Crime Junkie - CAPTURED: Jennifer Pan

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

The Pan Family seemed to have it all until a shocking home invasion upended their lives in the most vicious way imaginable. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit  https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/captured-jennifer-pan/ 

Hi Crime Junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brett. And the story I have for you today peels back the curtain on what, at first glance, looked like a happy family. The Pans represented a classic immigrant success story and they seemed to have everything they could want. A nice house in the suburbs, substantial savings in the bank, and two loving kids. Everything seemed perfect.

Right up until a shocking home invasion turned that image on its head in the most vicious way possible. This is the story of Vic Hoppan, Hue Hoppan, and their daughter, Jennifer. The night of November 8th, 2010, in Markham, Ontario, Canada, seems like every other quiet Monday evening. Markham's maybe not the most exciting place in the world, but it's a good community to raise a family. And since Toronto is less than an hour away, there's plenty of big city stuff within easy

distance while still being away from a lot of the big city problems. That is, until a 911 call comes into dispatch sometime after 10pm. On the other end of the line is a terrified girl living in a nightmare. And here is that call pulled from JCS Criminal Psychology YouTube. Okay, so I know that there was a lot going on in that. What did you hear? Yes, so the person who made that call was 24 year old Jennifer Pan. She lives at the house police responded to with her mom, Bik Ha, and her dad, Han.

According to an article from CBC News, her dad was found outside where he had gone running to when we heard him screaming on the 911 call and Jennifer still tied up upstairs bound to the banister with a shoelace. Han is rushed to the hospital and Jennifer tells police that multiple intruders came into her house, demanded money, and then tied her up and attacked her parents. She said she heard gunshots and then that's when her dad ran outside while she was on the phone with 911. Well police don't find her until they go down to the basement where they see her lying

on the floor with a blanket over her head. She has been shot and it's clear that Bik Ha is already dead. Police arrange for Bik Ha's body to be transported for autopsy while Han is airlifted to Toronto to be treated while he's in a coma. And Jennifer is transported to the hospital to be checked out for any injuries. Now meanwhile, police start processing the pan's house. They don't find any sign of forced entry and nothing in my research details any forensics like fingerprints that are found or even a murder weapon or shell casings or anything

like that. So while they're going through this, while this is going on, doctors are giving Jennifer a late all clear and she is then taken down to the police station where they get a full statement from her around 3 o'clock on the morning of November 9th. There, on video, she tells police that everything about her Monday night had been perfectly normal. Her mom went line dancing like she does every week while her dad stayed home and Jennifer watched TV up in her bedroom. Her little brother Felix is away at university in Hamilton, Ontario about an hour away so

he wasn't home for any of what happened. According to Karen Cahose reporting for Toronto Life Magazine, Jennifer tells police that she heard her mom get home from line dancing around 9.30 like she usually does. Her dad was already asleep and since Jennifer was starting to doze off to the TV in her room upstairs, she didn't go down to say good night. Sometime after she fell asleep, Jennifer is suddenly jolted awake and from her bed, Jennifer says that she could hear her mom downstairs and she could even kind of see out and it looked like she was calling out for her dad to come down.

Though not totally sure what was going on, Jennifer says she turned down the volume to hear better and sure enough she recognized her mom calling for her dad. But she could hear that Big Ha wasn't alone. There were other unfamiliar voices talking to her. According to Jennifer's own recollections to the York Region police, she was so terrified that she couldn't even get out of bed at first. But after a few minutes, her fear for her parents took over the fear for her own safety. Jennifer crept out of bed and tiptoed over to the door to try and see what was happening.

Instantly, she realized she made a huge mistake because standing right outside of her bedroom was a strange man with a string in his hands and he lunged at her. Pounding, Jennifer said there was nothing she could do as her hands were tied viciously behind her back. She says the man told her that he had a gun and all Jennifer had to do is follow his orders. Do what he said and nobody would get hurt. Jennifer says her attacker started demanding money, dragging her bound and stumbling through the bedrooms, yelling at her to hand over all of the cash.

