A Daughter's Deadly Deception

by Jeremy Grimaldi

  We know that Jennifer suffered from anxiety and learned to cover it with her “Happy Mask” — at first for the outside world and later for her family. The known facts suggest that from the beginning, from earliest infancy, Jennifer might have felt it was all or nothing — her parents’ approval or she was gone.

  If Jennifer had had the foundation of a solid sense of self, she likely could have withstood her parent’s criticism, and for a while she did, as long as she believed she was capable of living up to what her parents wanted. She took it constructively and tried harder. But people who knew Jennifer in elementary school say that her academics, while among the best, were not the very best. While she had friends, Jennifer was described as “cold” and “driven.” It reportedly upset Jennifer deeply that she was not awarded any significant prize at the end of grade eight. That unexpected outcome overturned her world. No matter that she had worked so hard; she was not sufficiently rewarded or recognized. Her intense efforts failed to result in prizes that would gratify her parents and validate her personhood.

  By grade nine in high school, with stiffer competition, Jennifer realized she did not have what it took to get that very top mark. Many students, faced with the prospect of trying and failing, decide that it is better not to try so that they can console themselves with the thought that if they had tried they would have succeeded. Better to abstain than to risk trying and failing. Consistent with her developmental age and stage, Jennifer turned attention to her peers, now that she had lost the motivation for all-consuming study. She spent time socializing instead. In grade nine, Jennifer began her string of lies. Having earlier conceded the right to create her own sense of herself and given it over to her parents, Jennifer next lost the identity that they had created for her. Lacking a sense of who she was to fall back on when she realized she was not going to be the girl her parents wanted her to be, Jennifer had nothing in its place. She would have been primed to fall hard for someone and to see that new person as everything for her, filling the empty spaces where her self-esteem and sense of personal identity should have been.

  It was not long after this that Jennifer met Daniel. His rescue of her during her asthma attack put Daniel in the place of a surrogate mother for Jennifer: a life-giver and saviour of her body and soul. She believed her life depended on him, just as an infant’s does on its first caretaker. He had soothed and calmed her breathing, the stuff of life itself, and stabilized her body the way a mother calms an infant. Daniel was simply with her, an attentive presence. It might be that he became Jennifer’s primary attachment figure: the person she believed most able and likely to protect her in times of danger, to look out for and care about her, so that she transferred that feeling from her parents to him. With Daniel around, Bich might have become replaceable for Jennifer — perhaps eventually expendable. It seems that Daniel became the repository of Jennifer’s sense of herself once the identity her parents had created for her was shattered. Jennifer might have been starved for someone to pay that kind of close attention to her. Much later, Jennifer could spend hours on the phone with Daniel while they both lay in bed in their separate homes, just listening to his breathing. This suggests the possibility that when she was very little, that kind of connection through silent, attentive presence might not have been forthcoming from her busy parents, that during those foundational early years, there might have been repeated times when Jennifer felt alone, fearful as children can be, and her parents were busy elsewhere and not available to her. Bich likely was busy with housework; Hann likely considered that kind of thing woman’s work.

  Jennifer also loved her stuffed toys: she and Daniel talked about them as if they were real, even in her twenties. Jennifer shared that, as a child, she felt affectionate and nurturing to Felix, who was three years younger. When in elementary school, she enjoyed helping the teachers by looking out for the younger children. These are nurturing activities and can sometimes represent the wish that a person had enjoyed that kind of care and attention for oneself. Jennifer’s stuffed toys appear to have served as “transitional objects.” These are things that young children become attached to, which offer comfort when parents are not available. They hug their bunnies or their blankets to feel safe when uneasy. As the child grows up and matures, that feeling of safety moves from the transitional object to inside themselves. The successful child can comfort herself and learns to feel safe on her own — that she can handle being alone. She no longer needs her mother or her toy to protect her. She knows that she herself has what it takes.

  It seems that Jennifer did not make that transition and failed to develop the ability to soothe herself. She continued to rely on her stuffed toys, even as an adult, giving them names and talking to Daniel about them. This fits with the baby talk she and Daniel indulged in together for hours at a time. With Daniel, Jennifer might try to elicit the kind of attention an attentive parent would give to an infant to calm childish, unnamed fears. As with an idealized parent, Jennifer might have come to believe that Daniel’s purpose was to be there and take care of her. Little children do not recognize that their parents have needs of their own. They believe parents should be right there whenever they want them and make everything better. Otherwise, the children can become enraged. This is another part of infancy that Jennifer does not seem to have outgrown but appears to have projected onto Daniel: that she should be the girlfriend who was good enough for him as she tried to be good for her parents, and that Daniel should recognize her value, be committed to her protection, and fulfill her wishes the way every infant believes a parent should do, leading to the inevitable disillusionment when the parent is not omnipresent and omnipotent. Jennifer stated that Daniel could make her calm, and that she needed him in order to be calm. He, on the other hand, talked about walking on eggshells around her, always being worried about her feelings. It sounds as if he monitored Jennifer’s emotional state. Her devotion to Daniel might have derived, at least in part, from his ability and willingness to manage her feelings for her.

