Documentary details woman’s plot to kill parents

Netflix has just released What Jennifer Did, a movie based on a 2010 crime in which a Markham woman was convicted of hiring a hit man to kill her parents.

Jennifer Pan was born in 1986 in Markham, Ont., to ethnic Chinese refugees who had fled Vietnam for Canada in the 1970s. The couple found work at Magna International, an auto-parts company, and had two children, Jennifer and her brother Felix, who was born in 1989. In 2004 they purchased a house in Markham.

According to a 2017 profile in Toronto Life, the Pans were strict parents who set many goals for their children. But Jennifer had been doctoring her report cards through high school and, when she failed to get into Ryerson, lied and said she was going to study there for two years before switching to a pharmacology program at U of T.

She kept up the ruse throughout her alleged university years. “I tried looking at myself in the third person, and I didn’t like who I saw,” the magazine quoted her as saying later, “but rationalizations in my head said I had to keep going — otherwise I would lose everything that ever meant anything to me.”

According to police, Pan and her boyfriend came up with a plan to pay a hit man $10,000 to kill her parents, after which she calculated she would inherit $500,000. On Nov. 8, 2010, she left the door to the family home unlocked and contacted David Mylvaganam, who entered the home that night with two other people, all of them armed. The three intruders demanded money, ransacked the main bedroom and shot Pan’s parents, killing her mother and injuring her father. Pan said she’d been tied up, but managed to call 911, which made police suspicious, as did the fact that many valuables had been left in the house by the supposed robbers.

Pan’s father told police he’d seen her whispering to one of the hit men. During an interview with police she confessed to hiring the hit men.

According to news reports at the time of Pan’s trial in 2014, a detective told her police had infrared satellites that could detect activity inside homes, and computer software that would know if she made conflicting statements. This helped lead to her confession. Pan and three others were convicted on Dec. 13, 2014, and each received a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.

In May 2023, the Court of Appeal for Ontario ordered a new first-degree murder trial for Pan. The court said the original trial judge erred by suggesting to the jury only two scenarios for the attack — one in which the plan was to murder both parents, and another in which the plan was to commit a home invasion, but that the parents were shot in the course of the robbery.

No date has yet been set for the new trial.