A Daughter's Deadly Deception

by Jeremy Grimaldi

  As for her decision, she said a choice might have been presented to her, but really there was no option. “I wasn’t leaving,” she said. “There was no choice, because family always comes first.”

  Jennifer was so terrified of the truth getting out that, astonishingly, she lied again. In the face of her screaming parents, Jennifer quickly decided what would be acceptable to admit and what would be a step too far. So she admitted that she had been staying at Daniel’s and that she had been lying about her work at SickKids, but she covered her tracks with regard to her Ryerson education and her failure to graduate from high school. About her fictional U of T career, she said she was doing correspondence, but not actually attending school. This was the first but not the last time she failed to grasp an opportunity to tell the whole truth.

  In one sense, Jennifer had succeeded, for the time being at least. While she was grounded, it was only for two weeks. But this wasn’t just another missed opportunity; it was also the beginning of an even more troubling way forward — half-truths.

  In addition to the grounding, one vital thing was removed from Jennifer’s life — the freedom to come and go as she pleased. This meant that her reasons for leaving the house became a subject of constant inquiry, bar two pre-approved activities: work and piano. Her methods of communication were withdrawn, including her cellphone and laptop. She was also forced to quit her jobs at East Side Mario’s and Boston Pizza (where she had been picking up further shifts alongside Daniel). She said her father claimed that one in the morning (when she would often return home after her shifts) was no time for a young woman to be out, anyway. To his face, she accepted the terms of the agreement, not willing to try to live on her own. But inwardly she was defiant. She continued living in the comfort of her father’s home, but refused to abide by certain rules he set down. At the heart of her defiance was the worry that Daniel might leave her. Jennifer knew this would spell disaster. She imagined herself as Juliet to Daniel’s Romeo, the pair sharing a love that could never be rivalled. It was Daniel who could save her from her own deep-seated melancholy; it was only with him, she believed, that she could ever achieve happiness.

  “I would say she hated herself less around him,” says Allison, an associate of Daniel. “It was his presence and his unconditional love that was calming for her. That’s why she wanted to be around him all the time, because she was incapable of feeling that way herself. She needed external validation.”

  All three surviving members of the Pan family describe this fight as explosive. Bich wept, and Hann screamed at Jennifer. But Felix and Hann both say efforts were taken in the following days to repair the damaged relationship. “They get upset, but it’s one of those things where they’re screaming for a day, everyone’s really upset, but they’re always trying to work it out somehow,” Felix says, explaining how his parents controlled with isolation before eventually bringing the child back into the family fold. He adds that, although Hann and Bich wanted Jennifer to follow tradition, they didn’t want to lose their daughter.

  As part of Jennifer’s punishment, Bich essentially became her daughter’s babysitter, with the pair spending most days at home together, running errands, or helping to care for ill family members. Jennifer was also told to reconnect with her neglected piano training as she buckled down to get her Associate of the Royal Conservatory (ATRC) teacher’s diploma. This comprehensive exam takes months if not years of intensive study and one must have the ability to perform multiple pieces by heart in order to pass. There are further requirements above and beyond that, including history and counterpoint. “I forced her to finish the theory part of the piano lessons in order to get a licence to teach piano,” Hann says.

  Almost immediately, Jennifer was back to her old tricks. Using the excuse that she needed her phone to check if any of the job applications she sent out had borne fruit, Bich capitulated and showed Jennifer where her father had hidden her cellphone. Jennifer used this time to check if Daniel had called and to touch base with him. “I did sneak a phone call here or there,” she said. “She allowed me to have access to it for maybe a minute or two to check any messages … I used it to check who had called me. Obviously, Daniel, being worried, would have sometimes called and I would see missed calls, and I would delete them so that my dad wouldn’t see them.” But when asked if she ever saw Daniel during that punishment, she insisted the pair held off. “I was housebound; my mother was pretty much beside me the whole time,” she said. “[Daniel] was frustrated that he couldn’t come over to his girlfriend’s house when he wanted to. I had shared with him that my parents didn’t think very highly of him and that he was a bad influence on me…. We loved each other and wanted to be with each other, but it was hard considering the restrictions. It put a real big strain on the relationship….”

  Over time, Jennifer regained a measure of freedom. But she squandered it almost immediately. Jennifer was allowed to use her cellphone and computer again in their presence. She also began driving her mother’s car to piano once more, although her parents clocked her mileage. But eventually, talking to Daniel at night, hidden in her room under the cover of darkness, Jennifer let her emotions get the better of her. One night, she said, he called her, said he “needed a friend,” and felt an “emptiness” without her. She agonized over what to do, but the temptation was too great. Jennifer saw Daniel as the only person who could quell the inner frustration consuming her life. The only thing she believed could get her back to reality was her one true love. “I caved,” she said. “I asked a friend to drive me over to his house … in the middle of the night while my parents slept. I had tucked in my blankets to look like I was there.” Afraid she was going to lose Daniel, she initiated a pact that night, which Daniel agreed to. If their relationship ever came to an end, they would remain friends. But fate, once again, conspired against her. It had slipped Jennifer’s mind that her mother’s wallet was still sitting in her room from the day before. And when her mother went to retrieve it early the next morning, she was shocked to find that Jennifer was nowhere to be found.

