Murder: True Crime Stories - SOLVED: The Model Student Murderer Pt. 2

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

By 2010, Jennifer Pan's carefully constructed lies were collapsing around her. Her parents had discovered the truth about her fabricated life, pulled her out of her relationship, and tightened their control over her every move. Desperate to regain command of a situation spinning out of her hands, Jennifer didn't beg for forgiveness. She arranged for three men to enter her family home one night and carry out a staged home invasion that left her mother dead and her father gravely wounded. In Part 2 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy follows the investigation that slowly unraveled Jennifer's story, the chilling inconsistencies that turned a grieving daughter into the prime suspect, the confession that shocked investigators, and the trial that gripped all of Canada.Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love crimes of Reddit. A new Crime House original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Link Letter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap.

It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. A lie is a strange kind of debt. The first one is small, almost free.

But every lie you tell to protect it costs a little more. And a little more until one day you're spending everything you have just to keep the whole thing standing. The people who love us are often the easiest to trick, not because they're foolish, but because they want to believe in the best version of us. They'll explain away the odd details. They'll talk themselves out of their doubts.

For almost 10 years, Bick and Han Pan wanted to believe in their daughter, and Jennifer Pan let them. right up until the night it got two people shot in their own basement. In the end, that lie would cost Jennifer everything. But by the time it did, it had already cost her parents far more. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on.

Sometimes the final chapter, arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is murder, true crime stories, a crime house original powered by Pave studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crime house community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, add free access to every episode, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the

Murder True Crime Stories show page on Apple Podcasts. Before we get started, a heads up, this episode includes references to self-harm and suicide. Please listen with care. This is the second of two episodes on the Pan Family Murder in Markham, Ontario. It's a story about how far two parents were willing to go to give their kids a better life. And what happens when saying no doesn't seem like an option. Last time, I told you about Bick and Hand Pan, two refugees who built a comfortable life in Canada, and pinned all of it on their gifted daughter, Jennifer. And I told you about the night in November 2010 when three armed men walked into their home,

killed Bick, and left hand clinging to life, while Jennifer survived untouched. Today, I'll tell you what investigators found when they pulled Jennifer's story apart. Nearly a decade of carefully built lies, the moment it all collapsed, and the decision she made when she ran out of other options. And we'll follow the case all the way to its resolution in 2006, more than 15 years after the night it began. All that and more coming up. On November 8, 2010, three armed men entered the Pan family home in Markham, Ontario.

They shot Jennifer Pan's parents in the basement, killing her 53-year-old mother Bick and leaving her father Han badly wounded. To everyone who pulled up to that house in the first hours, it looked like a home invasion gone wrong, and Jennifer, the 24-year-old daughter, found tied to an upstairs banister, looked like its lone surviving victim.

But almost nothing about the scene fit, a robbery. There was no forced entry, nothing of value taken, and a luxury car sitting untouched in the driveway with the keys by the door. Strangest of all was the detail nobody could explain. Why try to kill two people and leave the third alive and able to talk? The first crack in the story came from the one person who wasn't supposed to survive. On November 12th, four days after the attack,

Han Pan came out of his medically induced coma. He was badly hurt. He'd been shot in the face, but his memory of that night was intact, and when detective sat down at his bedside, what he told them didn't match a word of what his daughter had said. Han remembered being marched down his own staircase at gunpoint. He remembered the terror, and he remembered seeing Jennifer with one of the intruders.

she wasn't struggling and she wasn't tied up. She was speaking with him calmly, like the two of them already knew each other. That alone turned everything upside down because Jennifer had told police she was bound and helpless the entire time. And once detectives started looking with that in mind, the holes in Jennifer's account widened fast. Let's start with how she'd been tied.

Jennifer was bound to the banister with a shoelace. Three men supposedly arrived to rob and kill everyone, and they restrained the one witness they left alive with a shoelace. No rope, no zip ties, no tape. It's the kind of improvised, half-hearted restraint you'd use if the point was never really to hold someone at all. It's the kind of restraint you'd use if the person being tied up wanted to look tied up. And then there was the phone.

