A Daughter's Deadly Deception
Page 37
When Daniel told Jennifer that he loved Katrina, Jennifer asked, “Who will protect me from ‘them’ if you’re not in the picture?” Jennifer knew there was no “them,” having fabricated “them” herself. But my impression is that Jennifer really did not feel safe and had decided on Daniel as her protector from her chronic fear of annihilation, her fear of ego death — the loss of a workable image of herself. Possibly, when Jennifer decided to continue with the murder plot even after knowing about Daniel’s affection for Katrina, the plot actually became just for her own sake, as she had claimed all along. Perhaps at that point Jennifer felt she could manage alone in the family home, with her parents gone and Daniel with someone else, temporarily. She probably assumed she would get Daniel back.
With Daniel’s admission that he loved Katrina, Jennifer, who to that point had pretended acceptance of their relationship, texted Daniel: “I’m sorry for never being good enough.” This is exactly what she said about her family. Jennifer saw herself as “not good enough” for them and then for Daniel. Rejection of this sort was not something Jennifer could accept and move on from. She seems to have responded to perceived rejection by focusing her considerable effort and skill into trying to change reality into what she wanted it to be, even if that meant getting rid of people who did not see things that way. She congratulated Daniel (and Katrina) for “winning” — and hinted at suicide, likely another ploy to activate his attachment to her.
Her testimony that the intended plan was for the murderers to kill her, not her parents, a kind of suicide, was true in a way. With her parents gone, so also would go the vision of the daughter that her parents had wanted. It might have seemed a necessary sacrifice so that Jennifer could “come out” as a different kind of person. On one level, killing her parents was the ultimate way to protect them from the shame of her failure: they would never know how far down she had gone and the world would never know that the family was not a smooth-functioning unit of hard-working high achievers. In a way, murder would have fulfilled her cultural responsibility to take care of her parents. They would die with some remaining shred of belief in her and would not have to face the shame of social exposure when Jennifer did not return to school as they expected. In a way, she tried to take ultimate care of them, killing them to remove them from a life that would not be to their liking. Her mother, at least, did not live to witness public exposure and shame, something her father and brother now have to deal with.
Then there is the factor of “ultimate” winning. Patricide cannot be topped for extremes. This dramatic event could have been Jennifer’s Olympics, demonstrating the stuff that she was made of and her determination to win. Had she developed Hann’s stubbornness and rigidity? Was Jennifer, after all, faithful to her father — internalizing the characteristics of determination and persistence that he wanted her to have? With the murders, Jennifer would prove to herself and would show those who knew, such as Daniel, how exceptional she really was. The murders would be proof of her mettle, the most forceful display. For Daniel, it would show him how much he meant to her, and how “ultimate” a person she was: someone of extreme value that he should want to be with. If tiger parenting claims that the one who shows the most drama wins in the family competition, then that was Jennifer, with this ultimate play. She showed herself and others that she was not a “loser,” that she was capable of going to much greater extremes than anyone else to win: her father’s girl, after all.
One detail from the murder enactment is striking. Jennifer had no final words for her parents. Helpless, with guns pointed at them, Jennifer could have told her parents off with anger and impunity. She could have had the final word. She could have tried to explain herself or apologized. But there was nothing. She kept up the pretense that she was also a victim of the home invasion. This was an opportunity that I do not think Jennifer would have passed up if revenge had been her primary motive. I believe Jennifer really wanted her parents to die thinking well of her. She wanted to preserve what she could for them of the illusion that she was a good daughter and that they were a good family together. Jennifer also wanted to preserve it for herself, giving herself memories that she would revisit to think well of herself.
With the type of disorganized attachment that I think Jennifer might have had, with the ability to split off and repress from her awareness what was really going on, it might be that Jennifer was already focused in her head on her fantasies for what her life was going to be, how she was going to think about herself, and that the real-life flesh and blood of her parents held little meaning for her. Was this inborn in Jennifer? As I hope to have made clear, I think not. In my view, Jennifer did not have the type of upbringing that she needed to help her learn to cope with her vulnerabilities. It was not a good fit. She made, as they say, bad choices. Those kinds of choices and experiences take root within a person and become who they are. They are not easy to change, sometimes impossible to change. They can become a personality disorder, but that is not an excuse for murder.