  My impression is that Jennifer was vulnerable. She could be angry, she could be cold and calculating, but she could not soothe and calm herself. Her interior world seems to have been in a turmoil of anxiety. Jennifer needed someone else to regulate her feelings. Indications are that person was Daniel. The kind of behaviour that is attributed to Jennifer with her parents when she was younger is sometimes associated with disorganized attachment. The attachment system is a relationship between two people, originating when one is a vulnerable infant who could not survive on her own, and the other is older, usually a parent, who is inclined to want to keep that infant alive and therefore protects and nurtures her. In humans, when that infant realizes the protective figure takes the job seriously, keeps her safe, fed, and loved, the infant becomes securely attached. If instead the infant experiences that sometimes that figure is not around, is not dependable, wanders off or is too busy, lets her get hungry, cold, or in danger, that infant becomes insecurely attached. Such an infant puts effort into developing a way of handling things alone or clings close to parents, trying to be one with them so that they will not forget about her. Either way the infant develops organized strategies for coping.

  It seems that, when she was younger, Jennifer focused on her parents, not herself, trying to give them what they wanted from her. She existed in their sphere of influence and seems to have been distracted or even prevented from developing her own personality and style, likes and dislikes. But at the same time, Hann and Bich Pan are described as having been critical, dismissive, and rejecting of Jennifer, teaching her that other things such as academic achievement and superiority in individual activities were far more valuable than anything else that might have interested Jennifer — more important than friendships or relationships, for example. Jennifer’s parents wanted her close and paid close attention to what she was doing, but at the same time she felt they rejected her as “not good enough” — pulled her in, pushed her away. This type of experienc
e tends to disrupt a child’s ability to develop a coherent style of relationship, due to the inherent contradiction: “disorganized.” Often, it leaves the child, and later the adult, likely to have confused, unsatisfactory relationships.

  When Jennifer met Daniel in grade ten, after the disappointments of grade eight and the beginning forgeries of grade nine, it was within the context of ditching her old routines and old identity that her parents had crafted for her. She had seen that focusing exclusively on hard work had not led her to something satisfying, so she was open to change and experimentation. Jennifer was spending time with friends and had a casual boyfriend, but that changed when Daniel “saved her life.” Here was someone she could give her all to, turn toward, pleasing him the way she had tried to please her parents. Here was someone she might have hoped would give her the affectionate, dependable attention she craved. With Daniel, Jennifer was surrounded by marijuana and eventually got into sex and good times. The Happy Face mask she had previously shown to the world outside the family, she now showed to her parents. They did not know what she was doing or feeling. It was only with Daniel that Jennifer could relax — and she stated that she needed him in order to relax. Otherwise, during those “university” years, Jennifer drove herself to create the world of lies and to document the false life she presented to her parents, to prove to them that she was the daughter they wanted when, sadly, she knew she was not.

  Having grown up with “acceptable pretense,” described as putting on a show for the sake of appearances, people acting as if something was true while knowing that it wasn’t, Jennifer pushed that concept further. She seems to have developed the ability to decide that she would behave as if something that she knew to be true simply did not exist. To that end, she decided that she simply “refused to know” that Daniel was dealing drugs, or at least that is what she told the police. She knew, in other words, but was able to repress that information so thoroughly when she wanted to, that she could react as if she really did not know. There are indications that Jennifer helped Daniel distribute his drugs. But with this type of thinking, there would be moments when she might really feel that she did not know. This kind of behaviour was demonstrated later, under questioning by the police, when Jennifer was so shocked by the insinuation that she was lying, that her spontaneous body language made the officer apologetic for the suggestion. Of course, at the time Jennifer really was lying. Perhaps she did not let herself know in that moment. She convinced herself of her victimization and repressed acknowledging to herself her perpetrator status.

  Some people have described Jennifer as a consummate actor. I suggest an alternative possibility that she was not acting all the time: sometimes, yes, but not always. She had divided her thinking, had “split” her mind, and one part did not know what was going on in the other. This is a defence mechanism when things are too hard to handle. This type of “splitting” conceivably might allow the person to feel and act innocent when they are guilty. Once someone develops this type of coping, they can use it for many things in daily life to bolster self-esteem and feel good about themselves. They can use it to keep away thoughts about the bad things in their life done by others or by themselves. It might be that this helped Jennifer deal with the burden of her snowballing lies during what her parents thought were her university years. On some level she might have believed those lies, made herself not think about or forget the distasteful truths. She admitted to the police that she half or sometimes fully believed in her fantasies. As she said, Jennifer did not think about the future, or how it would all work out in the end. She took things day by day, moment by moment. This kind of defence mechanism is considered “primitive” because it cannot work over the long term. Reality comes crashing in sooner or later.