Last time we heard how shaky her 911 story was, she claimed she dialed and held the phone to her ear with her hands tied behind her back. On its own, it was a stretch. But set against her father's account, it stopped sounding like something that had happened to her and started sounding like something she'd needed to explain. None of it proved anything on its own, but together it was enough to turn the investigation toward Jennifer herself.

And over the next several days, detectives did the patient, unglomerous work that actually solves cases. They seized Jennifer's phone and combed through her calls and texts. They tracked where she'd been in the days before the attack. They talked to the people closest to her. And what they uncovered wasn't a single lie about a single night. It was an entire second life. To understand what the detectives were looking at, you have to go back.

Way back. Because Jennifer Pan had been lying to her parents from more than a decade. It had all started with something that on its surface looked almost small. I'll think back to that eighth grade graduation we talked about last time. When Jennifer was passed over for Valedictorian, we heard how hard that hit her. What we didn't hear was where it sent her. By the time she got to high school, that straight-A machine had quietly stalled. Her first ninth grade report card came back full of seas. The only place she really shown anymore was music. And Jennifer knew, with total certainty, what would happen if her parents saw those grades?

In a house where anything less than the best felt like failure, a report card full of seas wasn't a conversation, it was a catastrophe. So she made it disappear. 14-year-old Jennifer took an old report card and a photocopier and she changed her grades. The C's became A's. That night, she handed the forged card to her father. Han read it over. He smiled, and Jennifer felt the fear drain out of her because it had worked. He believed it completely.

Now, here's the thing. about a lie like that. Jennifer told herself it didn't really count. Universities don't look at ninth and tenth grade mark, so where was the harm? But that's not how this works, because she had just learned something dangerous. She had learned that she could fool the people whose approval ran her entire life, and that doing so was easy. And once you know that, The strange thing happens. The truth stops feeling like the safe option and starts feeling like the risky one. Every report card becomes a choice between a hard, honest conversation and a quick, painless forgery.

And Jennifer, who had spent her whole childhood learning to avoid disappointing her father at any cost, kept choosing the forgery. She kept faking her report cards. As she got older and the tools got better, she stopped using the photocopier and started using Photoshop. And before long, the grades weren't the only thing she was hiding. In 11th grade, when Jennifer was around 17, she met a boy named Daniel Wong. He was a year ahead of her.

He was easygoing, funny, and had a big laugh. they were both in the high school band. The thing that pushed them together was a medical scare. On a band trip to Europe in 2003, Jennifer had a serious asthma attack, and Daniel was the one who stayed with her and calmed her down. After that, they got closer. The texts got flirtier,

and by that summer, they were a couple, which was, by the rules of the Pan House, completely forbidden. Jennifer's parents had a strict no dating policy that ran all the way through university. If they found out about Daniel, there would be no end to it. So Jennifer did the thing she was already getting

frighteningly good at. She hid him. She used piano lessons as a cover, telling her parents she was going to practice when she was really going to see Daniel. When she couldn't get out, she snuck him into the house, sometimes through the back door, sometimes through his second floor window. And there was an extra reason to keep him secret, too. After he turned 18, Daniel had started selling marijuana on the side.

If Jennifer's parents ever caught wind of that, the relationship would be finished. And then came 2004 and the lie that would define the rest of Jennifer's life. She did get accepted to Ryerson University that year, a real acceptance into a science program. The plan was the one we talked about. She'd spend two years at Ryerson, then transfer into the University of Toronto's pharmacology program. But in her final year of high school, Jennifer was failing calculus, and without that credit, two things happened at once. Ryerson pulled her acceptance, and she didn't have the credits to graduate from high school at all.

