At first, it seemed like a robbery gone wrong. Jennifer Pan, then 24 years old, called 911 on November 8, 2010, to report that the Markham, Ontario home she lived in with her parents had been broken into and her parents shot.
“I think my dad’s outside, and he’s screaming,” she told the emergency dispatcher, further adding that she had been tied to a banister but allowed to live.
Pan’s mother, 53-year-old Bich Ha-Pan, died at the scene from her injuries. Her father, 57-year-old Huei Hann Pan, was rushed to the hospital with serious injuries after being shot in the face. The York Regional Police Chief described their targeting as “random” and money-driven.
What followed was a frantic search for a trio of killers. But in the end, investigators turned their attention to an unlikely source: Jennifer herself.
After a series of clues and interrogations, it became clear Jennifer Pan had orchestrated the hit on her parents. In her third interrogation, Pan confessed to hiring hitmen and was arrested for first-degree murder and attempted murder, along with Daniel Wong, Lenford Crawford and David Mylvaganam—the latter two of whom entered and committed the homicide, allegedly for $5,000 per parent. Another co-conspirator, Eric Carty, pleaded down to a lesser charge.
Pan was found guilty of first-degree murder and attempted murder on December 13, 2014. For her crimes, she was given a life sentence with no parole for at least 25 years.
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Wong, Crawford and Mylvaganam were also found guilty of the same charge and received the same sentence.
Carty was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. He received 18 years, to be served alongside another murder sentence he was already serving 25 years in prison for. He died in 2018.
The Common Motivations Behind Parent Killing
People who kill their parents (also known as “parricide”) tend to fall into one of four categories, says Kathleen Heide, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida who has written multiple books on the topic and conducted interviews with dozens of parricide perpetrators.
One group kills their parents after flying into a fit of blind rage. These are often children whose parents were “overindulgent,” Heide tells A&E True Crime. “The parents have given them everything…but at some point say, ‘This has gotta stop.'” But the child snaps because “they have no frustration tolerance. They have not learned ‘no.'”
Another group consists of the severely mentally ill—those suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar psychosis, who become violent in response to their delusions or hallucinations.
But Pan’s case, which involved premeditatedly contracting killers and then initially lying to police about what had transpired, seems to defy both those explanations.
Instead, hers most likely fits in one of two other categories: the “dangerously antisocial” or the “severely abused.”
The ‘Severely Abused’ Explanation for the Pan Double Parricide
According to Heide, the most common driver of parricide is child abuse. That can take many forms, including “behaviors that undermine a child’s sense of safety in the world and undermine that child’s self-concept.”
There were ways in which Pan’s case veered close to child abuse, explains Jeremy Grimaldi, a reporter whose book, A Daughter’s Deadly Deception, offers an exhaustive examination of the Jennifer Pan case.
“She was raised in a very strict household,” Grimaldi tells A&E True Crime, adding that Pan “had very little access to friends outside the home.”
As a result of that pressure, Pan began lying to her parents about a myriad of things: faking a university diploma after she had flunked out of high school, and later making counterfeit pay stubs from a phony job so she could spend time with her boyfriend.
At Pan’s trial, she testified that she felt like a “failure,” as a result of her parents’ high expectations of her and her inability to live up to those expectations. And so, she told the jury, she had hired the hitmen to kill herself, not her parents.
But while Pan may have felt pressured by parental demands, Grimaldi points out that she never claimed to suffer from physical or sexual abuse by either parent.
“She lived in an upper middle-class neighborhood, in an upper middle-class room,” Grimaldi says. “They had her fed and clothed. She was not locked in a closet.”
The ‘Dangerously Antisocial’ Explanation for the Pan Double Murder
The parent killers grouped in as “dangerously antisocial” are those who Heide says are driven to “kill the parent because the parent is an obstacle in the way of getting what they want.”
Sometimes Heide says this is about financial reward, like an inheritance. But “interestingly, I’ve had a number of cases…[of] girls who have killed because of love relationships.”
Pan’s case fits the latter explanation. At the time of her killing, Jennifer Pan was heartbroken over the loss of her relationship to Daniel Wong, one of her co-conspirators in the killing. They had dated for several years before cutting things off at the behest of her parents.
At the trial, Pan’s father testified that he had ordered her to end her relationship with Wong, saying, “If not, you have to wait till I’m dead.”
Bich Ha-Pan and Huei Hann Pan had approximately $200,000 in savings and life insurance policies combined, which would’ve been divided between Jennifer and her brother, Felix, had the plot to kill both parents succeeded.
At time of publication, Jennifer Pan is incarcerated at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario. For complicated legal reasons, she has won an appeal for a new trial in the killing of her mother. Her “attempted murder” conviction, for the shooting of her father, remains in place, so she is still serving a life sentence for her crimes.
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