In Markham, Ontario, on the night of November 8, 2010, a plan that Jennifer Pan had set in motion against her father was carried out by three men. Her mother, Bich Ha Pan, died. Her father survived. Jennifer Pan was unharmed. Within weeks she was charged, alongside four men, with first-degree murder in her mother's death and attempted murder of her father, and the case that followed ran for more than fifteen years through every level of the Canadian courts.
A jury in Newmarket convicted her and three of the men on both counts in December 2014, and in January 2015 each was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole for 25 years. Eight years later the Court of Appeal for Ontario set aside the murder convictions, holding that the jury should have been allowed to consider a narrower version of the plan: one aimed at the father alone. In April 2025 the Supreme Court of Canada agreed, by seven votes to two, and used the case to restate the test that governs when a trial judge must leave a lesser verdict with a jury. The attempted murder convictions stood throughout. On March 18, 2026, rather than face a second trial for her mother's death, Pan pleaded guilty to manslaughter, admitting that she had planned her father's killing and that her mother's death was a foreseeable result of that plan.
Pan lived with her parents in Markham, a city north of Toronto in York Region. The Crown's case at trial was that she had come to see her parents' control over her life as something she had to escape. Prosecutors told the jury that her aim was to be free of that control and to come into an inheritance. Her relationship with her father, the agreed statement of facts filed in 2026 says, had been deteriorating for months before November 2010.
Pan's mother was the one who died, and her death sits at the center of the whole legal history. Yet the question that went to the country's highest court was not whether her death was planned but whether a jury could reasonably have found that the plan was aimed at someone else and that she died because she was there.
The agreed statement of facts sets out the plan in its simplest form. Pan initiated it. She wanted her father killed, and she financed the plot. She enlisted Daniel Wong, and Wong helped find the people who would carry it out and helped organize it. The Crown's theory at trial ran along the same lines in more detail: that Pan arranged the killings through Wong and through Lenford Crawford, and that the men who acted on the night included David Mylvaganam. A fifth man, Eric Carty, was charged as part of the same chain.
On November 8, 2010, three men acted on that plan in Markham. Pan's mother died and her father survived. Pan herself was not hurt. One of the three men who took part had not been identified as of April 2024, when detectives were still trying to establish who he was.
Five people were charged in the case: Jennifer Pan, Daniel Chi-Kwong Wong, Lenford Crawford, David Mylvaganam and Eric Carty. Each faced the same two counts: first-degree murder in the death of Pan's mother, and attempted murder of her father. A conviction for first-degree murder carries an automatic sentence of life imprisonment with no chance of parole for 25 years.
The five were tried together before a judge and jury in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Newmarket, the seat of York Region. All entered pleas of not guilty.
The trial ran for roughly nine months in 2014. It was complicated in ways that later mattered on appeal: the Crown had to prove not only what happened in Markham but who among the accused had agreed to what.
The Crown's case was circumstantial and built around the planning. To help the jury hold the evidence in view, the prosecution prepared a slide presentation summarizing it, and the trial judge later allowed that presentation to go into the jury room during deliberations, with warnings about how it could and could not be used. The defense objected, and that ruling became one of the grounds of appeal.
Twice in the summer of 2014 the defense asked the trial judge to declare a mistrial. On July 21, 2014, the judge dismissed one application. On August 11, 2014, he dismissed a second application for a mistrial and a related application to discharge a juror whom the defense said was biased. The juror stayed on the panel, and that ruling too went up on appeal.
Midway through the trial, the proceedings against Eric Carty were severed after his lawyer fell ill. His case went forward separately from that point. The evidence at the joint trial about Carty's character and propensity for violence remained before the jury, and the judge gave instructions on how the other accused's cases could and could not be affected by it.
Pan testified in her own defense. She told the jury that she had at one stage tried to arrange her father's death but had abandoned that plan, and she said that a later arrangement she had made was not aimed at her parents and that she had called it off. She described herself as an unsuspecting victim of what happened on November 8. The Crown's position was that her account was not true and that the plan carried out that night was hers.
The legal issue that would decide the case on appeal arose at the end of the trial, when the judge settled what the jury would be told. The judge concluded that the evidence supported only two pictures of what had happened. In the first, the accused had joined in a single planned scheme intended to kill both parents, which meant first-degree murder of the mother and attempted murder of the father. In the second, the deaths and injuries flowed from something else entirely, which meant acquittal for those not proved to be part of it.