To tell her parents the truth now, she wouldn't just have to admit she wasn't going to Ryerson, she'd have to unravel everything. The forged report cards going back to ninth grade, and the grades that were never real, the whole carefully maintained image of the perfect daughter. Jennifer decided she couldn't do it, and in making that choice, she stopped patching small holes and started building an entirely false world. She opened up Photoshop again, and this time she didn't just doctor a report card, She built a Ryerson acceptance letter from scratch, and to make it convincing, she added a $3,000 scholarship. She'd already taken her high school graduation photos, so that part of the illusion held,

and she made up a reason her parents couldn't attend the ceremony itself, which they accepted. As far as Bick and Hand knew, their daughter was a university student with a scholarship, exactly on track. Now came the hard part. Jennifer had to live the lie every single day. High school had given her a schedule. College, the fake one, gave her nothing but empty hours she had to fill convincingly. So she built a routine. Each morning, she packed a bag and rode the bus downtown,

and her parents assumed she was heading to campus. In reality, she spent her days in public. libraries, researching the subjects she was supposedly studying, taking real notes just in case anyone asked to see her work. To sell the pharmacology story, she bought secondhand textbooks, watched lecture videos on the subject, and filled notebooks with pages of class notes she could show if anyone wanted proof. When she wasn't at the library, she was in cafes or with Daniel at York University where he was taking classes. She had so much spare time that she started working quietly without her parents knowing.

She picked up shifts at a Boston pizza where Daniel managed the kitchen and waited tables at an eastside Mario's in Markham. To Bick and Han, none of this existed. Their daughter was a busy science student bound for pharmacology, and they did. didn't want to distract her from it. Take a second to appreciate what this actually took. Jennifer was, in a sense, working harder to fake an education than most people worked to get a real one. And she was doing it completely alone, with no one she could ever fully relax around, because relaxing meant slipping.

She kept that up for two years. Then, in 2006, Jennifer brought home the next milestone. She told her parents she'd been accepted into the University of Toronto's pharmacology program. Han was overjoyed. It was the dream he'd carried since the day she was born. There was just one problem. Jennifer had never even. even applied.

By 2006, Jennifer Pan had told her parents her most audacious lie yet, that she'd been accepted into the University of Toronto's pharmacology program the exact future her father had always wanted for her. But the truth was she'd never applied. And holding a lie like that together would take more than forged paper. It would take other people. So she told her parents she was staying three nights a week with a friend named Topaz, who lived near the downtown campus, to cut down on the long commute.

Topaz was real, the arrangement was not. On those nights, Jennifer wasn't at Topaz's. She was staying at Daniels. By now, they'd been together for years. Serious enough that Daniels' family found it strange, they'd never met Jennifer's parents. When they asked about it, Jennifer brushed it off and Daniel, who knew the whole truth, backed her up. Up to this point, the lies had mostly been Jennifer's alone. Now another person was inside them helping hold them up.

A lie shared is a lie with a witness. It binds two people together in a way that's hard to undo, and it raises the stakes for both. both of them, if it ever comes out. Those stakes climbed higher in 2008, when Jennifer hit her biggest test yet. She was supposed to be graduating from UFT. For Bick and Han, this was the summit of everything. The year their daughter became a university graduate, a pharmacist in the making, the payoff for an ocean crossing in 25 years of double.

shifts. What actually happened was a transaction. There was no degree, so Jennifer and Daniel simply bought one, paying someone for a counterfeit diploma and a transcript full of A's. As for the ceremony, she reached for the same move that had worked before, telling her parents there weren't enough tickets to go around. They were let down, but they let it go. To them, the diploma mattered more than the ceremony. Then she needed to put that fake degree to use, so she invented a job, the one I mentioned last time, a volunteer position in the blood testing lab at Toronto's hospital for sick children on Friday nights and weekends.

Once again, it was the perfect cover. It explained her absences, it sounded noble, and it could. kept the dream alive. For about a year, Jennifer went to a job that didn't exist at a hospital where she didn't work, building experience for a career she was never going to have. But every false world has a loose thread. And Jennifer's was a uniform. In early 2009, line, Han noticed something. His daughter went off to her hospital job, but she never wore a uniform. She never carried a hospital key card. For a man as attentive as hand, that small detail snagged. When he asked about it, Jennifer tried to wave it away, but he could tell something was off.

