Netflix documentary revives interest in Canadian murder-for-hire case

The preferred film on Netflix Canada has resurfaced a dramatic murder-for-hire plot that shook an Ontario metropolis in 2010.

The documentary What Jennifer Did explores the lifetime of Jennifer Pan and the difficult occasions that led to her mom being killed and her father severely wounded in a Markham, Ont., case that was granted a brand new trial final yr.

“The truth that it is true, I’d say it is wilder than fiction. It is a Hollywood script,” government producer Jeremy Grimaldi instructed CBC Toronto’s Dwight Drummond. “However we all the time should do not forget that it is a tragedy.”

Pan had a tough relationship together with her strict and demanding mother and father, who had extraordinarily excessive expectations for her and intently monitored her after-school actions. She and her mates believed they had been controlling and restrictive.

Ultimately, they caught her in a sequence of lies about graduating from highschool, acquiring a pharmacology diploma and volunteering at a youngsters’s hospital. Secretly, she was additionally spending time together with her then-boyfriend, Daniel Wong.

In the course of the trial, the Crown stated Pan began plotting her mother and father’ homicide after they pressured her to decide on between them and Wong. He additionally turned implicated within the homicide plot.

Pan testified that she had a poor relationship together with her father, who was the “rule maker,” however was nearer together with her mom.

One night time in November 2010, three males entered the home the place she lived together with her mother and father and shot them each a number of instances, killing her mom and severely wounding her father, who escaped to a neighbour’s home with gunshot wounds in his face and shoulder, and would later go on to testify in opposition to his daughter.

Pan was initially assumed to be a sufferer of a house invasion, however police quickly turned on her as a suspect, and a sequence of texts and telephone calls between her and Wong appeared to disclose a plot to have the lads kill her mother and father for $10,000.

‘The flawed message to remove’

The documentary just isn’t sitting properly with everybody.

Karen Okay. Ho, a enterprise and artwork crime reporter in New York Metropolis who went to high school with Pan and Wong, wrote an article for Toronto Life in 2015 that detailed the complexities of the case and Pan’s household dynamic, emphasizing the pressures positioned on Pan and different youngsters of immigrant households. 

Ho’s article has been rehashed on true crime podcasts and obtained a brand new wave of consideration because the documentary got here out Wednesday. 

She says she is uncomfortable with the “true crime industrial advanced” and what she known as American audiences’ “all-consuming and countless” urge for food for content material about homicide.

“I’m not watching it and I am selecting to not watch it, as a result of I don’t need to incentivize the additional manufacturing of these items, with out not less than actually considerate consideration.”

She says true crime’s main viewers is white People, and the documentaries are primarily produced via a white lens. She says she was not stunned that Pan and her father declined to talk on digicam, or that the documentary depends closely on interviews with, and photographs from, police.

Ho says she want to see the cash for true crime documentaries circulation towards work that focuses on systemic points, quite than private tales, and particularly applauds the work of Cree journalist Connie Walker, of the Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan, and her reporting on lacking and murdered Indigenous girls.

“The over-emphasis on private accountability, versus systemic points, is the flawed message to remove,” Ho stated.

Whereas Ho says her 2015 article aimed to cowl the case in a nuanced and non-exploitative manner, she remembers receiving backlash on the time, and accusations that she was “capitalizing on a household’s worst day of their lives.”

Hopes for therapeutic, understanding

Co-producer Paul Nguyen says director Jenny Popplewell reached out to him two years in the past to assist join with members of Markham’s Vietnamese neighborhood for What Jennifer Did. 

“I can relate, being a Vietnamese particular person, second-generation and having pressures from my very own mother and father. And generally it damage me and upset me quite a bit, however I would not resort to one thing like this,” Nguyen instructed CBC Toronto.

(Pan and her household are ethnically Chinese language, however her mother and father got here to Canada as refugees from Vietnam.) 

He says psychological well being points are “a really taboo topic in Asian communities.” 

“I simply hope that the dialogue can occur and have extra therapeutic and folks can come to the understanding and keep away from these sorts of conditions.”

Pan was sentenced in 2015, at age 28, to life in jail with no parole for 25 years for first-degree homicide and tried homicide. Her co-accused — Wong, Lenford Crawford and David Mylvaganam — obtained the identical sentence. 

The Ontario Attraction Courtroom ordered in Could 2023 a retrial for the 4 for the first-degree homicide cost. Their legal professionals argued partially that it was unfair for the choose to solely current two choices to the jury: That the assault was both deliberate and deliberate, with the intention to homicide each mother and father, or that the assault arose as a part of a house invasion and theft gone flawed. 

Grimaldi, additionally a criminal offense reporter who lined Pan’s trial and wrote a e book concerning the case, says he hopes the documentary makes folks rethink the judgments they could have made about Pan on the time.

“She was actually made out to be the daughter from hell. Actually, that was a entrance web page of the Toronto Solar, ‘Daughter from Hell,'” he stated.

“Now, with a little bit of time, we will look again and see it is possibly a bit extra of a nuanced story and that it is extra advanced.”