A Daughter's Deadly Deception

by Jeremy Grimaldi

  “Were you serious? Did you go and have someone plan something out for yourself?” she asked him. “And he had said, well, he’d actually got in a physical altercation with his father, which surprised me.” It was at this point she said that Andrew handed the phone over to his roommate, saying, “You know who could help us … Ric.” After a brief conversation about the struggles she faced, which he sympathized with, she said the pair organized a time to meet near her piano school in Scarborough. It only dawned on her what she was getting involved in when she first saw him. “My first reaction was wow, this guy looks really gothic…. He was wearing a hat, black nail polish. His eyes were always kind of shifty. He looked … like one of those really serious gangsters in movies,” she said. “I was never opened to any of this, and I didn’t think it was real life…. He looked very much like one of those predators you see in the movies and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s the bad guy.’”

  The negative impression didn’t put her off one bit. Instead, Jennifer said the pair then went for bubble tea. It was at this time that Jennifer said she laid out her parameters. First, she said, she wanted her father to be alone, ideally near his workplace. But beyond that she didn’t know much else and needed advice. In response, Ric said the hit would cost $1,300 and that he would need to find a gun. “I don’t have the tools to do the job yet,” she said he told her. “I wanted to see if this guy was for real,” she added, explaining that she was suspicious that Ric might have just been trying to help Andrew get laid. “Or if he was just helping Andrew to boast about something.”

  About a week later, she and Ric met again. By her own admission, Jennifer finally committed herself to the murder. Armed with $1,300 she had allegedly earned teaching piano — the instrument her dad had encouraged her to dedicate her entire youth to — there was no turning back. When asked why she’d given him the money, Jennifer responded without flinching, “To kill my dad.” It was in a local Tim Hortons coffee shop that she handed over the cash and discussed with him how the scheme would be executed. “The plan was going to be that he’d go to my dad’s workplace and shoot him dead in the parking lot,” she said. Before departing, she said Ric asked for another $200, which she gave him, something bank records later confirmed. An inexperienced Jennifer said the pair agreed on a plan, and she gave him a Google map of Hann’s workplace and the area surrounding it. However, she added that Ric told her that, before anything went down, he had to arm himself. “He hadn’t found a gun yet,” she said. “So we hadn’t verified a date and time.” If Jennifer’s version is accurate, the three were engaging in conspiracy to commit murder, punishable by up to fourteen years in prison. It was during this meeting that he unlucky pair was spotted by Jennifer’s uncle.

  After that meeting, Ric all but disappeared, Jennifer said. Although she spoke to him a few more times to see if he had managed to purchase a gun, he eventually stopped answering her phone calls. And when she finally got hold of Andrew to inquire about Ric’s behaviour and ask for her money back, he told her that Ric had moved out and stopped answering his calls, as well. “He just kept making excuses for Ric,” she said. “I realized that Andrew and Ric had ripped me off … I realized it was a sham.”

  Ric’s version of events stands in stark contrast to Jennifer’s. He insists that, after a number of conversations over the phone, the pair met three times; however, he says, it was simply to get to know each other. Ric says he initially had romantic intentions with Jennifer, explaining the bet he and Andrew had to “hook up” with Jennifer. He details a number of stories she told him, including how she graduated with an accounting degree, same as her cousin, Michelle. Jennifer also told him, he says, that she was locked away in her house because her parents were afraid for her safety, considering she had been receiving messages from a jealous ex-girlfriend of her boyfriend. Ric adds that she told him she was “pissed off” about her parents’ rules at home and explained this, along with their meddling, was the only reason she wasn’t able to be with her ex-boyfriend. He denies the existence of any plot, any Google map, and any talk of guns. He does admit she gave him money but says the $200 was so that he could go out with some friends for karaoke.

  Ric says the last time he and Jennifer spoke, she told him she had tried to move out of her house but that her parents found her and brought her back. He says she was screaming mad on the phone before she asked him to kill not only her father but both of her parents. In reply he says, he considered her request “racial profiling,” since he’s a black male. He adds that he then told her to “fuck off,” hung up the phone, and never spoke with her again. That last communication between them took place on July 8, 2010.

  Despite believing Andrew had ripped her off, Jennifer said she remained friends with him and continued to speak with him over the next few months. “We’ve known each other for a long time,” she responded. “Forgive and forget. Money comes, money goes.”

  Around this time, Jennifer’s relationship with Daniel had progressed beyond phone calls and checking in on each other. She started sneaking out of her house to visit him at work, often bringing him and his colleagues breakfast and lunch from McDonald’s. Sometimes the visits lasted ten or fifteen minutes, sometimes longer. Jennifer was also using this time to entice him with sexual pleasure, someone close to the case says.

