A Daughter's Deadly Deception

by Jeremy Grimaldi

  Detective Slade and the other investigators, watching the interview via outdated recording equipment, listen intently as Jennifer begins to explain what transpired that November night. She recounts an incredible story. Her family home was raided by three gunmen who grew so enraged by the lack of spoils and her parents’ uncooperative behaviour that they shot them both in the head.

  Slade’s first order of business was nailing down the assailants’ descriptions. The first, Jennifer tells him, was black with a medium build and dreadlocks that “flopped” over his face so that she couldn’t make out his features. He was between twenty-eight and thirty-three, about five feet six inches tall, and “seemed to be the one in charge.” (Oddly, Jennifer refers to him using the term gentleman.) When asked about his facial hair, she motions with her hand around her chin, saying “I think …” before her first utterance of a phrase that would become a recurring theme throughout the interview: “I don’t want to say something wrong.” She says the man — who she describes as “Number One” — carried a handgun, wore black leather gloves, and sounded as though he was born in Canada. Her description of him is quite vague, even contradictory — his face, she tells Slade, had a “roundish, squarish” quality.

  “Number Two,” who she says was running back and forth between the other two men, assisting, had a long, oval face and was wearing a dark hoodie. A bandana covered his nose and he never spoke, only taking orders from others and nodding.

  Although she states she didn’t get much of a look at “Number Three,” who was holding her parents at gunpoint, she said he had a Caribbean accent, resembling the way her high school friend’s Guyanese parents spoke.

  When Slade asks her to take him through the day leading up to the murder, Jennifer starts on the morning of November 8. The day began with an odd occurrence in the normally peaceful neighbourhood. When they were leaving the house, Jennifer and her mother saw that police had cordoned off part of their street. They were told they couldn’t leave due to a gas leak nearby. Once police lifted the order, Jennifer told Slade, she decided to stay home and practise piano instead of going out with her mother. The day then unfolded in a routine sort of way, with Bich running errands before returning home in the mid-afternoon. Jennifer and her mother sat down for dinner together; Hann ate alone before retiring to his study to read the Vietnamese news, as was his habit. Jennifer’s brother, Felix, she explained, was in Hamilton, about forty-five minutes away, where he was attending McMaster University, studying engineering.

  After supper, Jennifer’s friend, Adrian Tymkewycz, dropped by and the pair watched their favourite television shows: How I Met Your Mother and Gossip Girl. When he left, Jennifer retired to her bedroom, turned on the TV, watched The Amazing Race, and chatted on the phone with Edward Pacificador, another friend. She said she heard her mother return home at about 9:30 p.m. from her weekly line dancing session held at a Toronto church — something her mother did each Monday.

  Upon hearing Bich “rummaging” around downstairs, Jennifer was startled to hear her mother yell upstairs for Hann to come down. It was the language she used — English — which sparked concern, prompting Jennifer to hang up the phone and sit in silence. Bich rarely used anything other than Vietnamese or her native Cantonese inside the home. Jennifer sat “frozen” in place, she says, listening to strange and muffled voices coming from inside her home. “The voices weren’t any voices I was familiar with, and so I was scared … I couldn’t move. I just sat in my room for a while and then I thought I heard them all leave the top floor.” When Jennifer finally opened the door and peered out into the dark hallway, she saw the man she refers to as Number One walking toward her with a string in his hands. He grabbed her and tied her hands behind her. “I have a gun behind your back. Do what I say,” she was told. “If you do what I say then no one will get hurt. Where is the money? Show me where your money is.”

  Jennifer says she obliged, showing the man where she kept $2,000 in cash, which she’d been saving to buy the new iPhone. The men then “pushed” her to her parents’ bedroom across the hall at gunpoint. Number One and Number Two asked her where her parents kept the money. She didn’t know, so the men ransacked the room and discovered some cash in her mother’s bedside table. They proceeded to “drag” Jennifer downstairs and ordered her to kneel on the floor and keep her eyes on the ground. Although she says she only saw Number Three’s shadow, she heard him engage her mother in an angry confrontation, demanding her wallet and yelling orders that confused Bich. “My mom kept trying to get up and they kept telling her to sit down,” she tells Slade in a weeping tone. “They were trying to find her wallet, but her English isn’t very good, so she kept saying purse.” When Bich tried to stand up one last time, Jennifer says she was shoved back onto the couch. “I didn’t want her to get hurt, so I told her to sit down,” she adds before beginning to sob and losing control of her emotions.

  “Take your time,” the detective tells her soothingly. “All this is very important, so take your time.”

  When Hann told the “gentlemen” that his wallet, containing $60, was upstairs in his bedroom, the men brought Jennifer back upstairs and found the money. Next Number One asked Number Two to get a string from “Cuzy.” When he returned, Number One used it to tie Jennifer to the upstairs banister. The next thing she remembers is her parents being led to the basement. “The last thing I heard them [the intruders] say was ‘You lied. You lied to us,’ and then I heard two pops,” a despondent Jennifer recalls. “My mom screamed, I yelled out for her, and [I heard] a couple more pops and I think I heard my mom say or moan or something. They did one more [shot] and one of the guys says ‘We have to go now, it’s been too long,’ and then they ran out the front door.”

