The crazy story of the girl who hired a hitman to kill her "tiger" parents.
A Murder-For-Hire Plot
Jennifer Pan was a young woman born to an immigrant family in Ontario, Canada. Her parents, Hann and Bich Pan, were extremely strict and expected excellence from their children. As a girl, Jennifer was an avid ice skater and was very promising at the sport. But her dreams to go pro fell short when she got a devastating injury that ended her skating career. After learning about her injury, Hann and Bich turned their high expectations from ice skating to academics. They wanted Jennifer to get high grades and attend college after high school. The Pans picked Jennifer up when classes ended each day and closely monitored her extracurricular activities. They never permitted her to date boys while attending high school or to attend high school dances out of fear that these activities would distract her from her academic commitments. But Jennifer found a boyfriend that she hid from her parents and began struggling in school. When Jennifer failed calculus class in grade 12, Ryerson University revoked her early admission. She began to lie to those she knew, including her parents, and pretended she was attending university to avoid public embarrassment and punishment from her parents. Instead, she sat in cafés, taught as a piano instructor, and worked in a restaurant to earn money. To maintain the charade, Jennifer told her parents she had won scholarships, later falsely claiming that she had accepted an offer into the pharmacology program at the University of Toronto, even purchasing second-hand textbooks and watching videos related to pharmacology to create notebooks full of fake class notes that she could show her parents. Furthermore, Jennifer would tell her parents that she was going to her college dorm, but in reality, she lived with her drug-dealer boyfriend. But Jennifer's deception wouldn't last for long, as her parents found out about Jennifer's charade. They offered her an ultimatum, she could either move back in with harsh restrictions by her parents and get financial support from them or be disowned by her family and completely lose all support. Jennifer decided to move back in with her parents, but she soon realized that her parents were an issue that prevented her from a free lifestyle and receiving an inheritance. Pan and her boyfriend Daniel Wong were back in contact at this time and, according to the police, came up with a plan to hire a professional hitman for $10,000 to kill her parents, calculating that she would then inherit $500,000. Wong connected Pan with a man, Lenford Roy Crawford. Crawford contacted another man, Eric Shawn "Sniper" Carty, who contacted Montreal-born David Mylvaganam. On November 8, 2010, Jennifer unlocked the family home's front door when she went to bed, then spoke by phone to Mylvaganam. Shortly afterward, Mylvaganam and two other people entered the home through the unlocked front door, all carrying guns. After demanding all the money in the house and ransacking the main bedroom, the three men took Bich and Hann to the basement, where they shot them multiple times. Bich was killed, but Hann barely survived his wounds. The three men then took all the cash that was in the house, including $2,000 from Pan, and left. Pan claimed that they tied her up but that she managed to free her hands and dial 9-1-1. Jennifer was originally brought to the police station for a witness statement, but soon detectives became suspicious because of Jennifer's shaky testimony. Jennifer was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy to commit murder. She pleaded "not guilty" to all charges.
The Trial of Jennifer Pan
The trial of Pan began on March 19, 2014, in Newmarket, Ontario. At the trial, the prosecution wished to establish a foundation explaining Hann and Bich Pan's "tiger parenting" and how it put Jennifer in a jail-like situation, making her believe that a murder-for-hire plot was the only way out. The evidence presented included exhaustive tracking of the mobile device movements and text message traffic, including over 100 messages sent between Jennifer and Daniel Wong six hours before the killing. Further evidence centered around the atypical nature of the "break-in", "robbery", shootings, and irregularities in Pan's testimony. Pan's obsession with Wong, her lack of true emotion, a confession regarding the attack, and recognition of her trauma was also detailed. The crux of the prosecution's case revolved around the fact that Jennifer was not assaulted, blindfolded, taken to the basement, or shot, leaving behind an eyewitness to the attack. Evidence from Hann, which differed greatly from Pan's version, also undermined her credibility. December 13, 2014, Jennifer Pan was found guilty of all charges. She was handed a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years