Bibliographic References
Barlow, D.H. et al. Abnormal Psychology: An Integrative Approach. 2nd ed. Toronto: Nelson Education, 2009.
Berling, Judith A. “Confucianism.” Focus on Asian Studies 2, no. 1 (Fall 1982).
Chao, Ruth, and Vivian Tseng. “Parenting of Asians.” In Handbook of Parenting: Volume 4, Social Conditions and Applied Parenting. 2nd ed. Ed. Marc H. Bornstein. Mahweh, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.
“Children and Lying.” The Truth About Deception website: www.truthaboutdeception.com/lying-and-deception/children-and-lying.html. Accessed in 2015.
Choi, Yoonsun et al. “Is Asian American Parenting Controlling and Harsh? Empirical Testing of Relationships Between Korean American and Western Parenting Measures.” Asian American Journal of Psychology 4, no. 1 (March 2013).
Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.
Lam, Andrew. “The Education of a Vietnamese American Writer.” The Huffington Post, January 29, 2013.
Park, Julie. “On Tiger Moms.” The Point (2012). Accessed at https://thepointmag.com/2012/examined-life/on-tiger-moms.
Reappropriate.com. “Let’s Talk About On-Campus Depression and Suicide.” (May 9, 2014). Accessed at http://reappropriate.co/2014/05/today-is-aapimentalhealth-awareness-day-remembering-jiwon-lee-kevin-lee-andrew-sun-others-apahm2014.
Tan, Amy. The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. New York: Putnam, 2003.
Truthaboutdeception.com.
Author’s Note
I have tried with this book to write a story that involves several people’s lives. That was difficult largely because only a handful of people involved or associated with the case directly chose to share their stories with me. Despite being a public institution, the Crown — a very political office — and its representatives rejected my repeated overtures to speak, missing out, in my humble opinion, on an ideal opportunity to educate Canadians about their very own public justice system. With this book, my goal was not scandalize, vilify or shame those convicted. In fact, I did my best to speak about the people they truly were outside of this one very negative event. As such, I attempted to approach this tale not in the traditional sense — delineating between right and wrong, reviling some and sanctifying others. This is a story really about humans making mistakes, some for the right reasons, some for the wrong.
Having said all that, I do realize the information in this book, especially regarding ethnicities and their values and belief systems, is understandably a very sensitive subject and can be taken in many ways. So, in short, I just want to say: I come in peace. I’ve done my best to keep my personality out of this story, but for anyone interested, I felt it important to say that I consider myself a traditionalist and raise my children as such, much like my parents raised me. It wasn’t my purpose to cast aspersions on either culture or tradition — two abstracts I have great respect for. Nor was I attempting to publish salacious de
tails about people’s private lives. My wish was to give an accurate account and educate people about the relationship between parents and children. It was intended as a means to an end; what that is exactly I’m not quite sure — perhaps just a better understanding of the world we live in and our fellow man, as clichéd as that sounds.
On a more personal level, I wrote the book because I wanted to share a tale of love gone so horribly wrong — a story of relationships and family, of fathers, mothers, and children, wives, husbands, lovers, and friends. It was a venture intended to peer deeper into a tangled saga, many of the details and nuances of which I believed were lost in the story’s original telling. This book was about Bich-Ha Pan. It was also about Hann, Felix, and Jennifer Pan. But that one night’s violence spread far beyond that family alone, causing heartbreak in many other homes. Mothers and fathers lost their sons; siblings their brothers, and children their fathers, now in jail serving twenty-five-year sentences. Eric Carty, Lenford Crawford, Daniel Wong, and David Mylvaganam are loved, and their presence in the lives of family and friends will also be missed. The book is also about them and should anyone in this book ever choose to speak, I would welcome those conversations.
My retelling of this tragic crime might dredge up bad memories for those involved. For that I apologize. I hope some good comes from it, and that more than one line of communication between parents and children is opened as a result.
I should point out, too, that because of the nature of this crime, a number of the names in this book have been altered to protect people’s identities.
I have one more story to tell, one that was far less publicized. Up until April 2016, I had never been to 238 Helen Avenue. But I knew — although there was very little chance he’d speak — that I had to meet Hann Pan eventually. I wasn’t successful. Walking up to the home that he and Bich had worked so much of their lives to buy, I first noticed its decrepit appearance — the two wooden pillars at the front and the two false windows up top were rotting.