Jennifer directed him to all the money she knew about from her own savings she stored in her room to some U.S. currency her mom had in her dresser, but it wasn't enough. When the man pulled her down the stairs, she said she had no choice but to follow his lead into the kitchen where two other strange men were holding her parents at gunpoint. Everything was happening so fast. It was a terrifying blur as the intruders yelled about wallets and Bik Ha and Han tried to talk in their native language. Then one of the men lost patience and pistol whipped Han.

Jennifer recalls to police how scared she was and how all she could do was watch as her mom started to cry and plead for her only daughter's safety. Jennifer got one last look at her family before she was dragged back upstairs and tied to the banister. It felt hopeless, completely out of control, until Jennifer felt something pressing against her side that gave her hope. Somehow in the chaos of the home invasion, Jennifer says she realized her phone was tucked in her waistband.

She managed to get her phone out, flip it open and dial 911. In addition to telling police all about what happened to her parents, Jennifer's also able to give them a description of the three assailants. According to the Markham Economist and Son, the first is a black man between 28 and 35 years old, about 5'5", 5'7", tall, with a medium build and his hair in long locks. The second man is another black man in his early 30s, around 5'7", 5'8", with a thin build and this second man had his face covered with a bandana and was wearing a dark hoodie during the attack on the pants.

The third man, meanwhile, is also a black man with a thin build, but unlike the other two, the police learn from Jennifer that he spoke with a Caribbean accent. When they ask, Jennifer tells police that she has no idea why anyone would want to do this to her family. She tells them in footage I watched on that JCS Criminal Psychology YouTube channel that the only thing she can think of is that since her mom maybe drove a Lexus and her dad drove a Mercedes, maybe these robbers were after the cars? So did they take either of the cars though?

That's the thing, according to True Crime Daily, both of the cars were still right there in the garage when police got there, even though the keys were right in plain sight for them to take if they wanted to. And even beyond that, that's the thing about this, these robbers actually left a lot of other pretty valuable things behind, like the home's electronics, there was literally cash sitting out on the countertop, and there was also over $200 in cash in Bicca's purse. So based on that, police are pretty sure that they're not dealing with master criminals here.

I mean, are honestly even a robbery. Maybe, but at the time that they're speaking with Jennifer, they're also not even convinced that the Pan family was being targeted at all. So this was just some random thing? Or like a mistaken identity, maybe? Like according to another piece I read on the CBC News website, dated that Tuesday after the attack, police are wondering if maybe the three guys meant to rob someone else and broke into the wrong house instead.

Okay, but even if they were in the wrong house, it seems kind of weird to leave the money and two really nice cars if they were just right there so easy to take. Again, not master criminals. As the investigation continues through the early morning and into the Tuesday workday, police get a hold of surveillance footage from the Pan's neighborhood. The footage isn't great, but they can make out a silver Acura parked outside of the Pan's house at the time of the assault and then taking off heading west around 10.30pm Monday night.

This is the same time Jennifer managed to call for help. But within a day, the lead on the silver Acura from the footage turns out to be a dead end after the owner comes forward and gets ruled out as a possible suspect. Now, at some point in the first days of the investigation, police talk to a man named Daniel Wong who, according to court records, is Jennifer's boyfriend. On the surface, it seemed normal that police would want to talk to someone so close to the Pan family to try and get some insight, right? But what I find so interesting about this is that whatever Daniel tells the officers,

it makes police want to talk to Jennifer again and they have something else that they want to go over with her. They want to know exactly how Jennifer was able to call 911 while she was still tied to the banister. Right. So in my mind, like the most 2010 thing to do is to keep your phone in your waistband. But I was kind of wondering how she was able to get it out and dial and talk and all of it really.

Right. So when she comes back in on November 11 for her second interview, they give her a phone and basically like show us like, you know, we're going to tie you up the way you say we're tied up the way we found you and show us how you did it and she can. I saw the video on true crime daily where Jennifer explains to the officers that her upper arms were tied to the banister and her hands were tied together behind her back. So she wiggles a bit and does manage to get the phone out of her waistband showing how she says she dialed 911 and turned the phone's volume all the way up.