  By the time Jennifer was able to access her phone to call the police, she began to hear her father’s voice coming from downstairs. “I still hadn’t heard anything from my mom, and all I could hear was my dad running [out onto] the street, moaning,” she adds.

  Once Jennifer’s initial account is complete, Detective Slade says he is intent on retracing the events with her one more time, but this time under his own methodical questioning: “We’re going to go back clinically. Put yourself now as a figure looking down at what you saw.”

  While the telling and retelling of an event can help victims remember small details, it can also give investigators an opportunity to catch any inconsistencies in the witness’s story. Jennifer remains composed and relatively concise during the recounting of the details, but there are key differences in her second version of events that catch the attention of investigators. Initially, she didn’t see her mother after she returned home, but

  The main floor and staircase leading to the second floor at the Pan home.

  The upstairs landing, where Jennifer was bound to the railing with string. An officer cut her loose with the scissors shown.

  in her second telling she descends the stairs to greet her. Her first account also involved a man coming toward her with a string, but in her retelling she claims Number One showed her his gun “in a holster” before ordering her to sit on the bed and grabbing the money — this time $2,500 rather than $2,000. In this version, she says she wasn’t tied up until Number Two brought Number One a shoelace. “He had pulled really, really tight, and I guess he felt me flinch and that’s when he tied the second knot,” she says.

  When she was led downstairs, she was told to sit on the floor (in the first account she said she was ordered to kneel). She then recalls something new: a critical moment. It was at this point, Jennifer says, that she disobeyed the assailant’s orders to keep her eyes on the floor and looked up, noticing that Number Three was of thin build. She also observed that he was pointing a “revolver” at her father — something she says she could tell because of the gun’s “rotating cylinder.” In this version, though, she tells Slade that the men found substantially more of her parent’s money — which she now reca
lls was $1,100 of unspent American dollars from a recent trip to the United States. During this second version, the men fail to locate the wallet and castigate her father for his perceived dishonesty (a comment Jennifer would repeat a number of times): “You lied to us. You lied to us. You just had to co-operate.”

  In a distressed, almost whiny voice, Jennifer then works her way through the terrifying end to her mother’s life: “I think I hear[d] my parents going down the stairs, and my mom was asking them for me to come with them, but they wouldn’t let me — ‘I want my daughter. Why can’t my daughter come, too? I want my daughter,’” she says, pausing, before breathing out heavily and continuing haltingly. “I heard two pops … my mom scream … I yelled out for her, and [heard] a couple more pops…. And I think I heard my mom say or moan something and then they did one more [shot]. One of the guys said, ‘We have to go now. It’s been too long.’ And then they ran out the door.”

  A few minutes after this, when she was on the phone with the 911 operator, Jennifer recalls hearing her father groaning as he fled the house. “My dad was outside,” she says, sobbing again. “I was yelling at him, but he wouldn’t come in. I don’t know if he didn’t hear me, but he didn’t come in. I think he went to look for help. And I didn’t get to see my dad … until before I left the hospital just now.”

  It is this detail that Detective Bill Courtice’s mind refuses to let go, turning it over and over as he watches the interview, wondering why a father would bolt from the house, injury or not, knowing his daughter is still inside. “Dad is shot downstairs. He has a fatal injury. Some parents might go up because of their concern for their child,” he later says, referencing cases where parents run into burning buildings to save their children. “In this case here, he exits stage left very quickly. He hears her screaming and he doesn’t stop.” Detective Courtice (pronounced Curtis), though, says he put his doubts to one side for the moment. “But at [that] point … we took her comments at face value.”

  As questions turn to her situation at home, Jennifer gives Slade little to go on, explaining that her family “needed [her] home for a while.” When he quizzes her about her professional circumstances and how she got the sort of money she handed to the thieves, she says she earned it teaching piano for family friends. When Slade inquires about her education, she mentions nothing about her past, only discussing her future plans: “I’m going back to school in January,” she tells him. “To study biotechnology engineering.” And when questioned about whether anything odd happened in the lead-up to the murder, she gives Slade the most vanilla of responses: “We live a straightforward, almost routine life.”

  Jennifer once again grows agitated when Slade nonchalantly tells her that her brother, Felix, is being interviewed in the room next door. Rather than asking how her baby brother is feeling or if she can speak to him, Jennifer seems more concerned with the police inquiries. Apparently unaware that a murder investigation, especially one as detailed as this would be, can involve hundreds of interviews, Jennifer breathlessly asks: “Oh, he has to be interviewed, too?”

  “Just because, you never know,” Slade replies, allaying her fears, suggesting police are just going through the motions by speaking to him. “It’s more of an administration.”

