True Crime Fiction Menu: What Jennifer Did Edition

there's a lot of discourse swirling here

Ever since Netflix premiered What Jennifer Did a few months ago, the think pieces have been flying thick and fast. For this month’s True Crime Fiction Menu, I thought we’d do a deep dive on some of the chatter around this doc, and see if we can suss out not only why there have been sooo many essays (that’s actually a pretty easy one to answer), but also if any of them contribute to a new understanding of this true crime micromoment.

First off, the case itself. In Ontario in 2010, Jennifer Pan called 911 to report a home invasion. Her mother, Bich Pan, died that night of gunshot wounds, and her father, Hann, was shot in the face but survived after a few days in a medically induced coma (that becomes important later). Over hours of police interrogation, Jennifer revealed frustrations with her home life (her parents disapproved of her boyfriend and wanted her to pursue a career in pharmacology) and her attempts to cope with their expectations (a lot of lying: about still speaking with her ex-boyfriend, and also about attending school for the past four years; she went so far as to buy a fake diploma). Eventually, Jennifer confessed to being involved in planning the “robbery gone wrong,” but claimed the plan was to kill her, not her parents. She, along with co-conspirators that included the ex, were convicted of first-degree murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy to commit murder. Key testimony was offered by her father, who, once he emerged from his coma, remembered her walking around the house with the intruders, not restrained upstairs as she told the police. She is currently serving 25 to life, but a new trial has been granted for the first-degree charge due to confusing jury directions.

Much of Jennifer’s motive, according to both her interviews and the case presented by the prosecution, derived from the magnitude of the lies she had constructed about her life and future plans. Eventually, her parents most likely would have learned that she had not earned the degree she claimed, and her father might have followed through on his earlier threat to throw her out of the house for lying (which he levied after following her to a supposed volunteer gig at a children’s hospital).

There are hours and hours of Jennifer’s interrogation tapes available to the public and featured in the doc, from the initial interviews the night of the crime through to her arrest after admitting she knew about and orchestrated the incident. You can watch Jennifer’s story shift, analyze her body language (if you’re into that sort of thing¹) and hear in her own words how her parents’ pressure made her feel inadequate and trapped. I’ve written before about how having so much primary footage of cult leaders has shaped our understanding of and access to those stories, and this is another case where, if you’re making a video documentary, there is an abundance of footage available to pad out a full-length runtime. And it seems that initial reviews of the doc dinged it for this very impulse. The “give it a skip” take from Eve Batey notes that it “would have been a perfectly acceptable episode in the average Oxygen, ID, etc case of the week true crime show” but didn’t warrant the 90-minutes Netflix gave it. Claire Lustig goes so far as to use the doc as a case study for the decline of the genre as a whole, arguing,

While true crime still has the potential to bring about meaningful change and give voice to victims who have been ignored, for now, the genre is firmly in its flop era as streamers and networks attempt to mine even the slightest bit of intrigue from clear-cut cases² that hardly deserve the feature-length documentary treatment.

However, What Jennifer Did became notable for more than its rather run-of-the-mill mediocrity when the filmmakers were accused of using AI-generated images of Jennifer in the documentary repeatedly and without disclosure.³ As the subheading from the Futurism article that broke the story succinctly states, “This Is Messed Up.” Pieces from Today, Collider, and Reality Blurred dig into how even the possibility of image manipulation in a true crime documentary destabilizes the circumscribed, but paramount, work the “true” part of that label is doing. I mean, “AI True Crime”? The mental gymnastics required to make that make sense aren’t ones I look forward to performing should what is now a censure becomes a trend.

However, What Jennifer Did doesn’t do is dig into the elements of this case that are heartbreaking, controversial, and genuinely compelling. To wit: in this case about lying it seems worth mentioning that the interrogator who elicited Jennifer’s confession did so by lying to her. He claimed that the police had infrared photographs of her house the night of the invasion, and could tell that she was untruthful about her movements. Using deception during interrogations is legal not only in Canada but in every state in the U.S., but not in Germany or the U.K., and several states have forbidden lying to juvenile suspects because of the possibility of coercion and false confessions. Might be worth mentioning here that Jennifer has maintained her innocence for the past fourteen years.

For a more complicated account of the case, which considers seriously and thoughtfully how the history and context of the Chinese diaspora in Canada could have impacted the crime, the gold standard seems to be this Toronto Life piece from Karen Ho. Eve Batey also recommends Yanan Wang’s analysis, and I found this personal essay from Alethia Allen, also a firstborn Asian-American daughter of immigrants, insightful.

I don’t recommend watching What Jennifer Did, but I think this roundup of commentary argues that even the true crime texts that fail are worth discussing for how and why they fall short, and also to elevate the accounts that recognize that even “clear-cut” cases have something to say about how violence and lawbreaking can reveal important insights about familial and communal dynamics.

1. If you are into that sort of thing, there’s a 90-minute doc on YouTube that annotates the tapes with body language analysis that is, to my mind, of varying degrees of bullshit.

2. How “clear-cut” the case is remains a matter of opinion, but I think the point is worth including.

3. The producer of the doc has denied the charges, saying that the pictures were authentic but the background anonymized. Neither the director nor Netflix have responded to these allegations as far as I can see. TAKE FROM THAT WHAT YOU WILL.