Female cop on body of proof9/1/2023 Hill gets people to talk to her even when they would seem to have little incentive to do so: an older man with a rap sheet who hired Jennifer as a babysitter a shifty ex-boyfriend who attracted Ron’s ire when Jennifer sought an abortion an unhoused guy in a MAGA hat who claims that the ex-boyfriend asked him for advice on how to dispose of a corpse.īut the most queasily fascinating figure in the documentary is the bland, stalwart Margie, whose minimalist brand of human behavior has maximal effects on her family and the investigation. The director, Cynthia Hill, is as tireless as Stephen she followed him for more than seven years, between 20, and pressed on when the official investigation unexpectedly began veering off-road toward different suspects. The twin protagonists of “Burden of Proof” are the Pandos siblings: the forever-fifteen Jennifer, who is seen in photographs and quasi-glimpsed in clumsy reënactments and the stoic and dogged Stephen, who, in his crusade to identify Jennifer’s probable killer, talks with a private investigator, a handwriting analyst, a hypnotist, and, in a desperate moment, a former military interrogator and “body-language expert” whose bona fides include a stint at Guantánamo Bay. The main puzzle piece, then, was Margie, who insisted that she had seen nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. By the time investigators began revisiting the case, in the two-thousands, the Pandos case file had been lost, and police suspected that Ron had a hand in taking it. But there was no physical evidence against Ron, no body, no witnesses. His second wife obtained an order of protection against him.) What’s more, one of Jennifer’s friends, who was on the phone with her the night she disappeared, overheard an intense argument between Jennifer and Ron, which may have augured violence. (Ron eventually served prison time for fraud and firearms possession. In “Burden of Proof,” when Stephen talks about the abuse in a tense on-camera phone conversation with Ron and his third wife, Ron does not deny it. after serving in Vietnam, and described his father as terrifyingly short-tempered and physically and emotionally abusive to the family Ron and Margie eventually divorced. In the decades that followed, Jennifer’s older brother, Stephen, became convinced that their father had killed Jennifer, and investigators believed that Margie may have composed the note, likely using her nondominant hand, as cover. Cadaver dogs showed interest in the ground beneath the Pandos home. Both parents maintained that they had nothing to do with her disappearance, but, later, Ron and Margie failed parts of polygraph tests about their knowledge of Jennifer’s fate. According to one of Margie’s sisters, a month passed before Margie told her that her niece was missing on Ron’s side of the family, relatives said they didn’t know for years. When one of Jennifer’s friends called the house, Margie came up with excuses-Jennifer was sick, or she was out with her dad. They seem to have made few public appeals. But Ron and Margie themselves conjured no such scenes, according to multiple sources in the new four-part HBO documentary series “Burden of Proof.” They waited until February 13th to contact the police. Anyone who has either children or an imagination can conjure the scenes that ensued: the screaming panic the frantic calls to 911, friends, and relatives the convening of search parties the “Have You Seen This Girl?” flyers all over town. It warned her parents to not contact the police, to go to work, to carry on as normal. A jaggedly scrawled note was found in her bedroom, claiming that Jennifer had run off with an unidentified older man. On the morning of February 10, 1987, Ron and Margie Pandos woke up in their home in Williamsburg, Virginia, to discover that, sometime overnight, their fifteen-year-old daughter, Jennifer, had vanished.
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