  And when he didn’t have access to her, he encouraged her to sext him and send him pictures and videos of her in various states of undress. Material later discovered on her cellphones included multiple short videos of her shaved vagina, one of her buttocks while she bent over and spread her cheeks, showing, as police later put it, “very intimate areas,” and bondage pictures with her arms tied behind her back. “I have been in similar positions when you’re dating someone older or someone you don’t feel you deserve, whether they’re saying I’m not going to love you if you don’t put out. You feel that pressure; you put that pressure on yourself. She felt she had to,” says Allison, who knew the couple. “I can totally imagine she would feel she needed to do that stuff in order to keep him interested, and maybe [she] regretted it. If you don’t like yourself, your body is a very easy way to get affection. Of course, he likes me. I know he likes this. I feel very close to him right now. He must love me, he’s making love to me … It’s a really common tool that girls with low self-esteem rely on because at least [the men] are demonstrating their affections.”

  Jennifer and Daniel engaged in sexting, and she sent him what were often sexually suggestive pictures of herself.

  This renewed relationship was an important turning point in Jennifer’s life. Up to this point, she had been lying to every person in her life except Daniel. But that changed. Whether he chose to believe her fabrications because she’d never lied to him in the past remains unknown.

  As time passed, the crank calls and messages received by Daniel (now also on the cellphone that Jennifer had purchased for him) became more bizarre. Jennifer had devised a new plan to leave her house even when her parents were at home. At night, a friend of Daniel’s quietly picked her up and delivered her to the pair’s favourite sushi restaurant so they could have dinner together. After one of these rendezvous, Daniel received the following messages: Doesn’t she ever learn. You didn’t listen to us, she’s going to have to pay.

  When Daniel texted Jennifer later to make sure she was safe, he received the reply: You don’t need to know where she is, we have got her.

  “When I tried to call back to make sure … it was okay, maybe about a half an hour later, there was no answer, so then that’s when I drove by her house to see if she was okay,” he said. “I kept calling her and eventually she picked up and said, ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’”

  Another night after they went out to see a film together he received the following messages: Why are you guys watching a movie, I thought you were just friends? and You shouldn’t be seeing each other like this if you guys are just friends, You should be with your girlfriend.
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br />   On another occasion, he took Jennifer to Dave and Buster’s, an adult arcade, only to receive a message after they left that said: Why would you be walking around there [Dave and Buster’s] with her? Daniel began to notice the messages stopped when they were together and included details no one else could have known. “When I went out with her, there were no messages, no phone calls,” he said. “But as soon as I dropped her off and she went home, probably within ten to fifteen minutes, I started to get messages of what happened when we were together or where we went. It led me to think, is she behind it, or is someone else behind it? Whenever they sent me a message, they’d tell me exactly what we were talking about. It’s as if they were there. But there’s no one around. If it’s not me, then … it’s got to be her.”

  Jennifer, meanwhile, always laid the blame squarely at Katrina’s feet, but Katrina denied sending the messages. Before long, though, the messages got even more threatening — something Jennifer did admit was her doing. One day Daniel received the following message: We’ve sent something to her house. The next time she opens it … Boom! Then a follow-up text arrived that read Bang, Bang. When he called to check in, Jennifer explained she had received a package at her home but that she hadn’t opened it and had given it directly to police (something we know she never did).

  Soon after this incident, Jennifer told Daniel that while she was out on a walk she dropped her phone. She said that the person who had been harassing her had discovered it and was using the information garnered from the phone against her and Daniel in these messages. Jennifer said she then received a text from the person saying Look in your mailbox, we have something for you. In it she found a bag containing her phone and some white residue. Jennifer lied to Daniel again, explaining that the police had analyzed the substance and found it was itching powder. Her lies eventually grew even more outlandish, almost as if she wanted to be caught in them by Daniel. The only problem was that he never called her out. After this incident, she told Daniel the police had grown so worried that investigators were sifting through her mail and following her around. At one point she told him how police conducted a takedown of a man who had tried to swap her water bottle after she got up to go to the bathroom while studying in the library. Eventually, the stories reached a crescendo. Soon after Jennifer said her father chased away five masked Asian teenagers who had repeatedly knocked at her door one night. She told Daniel that she’d received a voice mail one day with muffled screaming, something that made Daniel very nervous. Then she explained how after returning home from a jog, five Asian teenagers had pushed her in her home and raped her in her bedroom, covering her eyes while they performed sex acts on her.

  Allison, Daniel’s associate, says: “Instead of saying ‘Daniel I need you in my life. I need you, I miss you, I feel abandoned,’ she said I’ve been attacked and raped by Chinese gang members. She has told herself I can’t tell the truth because the truth won’t be accepted, so I have to find other ways. She was using his sensitivity, care, and worry for her against him.”

  Jennifer told him that her mother took her to the hospital and that the police were looking into the incident. But when he asked how he could help, she insisted she wanted to deal with it by herself.