The next day, Han and Bick insisted on driving. her to the hospital themselves. Jennifer barely held it together on the ride, and when they pulled up, she hurried inside. To stay out of sight, she ducked into an emergency room waiting area, waiting there until she was sure her parents had driven off. But the thread was already pulling loose. The next morning, her parents called Topaz the friend Jennifer was supposedly staying with. Topaz, half asleep, forgot the cover story entirely and answered honestly. Jennifer wasn't there. She'd never been there.

When Jennifer came home that day, she could see it on her father's face. Han was shaking with anger, and for the first time in nearly a decade, Jennifer ran out of lies. she confessed. Not all of it, but a lot of it. She admitted she wasn't volunteering at the hospital. She admitted she'd never been in U of T's pharmacology program. She admitted she'd been dating Daniel Wong this whole time, and that on those nights she was supposedly at Topaz's,

she was really at Daniels. What she didn't confess was the deepest layer that she'd never graduated high school, never attended Ryerson at all. Even cornered, she kept one floor of the false world standing. Bick and Han were devastated. Bick cried, Han's first instinct was to throw Jennifer out of the house. Bick talked him out of it, and they made a deal instead. Jennifer could stay, but only understead.

his rules. And the rules were absolute. She had to quit her jobs. She was forbidden from seeing Daniel, and confiscated her phone and her laptop, and he began monitoring the odometer on the car to track exactly where she went. At 23 years old, Jennifer was living under a level of control most teenagers would chafe against. And this is a one of the hardest knots to untangle in this whole story, because from one angle, you can understand Han completely. He had just found out that his adult daughter had lied to him about nearly everything for the better part of a decade, what parent wouldn't come down hard. Then, think about it from Jennifer's side. She was a grown woman in her 20s who was suddenly stripped of her phone,

her independence, her boyfriend, and any freedom to come and go, and told she'd be watched. Both things are true at once. The punishment was, in a sense, fair, and it was also gasoline on a fire that had been smoldering since she was a child. For a while, Jennifer seemed to take it. She followed the rules. She even enrolled in an online calculus course to finally earn that missing high school credit. By the spring of 2010, Han believed the worst was behind them, that his daughter had learned her lesson and was finding her way back. He was wrong. Underneath the obedience, Jennifer was seething.

The harder her parents squeezed, the more trapped she felt. and all the while she was breaking the biggest rule of all, sneaking calls and text to Daniel whenever she could. She told him she felt like a prisoner in her own home, and somewhere in those months, she made a decision that would end a life and shatter her family for good. She decided that the only way to truly be free of her parents was to have them killed.

She couldn't do it alone, and she didn't try to. She brought the idea to Daniel, who had seen up close how controlling her parents were. He agreed to help. And here's where it gets chilling because the plan was so practical. Jennifer stood to inherit around half a million dollars when her parents died. She figured that money could pay for a fresh start for her and Daniel, and it could pay the men they'd hire to do the killing. But before the plot that succeeded, there was one that fell apart, and it tells you something about how determined Jennifer had become. Around this time, Jennifer reconnected with Andrew Montemeyore, a friend from her,

elementary school days. According to Jennifer, he introduced her to a man named Ricardo Duncan. Sometime around the summer of 2010, she arranged to meet Duncan over bubble tea. According to Jennifer, she handed him $1,500 to kill her father. Then she said Duncan took the money and simply vanished. He never did anything. Well, that's the moment I'd point to if you ask me, where this stopped being a story about a desperate liar and became a story about something far colder. Because a lie, even a terrible one, is really just about dodging a consequence.

