Exactly two weeks after Jennifer Pan’s mother, Bich Ha Pan, was killed by gunmen and her father, Hann Pan, shot and wounded, Jennifer faced her third interrogation by York Regional Police. She continued to claim she was the lone victim left standing in the home invasion at her Markham residence on Nov. 8, 2010. Police are suspicious, but have little evidence.

In their bid to gain a confession, police use the Reid Technique, a tactic so controversial it has been outlawed in many countries because of the risk of false confessions. It often leaves many asking the same question: “If you can’t lie to police, why can they lie to you?” In an edited excerpt from A Daughter’s Deadly Deception, Jeremy Grimaldi takes us inside the interview room.

This interview is going to be much different than her last one. She is no longer a victim in the eyes of the police; rather, she’s their lead suspect.

Faced with a new interrogator, Det. Bill Goetz, Jennifer is about to be confronted by a dramatic shift in interview style.

Goetz — or “Gator” as he’s known around the force — is cold and calculating from the get-go. He clearly means business and is in no mood for Jennifer’s manipulative tendencies. A burly and imposing figure with grey hair in a military-style crewcut, he strikes an unsympathetic figure, playing both good cop and bad cop with Jennifer, a role with which he seems entirely at ease. His interview will contain a series of outright lies as part of the Reid Technique.

Jennifer’s responses are muffled by sobbing each time her mother is mentioned, but rather than console her, Goetz nonchalantly but sternly tells her to speak up. Goetz is not only an expert at detecting deception, he says, but is also well versed at coaxing information from those who otherwise try to deceive the police. In Jennifer’s case, he spends the next two hours gaining her trust. Once that stage is complete, he turns the tables, using the goodwill and familiarity he’s built with her to secure a confession.

After his initial bluntness, Goetz changes tack. He eases back in his chair, dropping the cop-speak and focusing his attention solely on Jennifer, prompting her bleak outlook to appear rosier.

The Reid Technique requires officers to “reinforce sincerity” to ensure the suspect is receptive to their overtures. Hence, Goetz shares with Jennifer his own experiences. When he reminisces about his time playing piano, he inaccurately refers to the ballet Swan Lake as “Swans on the Lake,” prompting a smile from Jennifer. He then asks her if she switched jobs from East Side Mario’s to Boston Pizza for “better tips,” again drawing a smile from Jennifer, who seems to somewhat enjoy the attention being lavished on her. The conversation focuses not only on her achievements but her struggles, as if she’s reminiscing with someone who really understands what she’s been through. The “scheduled” existence she claims to have suffered through as a child and teenager takes centre stage.

Jennifer remarks how little time there was for anything other than school, competitive skating and piano lessons. Her parents constantly comparing her to her classmates, teammates, and cousins also affected her negatively, she says. And when Goetz suggests that Jennifer never thought of herself as being “as smart” as Hann and Bich imagined, Jennifer agrees. At one point she tells the detective that she was under so much pressure during her teenage years that she was compelled to forge high school report cards to mask her average grades, turning them into exceptional ones. Her lies multiplied from there, she confesses, morphing into a bogus university career after her applications to higher learning were rejected.

It was more than just her schooling that she’d end up lying about, though. Jennifer tells Goetz she dated Daniel without their knowledge or consent for seven years. “I hid it from my parents at first because they didn’t agree with me having a boyfriend,” she says. “Once they found out, they didn’t like the fact that he was of mixed race and they told me to stop seeing him.” She tried to keep her separation from Daniel permanent, but somehow she’d always end up back in his arms. “He was the person who filled an empty void,” she says. “So [when we broke up], I felt that a part of me was missing.”

Eventually, though, the option to run back to Daniel was wrenched from her grasp. Her parents offered Jennifer an ultimatum after she was caught lying one final time: stay with the family or go with Daniel and never return.

Jennifer chose her family and was subsequently kept at home, rarely let out of her parents’ sights, she contends. This is when Daniel decided to move on with another woman . . . Jennifer explains how depression eventually led to cutting, and then finally a failed suicide attempt.

As for how she felt having to remain home under strict guidelines for some 18 months after she was given the ultimatum, Jennifer says it was difficult.

In response, Goetz empathizes with Jennifer, at one point even giggling at her deceit. Justifying her behaviour, he even labels Hann and Bich’s treatment of their daughter “abuse,” suggesting their expectations were just too high. “I get that feeling: it’s pretty tough to live up to their expectations,” he notes after Jennifer tells him that if she could, she’d become a piano teacher. “Your dad would ultimately like you to be a doctor, that type of thing, but maybe you can’t do it. Those are pretty high standards for anybody … Not everybody can be a doctor, but they may have acted like you could have done it no problem.”

But his empathy doesn’t last. Now that he’s gained the personal knowledge required to implement his technique, the conversation slowly shifts back to her behaviour in the lead-up to and the night of the murder. Goetz asks Jennifer if she told a family member that the intruders “liked her” and that’s why they kept her alive.

“I didn’t say that,” she insists after a moment. “I asked them [the intruders] why I couldn’t be with them [her parents], and they’re just, like, ‘You co-operated. Keep co-operating.’”

Goetz then asks Jennifer to list the African-Canadian males she knows, explaining that the police have a photo of her speaking with a black man in a café. She names only two men, identifying the male she met in a café months before the murder only as “Ric.”

“He’s not really a friend. He’s more of a friend of mine’s roommate,” Jennifer contends. “But I did meet up with him once.” It’s at this point that she admits to lending “Ric” $1,100 because he and his roommate, Andrew Montemayor, were having rent problems.