So basically she could shout to the dispatchers. Not only she was holding it to her ear, but even with the demonstration, there's something about Jennifer's story that doesn't add up. These loose threads that police want to pull to see if they hold firm or if they unravel everything she's told them up to now. Like for example, these three robbers, if they actually were robbers, why did they, you know, not rob the house? Like you said, even if they did come to the Pan's house by mistake, they still could

have made it worth their while, yet they chose not to. And beyond that, have you ever heard of a home invader tying someone up with a shoelace? Like not handcuffs, not zip ties on duct tape, but like a freaking shoelace? No, but also that fits right in with the fact that these guys are kind of crappy criminals. Well, which leads to the next, and I think the biggest thing that's bugging police about Jennifer's story during this second round of questioning. Why didn't the attackers shoot her? They had no problem shooting Han and Big Ha, so why would they risk leaving Jennifer

alive as a witness? Why weren't her wrist bruised or shaped from being tied up and struggling to get her phone? It just doesn't make sense. According to court documents, over the course of this second interview, police start probing Jennifer for details about her personal life, like her relationship with Daniel. Jennifer tells police that her parents disapproved so strongly of them dating that they'd basically given her an ultimatum, either she choose them or him, and Jennifer alleges that she chose her parents.

But Jennifer confesses that she'd been lying to her mom and dad about another huge aspect of her life, her education. You see, part of why Jennifer's been living at home at 24 years old is because she's supposed to be going to college, except she admits to police that she hasn't actually been going to college at all. Now the police know she'd been lying to her parents, she admits that her relationship with them was difficult, particularly with her dad, but she's adamant to law enforcement that she had no involvement in the home invasion.

After four hours, the police let Jennifer go. She's not under arrest and she's not considered a suspect, but this second interview hasn't eased police's concerns. Getting to the truth of what she really knows is still just this itch that they can't seem to scratch, and so they put Jennifer under surveillance. And the very next day, something incredible happens. They get another witness to the crime because Han Pan wakes up from a coma and police are dying to know if he will back up Jennifer's story.

According to Karen Cahoe's article, he was shot twice, once in the shoulder and once in the face. As a result, he's got broken facial bones, bullet fragments in his face that can't be removed, and a shattered bone in his neck where the bullet grazed Han's carotid artery. Yes, and police are super eager to talk to him, but Han can't actually talk yet due to the severity of his injuries, so police will have to wait to get a statement from him. In fact, his injuries are so bad that he can't leave the hospital to go to his wife's

funeral even. During the funeral, though, police still have surveillance on Jennifer, and Jennifer doesn't show a lot of emotion during her mom's funeral, which strikes police as odd. Okay, here's the thing, I feel like a broken record because I feel like we say this in every single episode, but people have expectations for what they think grief looks like, and I think that gets lost a lot when we talk about stuff like this. We as outsiders don't know what kind of behavior is taught in any person's upbringing or home. Some families, like mine, they feel very big, and they feel very big out loud to each other,

and that's incredibly healthy to my family, but others just don't. Sometimes it's cultural, sometimes it's just personalities, but when I remember back to listening to season three of Counter Clock. Which if you haven't yet, you absolutely need to listen to that as soon as you're done with this episode, but I know you're going. Oh, 1,000%, and no spoilers. I remember Jeff and Jackie, Kelly, talking about how their dad taught them and their siblings, like, crying was not an option.

Do not cry no matter what. Yeah, so to your point, I mean, a lot of how people respond in those moments is how were they raised to respond in those moments, because we by all means were not all raised in that same box. Anyways, however she was acting, however they felt about it, doesn't matter. What they needed more than anything was Han's statement, and amazingly, just a few days after coming out of his coma, he's able to talk to police. He remembers every terrible thing that happened on the night of the shooting, and he tells

law enforcement a truly incredible story. According to Christie Blatchford's piece in the leader post, Han details a pretty normal Monday. He tells officers that he went to work, then he went to Home Depot with his brother in law before going home for dinner with Bik Ha and Jennifer, and he said he was asleep in bed by 8.30. Everything seemed fine until, suddenly, Han jolted awake to find a strange man in his bedroom pointing a gun right at his forehead and demanding money.