Handing a stranger cash to kill your father isn't dodging anything. It's intent. And when the first attempt failed, Jennifer could have treated it as a near miss, a line she'd, walked up to and backed away from. Instead, she treated it as a logistics problem. The solution came through Daniel. He'd reconnected with contacts from his days in the drug trade, and one

of them was a man named Lennford Crawford. Daniel gave Jennifer an old phone and a SIM card to communicate with him, keeping it off her regular line, and soon Crawford told her he was was in. And the rest of the crew came together one link at a time. Crawford pulled in an older man named Eric Carty, who had a long criminal history. Cardi, in turn, recruited a younger associate David Milvaganum, along with at least one other man whose identity the courts were never able to pin down. The agreed price for killing Bick and Handpan was $10,000. By early November 2000, 10, everything was in place. All that was left was the signal. And last time I walked you through that night as Jennifer first described it to police, the armed men, the robbery,

the helpless daughter tied up while her parents were shot. Now, let me tell you what investigators concluded actually happened. On the morning of November 8th, Crawford had sent Jennifer a text telling her that after work it would be game time. That evening, everything began to move around a house where only Jennifer knew what was coming. Bick came home from line dancing and settled onto the couch to soak her feet, while Han was already asleep upstairs. And as her mother sat there, Jennifer slipped to the front door and quietly unlocked it. All the while, her phone kept lighting up.

with more than a hundred messages passing between her and Daniel in the hours around the attack. Then the coordination began in earnest. At about 9.35 p.m., one of the hired men, Milvaganum called Jennifer's phone, and the two spoke for roughly two minutes. At 10.02, the light and the upstairs study switched on, then off again a minute later. the signal to the men waiting outside. Milvaganum called once more at 10.05, and moments after that, the men let themselves in through the door Jennifer had left open for them.

The rest unfolded the way we heard last time, except for who was really in control. One man took Bick at gunpoint, another went upstairs for Han, and the third came to Jennifer, who handed him the shoelaced he used to loosely tire to the banister, the staged restraint that would sell her story. Keeping up the appearance of a robbery,

the men took roughly $2,500 in cash from Jennifer and found about $1,100 in U.S. bills in her parents' bedroom. Then they took Bick and Hand down to the basement, covered their heads with blankets. and shot them. They shot Han twice, once in the shoulder and once in the face. They shot Bick three times in the head. They killed Bick.

They believed they'd killed Hand too, but Han somehow survived, dragged himself out the front door and lived to remember his daughter, standing calmly among the men who were destroying his family. That's memory. would be the beginning of the end for Jennifer. Pan Pan was never meant to walk out of that basement alive, but he did,

and the account he gave from his hospital bed turned investigators toward his own daughter. While he recovered, the case against Jennifer kept building. The phone she'd used to reach Crawford, the text messages, the movements that didn't line up, Peace by piece, it all led back to her. On November 22nd, two weeks after the attack, detectives brought Jennifer back into the station. This time, they weren't interviewing a victim. Detective William Getz led the questioning, and he came in knowing far more than Jennifer realized. The detectives also walked in carrying something from the first time they'd met her in that initial interview,

just after the attack, Jennifer's composure had quietly unnerved them, a daughter whose mother had been shot to death a floor below her, calmly walking them through the night. They remembered the tissue she lifted to her eyes that came away dry. They remembered her calling the men who murdered her mother, gentlemen. Back then, a dry tissue proved nothing, and they had filed it away to see whether the rest of her story would hold up. It hadn't. Now, the calm, the tissue, the word gentleman, all of it looked like a performance and Gets intended to take it apart. Gets used what's called the read technique. It's a confrontational style of questioning, controversial enough that some countries have restricted it because it can push people into

false confessions. The central part of the method is convincing a suspect that the evidence against them is already overwhelming. And in Canada, police are legally allowed to manufacture that certainty and lie to a suspect about the evidence they have. So, Gets did. He told Jennifer the police had software that could tell when someone was lying and that there were satellites with infrared that could track people moving around inside a building. None of it was real, but Jennifer didn't know that. For ten years, she had been the one telling the lies. Now, she was on the other end of one.