Goetz asks if this was the same Andrew she spoke with the night of the murder.

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Jennifer says that it was.

These two admissions signal an interlude as Goetz shifts his tactics anew, heaping further pressure on Jennifer. Suddenly, he sheds his friendly and engaging demeanour and begins to sow strife between them. Step One of the Reid Technique: direct confrontation.

“Would it make sense for someone that was going to kill somebody to leave a witness behind that could describe them? Does that make … sense, for killers?” he asks. “Do you think that was a mistake they made then? You must think about this.”

“I still do, and I’ve spoken to a therapist about it,” Jennifer responds before repeating her well-worn line that she “co-operated” and that the men kept saying it was “taking too long,” implying they had no time to shoot her because they were forced to flee. To Jennifer’s dismay, Goetz then recounts the sequence of events once more. “I don’t want to go through this again,” she tells him, weeping.

When Goetz gets up and leaves to get some water, Jennifer curls back up into the fetal position, gripping her head tightly. As silence fills the room, she begins to make noises that sound like squeals. When he returns, Goetz asks her to recount the denominations of the bills that made up the $2,500 she handed over to Number One. How long was the cash in her night table? How big was the stack? These probing questions continue until Goetz enters the penultimate phase of the interview: “In my experience as a police officer, no matter what the case is, people make mistakes, as in they don’t always tell the truth,” he says as she strokes her braid, repeatedly winding the tip between her fingers.

Goetz uses the trickery that Jennifer has honed for so many years against her.

“[The police] are going over that house with a fine-tooth comb. They’re going over every hair fibre, every skin cell, every bit of blood. You know what DNA is, right? . . . We have to reach out to modern technology, so another thing we utilize is satellites. The satellite is a 24-hour video that’s going on. It’s recording information … the military uses it for precision bombing. We’re able to go back and review that. It’s like an X-ray. We’re able to tell … are the people in the positions that the witness is telling us they were in or are they different? Another thing we do is talk to a lot of people … we don’t leave any rock unturned. You’ve heard of Crime Stoppers, right? When you get a case like this, people want to help. It’s in the papers; it’s everywhere. So people end up coming to us to help us out with the case . . . You don’t know how many people call in on their friends … they want that money. They get greedy.”

The Reid Technique clearly states that an interrogator must try to discourage the suspect from denying his or her guilt. True to form, Goetz refuses to let Jennifer get a word in edgewise — she speaks little for the following 60 minutes — but he eventually offers her a way out. “Nothing surprises me in this job. I am well aware that anyone on this Earth is capable of making a mistake,” he tells her as she bows her head. “I don’t care if they’re a priest or a schoolteacher. One thing that you have to remember is that your dad was there and your dad had a front-row seat to all of this. Your dad’s a very smart man and he has a very clear perception of what’s going on. A lot of the things you told the police didn’t happen. It doesn’t match at all …”

After alleging guilt and implying that police have proof of such guilt, Goetz now seamlessly shifts his attention to Step Two of the Reid Technique: shifting the blame away from the suspect, justifying her behaviour, and excusing the crime. “You’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the past seven years telling half-truths, and I can understand why. You’ve had a tough life. What’s happened to you, to me, equates to abuse. Now you’re under a tremendous amount of stress. You’re involved in this. I know that. You’ve lived your whole life trying to live up to expectations that you can’t make. You’re a 24-year-old woman being treated like a 15-year-old. You’re not the first person [to lie about] dating a guy, because in your culture they don’t accept it.” Then he offers her a chance to confess. “Who else is involved in this?”

“I don’t know,” Jennifer manages to say, still stroking her hair but listening intently.

Using Hann’s description of a white male in the house, Goetz accuses Jennifer of falsifying Number One’s description entirely. He then moves back into the accusatory stage, treating her guilt as a fact they’ve already established before justifying it. “We know that you were involved, but we also know that you’re a good person that’s made a mistake here,” he adds. “You got involved with the wrong people. You don’t want to keep living this lie. Everyone knows, and you’re getting that feeling. Nobody is surprised here. You were a prisoner in your own house. You were living someone else’s expectations. No matter how much they love you, they’re taking away Jen. The Jen that just wanted to be a piano teacher. Why is that not good enough? Why not just be a lab technician? Why a doctor? Why does it always have to be something bigger?”

“It was a form of abuse,” he continues. “You can’t do that to a person. This is Canada. We’re in the 21st century here. It’s like your dad fixing everybody else’s home but not his own. It’s the same with you. He was trying to make a future for you bigger than it should have been . . . The good thing is that you didn’t shoot anyone here. You couldn’t do that. You’re not that type of person, right?”

As part of the Reid Technique, the investigator must be seated in a wheeled chair and the suspect in a fixed one. This is so that the interrogator can wheel close, either to show sympathy or make the suspect feel she is cornered. As Goetz begins to accuse Jennifer, he inches his chair closer and closer to her until the pair are almost touching, his burly stature bearing down on her. “You’re involved in this. I know that,” he tells her as she continues to fiddle with her hair. “There’s no question about it. The only question right now is: Are you going to keep making mistakes?” Just before the three-hour mark, after about forty-five minutes of Goetz droning on in this vein, Jennifer finally starts to crack. After barely a peep for so long, she utters a muffled, inaudible sentence. She repeats it, this time loud enough for Goetz and the audio system to pick up.

“What happens to me?”

Excerpted from A Daughter’s Deadly Deception by Jeremy Grimaldi. © 2016 Jeremy Grimaldi. All rights reserved. Published by Dundurn Press