York crime reporter Jeremy Grimaldi wins national book award

It didn't take long at all for Metroland Media York Region crime reporter Jeremy Grimaldi to make a major mark on the Canadian true crime landscape.

Grimaldi, whose debut book, A Daughter's Deadly Deception: The Jennifer Pan Story, was released to solid reviews last fall, announced himself with a bang Saturday night by winning the Canada Crime Writers' national Arthur Ellis Award for 2017, for non-fiction.

In doing so, the Toronto resident beat out a stellar field of nominees, which most notably included veteran National Post columnist and longtime author Christie Blatchford who was nominated for her collection: Life Sentence: Stories from Four Decades of Court Reporting — or, How I fell out of Love with the Canadian Justice System.

He also won over books written by Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon, for Shadow of Doubt: The Trial of Dennis Oland; Joe Friesen, for The Ballad of Danny Wolfe: The Life of a Modern Outlaw; and Debra Komar, for Black River Road: An Unthinkable Crime, an Unlikely Suspect, and the Question of Character.

Grimaldi was surprised by the win, especially since this was his first book.

Published in 2016 by Dundurn Press, Grimaldi's book tells the story of a young Markham woman's plot to kill her parents for love and money, after a lifetime of lies brought on by what she felt were pressures to be the perfect child.

Grimaldi spent nearly a year in court covering the Pan, trial then did painstaking research to learn about Pan’s life and the motivation that led her to make up an alternate existence to the one her parents believed she was living. It eventually led to a catastrophic evening that left her mother dead and her father severely wounded. She was convicted of the crime.

"This book is a manifestation of two years of my life and more years of police investigation, and I hope it does some good," Grimaldi said.

"I just didn't think I was going to win, there was no way. I was very surprised.... But I think it was a tale of a very private culture, and we got to see child-rearing techniques inside a strict Asian family. We got to see, from Jennifer's standpoint, what the results were and we got to see something we've never seen in Canadian history: a case of a daughter hiring men to kill her own parents," Grimaldi said.

A Daughter's Deadly Deception is broken into several parts dealing with the investigation, the trial and then, perhaps most importantly, Jennifer's upbringing and the lead-up to the crime itself. The what, where, when, who and how of the crime involving the shooting of Jennifer's parents is revealed.

What Grimaldi tries hard to do is tell the reader why it happened, the most difficult and most interesting thing to do.

Grimaldi considers this third section the key to the book.

"In so many ways, true crime focuses on the act, but the act is tiny, it is minutiae, it's what leads up to the act, not just in the months and weeks before, but in years and decades before, from birth. If a society is judged on how we treat our most vulnerable people, history may not look at us too kindly. Some may say criminals are our most vulnerable. What do we do to them? We throw them in jail and there's very little help for them after or before.

"It's a look at the whole story, rather than just the crime, that's what sets this book apart from other books in the same genre."

After covering the trial and writing the book, Grimaldi doesn't consider Jennifer a monster.

"I just consider her a normal girl, with normal problems who spiraled out of control. I've spoken to Asian-American psychiatrists and I said: 'Are you surprised by this (what happened with Jennifer)? And they said: 'Not at all. This is just the perfect storm. This is just the result of tiger parenting.'

"Whether that is true or not is up to the reader (to decide.)"

And his hopes for the book? What every author hopes for.

"I really hope it gets read."