On the night of Nov. 8, 2010, a frantic 911 call went out from a family home in Ontario, Canada. The caller, a young woman named Jennifer Pan, told dispatchers that she had been at home with her parents when armed gunmen forced their way into the house and demanded money. Jennifer said that the intruders tied her up, shot both of her parents, and fled. As Jennifer pleaded with the dispatcher to send help, her father, Huei Hann, could be heard in the background — he had survived the shooting and needed urgent medical care. Her mother, Bich Ha, died instantly.
Initially, the Pans appeared to be the random victims of a deadly home invasion, a shocking anomaly in their quiet residential neighborhood.
“Trying to get someone to talk about a traumatic event is very difficult,” says lead case investigator Detective Bill Courtice in the doc. “She may want to just repress the memory, so it’s critical to make sure she’s fine. But I want her to continue speaking to our investigators.”
As more details emerged, it became clear that Jennifer knew more about what happened that night than she was letting on. What Jennifer Did, a new documentary by Jenny Popplewell (American Murder: The Family Next Door) premiering on April 10, revisits that horrifying night, relying on police interrogation footage and new interviews with detectives and friends of the Pan family to get closer to the truth.
At the time of the crime, Pan was living at home with her parents. For years, she avoided their disappointment by lying to them about her accomplishments, including her acceptance to college.
“At our high school, everybody was expected to be a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer, or an engineer,” says Jennifer’s high school friend Nam Nguyen in the doc. “For Jennifer, she was not anywhere close to being top of class … and this was a school where getting straight A’s was kind of the standard.”
She told her parents she was studying to be a pharmacist, and even forged a diploma to complete the ruse. “If you’re in an environment where you’re expected to come out on top every single time, and you’re failing to meet that expectation, I think that can lead to disastrous results,” Nam explains.
A high school friend of Jennifer’s, Daniel Wong had dealt drugs and had a criminal record. The two dated, but the Pans never approved of the relationship, and when they discovered Jennifer had been lying about attending college, and they forbade her from spending any time with Wong.
Jennifer continued to remain friendly with Wong, but when her parents realized that she was continuing to flout their rules, they took away her phone and became even more vigilant about tracking her whereabouts. Fernando Baldassini, Jennifer’s piano teacher at the time, recalls his student’s frustration: “She started to sob, she started to break down, and I had never seen that from her,” he says in the doc. “She says, ‘Fernando, my parents, they don’t trust me, they follow me around, they don’t want me to go out with my boyfriend. He’s not acceptable to my father. He won’t allow me to waste time going out with a cook.’”
Furious about her parents’ restrictions, Jennifer eventually took drastic and shocking measures: She enlisted Wong to help her organize a plot to murder her parents. The murder was intended to look like a robbery gone awry, with Jennifer playing the part of helpless witness. Three hit men (David Mylvaganam, Lenford Crawford, and Eric Carty) entered the Pan home, fatally shot Bich Ha, and severely wounded Huei Hann.
Police investigators became aware that Jennifer had spun a web of lies in the years leading up to the home invasion, but after her mother’s murder, and with her father in a coma, she was initially the sole eyewitness to the events of Nov. 8. That changed when her father came out of his coma — and told police that his daughter appeared to be familiar with the people who broke into their home. According to Huei Hann, Jennifer’s hands had never been bound during the home invasion, a fact that directly contradicted Jennifer’s retelling of the night’s events. He entreated law enforcement to figure out exactly how his daughter was involved in the murder of his wife.
In her third interview with local police, Jennifer finally confessed to hiring the killers and leaving her house unlocked — though she claimed that she had actually arranged for herself, and not her parents, to be their target. She claimed that she had engaged in self-harm in the past, and was intent on ending her own life as a result of feeling out of step with her peers. After she was arrested for murder and attempted murder, detectives found Jennifer’s diary, which further revealed her vendetta against her parents. “She wanted to have this fairy tale relationship with Daniel Wong,” says Detective Courtice. “That was her end goal, and she was going to do her damndest to make that happen.” She was also set to receive a large sum of money after her parents’ death. Detectives also learned that this was actually Jennifer’s second attempt to pull off a murder-for-hire: Ten months earlier, she had asked another acquaintance to kill her parents.
Huei Hann Pan testified for the prosecution at his daughter’s 2014 murder trial, at which Jennifer was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years. Wong, Mylvaganam, and Crawford were convicted as well, and also received a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 25 years. Carty’s case was declared a mistrial, but in December 2015, he received an 18-year sentence after pleading guilty to conspiring to commit murder, with eligibility for parole after nine years. He died in jail in 2018.
Jennifer was ordered by the court to have no further contact with her family. She is currently in prison, though she continues to maintain her innocence. In May 2023, the Court of Appeal for Ontario argued that the jury should have been given the option to select second-degree murder or manslaughter as potential verdicts, and overturned first-degree murder convictions for Jennifer, Wong, Crawford, and Mylvaganam. The Supreme Court of Canada is currently deciding whether or not it will hear the case.
Watch What Jennifer Did on Netflix now.