Han tells police how the intruder herded him out into the hallway, but just as he was about to go downstairs, Han says that he saw something that turned his fear into utter shock. There, standing in the doorway to her bedroom, was Jennifer, not Tida, not at gunpoint, but speaking quietly to another one of the intruders. As Han tells police, it was as if Jennifer was talking to a friend. From there, Han says the man forced him downstairs at gunpoint where he saw his wife, Bik Ha, sitting on the couch with yet another strange man behind her holding a gun on her. According to Han, she hadn't even had time to take her feet out of the tub she'd been

soaking them in. The gunman then hurried Han and Bik Ha down to the basement. Han says Bik Ha begged for the men to spare Jennifer's life and instead of telling her to shut up or demanding money like they'd been doing all along, one of the intruders said something strange. He said, quote, don't worry, your daughter is very nice, so I won't hurt her, end quote. The next thing Han knew, he blacked out from being shot in the face. As Jeremy Grimaldi reported for the Markham Economist and son, Han tells police that when

he woke up, he was bleeding and Bik Ha was lying on the floor next to him. She didn't respond when he said her name or moved when he shook her. That's when he ran out of the basement screaming just like we heard on that 911 call. I mean, at this point, I'm still in awe that not only is he alive and awake, but he was able to run for his life after being shot in the face. It's a miracle. It is truly incredible. So hearing this, suddenly all of the police's suspicions about Jennifer, those little gnawing

feelings that something wasn't quite right with her story, they all click into place. Jennifer wasn't able to call 911 because she'd miraculously contorted her body to get her phone out. She was able to call because she had help. Nothing was taken from the pan's home because the invaders weren't there to commit a robbery. They were there to commit murder, and they didn't leave Jennifer as a witness because they were incompetent. They didn't shoot her because she wasn't their target.

Just like that, police named Jennifer as a suspect in her mother's murder. And mind you, this isn't publicly, but internally, among police. Jennifer is now their prime suspect. In November 22, exactly two weeks after the murders, police called Jennifer back to the station for a third interview. According to court records, detectives once again have her walk them through her version of events. They talk about Jennifer's relationship with her family and her boyfriend Daniel, and then,

about an hour and 15 minutes into the interview, they switch tactics. Instead of asking her what she remembers happened, they start telling her what they think happened. That instead of being a victim like she's been claiming, they think she's involved. What they don't know, though, and what they want her to tell them is exactly how. Over the next couple of hours, the police keep pressing her. Just tell us the truth, Jennifer. Do the right thing, Jennifer. Get it off your chest.

Let all the hurt and pain and secrets go. All you have to do is be honest. More than once, Jennifer asks what's going to happen to her, but detectives reiterate that until they know the truth about what she did, there's no way of knowing what happens next. Finally, after over three hours of questioning, police watch as an emotional Jennifer bends forward in her chair, almost in the fetal position. She stays quiet for several long minutes.

And then finally, she starts to talk about what really happened that night. And no one, I mean, no one is prepared for what she says next. Jennifer claims to police that she didn't hire these guys to kill her parents. She insists she hired them to kill her instead. Wait, I'm sorry, what? Yeah, according to another one of Jeremy Grimaldi's pieces for the Markham Economist and Son, Jennifer claims that she got the cell phone number of someone known as Homeboy or Homie and offered this person $2,000 to come to her house and kill her.

On the night of the attack, she made sure to unlock the front door so the men could get in. Okay, but I'm sorry, stop. If she really hired them to kill her, why on earth would the guy upstairs have been talking to her like a friend like her dad said? Yeah, you're hearing this like the same way the police did, and that's one of the reasons they are side-eyeing her story so hard. They don't believe it at all.

And so right then and there, they arrest Jennifer Pan for murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy to commit murder. According to Vincent McDermott and Megan O'Toole's reporting for post-media in the Edmonton Journal, police update their descriptions of the attackers at the same time they announced Jennifer's arrest. Now, police describe them as two black men and one white man, all between 20 and 25 years old. Over the course of their investigation, both before Jennifer's arrest and after, police

start to get a clearer picture of the Pan's family life as they try to analyze what could have driven Jennifer to try and murder her own parents. And one thing that comes up again and again and again is the drive for achievement at all costs. Yanan Wang reported for the Washington Post that both Han and Bik Ha had immigrated to Canada from Vietnam and they spent years working hard at Carparts Factory in the Greater Toronto area in order to save their money and give their kids better lives than what they ever had themselves.

