to that. Jennifer said a number of threats were issued at that time by Hann, including one that she said proved she was on the right track: he would disown her. He would hire a private investigator to follow her around to make sure she wasn’t seeing Daniel. In the midst of the hollering, recriminations, and tears, a furious Hann came up with another threat that proved all the more poisonous. “I got mad and I said you have two options,” he later said. “First you stay home and go to school. The second choice is go with Danny Wong and never come back.” He then added what would become an ominous premonition: “If not, you’ll have to wait until I’m dead.”

  Hann later contended that he meant none of these statements and only said them in a frenzied state. “It was in anger that I made the statement. I could not accept the fact that this person [Daniel] helped my daughter not attend school for four years. This does not mean I would have not cared about my children. All parents have deep affection for their children. When mistakes were made, I showed my anger, but she is my daughter; I do not always have anger.”