  Bich called Jennifer immediately and ordered her to come home. It was on the long trip home that Jennifer would devise yet another lie. When she reached 238 Helen Avenue at 7:00 a.m., she explained to her exasperated mother that she had only just slipped out that morning to see Daniel at a nearby café. “I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it, but with my restrictions I did feel very guilty for breaking that,” she said. “For my parents, any girl my age, before marriage, going to a man’s house and sleeping over is something that would look really, really bad on my family.” After this, Hann and Bich began looking at other ways to straighten their daughter out, including sending her to stay with her uncle, who was a teacher in New Brunswick. “[I was to] cut him [Daniel] out of my life completely and to reapply to school and start a brand-new life,” she said. “They even thought about taking me out of province and starting a new life, new school out there.”

  Faced with this possibility and realizing how determined her parents were, Jennifer became even more resolute. After this last transgression, it was her brother who took up the family cause, lashing out at his sister. “I had just found out that they were going out again,” he says about that day. “My parents found out first, and then they were kind of arguing about it. I was upset about everything, so I was asking her why she’s still going out with this guy when it’s upsetting our parents. I was too angry to listen [to her response].”

  “He thought I was tearing the family apart,” Jennifer said about Felix’s feelings that day. “[He didn’t understand] why I couldn’t drop one person for the sake of the family.”

  Dr. Helen Hsu says she often sees this type of behaviour among the young people she works with — situations in which a young female might have been unable to relinquish her relationship because of a poor relationship with her father. “Girls who have close relationships with their fathers are less likely to engage in premar
ital sex and less likely to have abusive relationships,” she says. “If you don’t [have a close relationship with your father], you have someone who feels very vulnerable, displays poor judgment in young love, feeling as though ‘this is the only thing that will ever make me feel like this.’”

  Stuck at home and becoming increasingly frustrated, Jennifer once again picked herself off the ground the only way she knew how — with a new set of falsehoods. In a doomed attempt to win more freedoms, she told her parents that she’d finally landed a job at a pharmacy located in the same Walmart where she had gone for an interview before. Her father, delighted by the news, advised Bich to let her use the car to drive to work.

  To bolster her lie, she told everyone around her about it. “She needed the hours to finish her pharmacy [she told me] and she talked about it a lot,” Felix says. To her cousin, Michelle, she said she was working at the back of the pharmacy, packing, unpacking, and labelling medications. Melissa, from East Side Mario’s, also explains how Jennifer would always talk about how many hours she was putting in at the pharmacy soon after she stopped talking about volunteering at SickKids.

  For a discriminating Hann, though, it seemed too good to be true, and he once again wondered how a girl without a uniform and swipe card could work at a pharmacy. So one day, two weeks after Jennifer started, he approached her and asked if he could see one of her pay slips. She didn’t blink; she made up lies to quell his concerns, saying she’d left her pay stubs in her work locker. The next day, she came home with a forged copy of a Walmart pay slip she’d found online. Jennifer said when he insisted on driving her to work the next day she obliged, this time having scouted the location beforehand. Lucky for her, someone was coming out of the employee entrance when she arrived and she slipped right in. She hid in the Walmart until her father left, and then went to the library. But this still wasn’t enough to placate Hann. When she arrived home, he ordered her onto the computer and demanded to see the payment received from Walmart through her online banking statement.

  Jennifer didn’t let her repeated failure dissuade her and used her newfound tactics once again. She admitted to him that the hours were faked and used the opportunity to get other lies off her chest after explaining to her father that she hadn’t actually graduated from U of T. However, she left out the deceptions regarding high school and attending Ryerson (something he didn’t find out until after the murder). Hann also took this opportunity to confront her about a call he had seen on the family’s call display from Boston Pizza. “[You’re] a liar, a liar, a liar!” he yelled at her. After waffling about the next step to take following her last punishment, Hann quickly decided to take control of the situation. “Right: there’s no way you’re not going back to school,” he told her.

  Jennifer knew that she’d lost her father’s trust forever; Hann never believed outright what his daughter ever told him again. “It made me feel no matter what I told my dad, the trust had been lost,” she said. “It made me feel that I was not the daughter he wanted. That no matter what I would do or what I was willing to do. I was [never] going to gain back that feeling of what we did have between my father and me. The trust was broken and it would never be the same.”

  25

  “House-Arrested”

  After much of the truth had come to light, Hann sat his daughter in front of the computer and together the pair crafted an email to Daniel informing him that she was no longer to see him. Hann was so determined, that he even told Jennifer to blame the decision on him.