In order to further that dream, the Pan's, Han in particular, set super high standards for Jennifer and they expected nothing but the best from her at all times. Now, when I was researching for this episode, I did come across the term tiger parent used to describe Han and Bik Ha more than once. I am not going to speak to that characterization because, you know, neither you or I are from this cultural background and our parents aren't immigrants, so I don't think we can speak about an experience like Jennifer's. Now I did come across some great articles by people who identify their own parents as

tiger parents, though, like the Toronto Life piece by Karen Kay Ho that I've mentioned several times, and also Diana Soif's piece for the cut called My Tiger Mom Prepared Me for the Ultimate Sin, Not Being the Perfect Daughter. And we'll have those linked out in our sources and I'd say definitely go check them out to hear directly from people who are familiar with this type of upbringing. So I have a question real quick, did Jennifer's younger brother have this same kind of pressure on him? You know, I don't know.

Felix has like a super low profile and he doesn't come up a lot in the research for this case, so I can't say for sure. But as police dig into the family dynamic, they learn that specifically Jennifer, as the oldest child, spent her whole life in like this pressure cooker. Going back to her time in elementary school, Jennifer was expected to always get the highest grades and always be the best in her class. Her social life was strictly regimented down to literally the last detail. Jennifer wasn't allowed to go to school dances since her dad didn't consider them

to be productive activities. She couldn't spend a lot of time with her friends, and dating was totally off the table until after she graduated from college. For Jennifer's parents, hard work came before everything else, including personal happiness. As far as extracurricular activities, instead of doing them for fun or, you know, on any sort of casual level, Jennifer was expected to go all the way. Like, let me just give you an example. So Jennifer took music lessons and she was actually pretty good at piano, but she also

took figure skating lessons growing up, and her goal was nothing less than earning a spot on Team Canada in order to compete at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Oh, wow. Huge deal, right? Yeah. A first-generation daughter skating for her country on the very soil her parents chose to call home. But that dream died after a serious knee injury ended her skating career.

But what you're saying is, if she wasn't the best, then she was failing. Right. Perfection was the only thing that mattered, and it took a serious toll on Jennifer's mental health. According to Karen K. Ho's Toronto Life piece, Jennifer was self-harming by middle school. When her grades started to drop in high school from A's to B's, police learned that Jennifer responded by forging her report cards, and she did this for years. Well, and didn't you say before that she'd been lying to her parents about going to university?

Yeah, because it turns out Jennifer never even graduated from high school. Yeah, and so, clear as day in the records, police see that when Jennifer wound up one credit short from graduating, she decided to just keep lying instead of risking her parents' anger. She faked everything, college acceptance, student loan paperwork, her class notes, all of it. Oh my god. She'd leave the house and pretend she was going to class, but in reality, Jennifer was

spending her time with the boy she'd loved for years. Daniel Wong. Police are stunned as they sort through all of this information, because like I said, this is years worth of lie, after lie, after lie, until finally in 2009, Jennifer's parents found out the truth, and they went basically nuclear. And truly, that is when her dad gave her the ultimatum, it's Daniel or it's us. And she chose her parents, but Jennifer didn't break up with Daniel, so the cycle just repeated arguments, demands, tears, restrictions.

But here's the thing, Jennifer just wasn't lying to her family. Her lying extended to all of her personal relationships. Police learned that she'd lied to her friends and told them her dad hired a private investigator to track her every move, which he didn't. After Daniel broke up with her once and started a new relationship, Jennifer came up with a way to get him back. According to court documents and Christie Blatchford's piece in the Montreal Gazette, Jennifer told Daniel that several men disguised as police officers, tricked their way into

her house and gang raped her. Wait, what? Yeah, and that's not all she said, Jennifer told Daniel that her rapists were sent by his new girlfriend. And then she claimed that these people, again, instructed by Daniel's new girlfriend, stuck a bullet in an envelope a few days after the alleged rape and mailed it to her house as another warning to stay away from him. So once again, when the truth was in what Jennifer wanted, she lied to get her way.

So I keep coming back to Jennifer's age, not that what she did would have been more justifiable if she'd still been a teenager, but I don't know, was moving out just not an option. Yeah, right. I don't know. Don't get me wrong, clearly there is some deep-seated mental health issues she needs help for. I mean, the fact that she was self-harming is incredibly concerning.