The defense asked for a third possibility to be put to the jury: that the plan was to kill the father alone and that the mother was killed while it was being carried out. If the jury accepted that version, or had a reasonable doubt that the mother was an intended target, the law could support a verdict of second-degree murder or manslaughter on the murder count instead of first-degree murder. The judge refused. He found that the third scenario had no "air of reality," the legal threshold an alternative theory must cross before a jury may be told about it. Second-degree murder was left with the jury for the three men, but not for Pan.
The jury deliberated for four days. On December 13, 2014, it found Jennifer Pan guilty of first-degree murder in her mother's death and guilty of the attempted murder of her father. Lenford Crawford, David Mylvaganam and Daniel Wong were found guilty of the same two counts.
On January 23, 2015, in Newmarket, each of the four was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole for 25 years on the first-degree murder conviction, and to life imprisonment on the attempted murder conviction.
Eric Carty's separate case was resolved with a conviction in December 2015. He was not a party to the appeals that followed.
All four convicted accused appealed. The appeals were not decided until May 19, 2023, when the Court of Appeal for Ontario released its judgment, cited as 2023 ONCA 362.
The court held that the trial judge had erred in refusing to leave the third scenario with the jury. On the evidence the jury heard, it said, there was a realistic possibility that jurors could find the plan was aimed only at the father. That was enough to give the theory an air of reality, and the jury should have been allowed to consider it. Because they were not, the first-degree murder convictions could not stand. The court allowed the appeals on that count and ordered a new trial on the charge of first-degree murder.
The attempted murder convictions were a different matter. The court found that the error did not taint them. A jury that accepted the third scenario would still have been looking at a plan to kill the father, and the convictions for his attempted murder did not depend on whether the mother had been an intended target. The court dismissed the appeals from those convictions.
The accused had raised other grounds, and the court rejected each one. It found no error in allowing the Crown's slide presentation into the jury room, none in the trial judge's handling of the allegedly biased juror, and none in his instructions on the evidence about Carty's character.
The Crown sought leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, asking it to restore the first-degree murder convictions. The four accused sought leave to cross-appeal, asking for new trials on the attempted murder counts as well. On December 21, 2023, the court granted both. The case, His Majesty the King v. Jennifer Pan, et al., was heard on October 17, 2024, with the Attorney General of Alberta intervening, and the court reserved its decision.
Judgment came on April 10, 2025, as 2025 SCC 12. The court dismissed the appeal and the cross-appeals. The Chief Justice wrote for a majority of seven. Two justices dissented on the Crown's appeal.
The majority held that the Court of Appeal had been right. The question of whether an alternative theory has an air of reality, the Chief Justice wrote, is not a matter of trial-judge discretion owed deference on appeal. "A trial judge's determination about whether there is an air of reality is a question of law reviewable for correctness." A jury must be allowed to consider an included offense where the evidence gives rise to "a realistic possibility of an acquittal on the principal offence and a conviction on the included offence." A judge applying that test does not weigh credibility or decide how likely a conviction on the lesser offense would be. The test is a gatekeeping exercise, and the majority described it as a meaningful and important one, but its purpose is to keep from the jury only those theories the evidence cannot support.
Applied to the record, the majority held that the evidence allowed a reasonable inference that the plan was to kill the father and not the mother. A jury could have accepted that the accused planned the father's death while holding a reasonable doubt that the mother was an intended target. On that view, a conviction for second-degree murder or manslaughter in her death was possible. The fact that the jury had convicted of first-degree murder did not show that it would have rejected a lesser verdict had one been offered. The order for a new trial on first-degree murder stood for all four accused.
The majority agreed with the Court of Appeal that the error did not taint the attempted murder convictions, which remained in place. It also found no reversible error in the remaining grounds. Admitting the Crown's slide presentation to the jury room had been fair: its value in explaining a long and complicated case outweighed its potential for prejudice, which defense aids and the trial judge's warnings had reduced. The juror bias allegation and the Carty instructions did not warrant a new trial.
The two dissenting justices would have allowed the Crown's appeal and restored the first-degree murder convictions. In their view the trial judge had properly exercised his gatekeeping role. There was no direct evidence of a plan aimed only at the father, and the judge had reasonably concluded that the circumstantial evidence could not support that theory. They agreed with the majority that the cross-appeals should be dismissed.
The Supreme Court's ruling sent the murder count back to the Superior Court in Newmarket for a new trial. It never reached a jury. On Wednesday, March 18, 2026, in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Newmarket, Jennifer Pan, then 40, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in her mother's death.
