Crown claims woman staged home invasion to mask parents' murder plot

Jennifer Pan of Markham as depicted in a sketch during her appearance in a Newmarket courtroom on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2010.

Closing arguments by the Crown began Monday morning in the Jennifer Pan trial.

Pan, her boyfriend, and two other men are all charged with murder and attempted murder and have been on trial since last March.

Pan's parents were shot by intruders who came into their Markham home on Nov. 8, 2010. The defence has repeatedly told the jury that the home invasion was only meant to be a robbery, but it got out of control.

On Monday, the Crown insisted the intruders made it look like a robbery to throw off police.

"Don't let them get away with it," Crown lawyer Michelle Rumble told the jury.

"This was a planned, cold-blooded murder because Jennifer Pan wanted to get rid of her parents."

The Crown claimed Pan wanted her parents dead so that she could collect her inheritance, and so that she could be with her boyfriend, Dan Wong, whom her parents didn't approve of.

Wong was likely not at the Markham home on the night of the murder and “he didn’t do the dirty work,” the Crown told the court on Monday. However, the Crown claimed he was equally guilty because he was the person who set up the apparent home invasion.

The Crown pointed to a complex web of cell phone records that tracked calls between all of the accused. The Crown showed that Pan never used her own phone, saying that she used "a secret murder phone" to contact the men instead, and that the phone’s SIM card was removed moments before police arrived that night.

Police found the parents shot in the basement, and they found Pan loosely tied to an upstairs bannister.

By the time police found the parents, Pan's mother was dead, but her father survived to tell police that he saw his daughter walking around the house with the intruders that night.

Later, after hours of police interrogation, Pan broke down and admitted to police that she hired the men to come into her home. At the time, she said it was a suicide bid and they were supposed to kill her, not her parents.

The Crown insisted that her “weird assisted suicide” confession was a “bizarre” lie.

"There never was a suicide plan," Rumble said, calling it "just another lie" from Pan.

She told the jury that Pan lived a life of lies, including allegedly forging a fake diploma from a university she never ever attended, in an attempt to trick her parents into thinking she was studying while she was living with her boyfriend. It was when her parents discovered her lies and ordered her to come home that Pan hatched the plan to kill them, the Crown claimed.

The Crown's closing arguments are expected to continue until Thursday.