But she wasn't a child anymore. I feel like she had options available that, I don't know, weren't murder. Yeah. Well, throughout the rest of 2010 and into the spring of 2011 with Jennifer in custody, police focused their efforts on identifying the men Jennifer allegedly hired to kill her parents. According to that same Montreal Gazette piece, I just mentioned, police use cell phone records and banking records to tie three men named David Milvaganum, Eric Cardi, and Lenford

Crawford to the attack. David and Eric, who are already in police custody on an unrelated murder charge, are arrested on Friday, April 15, and Lenford a couple of weeks later in early May. All three are charged with murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy to commit murder. All connected, not just through Jennifer, but to Daniel, too. What? You see, even though Daniel wasn't one of the intruders, police learned that he was the go-between for them and Jennifer, and he helped devise the whole plan.

So Daniel Wong, too, is arrested. The pre-trial proceedings go on for years, and the trial finally starts on March 19, 2014, almost three and a half years after the murder of Vic Hoppan. According to CBC News, all five defendants, Jennifer, Daniel, David, Eric, and Lenford, are being tried together, one count each of first-degree murder and attempted murder. The ground prosecution alleges that with her parents out of the way, Jennifer stood to inherit half of their estate, which, according to the Red Deer advocate, was worth around a million dollars at the time of the shooting, so that would have been more than enough for

Jennifer to set up a new life with Daniel. Jennifer herself actually testifies, and she sticks to her story that the whole night was a suicide attempt gone horribly wrong, but the jury doesn't buy it. In the end, after an intense trial lasting almost nine months, Jennifer Pan is found guilty on one count of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. Daniel, David, and Lenford are also found guilty. But wait, what about Eric? So I guess Eric's lawyer got sick during the trial, so Eric's case was severed from

the others, but instead of going to another trial, he ends up pleading guilty in December of 2015 to conspiracy to commit murder. Remember he is already doing time for a separate murder, so his sentence for his part in Jennifer's scheme adds 18 more years on top of what he's already serving. At his sentencing, he admits that he did indeed help plan to murder Jennifer's parents and to driving Lenford and David to the Pan's house, but he denies ever going in the house. He died in prison in 2018, and to this day, none of the men have ever admitted who actually pulled the trigger.

For trying to kill her parents, Jennifer Pan is sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 25 years before she'll be eligible for parole. The soonest she can apply is 2035 when she'll be 49 years old, and she's banned by court order from contacting her father or her brother. At Jennifer's sentencing, her younger brother Felix used his victim impact statement to tell the court about how her actions shattered his life. His happy memories of his mom and his childhood are too painful to even talk about now, forever tainted by Bicca's brutal death.

Felix recounts how, as a result of what Jennifer did, he's lost most of his friends, he can't find work because people hear his last name Pan and automatically assume the worst, and he describes coping with his new reality as being, quote, like a dark shadow. It's something I can't hide from. In Han's victim impact statement, he tells the court about the lasting burden the crime has put on his life. He can't work anymore, he has to take all kinds of medication every single day, and he's wracked by nightmares, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

He also has depression and constant chronic pain from the shooting that have sucked the joy out of his hobbies like gardening and working on old cars, while grief haunts every move that he makes. Not just grief for his wife, but grief for Jennifer too, and the family that he feels like he lost. At the end of his statement, Han talked to Jennifer directly. And he told her, quote, I hope my daughter Jennifer thinks about what has happened to her family and can become a good, honest person someday.

You know, I've said it before and I'll keep saying it as long as we do this show, when people show you what they're capable of, pay attention. Obviously, Jennifer Pan is a very extreme case, not everyone who grows up with demanding parents tries to have them executed, and not everyone who tells a lie is capable of planning a murder. But when there is not just one lie, but a complicated web of deceit that spans back over a decade and creates almost an alternate reality in the process, that is concerning. If someone can lie that much to so many people for so long, then what else can they do?

It's not easy or pleasant to ask these questions about the people you love, but the truth is, it could save your life. You can find all of the source material for this episode on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. So, what do you think Chuck, do you approve?