Here’s another psychopath who hired hit men to murder her parents
The extremely sad and horrifying story of how Jennifer Pan, a Canadian woman whose parents hailed from Vietnam and who had huge dreams for her academic success and pressured her to achieve it, came to hire three hit men to murder them is told as though it’s a tragedy of “tiger parenting” gone wrong:
Bich and Hann had raised Jennifer and her brother, Felix, to believe in the supreme importance of academic success, and they restricted their activities to ensure nothing less. Pan, whose high school life included numerous extracurricular activities, like figure skating, piano, martial arts and swimming, in addition to long nights studying, was forbidden from attending parties of any kind. Dating was out of the question. In their Markham home, they had trophy cases displaying Pan’s many awards.
When Pan’s parents learned that all of their efforts had been for naught [and she had been deceiving them for many years about her grades and status as a college student when in fact she had failed to graduate high school], they placed further restrictions on their now-adult daughter. No more cellphone. No more laptop. No more clandestine dates with her boyfriend, Daniel Wong.
While she eventually gained more freedom, Pan stayed angry. She thought about how much better her life would be without her parents. And so, with Daniel’s help, she plotted to kill the two people who had made her life like “house arrest.”
The scene described in Toronto Life and earlier in the trial is gruesome. In a planned murder disguised to look like a robbery gone awry, Pan played the part of helpless witness as three hired hit men, David Mylvaganam, Lenford Crawford and allegedly Eric Carty, fatally shot her mother and severely wounded her father. She called 911, distraught, to bolster the illusion.
This story sounds like it has to do with parental pressure. But if you look back at the post I recently wrote about the patterns shown by psychopathic children who murder (or try to murder) their parents, Jennifer Pan fits the template very well. She seems to have a knack for deception and had been expertly practicing it long before the plan to murder, faking grades in high school, and creating a complex web of evidence that she was attending college for four years when she actually was not. It was when her parents found out, and tried to impose consequences and restrictions on her as a result, that her plan to murder them seems to have been hatched.
This article written by a former classmate of Pan’s relates incident upon incident of Pan’s deception and later cold-blooded violence, a veritable blueprint of teen and young adult psychopathy, but the author remains sympathetic to Pan. She ascribes emotions to Pan of “inadequacy, self-doubt and shame,” but offers little evidence of any of these except to say that Pan made “little horizontal cuts on her forearms,” but doesn’t say who saw these cuts or how she knows this happened.
But to me the best indication of Pan as psychopath rather than abused child who had no recourse is that when the murders occurred she was 24 years old, and had a boyfriend. They could certainly have gone out and lived on their own at that point, but chose not to. What’s more, here’s the classic “psychopathic teen who kills parents” story, a sort of smoking gun:
According to the police, it was at this point that Daniel and Jennifer, who were back in contact and exchanging daily flirty texts, devised an even more sinister plan: they’d hire a hit on Bich and Hann, collect the estate””Jennifer’s portion totalling about $500,000””and live together, unencumbered by her meddling parents. Daniel gave Jennifer a spare iPhone and SIM card, and connected her with an acquaintance named Lenford Crawford, whom he called Homeboy. Jennifer asked what the going rate was for a contract killing. Crawford said it was $20,000, but for a friend of Daniel’s it could be done for $10,000. Jennifer was careful to use her iPhone for crime-related conversations and her Samsung phone for everything else.
This is not a portrait of a child who is abused for years, has no way out, and who snaps. This is something else entirely.
The description of the killings, and Jennifer Pan’s part in them, makes very chilling reading—and includes the sadly ironic fact that Jennifer’s mother, who thought it was a home invasion and thought Jennifer was threatened as well, pleaded desperately with the killers to spare her daughter.
Pan’s father lived, despite being shot in the head. Here’s one small part of how Jennifer’s involvement in the crime came to be known:
By November 12, Hann [Jennifer’s father] had woken up from his three-day induced coma. He had a broken bone near his eye, bullet fragments lodged in his face that doctors couldn’t remove and a shattered neck bone””the bullet had grazed the carotid artery. Remarkably, he remembered everything, including two troubling details: he recalled seeing his daughter chatting softly””“like a friend,” he said””with one of the intruders, and that her arms were not tied behind her back while she was being led around the house.
When confronted with the fact that the police strongly suspected she was involved, Jennifer’s reaction was also very typical of a psychopath: she was “hunched over and sobbing, ask[ing] repeatedly, ‘But what happens to me?’”
Stories like this make terrible reading. No doubt Pan’s parents were not ideal, but most parents are not ideal and most children don’t hire hit men to kill their parents and live high off the hog on the insurance money. That is the province of the psychopath, and we do ourselves no good when we make excuses, blame the parents, or fail to see a pattern.
Meet:
Jean-Claude ROMAND.
When all was said and done, he had never felt so free ….
Forgot:
Do.not.read.the.book!
I read the stories. This doesn’t sound like psychopathy to me, just selfishness. I looked over the psychopathy checklist, and she doesn’t seem to match a lot of the traits, as far as the articles reveal at least. She lied to her parents and concocted a rape story, and maybe didn’t regret her actions, but how many criminals really do regret their actions? I don’t see impulsivity, promiscuity, glibness, or an overinflated sense of self-worth. She doesn’t seem more parasitic than the average 24-year-old living off her parents.
I agree with you that the tiger mom thing is an excuse. But calling her a psychopath seems like an excuse too, or a deflection from the fact that she just did a bunch of selfish things, took them too far, and got caught.