  I have to wonder about the nature of the relationship between Jennifer and Daniel. She said that not even Daniel knew everything about her. At the end, she spun out quite a web of deceit in order to try to get Daniel away from his new girlfriend, Katrina, who thought that Daniel used humour to mask what he was really feeling. Were Jennifer and Daniel really open with each other? How emotionally intimate was the relationship, really? They spent hours baby-talking on the phone. That kind of conversation would not likely get very deep or thoughtful. They seem to have related on the level of little children seeking comfort at bedtime. And there was sex. Police have suggested that Daniel was in the relationship for the money that he got from Jennifer, but for him there was also her adoration and Jennifer’s wish to be what he wanted. She would be the “best” girlfriend for him, just as when younger she wanted to be the “best” daughter for her parents. Daniel was increasingly into a criminal element. Did Jennifer think she would enhance her attractiveness to him by becoming a gun moll? A Mata Hari? A master criminal? A murderer? Would that give Jennifer street cred with her man?

  On her side, the attraction might have been that sense of almost maternal acceptance and nurturance from Daniel — his close attention to her moods and feelings, his regulation of her anxiety. These suggest a wish to repair a maternal bond gone astray. If Daniel was a type of replacement for her mother, her mother might have felt disposable to Jennifer. It seems that Jennifer withdrew her focus from her family and gave up the hope of having her parents meet her emotional needs — that she poured out all that need onto Daniel.

  Daniel urged Jennifer to leave her parents and move in with him, but she refused. Daniel would live with her but would not, at least at that time, marry her. Perhaps she could not bring shame on herself and on her family by living common law. Friends attempted an “intervention,” believing that the restrictions her parents placed on Jennifer were draconian and she should leave them. They offered to help Jennifer find a place of her own. But she would not. Was it because she simply wanted the creature comforts of her family home, the middle-class existence her parents had worked so hard to provide? I think not. By this point, someone with this type of upbringing would most likely have incorporated the values of her family, and Jennifer’s sense of personal esteem likely by now was dependent on public success, presenting a “correct” image to the outside world. She would not be likely to settle for living in a place that she would consider substandard, or in a public relationship that lacked social status. Status was non-negotiable. In a real sense she had already lost her family. She had “killed” their image of the kind of daughter that they had, and the kind of family that they were, but only in private. If she moved out, she said, she “would lose everything that ever meant anything to me, my family, my mother, my father, and my brother” because it would become a public shame. Jennifer knew that she could not survive on her own. Alone, she did not feel real to herself. She felt empty, “nothing.”

  The extreme of this was demonstrated during police interrogation. Jennifer shook violently, visibly, when questioned, and also when alone. She asked for someone to come in with her whenever the investigating detective stepped out. At first she was accommodated, but not later, when suspicion against her was gaining momentum. Jennifer had a “meltdown.” She paced, “manically” stroked her hair, rambled to herself, and became dizzy, needing to lean on something to keep her balance. At times, she took the fetal position, rocked, covered her face, and wept. Many guilty people would not be able to rise to the occasion under police interrogation. But Jennifer’s reaction was extreme. Under pressure, on her own, it seems that there was nothing inside her to fall back on. Having felt rejected and abandoned by her family, Jennifer next was rejected by Daniel when he took up with someone else. Even worse, Jennifer was losing the competition to another woman. Losing was intolerable for Jennifer. She had to win with Daniel, just as she had to win those competitions and prizes for her parents. Sometimes a suicide attempt such as Jennifer alluded to can be a call to activate the attachment system, to bring running that person who is supposed to care, to get them to demonstrate their concern and bring them close. If Jennifer actually did self-harm (she had scars) and considered suicide when younge
r (she told Felix), it might have been in the service of trying to get her family to show affection to her and about the “real” Jennifer. Her fabrications to Daniel about phone calls, texts, threats, rape, et cetera, fantastic as they were, might have similarly been intended to activate Daniel’s attachment and pull Daniel back to her — and they were partially successful.

  Jennifer used what her father had nourished in her, that dedication and perseverance, to disrupt Daniel and his new girlfriend. Daniel got back in touch, involved, to ensure Jennifer’s safety. She successfully activated the attachment system. For Jennifer, the murder plot provided another reason for Daniel to stay in contact. She had to hook him and keep him. With a shared murder between them, Daniel would not be likely to abandon Jennifer, even if he wanted to. She presented the idea to Daniel in a five-hour phone conversation followed by his silence and then massive communication attempts from her to him. Jennifer bombarded Daniel with calls and texts, suggesting that he needed persuading.

  Eight days prior to the murder, Jennifer was engaging in endless baby talk with Daniel. On the day before the original date set for the home invasion, he confessed his love for Katrina. Why would he bring up this potentially destabilizing news at just the point when he and Jennifer most needed to rely on each other? When the transcript of those texts is read, it seems as if Daniel is naive about Jennifer’s motives, and innocently trusts in the goodness of her character. My interpretation is that the intensity of the planning made him feel close to Jennifer; that he was performing the murder for her benefit — a gift for an important friend. I suggest that he thought he was doing so much for her, that Jennifer should be able to do something for him: to recognize and acknowledge him as a true friend and be happy for him about his feelings for Katrina. This reveals Daniel’s naïveté. His function to Jennifer was to provide her with unconditional love, not to develop his own desires and pursue them. Jennifer might have felt that she was replaceable to Daniel and that she was not going to be missed. Again, she did not exist. She existed only in the image that someone else had of her. Jennifer needed to be first and constantly on someone’s mind in order to keep her reassured that she was real, hence the need for constant texting and contact with Daniel.