  Obliging her wish to repay Daniel close to $3,000 she owed him, Hann cut a cheque on the spot. One investigator later called this little more than a “payoff” that Hann hoped to dispense to Daniel to keep him away from Jennifer. Afterward, Hann and Jennifer applied to three colleges, including a lab technician course at Centennial College for which she was eventually accepted. Hann paid a further $3,000 for her tuition. Jennifer later suggested that at this time the pair had released long pent-up emotions, crying together for the first time.

  After this latest offence, Jennifer’s two-week punishment, during which she was not to leave the house, was made permanent. Jennifer felt like a broken woman, and her excuses had worn so thin that even her mother had lost faith in her. “My mom was so disappointed. She had tried in so many ways and [had] given me so many chances. And I had blown them all. I still loved her, she still loved me, but she just had no more words and no more advice to give me.” If there was any point when Jennifer’s grip on reality started to loosen, this was the time. The happy mask that had been so firmly fixed to her face for all those years finally slipped. She felt defeated and her solemn mood began to show in her behaviour. Jennifer could no longer reach Daniel on a regular basis and her immediate family was at the end of their wits with her presence.

  “I felt unwanted. I felt unlovable, unworthy,” she said. “No matter what I do, [my father] won’t accept it, no matter how hard I try, he won’t accept it. It was a common theme in my life. That no matter how hard I tried when I was doing the right thing … sometimes doing the wrong thing was the same repercussions or sometimes it gave me more ease.” As the days passed, Jennifer felt as though she was under house arrest.

  Her father, who had specifically rescinded her ban from using the car to help her get a leg up at work, decided she was unworthy of any trust. “I said, ‘From now on you have no right to use the car, and you stay home,’ ” Hann says. “There was no more trust in me, and I also wanted my daughter to study and go back to school.”

  “It was hard to be home because I didn’t have any more time for myself. It was so much expectation to go back to school, or always being watched by somebody…. Bedtimes being watched, surprise checks on my phone to see if I was calling Daniel or anybody, even the house phone display was being checked to see if anyone was calling that was suspicious. Everything was double-, triple-, quadruple-checked.

  “I had no room to breathe, everything I felt was just squeezing down upon me,” she continued, explaining how the monitoring became too much for her. The messages Jennifer’s friends were seeing her post on Facebook during this time were also worrying. “Living in my house is like living under house arrest,” she wrote, according to one friend. “No one person knows everything about me, and no two people put together knows everything about me … I like being a mystery.”

  Friends explain that, around this time, Jennifer started to convey, both through actions and words, the extent of the situation she was living under and how it was making her feel. This was followed by countless efforts by those around her to encourage her to move out. “It’s not an option to leave my house,” she told them. “I felt I was still needed in my house and I would do whatever it took to keep the family face.”

  The stress she was under was palpable for her piano teacher, Fernando Baldassini, after Jennifer told him that although her cousin, Michelle, was allowed to have a boyfriend, she wasn’t. “I told her she should go out on her own and that she can’t have it both ways,” he says. But Jennifer replied that moving out was not an option. And although she would later say that she chose not to move out due to her dedication to the family, Fernando says he believed Jennifer didn’t want to lose all the comforts of home. He also got the impression that she had doubts about whether she could make it on her own.

  Jennifer bolstered her story to Fernando with details we now know to be untrue. “She said her dad was following her around. She said she couldn’t go out without having him follow her and not refusing to believe where she was.”

  Her friend, Melissa, also confronted her about her situation, repeatedly asking why she continued to live in her home if life was so difficult for her there. “When I asked her ‘Why don’t you just move out?’” she said, ‘If I leave, I can’t just come back. I’d be cutting ties, so there’s no changing my mind.’”

  Adrian, Jennifer’s ex-boyfriend and one of her closest companions over the years, who was attendin
g McMaster University with Felix, says he also saw through her facade. He was worried, so he gathered together a group of friends to discuss her behaviour and what appeared to be an increasing number of lies. “A number of things weren’t fitting together in respect to work and her job,” he says. “We were all curious and asking questions.” But when he pressed her for answers, she told him she didn’t want to talk about it or, as Jennifer would put it, she was constantly “changing topics” when friends asked her for details. “The topic in this case was Why don’t you move out?” he says, referring to the “intervention.”

  “She did not like the restrictions and felt like she was being treated like she was still in high school,” Adrian adds. [We said to her,] ‘If things are that bad, you can just move out. We can probably help you find an apartment.’ But she was worried about how it would affect her relationship with her parents. She had to support her parents.” As to what Jennifer was doing during this time in her life, he says he recalls playing plenty of Scrabble. “I remember trying to distract her all the time. Just trying to be a good friend.”

  There were others who tried to intervene. Even Daniel stepped in, begging her to escape what he later called her “hellhole.” He asked her to move out with him to his family’s former home in Scarborough where his aunt and grandmother lived. But once more Jennifer refused. “I needed my family to be around me,” she said. “I wanted them to accept me. I didn’t want to live alone. I wanted to be a part of the family. I’ve always been a pillar of the family, when I was younger, and my family was pretty much all I really knew. I would also be ashamed if I moved out. You were expected to live in your house with your family until you’re married.”