It was a long session around ten hours, and at a certain point, when Gets made it clear that they knew she'd been involved, Jennifer's composure finally broke. she hunched over and cried and then looked up and asked a question that has stuck to this case ever since not is my father okay not what happened to my mother she asked but what happens to me it's a small line just five words but it tells you almost everything about where jennifer's head was at her mother was dead. Her father was in a hospital bed fighting for his life,

and the question that surfaced first in the moment her world collapsed was about her own fate. I won't pretend to know what was in her heart. People say strange things in the worst moments of their lives, but investigators heard it, the jury would eventually hear about it, and it became one of those details that, Once you know it is very hard to set back down.

That was the turning point, and once Jennifer broke, the word started coming. What Jennifer admitted in that room was stunning, and what she refused to admit was just as telling. She acknowledged that she had hired Lentford Crawford. She could no longer deny that, but she gave it a desperate spin. She insisted that the plan had never been to kill her parents. The plan had been for the men to kill her. She claimed she'd wanted to die and that the men had somehow gotten confused and turned their guns on her mother and father instead. Gets didn't believe it for a moment and neither did the evidence.

Jennifer was arrested that day and charged. with first-degree murder in the death of her mother and attempted murder in the shooting of her father. In the months that followed, investigators built their cases against the others. By the spring of 2011, Daniel Wong, Lennford, Crawford, David Milvaganum, and Eric Cardi were all under arrest charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy. It would be nearly three years before the case. the case reached a courtroom. The trial began in March 2014 in Newmarket, Ontario, and it was a marathon. Over roughly 10 months, the jury heard from more than 50 witnesses and reviewed over 200

exhibits. Eric Carty's case got split off from the rest after his lawyer fell ill. For the others, the trial pressed on. Jennifer spent about a week on the witness stand trying to convince the jury she'd had a change of heart and tried to call the whole thing off before it happened. But the weight of the evidence was overwhelming. In December 2014, Jennifer Pan, Daniel Wong, Lentford Crawford, and David Milvaganum were each found guilty of first-degree murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy to commit murder. The following month in January 2015,

Jennifer got the automatic sentence for first-degree murder in Canada, life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. Eric Carty was handled separately and later convicted for his part in the plot. He would never see the end of his sentence. In April 2018, he was found dead in his prison cell. For most cases, that would be the end. for this one, it was the start of an argument that would run for another decade all the way to the highest court in the country. And it came down to one deceptively hard legal question. Everyone agreed

Jennifer had plotted a murder. But which murder? The defense argued the jury hadn't been given enough options to choose from. They said there was a third possibility the jurors should have been allowed to weigh. According to them, the plan had been to kill only hand. I know that can sound like a technicality, the kind of fine distinction that makes people roll their eyes at the legal system, but it isn't nothing. In Canadian law, first-degree murder has to be planned and deliberate, and it comes with that automatic 25-year wall before parole. If a jury believed Jennifer plan to kill her father, but not her mother, her mother's death might legally count as something less than first-degree murder, and the 25-year wall might come down with it. That distinction

between a planned execution and something less is what the next several years would be spent fighting over. In May 23, more than eight years after the jury first convicted her, the The Ontario Court of Appeal agreed with the defense. It overturned the first-degree murder convictions for Jennifer and her co-accused and ordered a new trial on that charge. Ruling the jurors should have been allowed to weigh that third scenario and the lesser verdicts that came with it. But the court drew a hard line around the rest of the case.

The attempt on Hand's life was a separate question from who was meant to die that night. and on that count, the convictions held. Which meant that even with the murder charge reopened, Jennifer wasn't going anywhere. She was still serving a life sentence for trying to kill her father. The appeal hadn't reopened her freedom. It had reopened the question of what her mother's death would be called. Neither side was willing to live with that split.

