In 2015, Jennifer Pan was convicted of plotting to kill her parents in an attack staged to look like a home invasion robbery. Pan’s father, Huei Hann Pan, survived, but her mother, Bich Ha Pan, died. As covered in the 2024 Netflix documentary What Jennifer Did, here’s why Pan planned to have her parents murdered.
In 2010, when the supposed home invasion happened outside Toronto, Canada, Pan was just a teenager. Pan’s dad was left in a coma after the incident, but eventually, he woke up, and as the police interviewed Pan and Huei — the only surviving witness — they discovered holes in Pan’s story. There was also no sign of forced entry, and police recovered text messages between Pan and her boyfriend, Daniel Wong, about the conspiracy.
One question police had, according to What Jennifer Did director Jenny Popplewell, was why robbers did not also kill Pan. “Why leave a surviving witness? If you’re going to shoot two people, you would shoot the third,” Popplewell said. At her trial, Pan admitted everything and said she plotted to kill her father before and even tried to hire men to kill her in the past, but those plans never worked out. Why would she take such drastic measures?
Why did Jennifer do it?
According to What Jennifer Did, Jennifer Pan had lied to her parents about accomplishments and opportunities in her life that weren’t true. She forged documents to make her parents believe she was enrolled in college, but she wasn’t, and she told them she graduated from high school, but she didn’t. Pan’s parents were strict and put a lot of pressure on their daughter to succeed, and they believed her. They drove her to where she supposedly went to college. Her father wanted her to become a pharmacist, while her mother dreamed she might one day be a professional pianist.
Meanwhile, Pan’s parents disapproved of her boyfriend, Daniel Wong, and caught in the middle, Pan had no other choice but to kill her parents, or so she thought, as her mental state deteriorated. Pan told the police, “I needed them to kill me. I didn’t want to live anymore…because I was such a disappointment.”
In 2015, Pan and her co-conspirators were sentenced to life in prison. The Netflix show ends on a cliffhanger, revealing that those convictions were thrown out when an appeals court ruled the jury received improper instructions. The prosecution appealed the ruling, and as of 2024, the Canadian Supreme Court had not heard the case. According to Forbes, Pan is serving her sentence at Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario.