Netflix Canada’s most popular movie-for-hire re-enacts the plot of a dramatic murder that rocked an Ontario city in 2010.

Documentary film What did Jennifer do? Jennifer Penn’s life and the complicated events that led to her mother being killed and her father seriously injured in Markham, Ont., were granted a new trial last year.

“The fact that it’s true, I’d say it’s wilder than fiction. It’s a Hollywood script,” executive producer Jeremy Grimaldi told CBC Toronto’s Dwight Drummond. “But we always have to remember that this is a tragedy.”

Penn had a difficult relationship with his strict and demanding parents, who had high expectations of him and kept a close eye on his after-school activities. He and his friends thought they were controlling and restrictive.

Eventually, they trick him into a series of lies about graduating high school, getting a pharmacology degree, and volunteering at a children’s hospital. She was also secretly spending time with her then boyfriend Daniel Wong.

During the trial, the Crown said Penn began plotting to kill his parents after they forced him to choose between himself and Wong. He also got involved in the assassination plot.

Penn testified that he had a bad relationship with his father, who was a “ruler”, but was closer to his mother.

One night in November 2010, three men entered the home where she lived with her parents and shot both of them multiple times, killing her mother and seriously injuring her father, who was her father. fled to a neighbor’s house with gunshot wounds to the face and shoulder. Later proceed to testify against his daughter.

Penn was initially considered the victim of a home invasion, but police soon arrested him as a suspect, and a series of texts and phone calls between him and Wong show that the men A plot to kill his parents for $10,000 is revealed.

‘Remove wrong message’

The documentary has not sat well with everyone.

Karen K. Ho, a business and art crime reporter in New York City who went to school with Pan and Wong, wrote An essay for Toronto Life in 2015 that detailed the complexities of the case and Penn’s family dynamics, emphasizing the stress placed on Penn and other children of immigrant families.

Ho’s article has been retweeted on true crime podcasts and has garnered a new wave of attention since the documentary came out on Wednesday.

She says she is frustrated by the “true crime industrial complex” and what she calls the American audience’s “consumptive and insatiable” appetite for material about murder.

“I’m not seeing it and I’m choosing not to see it, because I don’t want to encourage more production of this stuff, without at least really thinking about it.”

The real audience for crime is white Americans, she says, and documentaries are framed primarily through a white lens. She says she wasn’t surprised that Penn and her father refused to talk on camera, or that the documentary relied heavily on police interviews and footage.

Ho says she would like to see money for true-crime documentaries flow toward work that focuses on systemic issues rather than personal stories, and specifically the work of Cree journalist Connie Walker of the Okanaise First Nation in Saskatchewan. Appreciates, and reports on missing and murdered indigenous women.

“An overemphasis on personal responsibility, versus systemic issues, sends the wrong message,” Ho said.

While Ho says her 2015 article was intended to cover the case in a concise and non-exploitative way, she recalls the backlash she faced at the time, alleging that it was “a family’s life.” was investing on its worst day.”

Hope for understanding.

Co-producer Paul Nguyen says director Jenny Popplewell approached him two years ago to help connect with members of Markham’s Vietnamese community. What did Jennifer do?.

“Being a Vietnamese person, being of a different race and being pressured by my parents, I can be pressured. And sometimes it hurts me and makes me very upset, but I don’t like it,” Nguyen told CBC Toronto. No recourse,” Nguyen told CBC Toronto.

(Pan and his family are ethnically Chinese, but his parents came to Canada as immigrants from Vietnam.)

Mental health issues are “a very taboo subject in Asian communities,” he says.

“I just hope that communication can happen and that it can lead to more healing and that people can come to an understanding and avoid these types of situations.”

Penn was sentenced in 2015, at age 28, to life in prison without parole for 25 years for first-degree murder and attempted murder. His co-accused – Wong, Lanford Crawford and David Melvagnam – also received the same sentence.

The Ontario Court of Appeal ordered a retrial for the four in May 2023 on charges of first-degree murder. Their attorneys argued, in part, that it was unfair for the judge to present the jury with only two options: the attack was either planned and deliberate, with the intent to kill both parents, or The attack happened as part of a home invasion and burglary gone wrong.

Grimaldi, also a crime reporter who covered Penn’s trial and wrote a book about the case, says he hopes the documentary will make people rethink the decisions they made. At that time Pan was done.

“She was really made up as a daughter from hell. In fact, it was the front page of the Toronto Sun, ‘Daughter from Hell,'” he said.

“Now, with a little more time, we can look back and see that it’s probably a smaller story and it’s more complicated.”