  The news of her sibling’s presence seems to be the precursor to something far more intriguing. When Slade eventually leaves the room to discuss what he’s uncovered so far with his colleagues, we begin to see wild fluctuations in Jennifer’s behaviour. The video footage shows her taking a swig of water before placing her head in her hand, her thumb and her forefinger on her temples. Her two hands eventually cover her face before she sits up and places her hand over her stomach. She stands up, appearing dizzy and disoriented, at one point even regaining her balance on the wall and then her chair before almost fainting as she paces around the room, one hand always on the wall. She begins to shake her hands and then places her forehead against the wall. When Slade re-enters twenty excruciating minutes later, he shares with her some of what the investigative team might have been contemplating. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out [the intruders might] have been drawn to [your mother] because of the type of car she is driving and where she’s driving to,” he says. “It’s something we have to explore.”

  It is with the utterance of this theory that Jennifer comes alive once again, seemingly more at ease with the new line of discussion. She’s questioned about whether a potential motive for the crime could have been what Jennifer calls the family’s wealthy “aesthetics.” Jennifer enthusiastically responds that her mother does drive a Lexus. When asked about her father’s car, she responds with a wry smile: “He drives a Mercedes, and he loves that baby.”

  However, this mood doesn’t last, and her emotions start to shift as police focus on her electronic communication. Jennifer appears to flinch when Slade mentions “time stamping” events using data collected from her cellphone. “I just don’t, like, I talk to people on the phone, but I don’t —” She hesitates.

  Slade interrupts her with a response that seems to worry her even more. “The unfortunate thing is that Edward [Pacificador] and Adrian [Tymkewycz] are probably going to have to be interviewed because they were in the house and on the phone with you,” he explains. The distressing news doesn’t stop there. Detective Slade advises her exactly what to expect from the media whirlwind that is likely to follow a murder of this type. “I’m telling you that the media is going to be around this case,” he explains. “We have no control over what they say and they do. My only advice to you is, don’t read the papers and turn the TVs off. Home-invasion-type robberies where someone is murdered can become very big news and people … hang on it.”

  Jennifer takes it all in with her hands crossed, again over her chest, on the verge of tears. Investigators then ask her to sign over her consent for access to calls and texts from her Rogers Samsung phone between November 1 and 9. She manages to muster enough intestinal fortitude to question exactly who will be contacted. “How … deep into this will they look …?” she asks. “Just regular phone calls …? It’s only because sometimes I phone [piano] teachers and stuff like that.”

  When Slade mentions just how vital her cellphone information will be to catch the murderers, Jennifer appears surprised the police won’t simply take her word for what happened in that house. In today’s cellular world, Slade says, corresponding cell towers track mobile phone usage, and this information can become central to any homicide investigation. “Towers become relevant in this case because of where you are when the phone call comes in,” he explains to Jennifer. “It firms your story to say ‘I was in my room when the calls came in.’ That will show up on the tower site information. It also may turn out that [in the lead-up] you were targeted and you were in an area, and towers enable us to go back and try to look for cameras [in those areas]. Not saying it’s going to happen in your case, but … tower sites always show where and [at what time] you’re on the phone making calls. If you’re lying as a part of this whole process, telling us fictitious information, now the records can also be used against you. We have to let you know [that] by law we can use these against you if you’re lying to us.”

  Clearly shocked by where this investigation might be headed, Jennifer tries to salvage her sense of control over what might occur next. “Will I be informed of who, if anyone, is contacted on that?” she inquires. But Slade won’t budge. She’ll be left in the dark from here on in.

  Jennifer leaves the station at around 5:00 a.m.

  It is during the meat of this conversation that, just a few miles away, the decision is made to airlift Jennifer’s father from Markham Stouffville Hospital to a central Toronto trauma centre. Doctors make the difficult decision to place Hann in an induced coma.

  3

  A Crack Squad

  The brutal nature of this particular crime prompts some investigators to consider the possibility that Hann and Bich may have be
en involved in the underworld — gambling and drugs can’t be ruled out. During her first interview, the subject of illegal gambling is raised with Jennifer when she is asked if her parents are known to keep large sums of money in the house. However, this line of questioning is soon abandoned. Although detectives don’t like to dismiss motive without firm evidence, the clues left behind at the crime scene reveal a very different story. The reality is that fifty-seven-year-old Hann and fifty-three-year-old Bich couldn’t be more straitlaced: these Vietnamese residents were just hard-working, middle-class parents.

  But something clearly doesn’t fit. The idea that Hann and Bich are two entirely innocent victims runs counter to everything detectives surveying the scene know from experience. Why would thieves intent on plundering a home of its wealth complicate a quick payday by resorting to such violence? It is completely out of the ordinary. A random home invasion, one in which criminals drive down a street and indiscriminately select a home based on appeal or assumed riches, may be widely feared by the public, but in police circles it’s virtually unheard of. Any seasoned investigator will tell you that in 99 percent of cases there is a distinct motive, a reason — a tip about a safe bursting with cash, rumours of jewellery, thousands of dollars under the mattress, or top-of-the-line sports cars. However, in all these instances the motive is material benefit, and those willing to take part would ensure the home is empty. After all, those who steal possessions can expect six months or less in prison; murder, on the other hand, can land you in prison for life.

  Otherwise, a victim might have links to the underworld. In this case, the motive might switch to payback for an assumed wrongdoing, or to send a signal if someone is trying to muscle in on your turf.