Stephen Pandos was a freshman in college when, in February 1987, his 15-year-old sister, Jennifer, went missing from their family home in Williamsburg, Virginia.
The details of her disappearance were hazy. Stephen’s mother, Margie Pandos, claimed that she had grown concerned one morning when she didn’t hear Jennifer taking a shower and found her door locked. Possibly she ran away. But on her bed, Margie claimed to find a strange note messily scrawled in large, block handwriting, in which an unknown third party claimed Jennifer was “having some problems and needs time away”. The note allegedly transcribed Jennifer’s wishes: don’t call the police, don’t tell her friends, deposit money in her bank account.
Margie and her husband, Ron, did not call the police for three days and told Jennifer’s friends she was either sick or out of the house. By the time they contacted police, the case was close to cold. Jennifer never returned home, nor were any arrests made in her disappearance.
For years, Stephen was at a loss over what happened to the sister he barely knew – three and a half years apart, the two were “just naturally in different orbits”, he told the Guardian. The opening minutes of Burden of Proof, a new HBO docuseries on Stephen’s quest for truth decades after his sister’s disappearance, offer contrasting versions of Jennifer, fitting for a teenage girl barely on the cusp of adulthood. How people remembered her – funny, serious, lighthearted, troubled, open, shy – depended on who was telling the story. And as Burden of Proof examines in four hour-long episodes filmed over nearly eight years, that story shapes which details get remembered, whose discrepancies are highlighted and which doubts pull weight.
The series begins from a point of near certainty, if not closure: by the time Stephen Pandos contacted director Cynthia Hill in 2015, he was convinced his parents were responsible for Jennifer’s disappearance. According to his theory, backed by a file of evidence if not any legal action, Ron Pandos, a Vietnam vet with a history of PTSD and domestic violence, accidentally killed Jennifer during a fight, and Margie, under threat, either looked the other way or covered for him. Stephen suspected that his mother, in a haze of abuse and pressure, composed the bizarre non-ransom note with her non-dominant hand.
It was Stephen’s best attempt, as the series outlines and investigates over several episodes, to make sense of his parents’ confounding behavior. Why had Ron and Margie Pandos taken three days to contact authorities? Why, as one of Jennifer’s friends recalls, did they not seem distraught by her disappearance? Why did both fail polygraph tests when the case was reopened two decades later? Why did it take years for Ron Pandos to even tell his extended family that Jennifer was missing?
Estranged from his father, who Stephen says was terrifying and physically abusive during his youth, Stephen’s frustration mostly trains on Margie, a disconcertingly passive figure. At one point, Margie produces for Hill the original note from Jennifer’s bedroom, which should’ve been filed with police evidence. It took her two and a half years to notify police when she moved. Her explanations for why she went to work after discovering Jennifer missing (“it was where I was supposed to be”, according to the note) or contacted Ron, by then her ex-husband, instead of responding to calls from police investigators in the mid-2000s (“I thought he was driving this bus”) demonstrate baffling deference to unreliable, murky authority.
A documentary, Stephen hoped, would “tell a story about the nuances and complications of trauma” as well as the domestic violence he suspected was at the root of Jennifer’s disappearance and his mother’s seeming reticence to discuss details. He thought, at the time, that Margie had compartmentalized and “buried this somewhere. And in the absence of context, it’s a hard thing to explain. And it was about justice for my sister.”
Hill, meanwhile, was compelled by the long shadow of doubt splintering through the Pandos family; as evidenced in one scene in the first episode, even Margie’s sisters suspected she was involved. “What does that do to you?” she wondered. “To think that your parents are responsible for the most horrific thing that’s ever happened to you in your lifetime – what does that mean? And where do you go from there?”
At the beginning of filming around Stephen Pandos’s home in Charlotte, North Carolina, “it seemed like it was a foregone conclusion that his parents were responsible”, said Hill. Though Ron and Margie Pandos adamantly denied any involvement, to police and on camera in Burden of Proof, both James City county police investigators and private ones consulted by Pandos suspected they were hiding something.
Burden of Proof, however, plays out not so much an investigation of the Pandos’ potential guilt as a reckoning with the heaviest of allegations within a family – Stephen and some aunts and uncles on one side; on the other, Margie and Ron, who moved to Oklahoma and served jail time for firearm possession after a felony conviction. Margie remembers Jennifer fondly; all three profess a hope that she will return, that the truth will be revealed or justice delivered. Stephen interacts with his parents for legal or investigative purposes with chilly cordiality – they are his family and also the people he suspects took his sister away.
Over three years into filming (and about halfway through the series), things take an unexpected, if more conventionally true crime-y turn: police reopened the investigation and began pursuing leads other than his parents, namely Jennifer’s on-again, off-again ex-boyfriend at the time. The final two episodes capture Stephen, years into his conviction that his parents were responsible for his sister’s death, reeling from the painfully slow trickle of news from the police department, which still has not amounted in an arrest or an official suspect.
“We always coined it as an ‘anti-true crime true crime’,” said Hill of the series. “We didn’t know when we got into this that the case would become active again and we just happened to be there for all of that.” On camera, Stephen Pandos slowly comes around to the idea of other potential narratives, particularly as old letters – ones conjured, in a typically strange Margie way, from a box apparently sitting in her house for over 30 years – reveal Jennifer’s tempestuous teenage relationship and handwriting sample analyses appear to rule out his parents for the note. It’s not enough for an arrest, not even close to conclusive. But it’s enough room for doubt, and for Stephen’s purgatory to shift from seeking more information from his estranged parents to seeking more information, period.
Which makes for an even more shapeless understanding of what happened; the over seven-year arc of Burden of Proof bends not toward certainty but cloudy inconclusiveness. “I don’t know what happened,” Stephen Pandos said on where he’s landed now. But the series, for all its open ends and bizarre family moments and unconfirmed suspicions, is “about never giving up”, said Pandos. “In the absence of justice for Jennifer, closure is me being comfortable with knowing that I’ve done my very best for her.”
“At the end of the day, as Stephen says, we still don’t know,” said Hill. After nearly eight years following lead after lead, question after question on Jennifer’s case, the truth of her disappearance “is not something that I’m comfortable speculating on at this point”, she said. “But we do believe that someone probably knows more. And hopefully as soon as this series comes out, somebody is compelled to talk about it.”
Burden of Proof is now available on HBO with a UK and Australian release to be announced
