When Jennifer Pan was arrested for hiring hit men to kill her parents in 2010, her motivations seemed straight forward.
The 24-year-old's strict Vietnamese parents forbade her to see her boyfriend and she snapped.
But a new report from a journalist who grew up with Jennifer is shedding light on the years of deceit that the first-generation Canadian fed her parents, which caused a break in their relationship which never healed
According to Toronto Life's Karen Ko, who went to the same elementary school as Jennifer, she had excelled both as a student and as an ice skater in her formative years.
But when Jennifer was 'snubbed' a valedictorian award for her 8th grade class, Jennifer stopped dedicating herself to her studies and her grades began to slide to the point where she was averaging 70 per cent in all of her classes except music by the first year of high school.
This is something that Jennifer's parents, mother Bich Ha and father Huei Hann, never knew.
Ko describes Hann as the 'classic tiger dad' who gave up everything to move to the U.S. and labored at a tool manufacturing job so that his two kids could have a better life than him.
Like many immigrant parents, he expected his children to perform at the top of their class so that they could get into the best colleges that would lead them to high-paid careers.
Obviously afraid for her parents to find out that she was slipping, Jennifer decided to forge her report cards to show straight A's using old progress reports, scissors, glue and a copy machine.
For the most part, Jennifer was getting B's which was 'respectable for most kids but unacceptable in her strict household,' according to Ko.
Her grades were good enough to get her into Ryerson University on early admission, and she told her parents that she would spend two years there studying science before transferring to the more prestigious University of Toronto to study pharmacology like her father always wanted.
However, in her last semester Jennifer failed calculus, which kept her from graduating and Ryerson withdrew their admission offer.
Sole survivor: Pan's father Huei Hann Pan, left, survived the attempt on his life while her mother, Bich Ha, right, was not as lucky
Instead of fessing up, Jennifer continued to go about as if nothing was wrong. She accepted her father's offer of a new laptop, started buying used biology and physics textbooks and even pretended to attend freshman week in September.
As for questions about how she was paying for college, Jennifer doctored papers saying she had received a loan and told her parents she had won a $3,000 scholarship.
When classes started, Jennifer would take public transport downtown every day, where instead of attending lectures, she would go to public libraries and take notes on topics she thought she would be learning in her first-year science classes.
After two full years of this conceit, her father started asking about transferring to the University of Toronto. Jennifer again fed her parents a lie, saying she had been accepted, and convinced them to let her stay with a friend downtown a few days of the week when in fact she was living at her high school sweetheart's house.
Another two years passed, and it was time for Jennifer to 'graduate' from University of Toronto. This time, she and her boyfriend Daniel Wong found someone to forge a straight-A college transcript. She then told her parents that because of over-crowding at the school, each student was only allowed one guest at graduation, so she gave her ticket to a friend, not wanting to make one of her parents feel left out.
For love? When news of the murder and attempted murder broke in 2010, it seemed that Jennifer had orchestrated the hit to get back at her parents for forbidding her from seeing her boyfriend Daniel Wong (right). However, it later emerged that he helped plan the hit before breaking up with Jennifer for a second time
Jennifer's near-decade of deceit finally came crashing down when she told her parents that she had gotten a volunteer job working in the blood-testing lab at SickKids hospital.
Her dad thought something was amiss though when he noticed she had neither a uniform or a card key to get into the building.
So one day he insisted on dropping her off at work, and had his wife tail her inside the hospital where she was nowhere to be found. The next morning, he then called the friend that Jennifer was supposed to be living with and found out that she never stayed there.
The Pans confronted their daughter after that and she conceded that she had never attended the University of Toronto and had been staying at her boyfriend's, but she kept secret the fact that she never went to Ryerson or completed high school.
While Hann, feeling betrayed, first banished his daughter from the house, his wife eventually convinced him to let her stay with a strict set of ground rules.
Hit men: Eric Carty (left) is accused of helping Jennifer arrange the murder, but has not yet been tried. At right is David Mylvaganam, who was found guilty of taking part in the hit and is also serving a life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years sentence
For the first two weeks, Jennifer was banned from using her computer and cellphone and after that time was up her parents had to be in her presence when using them.
Forbidden from seeing her boyfriend, their relationship began to fall apart and Daniel started seeing a new girl named Christine.
However, it was not because her parents cut her off from Daniel that led Jennifer to plot their murder. Instead, it was when she briefly got back together with Daniel that the two schemed together to have them killed, so Jennifer could collect a $500,000 inheritance and they could move in together.
Daniel is the one who introduced Jennifer to one of the hit men, Lenford Crawford, who agreed to do the hit for $10,000.
Eventually, hot-and-cold Daniel said he was going back to Christine and asked if Jennifer still wanted to go through with the hit. After some hesitation, she texted back: 'I want it for me' and the plot went on as planned.
November 8, 2010 was the agreed date that the hit would happen. While her mother was watching TV and her dad was falling asleep in his bedroom, Jennifer allegedly texted with the killers and signaled for them to come into the house.
Crawford and his associates David Mylvaganam and Eric Carty allegedly walked in through the unlocked front door, each bearing their own gun.
From there they brought Hann out of his room and down into the living room, while pretending to be staging a home invasion by tying Jennifer's hands to a bannister.
Scene: Above, the Pan family home in Markham where the hit happened on November 8, 2010
They stole some money hidden around the home and then led the parents to the basement where each was shot multiple times.
After the men fled, Jennifer pulled out her cellphone from her waistband and call 911, just as her father surprisingly emerged from the basement - having survived a gun shot wound to the face.
When Hann woke up from a three-day coma, he told investigators details of the home invasion that put the eye of suspicion on Jennifer. Hann said that he saw his daughter talking to one of the men 'like a friend' and that her arms weren't even tied behind her back while she was being led around the house.
Investigators then played bad cop with Jennifer and told her that they knew everything, to which she admitted to hiring the men men to kill both her parents and herself.
However, she claims that her relationship with her dad mended and she called the murder-suicide plot off and had nothing to do with what happened.
Police didn't buy the story and Jennifer was arrested soon after, in addition to her boyfriend Daniel and the three men believed to be part of the home invasion: Mylvaganam, Carty and Crawford. All were charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
In December, Jennifer was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole for 25 years for the murder charge and for the same for the attempted murder charge, to be served concurrently. She will be eligible for parole at the age of 49.
Daniel, Crawford and Mylvaganam received the same sentence while Carty's trial has been postponed until early 2016.
A judge initially banned Jennifer from communicating with her family, and her lawyer asked at trial for that to be dropped.
'Jennifer is open to communicating with her family if they wanted to,' he said.
However, it seems that Jennifer's father has no interest in maintain any kind of relationship.
During the trial, he gave statements to the court about how the death of his wife has changed their life.
'When I lost my wife, I lost my daughter at the same time,' Hann wrote. 'I don’t feel like I have a family anymore. […] Some say I should feel lucky to be alive but I feel like I am dead too...I hope my daughter Jennifer thinks about what has happened to her family and can become a good honest person someday.'
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