  “There was so much controversy in it that I really didn’t know how to take it, but I would rather be safe, right, so I just took her word for it,” he said. “One thing I kept thinking about is that, if there was a sexual assault, it would be all over the news, just like everything else. Some guy just sexually assaulted a woman in the park recently. It was all over the news. But her case wasn’t.” By this point, Daniel didn’t know what to believe. The last thing he wanted to do was accuse her of lying, but he found the details so shocking as to be unbelievable. “I asked her for some sort of proof, like … the blue card or the wristband [you’re given] when you get admitted to the hospital,” he said. “[But] she’d say, ‘My mom got it, and I don’t know whether she kept it.’ When I started to get these phone calls and these messages, I asked, ‘Can I see your phone bill to see?’ and she said I’ll bring it to you next time I see you [but never did]. Because of how long I’ve known her and what we’ve been through together, I believe her. But in terms of seeing any distinctive hard proof of it, I haven’t.”

  Daniel said he believed Jennifer because of her uncanny ability to make those around her believe what she was saying, despite evidence or lack thereof appearing to show otherwise. She was able to conjure up intense emotions at the drop of a hat to manipulate those who loved her. Now, no one was safe from her trickery. “At first, honestly, I thought she just wanted me to get back with her,” Daniel said. “She was seeking [an] attention sort of thing. But when she told me something like that [about the rape] and I heard it in her voice even though I couldn’t see her. It’s not like I could call her parents and confirm whether it happened or not. From then on I told her to just keep reporting it and keep calling and keep the contact with me so I know that she’s okay. After that point … I believed her.”

  Daniel later explained that he thought about going to the police with the issues but was reluctant given his criminal record. Although counterintuitive, the messages and lies resulted in a marked improvement in the pair’s relationship. By this point, Jennifer said they were once again communicating daily.

  28

  Deadly Betrayal

  Jennifer’s version of events as they unfolded was examined, and the jury soundly rejected it. Hence, it will be the Crown’s theory that we will explore from this point on.

  The five months leading up to that terrible night in November were agonizing and terrifying from the outside looking in. The distress was only intensified by the nonchalance with which Jennifer seemed to manage the roles in her life, from doting daughter to loving niece, to caring friend, to calculating, cold-blooded murderer. She seamlessly switched between those roles, simultaneously texting with murderers to plan her parents’ assassination while handing out candy to toddlers at Halloween with her mother. When what Jennifer called her initial plan fell apart — whether because it was rejected or it was just an elaborate rip-off from the beginning — she was left undeterred. Rather than reject the idea and allow it to fade from her mind, she pushed on using her scant resources to find a group of men willing to carry out her scheme.

  Crown lawyers contended that over the next month Jennifer honed her plan to rid herself of her parents. Her instrument of choice was not a knife or a match but her cellphone. At all hours of the day and night, in hushed tones and darkened rooms, she forged ever onward on her path of destruction. All the while, her unwitting parents carried on with their daily tasks and chores, earning money to keep a roof over her head, making her food, and trying to plan for her future.

  During this time, Jennifer didn’t seem moved by the day-to-day machinations of a normal family household in which someone might hate their parents and want to be free of them one day and the next make up and forgive them. Rather, she spent three months planning without ever once, as far as any evidence showed, giving any indication that she had second thoughts about carrying it out. In fact, it appeared the only time she might have felt some remorse was after her mother’s passing, but even that was questionable. Her scheme spanned half of the summer of 2010 and into the autumn, while her parents remained blithely unaware of the doom that was about to shatter their lives. In fact, Hann later remarked that right up until that most awful moment, he thought his family was content, even joyful.

  What made the plot even more unnerving was, as far as we know, there was never anything other than acquiescence from Jennifer toward Hann’s or Bich’s demands — not the slightest outburst of anger or violence, as seen in other murders by young people who find themselves under intense pressure. Jennifer bided her time under the pretense of the good daughter, all the while conniving her way toward her ultimate goal. It was during this summer that the twenty-four-year-old was wracked with feelings of revenge and bitter
alienation that gave way to the most callous and shallow of acts — murder. One can only assume that Jennifer felt all her options had been exhausted. So surreal was the evidence that one might conclude by this point she had either turned wicked or was losing her mind, but both are mere assumptions. It was her love for Daniel and her refusal to give up on their future together that continued to propel her forward. In fact, the adoration of Daniel was the one and only thing Jennifer appeared concerned with throughout much of this time, oblivious to anyone else around her. This apparent detachment from any sort of reality carried on right up until the moment her parents were brutally shot and well beyond the death of her mother.

  At some point during their relationship Daniel certainly was in love with Jennifer. However, after they broke up and he started a new relationship with Katrina, there seemed to be a switch in the impetus behind the pair’s dealings. Daniel tried to keep his distance from Jennifer but was brought back into the fold by her duplicitous ways.

  After entangling himself in Jennifer’s net again, Daniel sought a way out. But it was too late. Jennifer lashed out. This was his chance to be done with her, but for some reason or other it was now Daniel who reached out, reuniting with Jennifer once more and professing his love for her mere days before the killing. The question was: why? Why did Daniel want this crazy scheme to go ahead? Was it for Jennifer’s insurance money? Was it so he wouldn’t lose face in front of his friends? How could Daniel have gone along with this plot?