The four-part series, “Burden of Proof,” explores what happened to Jennifer Pandos, who went missing in 1987.
A new HBO docuseries is trying to answer the decades-old question of what happened to Jennifer Pandos.
The four-part series, “Burden of Proof,” explores what happened to Pandos, who went missing in 1987.
On the morning of February 10, 1987, Pandos, then 15 years old, went missing from her Kingsmill, Virginia, home, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Her parents discovered that she was gone and found a messily written note left on the teen’s bed, which claimed that she was "fine" and just needed "time away from this place,” Entertainment Weekly reported.
The note also reportedly said that she had run off with an unidentified older man, the New Yorker reported.
The letter also warned her parents to not contact the police, to go to work and to carry on as normal. But her parents did just that and plastered missing person posters across town and the police opened an investigation, the New Yorker reported.
More than 30 years later, she never returned, nor was her body ever found.
Pandos’ brother, Stephen, who was away at college at the time, believed his parents had something to do with her disappearance, which becomes the center of “Burden of Proof.”
The series, directed by Cynthia Hill and Christine Delp, follows Stephen from 2016 to present day in his quest to find out what happened to his sister. In the series, he meets with experts, investigators and her friends to dig deep into what happened to Jennifer and if his parents had something to do with it.
No charges were ever filed against his parents, who are also interviewed in the series.
"What drew me to the story was this emotional rollercoaster that Stephen had already been on and that he was continuing to be on," Cynthia told Variety. "It was more about trying to just witness this destruction of this family and how you come out of that.”
Stephen’s parents divorced in the '90s, with Stephen's dad telling his mom he "never wanted to speak to her again,” Distractify reported.
The series reportedly takes twists and turns in trying to answer the question – what happened to Jennifer?
“Burden of Proof” is now on HBO and Max.
