Jennifer Pan pleads guilty to manslaughter in 2010 home-invasion death of mom
· Toronto Sun
Her mother was never her intended target — Jennifer Pan insists she only wanted her father dead when she hired men to stage a home invasion at their Markham home.
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But in the orchestrated hit, both parents would be shot by the intruders — and while her father Hann Pan survived gunshots to his eye, her mother Bich Ha Pan died at the scene.
In Newmarket court on Wednesday, their daughter — who had her first-degree murder conviction overturned on appeal — pleaded guilty instead to manslaughter. Sentenced to life, Pan, 40, is now eligible to apply for parole.
There was no sense of relief for his client, said her lawyer Nathan Gorham.
“There was nothing here that was a win. She was deflated and sad and emotional,” Gorham said in an interview after the hearing. “As she told the court, she has lived with the guilt and will continue to live with the guilt beyond the sentence.”
It was a true crime murder-for-hire that captivated headlines for years and was the subject of a Netflix documentary in 2024 : a golden girl who lived a double life, yearning to break free of her immigrant father’s increasingly onerous expectations of good grades and good behaviour.
While she never graduated high school, let alone a pharmacy program at U of T, Pan had forged documents to convince her strict parents that she was excelling at the life they’d planned for her. When they found out the truth, she was placed under virtual house arrest.
‘She was a good child’
“She was a good child and she worked really hard and she faced a really difficult situation where she was pressed beyond a point where children should be pressed and she was pushed to the point where she was in an irrational state of mind,” Gorham argued.
According to the agreed statement of facts, as her relationship with her father deteriorated in 2010, Pan enlisted the help of her former boyfriend, Daniel Wong, in finding the intruders and organizing the hit. The agreed facts state that he put her in contact with Lenford Crawford, who, in turn, enlisted the assistance of Eric Carty and one other individual.
Wong was convicted of manslaughter and Crawford and Carty were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. The other individual’s case is still pending.
On Nov. 8, 2010, at approximately 10:15 p.m., three men armed with guns entered the Pan home in Markham. Her father was asleep in his second-floor bedroom; Jennifer Pan was in her bedroom; and her mother, home from line-dancing at church, was soaking her feet on the main floor.
One of the intruders woke her father and brought him at gunpoint to the family room, where another man had a gun pointed at her mom. The third intruder tied their daughter to the upstairs banister with a shoelace.
After some discussion about money, her parents were taken to the basement and ordered at gunpoint to sit on the sectional couch and put blankets over their heads. Both were then shot.
Daughter called 911 once intruders left
After the intruders left, their unharmed daughter called 911.
Police found Pan’s 53-year-old mother dead from three gunshot wounds–one at close range to her skull. Her 60-year-old father had been shot in the eye and shoulder.
In 2014, a jury found Pan guilty of the first-degree murder of her mother and the attempted murder of her father.
Nine years later, the Court of Appeal ordered a new trial on the murder charge because the trial judge should have given the jury second-degree murder and manslaughter as other possible verdicts in the death of Pan’s mother.
Last April, the Supreme Court of Canada agreed .
Pan’s lawyer insists they could have gone to trial and won: he and Breana Vandebeek would have argued that police violated her Charter rights when they gave American-style documentary interviews about the case while her appeal was pending — “poisoning the well” of any potential jurors.
“She was portrayed by the police as the epitome of evil and that message really went viral,” Gorham complained.
“I don’t think I’m naive in seeing the good in her. I don’t think she’s an intrinsically bad person.”