Jennifer’s parents assumed their daughter was an A student; in truth, she earned mostly Bs—respectable for most kids but unacceptable in her strict household. So Jennifer continued to doctor her report cards throughout high school. She received early acceptance to Ryerson, but then failed calculus in her final year and wasn’t able to graduate. The university withdrew its offer. Desperate to keep her parents from digging into her high school records, she lied and said she’d be starting at Ryerson in the fall. She said her plan was to do two years of science, then transfer over to U of T’s pharmacology program, which was her father’s hope. Hann was delighted and bought her a laptop. Jennifer collected used biology and physics textbooks and bought school supplies. In September, she pretended to attend frosh week. When it came to tuition, she doctored papers stating she was receiving an OSAP loan and convinced her dad she’d won a $3,000 scholarship.
She would pack up her book bag and take public transit downtown. Her parents assumed she was headed to class. Instead, Jennifer would go to public libraries, where she would research on the Web what she figured were relevant scientific topics and fill her books with copious notes. She’d spend her free time at cafes or visiting Daniel at York University, where he was taking classes. She picked up a few day shifts as a server at East Side Mario’s in Markham, taught piano lessons, and later tended bar at a Boston Pizza, where Daniel worked as a kitchen manager. At home, Hann often asked Jennifer about her studies, but Bich told him not to interfere. “Let her be herself,” she’d say.
In order to keep the charade from unraveling, Jennifer lied to her friends, too. She even amplified her dad’s meddling ways, telling one friend, falsely, that her father had hired a private investigator to follow her.
After Jennifer had pretended to be enrolled at Ryerson for two years, Hann asked her if she was still planning to switch to U of T. She said yes, she’d been accepted into the pharmacology program. Her parents were thrilled. She suggested moving in with her friend Topaz downtown for three nights a week. Bich sympathized with Jennifer’s long commute each day and convinced Hann that it was a good idea.
Jennifer never stayed with Topaz. Monday through Wednesday, she stayed with Daniel and his family at their home in Ajax, a large house on a quiet, tree-lined street. Jennifer lied to Daniel’s parents as well, telling them her parents were okay with the arrangement and brushing off their repeated requests to meet Hann and Bich over dim sum.
After two more years, it was theoretically time to graduate from U of T. Jennifer and Daniel hired someone they found online to create a fake transcript, full of As. When it came to the ceremony, Jennifer told her parents that the extra-large class size meant there weren’t enough seats—graduating students were allowed only one guest each, and she didn’t want one of her parents to feel left out, so she gave her ticket to a friend.
Jennifer developed a mental strategy to deal with her lies. “I tried looking at myself in the third person, and I didn’t like who I saw,” she later said, “but rationalizations in my head said I had to keep going—otherwise I would lose everything that ever meant anything to me.”
Eventually, Jennifer’s fictional academic career began to collapse. While supposedly studying at U of T, she had told her parents about an exciting new development: she was volunteering at the blood-testing lab at SickKids. The gig sometimes required late-night shifts on Fridays and weekends. Perhaps, she suggested, she should spend more of the week at Topaz’s. But Hann noticed something odd: Jennifer had no uniform or key card from SickKids. So the next day, he insisted that they drop her off at the hospital. As soon as the car stopped, she sprinted inside, and Hann instructed Bich to follow her. Realizing she was being tailed by her mom, Jennifer hid in the waiting area of the ER for a few hours until they left. Early the next morning, they called Topaz, who groggily told the truth: Jennifer wasn’t there. When Jennifer finally came home, Hann confronted her. She confessed that she didn’t volunteer at SickKids, had never been in U of T’s pharmacology program and had indeed been staying at Daniel’s—though she neglected to tell them that she’d never graduated high school and that her time at Ryerson was also complete fiction.
Bich wept. Hann was apoplectic. He told Jennifer to get out and never come back, but Bich convinced him to let their daughter stay. They took away her cell phone and laptop for two weeks, after which she was only permitted to use them in her parents’ presence and had to endure surprise checks of her messages. They forbade her from seeing Daniel. They ordered her to quit all of her jobs except for teaching piano and began tracking the odometer on the car.
Jennifer was madly in love with Daniel, and lonely, too. For two weeks, she was housebound, her mother by her side nearly constantly—though Bich told Jennifer where her dad had hidden her phone, so she could periodically check her messages. In February 2009, she wrote on her Facebook page: “Living in my house is like living under house arrest.” She also posted a note: “No one person knows everything about me, and no two people put together knows everything about me . . . I like being a mystery.” Over the spring and summer, she snuck calls with Daniel on her cell phone at night, whispering in the dark.
Eventually, she was allowed some measure of freedom, and she enrolled in a calculus course to get her final high school credit. Still, in defiance of her parents’ orders, she visited Daniel in between piano lessons. One night, she arranged her blankets to look like she was asleep, then snuck out to Daniel’s house. But she forgot that she had her mother’s wallet. In the morning, Bich went into the room to get it and discovered Jennifer was gone. Bich and Hann ordered Jennifer to come home immediately. They demanded that she apply to college—she could still be a pharmacy lab technician or nurse—and told her that she had to cut off all contact with Daniel.
Jennifer resisted, but Daniel had grown weary of their secret romance. She was 24 and still sneaking around, terrified of her parents’ tirades but not willing to leave home. He told her to figure out her life, and he broke off their relationship. Jennifer was heartbroken. Shortly thereafter, she learned that Daniel was seeing a girl named Christine. In an attempt to win back his attention and discredit Christine, she concocted a bizarre tale. She told him a man had knocked on her door and flashed what looked like a police badge. When she opened the door, a group of men rushed in, overpowered her, and gang-raped her in the foyer of her house. Then a few days later, she said, she received a bullet in an envelope in her mailbox. Both instances, she alleged, were warnings from Christine to leave Daniel alone.
IN THE SPRING OF 2010, JENNIFER RECONNECTED WITH Andrew Montemayor, a friend from elementary school. According to Jennifer’s later evidence in court, he had boasted about robbing people at knifepoint in the park near his home (a claim he denies). When Jennifer told him about her torturous relationship with her dad, Montemayor confessed that he’d once considered killing his own father. The notion intrigued Jennifer, who began imagining how much better her life would be without her father around. Montemayor introduced Jennifer to his roommate, Ricardo Duncan, a goth kid with black nail polish.
Over bubble tea in between her piano lessons, according to Jennifer, they hatched a plan for Duncan to murder her father in a parking lot at his work, a tool and die company called Kobay Enstel, near Finch and McCowan. She says she gave Duncan $1,500, earnings from her piano classes, and they agreed to connect later by phone to arrange the date and time of the hit. But Duncan stopped answering her calls, and by early July, Jennifer realized she had been ripped off. (Duncan says she called him in early July, hysterical, requesting that he come and kill her parents. He said he felt offended and said no, and that the only money she gave him was $200 for a night out, which he promptly returned.)