Good analysis. This is the sort of piece which brings me to the site.
Nick:
Read my other articles about psychopathy and/or sociopathy.
Not every trait must be present for someone to be a psychopath, and not all psychopaths are alike. And psychopathy is no sort of excuse whatsoever; it’s a description of something we don’t understand at all well.
This one exhibits plenty of those traits, however, and has exhibited them for a long time.
Obviously it’s not possible to know for sure.
“psychopathy is … a description of something we don’t understand at all well.” neo
Damaged ‘wiring’…
A mechanic needs to understand that frayed spark plug wires can prevent proper operation of a vehicle. But everyone recognizes a dysfunctional vehicle.
Until we can actually cure murderous psychopaths, put them down like the rabid dogs that they are…
Neo – “Excuse” was too strong a word. I think that labeling a sin as something other than a sin is dangerous, though. I could easily see myself being tempted to fake my grades and sneaking out to be with a romantic interest. I could see myself lying and getting caught up in the embarrassment of it. As the story goes along it’s harder for me to picture myself doing those things, but when you’ve proceeded from A through J, K and L are probably a lot easier. If we rely too much on labels it can make it seem like “they” do that kind of horrible act, when I suspect it’s more like “we”.
I find it astonishing that her parents didn’t pick up a CLUE when their daughter was already of adult age.
The solution is to admit that her childhood days were over.
And that it was now impossible/ too late to stay on the Tiger Mommy track.
For their daughter to NOT graduate from high school — for an Asian/ Oriental is absolutely extraordinary.
The only explanation is that she was skipping classes something phenomenal.
Once her perfidy was revealed professional counselling was in order… because the gal was w a a a y off the rails.
Instead, they did the absolute worst: clamping down on the pressure release.
%%%
Such ‘blow ups’ are strikingly common in the Orient.
Japan, Korea, China all routinely reveal family tragedies of this type. However, the single most common resolution is suicide by the child.
And like the gal in question the other resolution is to massively cheat ‘the system.’ This is normally done by employing ringers to take ones critical tests, and submitting plagiarized work.
The above cheats are now pandemic across China, Korea and Japan. It’s the primary reason you can’t trust the nominal IQs that flow from the Orient. The fake scores lift them up to Ashkenazi standards — whereas their adult performances are right back down with the Finns.
The perp has to be judged very high on the psychopathic scale.
Her crime was one of pure volition and pre-meditation — of an extreme sort.
Life in prison — w/o parole — or death by lethal injection. Both would be just.
Geoffrey Britain Says at 5:35 pm: ““psychopathy is … a description of something we don’t understand at all well.” neo
Damaged ‘wiring’…”
An alternative explanation is that psychopathy is a highly successful evolutionary strategy which leads to reproductive success for many individual psychopaths. In the animal world psychopaths may be analogous to killer bees which resemble normal honey bees but are much more aggressive and end up taking over hives.
Some cultures are more amenable to psychopaths to give them a competitive reproductive advantage. Perhaps the culture the culture which has been most hospitable to psychopaths over the last millennium is Islam which has always depended primarily on plunder and exploitation of non-Muslims to survive.
I’m not a psychologist and I don’t know the girl so I cannot say for certain if she was a psychopath. I’ve been actually trying to figure if an uncle of mine is a psychopath or not, but as I said I’m not a psychologist.
What I think is interesting is how society now uses words like psychopath instead of simply calling them evil. Whether or not she was a psychopath she was clearly evil. Neo obviously knows the difference, but so many people do not. To me this is one of the most scary things about society today.
On a different note, this is the first true crime story I’ve read in which someone hires a hitman in which the hitman does not turn out to be an undercover cop. That’s excluding stories where the person is a member of the Mafia. I’m guessing “Homeboy” was Daniel’s drug dealer or something. Normal people do not have the connections to find someone to kill for money.
The comments on the article by the woman who knew her in school are more than a little chilling — many young people, apparently Asian or otherwise from high-pressure family situations, sympathizing with her and seeming to blame her parents.
For more about psychopaths or what this author calls “covert aggressive people” who are not QUITE psychopaths:
http://www.amazon.com/In-Sheeps-Clothing-Understanding-Manipulative/dp/1935166301
The important thing to know is that they are not wounded and masking unbearable psychological pain caused by their upbringing, etc. They do what they do on purpose to get their way.
That Jean-Claude ROMAND errr … person is now eligible for parole and they’ll probably will set him free.
He was an ‘exemplary’ inmate.
Same as Jennifer Pan, slowly lies become an imaginary construct which had to unravel, at once.
Just like bankruptcy, it starts gradually and then all at once ….
If you’re normal in the head you have no chance against such people ….
Chilling.
There was a similar case in Northern VA in the late 90’s where a teenaged boy of a Taiwanese immigrant family killed his parents (and IIRC, one or two siblings). He was involved in a local gang, and lived off of his inheritance quite comfortably for a few years until he had a falling out w/his girlfriend who then turned him in. He told all of the family’s local friends that they had returned to Taiwan to keep up the charade.
I judge by their actions, and care not about motives or psychological profile. The firing squad is the solution.
I wonder if something like a mild case of Aspergers would mimic sociopathy, in that they go directly for what they want, circumstances notwithstanding. I have an acquaintance who cannot be taught–he’s an adult–that when he wants to buy something he must not grab his mother”s purse from her arm for the money.
What I’m feeling for is whether X number of behaviors for Y number of reasons could combine to look like psychopathy without psychopathy’s crossed wires.