The plea rested on an agreed statement of facts filed with the court. In it Pan accepted that she had initiated a plan to have her father killed, that she had financed it, and that she had enlisted Daniel Wong, who helped find the men who would carry it out and helped organize it. The statement also set out the limit of what she admitted. She had not planned to kill her mother. But she knew or ought to have known that her mother could be present when the plan was carried out, and her mother's death was, in the words of the agreed facts, "an objectively foreseeable consequence of the unlawful plan" to kill her father. That is the line between manslaughter and murder that the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court had said the original jury should have been allowed to draw.
The Crown accepted the resolution on the basis that Pan had not intended her mother to die. She received a life sentence for manslaughter, and with the plea she became eligible to apply for parole, which the 25-year bar attached to the first-degree murder conviction had ruled out. Her conviction and life sentence for the attempted murder of her father, upheld at every level, were unaffected.
Daniel Chi-Kwong Wong, Lenford Crawford and David Mylvaganam were each convicted by the jury on December 13, 2014, of first-degree murder and attempted murder, and each was sentenced on January 23, 2015, to life imprisonment with no chance of parole for 25 years on the murder count and to life on the attempted murder count. Each appealed. The Court of Appeal for Ontario set aside each man's first-degree murder conviction in May 2023 and ordered a new trial, and dismissed each man's appeal from his attempted murder conviction. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld both results for all three in April 2025, and each man's murder count went back to Newmarket for a new trial.
Eric Carty's case was severed from the joint trial in 2014 after his lawyer fell ill and proceeded separately, ending in a conviction in December 2015.
Under Canadian criminal law, a charge of murder carries within it lesser offenses, chiefly second-degree murder and manslaughter, on which a jury may convict if the Crown proves some elements of the more serious charge but not all of them. The trial judge decides which of those possibilities the jury will hear. The standard for that decision is whether the possibility has an air of reality on the evidence, which the Supreme Court framed as a realistic possibility of acquittal on the principal offense and conviction on the included one.
R. v. Pan turned on how that test applies in a long, multi-accused trial where the defense asks for an alternative that the Crown says the evidence does not support. The Crown argued that the Court of Appeal had applied the test too strictly and had given too little deference to a trial judge managing a complex case. The Supreme Court rejected both points. It held that the test is the same whichever side invokes it, that it is a question of law reviewed for correctness rather than a judgment call owed deference, and that a judge applying it may not weigh the credibility or reliability of the evidence.
The ruling also addressed when a successful appeal on one count requires a retrial on related counts. Because the attempted murder convictions concerned a plan the accused had been proved to share, the error about the mother's death did not reach them, and they stood.
The Crown's theory at the 2014 trial was that the plan was aimed at both parents. The jury accepted it, but both appellate courts held that the jury had not been allowed to consider the alternative. In the 2026 plea, the Crown accepted the narrower version: that the plan Pan initiated and financed was aimed at her father, and that she did not intend her mother's death. The first-degree murder verdict no longer stands, and her conviction in her mother's death is for manslaughter.
Pan testified at trial that she had abandoned her efforts against her father and that she was an unsuspecting victim of November 8. The jury rejected that account on the attempted murder count, and the conviction on that count was upheld at every level. Her 2026 plea admits that the plan against her father was hers.
November 8, 2010: In Markham, Ontario, a plan initiated by Jennifer Pan is carried out; her mother dies and her father survives.
2010 to 2011: Jennifer Pan, Daniel Wong, Lenford Crawford, David Mylvaganam and Eric Carty are charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder.
2014: Joint jury trial in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Newmarket, about nine months long.
July 21, 2014: The trial judge dismisses a mistrial application.
August 11, 2014: The trial judge dismisses a second mistrial application and an application to discharge a juror.
2014: Proceedings against Eric Carty are severed mid-trial after his lawyer falls ill.
December 13, 2014: After four days of deliberation, the jury convicts Pan, Wong, Crawford and Mylvaganam of first-degree murder and attempted murder.
January 23, 2015: All four are sentenced to life imprisonment with no parole for 25 years for first-degree murder and to life for attempted murder.
December 2015: Eric Carty is convicted in his separate case.
May 19, 2023: The Court of Appeal for Ontario (2023 ONCA 362) sets aside the first-degree murder convictions, orders a new trial on that count and upholds the attempted murder convictions.
December 21, 2023: The Supreme Court of Canada grants leave to appeal and to cross-appeal.
October 17, 2024: The Supreme Court hears the appeal.
April 10, 2025: The Supreme Court (2025 SCC 12) dismisses the Crown's appeal and the cross-appeals, seven to two on the appeal.
March 18, 2026: Pan pleads guilty to manslaughter in Newmarket and receives a life sentence with parole eligibility.