Knowing how much violence had been brought to bear on this unsuspecting family gave the home an eerie feel. Having been immersed in what occurred there for much of the past two years left me emotional, and I shivered as I strode up. As I got closer, the feeling became more intense, growing almost too much to handle. My stomach churned, much like Jennifer’s might have done in the police station. As a matter of fact, my stomach turns as I write this. Perhaps the most frightening detail lying before me was the front door’s sheer curtains that blocked my view of the inside of the home my eyes strained to witness. The lower centre portion of one curtain was stained black and permanently wrenched to the side. I imagined a frightened Hann repeatedly peeling it back to see who was at the door, whether journalists, television cameras, or well-wishers. When no one answered my knocking, I ventured to the back of the home on Dodds Gate and the alley behind. My eyes immediately looked up to what would have been Jennifer’s window, imagining her sitting there as her alleged decisions became reality. I then left a note for Hann in the mailbox.
Fate brought me back to that door on April 10, 2016, when I randomly found myself nearby, the second and last time I was in the neighbourhood. At the front door my emotions betrayed me once again as I lost my nerve, not wanting to bother this poor man. After twisting to walk away, I steadied myself, turned back, lifted my arm to knock and noticed what I figured were Hann’s outdoor shoes and a potted plant to my right. I knocked, expecting the door to be slammed in my face if it opened. Instead, a short man with one of the widest grins I’ve ever seen answered the door. We spoke briefly. He told me he was Bich’s brother and that he was living at the house. By the end of the conversation, he still maintained the huge grin on his face, so I remarked on it. “You smile a lot,” I said with a grin of my own.
“They call me Smiler,” he replied with a giggle.
I asked Smiler to inform Hann of my request to speak with him, thanked him, and went on my way. Two days later, Sandy Luong, twenty-three, went missing at 2:30 p.m. On April 15 her sister, Tracy (Jennifer’s cousin), along with police, were in front of cameras pleading for her return.
“We love her very much,” Tracy said. “Sandy’s the type of person who’s soft-spoken. She loves to read. She’s very kind and very caring. She’s the type of person that, if she only had $1, she’d rather give it to someone else to help them.”
A man cried in the background, his face covered by one hand as he wept. When the broken man glanced up and spoke to the camera, the frown on his face was remarkable in its despair — it was Smiler. He talked quickly in a thick accent to the cameras. “Sandy, if you hear this, call me,” he said before shrinking away from the cameras almost immediately.
Two days later Jennifer Pan’s cousin and Smiler’s daughter, Sandra Luong, who had been living at 238 Helen Avenue where her aunt had been gunned down just years earlier, was found dead — a suicide.
Image Credits
Page 15. Court exhibit.
Page 17. Published with the express permission of Global News, a division of Global Television Network.
Page 19. Court exhibit.
Page 23. Court exhibit.
Page 30. Court exhibit.
Page 37. York Regional Police.
Page 46. York Regional Police.
Page 59. Published with the express permission of Sing Tao Daily Limited.
Page 66. York Regional Police.
Page 99. York Regional Police.
Page 110. York Regional Police.
Page 117. Court exhibit.
Page 127. Court exhibit.
Page 139. Courtesy of Marianne Boucher, CityNews.
Page 144. Courtesy of Marianne Boucher, CityNews.
Page 161. Photograph by author.
Page 162. Published with the express permission of Toronto Sun, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.
Page 264. Court exhibit.
Page 308. Court exhibit.
Copyright © Jeremy Grimaldi, 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
To protect identities, some names in this book have been changed.
Cover image: High-school portrait of Jennifer Pan.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Grimaldi, Jeremy, author
A daughter’s deadly deception : the Jennifer Pan story / Jeremy Grimaldi.
Includes bibliographical references.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-3524-8 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3525-5 (pdf).-- ISBN 978-1-4597-3526-2 (epub)
1. Pan, Jennifer. 2. Deception--Ontario--Case studies. 3. Murder for hire--Ontario--Case studies. 4. Murder--Ontario--Case studies. I. Title.
HV6535.C32O65 2016b 364.152’309713 C2016-905288-5 C2016-905289-3
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