The crown took it to the Supreme Court of Canada, fighting to put the first-degree murder convictions back. Jennifer and her co-accused cross-appealed, arguing that if the trial error was serious enough to topple the murder charge, it had to topple the attempt on her father too. Two opposite appeals, both riding on the same courtroom mistake, and on April 10, 2025, the country's top court turned both sides down,

though not unanimously. Two of its nine justices would have restored the original first-degree murder convictions outright, a measure of how hard the question really was. The majority let the Court of Appeals ruling stand. A new trial on the murder charge would go forward for all four, the attempted murder convictions would stand, which brings us at last to this year, to how this finally ended more than 15 years after Bick Pan died in her basement.

On March 18, 2006, rather than face that new trial, Jennifer Pan pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of her mother, and the agreed facts behind that plea reframe the whole thing one final time. Jennifer admitted that she had plotted to have. her father killed. She maintained she didn't intend for her mother to die, but she acknowledged that she knew or should have known that her mother could be home that night and that if she was, she could end up hurt. I want to be precise about what this does and doesn't mean because it's easy to misread. The first-degree murder charge in her mother's death was withdrawn.

Jennifer wasn't acquitted of anything. She's still convicted of trying to murder her father. Well, that was never in doubt and never overturned. She's still serving a life sentence. The one real change is this. Under the manslaughter plea, she can now apply for parole rather than being locked out of it for 25 years. Whether she ever actually gets out on parole is a separate question.

Her co-accused followed the same path. In April 2006, David Milvaganum, the last of them to be sentenced, was convicted of manslaughter and given a life sentence. He didn't dispute that he'd been part of the plot, and he apologized to the Pan family in court. With that, all four, Jennifer, Daniel Wong, Lentford, Crawford, and Milvaganum can now apply for parole. Today, Jennifer Pan is 40 years old and held at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario.

Her case became the subject of books, of endless articles, and in 2024, of a Netflix documentary that introduced her story to millions of people who'd never heard it. But strip away the headlines, endless streaming specials, and what you're left with, is a family that destroyed itself from the inside. One investigator who worked the case described it in a way I keep coming back to. Detective Deborah Gladding said that for Jennifer, this was a love story gone wrong. A daughter so desperate to be with a boy she loved

and so trapped by the parents who loved her that she convinced herself the only exit ran straight through their deaths. Han survived the bullet, but surviving the betrayal was harder. He's spoken about losing his wife and his daughter in a single night, his wife to a grave, and his daughter to a prison, and to everything he learned about her. He cut off contact with Jennifer and rebuilt what life he could around his son, Felix. I think about that very first forged report card a lot.

A frightened 14-year-old at a photocopier turning C's into A's, telling herself it didn't count. It would be easy to draw a tidy line from that moment to the basement, as if one always leads to the other. It doesn't. Plenty of kids buckle under impossible pressure, tell desperate lies, and never come anywhere near violence. The pressure Jennifer was under was real, and it was cruel in its own way. But millions of people carry burdens like hers and choose every single day not to do what she did. What makes Jennifer Pan's story so unsettling isn't that she was a monster.

It's that she wasn't. She was a gifted, frightened, deeply controlled young woman. who told one lie to survive a moment, then spent 10 years feeding it. By the end, the lie had grown bigger than she was, and the only way she could think to protect it was to kill the two people it was built to fool. But the truth always comes out. It came out for Jennifer in the worst way it possibly could. The tragedy is that by the time it did, her mother was already,

gone and there was no version of the story left that ended in freedom. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy and this is Murder True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios here at Crimehouse. We want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media.

crime house on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate review and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your murder true crime stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday, completely ad-free, no waiting for part two, Plus, add free and early access to every show across Crimehouse and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap, try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Friday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original powered by Page Studios.

This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pertzowski, Lori Maranelli, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Nicolette Tavallero, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Hi, it's Carter. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? Well, you'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new Crime House original with Sabrina DeAnna Roga and Alexis Link Letter.

Every week, one host brings real true crime stories. from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a thread at 2 a.m. that starts with, you have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube.