Netflix documentary revives interest in Canadian murder-for-hire case
The most popular movie on Netflix Canada has resur‐ faced a dramatic murderfor-hire plot that shook an Ontario city in 2010.
The documentary What Jennifer Did explores the life of Jennifer Pan and the com‐ plicated events that led to her mother being killed and her father severely wounded in a Markham, Ont., case that was granted a new trial last year.
"The fact that it's true, I would say it's wilder than fic‐ tion. It's a Hollywood script," executive producer Jeremy Grimaldi told CBC Toronto's Dwight Drummond. "But we always have to remember that it's a tragedy."
Pan had a difficult rela‐ tionship with her strict and demanding parents, who had extremely high expectations for her and closely moni‐ tored her after-school activi‐ ties. She and her friends be‐ lieved they were controlling and restrictive.
Eventually, they caught her in a series of lies about graduating from high school, obtaining a pharmacology degree and volunteering at a children's hospital. Secretly, she was also spending time with her then-boyfriend, Daniel Wong.
During the trial, the Crown said Pan started plot‐ ting her parents' murder af‐ ter they forced her to choose between them and Wong. He also became implicated in the murder plot.
Pan testified that she had a poor relationship with her father, who was the "rule maker," but was closer with her mother.
One night in November 2010, three men entered the house where she lived with her parents and shot them both multiple times, killing her mother and severely wounding her father, who es‐ caped to a neighbour's house with gunshot wounds in his face and shoulder, and would later go on to testify against his daughter.
Pan was initially assumed to be a victim of a home inva‐ sion, but police soon turned on her as a suspect, and a se‐ ries of texts and phone calls between her and Wong ap‐ peared to reveal a plot to have the men kill her parents for $10,000.
'The wrong message to take away'
The documentary is not sitting well with everyone.
Karen K. Ho, a business and art crime reporter in New York City who went to school with Pan and Wong, wrote an article for Toronto Life in 2015 that detailed the complexities of the case and Pan's family dynamic, em‐ phasizing the pressures placed on Pan and other chil‐ dren of immigrant families.
Ho's article has been re‐ hashed on true crime pod‐ casts and received a new wave of attention since the documentary came out Wednesday.
She says she is uncom‐ fortable with the "true crime industrial complex" and what she called American audi‐ ences' "all-consuming and endless" appetite for content about murder.
"I am not watching it and I'm choosing not to watch it, because I do not want to in‐ centivize the further produc‐ tion of this stuff, without at least really thoughtful consid‐ eration."
She says true crime's pri‐ mary audience is white Americans, and the docu‐ mentaries are primarily pro‐ duced through a white lens. She says she was not sur‐ prised that Pan and her fa‐ ther declined to speak on camera, or that the docu‐ mentary relies heavily on in‐ terviews with, and footage from, police.
Ho says she would like to see the money for true crime documentaries flow toward work that focuses on sys‐ temic issues, rather than per‐ sonal stories, and specifically applauds the work of Cree journalist Connie Walker, of the Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan, and her re‐ porting on missing and mur‐ dered Indigenous women.
"The over-emphasis on personal responsibility, ver‐ sus systemic issues, is the wrong message to take away," Ho said.
While Ho says her 2015 article aimed to cover the case in a nuanced and nonexploitative way, she remem‐ bers receiving backlash at the time, and accusations that she was "capitalizing on a family's worst day of their lives."
Hopes for healing, un‐ derstanding
Co-producer Paul Nguyen says director Jenny Pop‐ plewell reached out to him two years ago to help con‐ nect with members of Markham's Vietnamese com‐ munity for What Jennifer Did.
"I can relate, being a Viet‐ namese person, second-gen‐ eration and having pressures from my own parents. And sometimes it hurt me and upset me a lot, but I wouldn't resort to something like this," Nguyen told CBC Toronto.
(Pan and her family are ethnically Chinese, but her parents came to Canada as refugees from Vietnam.)
He says mental health is‐ sues are "a very taboo sub‐ ject in Asian communities."
"I just hope that the dia‐ logue can happen and have more healing and people can come to the understanding and avoid these kinds of situ‐ ations."
Pan was sentenced in 2015, at age 28, to life in prison with no parole for 25 years for first-degree murder and attempted murder. Her co-accused - Wong, Lenford Crawford and David Mylva‐ ganam - received the same sentence.
The Ontario Appeal Court ordered in May 2023 a retrial for the four for the first-de‐ gree murder charge. Their lawyers argued in part that it was unfair for the judge to only present two options to the jury: That the attack was either planned and deliber‐ ate, with the intention to murder both parents, or that the attack arose as part of a home invasion and robbery gone wrong.
Grimaldi, also a crime re‐ porter who covered Pan's tri‐ al and wrote a book about the case, says he hopes the documentary makes people reconsider the judgments they may have made about Pan at the time.
"She was really made out to be the daughter from hell. In fact, that was a front page of the Toronto Sun, 'Daugh‐ ter from Hell,'" he said.
"Now, with a bit of time, we can look back and see it's maybe a bit more of a nu‐ anced story and that it's more complex."