HBO’s “Burden of Proof” and the Problem of the Passive Mother

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. A jaggedly scrawled note was found in her bedroom, claiming that Jennifer had run off with an unidentified older man. It warned her parents to not contact the police, to go to work, to carry on as normal. 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. 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. They seem to have made few public appeals. When one of Jennifer’s friends called the house, Margie came up with excuses—Jennifer was sick, or she was out with her dad. 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. 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. Cadaver dogs showed interest in the ground beneath the Pandos home.

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. Stephen said that Ron developed P.T.S.D. 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 “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. (Ron eventually served prison time for fraud and firearms possession. 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. But there was no physical evidence against Ron, no body, no witnesses. 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. The main puzzle piece, then, was Margie, who insisted that she had seen nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing.

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 director, Cynthia Hill, is as tireless as Stephen; she followed him for more than seven years, between 2015 and 2023, and pressed on when the official investigation unexpectedly began veering off-road toward different suspects. 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.

But 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. A police officer tells Hill that, in 2007, Margie offhandedly revealed that she had in her possession the original note left in Jennifer’s bedroom, long thought missing along with the rest of the case file; the document was now twenty years old, its value as evidence presumably degraded. Somehow, Margie also had dental records that had been turned over directly to local police. When she and Ron moved away from the area, she didn’t inform the police for two and a half years, Stephen said. At one point, in 2007, she ignored seven straight phone calls from an investigator on the case, and instead, according to records, sent e-mails to Ron. She attempts to explain this bizarre deference to a man who was, by then, her ex-husband, saying, “I thought he was driving this bus.” But the exact nature of this metaphorical bus, its shape, its destination, the question of whether her daughter’s body was inside it—all is unknowable to the viewer, and perhaps to Margie herself.

Often in “Burden of Proof,” Margie seems to be a one-woman Milgram experiment, taking nonsensical, self-sabotaging orders not from an authority figure in a lab coat but from a scribble-scrabbled letter, torn from a spiral notebook, that she may or may not have written under duress one night in 1987. Why, for example, did she go to work the day after Jennifer vanished? “That’s where I was supposed to be,” she says, citing the note’s instructions. At her worst moments, she is a tragic cliché: the passive, enabling helpmeet of the scary, controlling patriarch, self-erasing in compliance, placidly waiting out the latest storm, no matter what or who it’s tearing up around her.

The narrative’s last major turn, or at least the timing of it, also seems to hinge on Margie doing nothing for a long, long time. In May, 2020, a private investigator requests handwriting samples from the ex-boyfriend. In yet another that’s-so-Margie! moment, she dutifully produces a shoebox from her attic, crammed full of notes and letters that Jennifer exchanged with her friends, including fifty or so from the ex-boyfriend. The letters are shocking, revelatory of Jennifer’s secret life, possibly incriminating, and, for reasons only Margie can fathom, freshly available to be read a mere thirty-three years after her daughter’s disappearance. Were copies of these letters in the original, lost case file, which was rediscovered in 2018? No one says. (They certainly seem to be new to Stephen.) As Margie moves toward reconciliation with her son, she continues to find new authority figures to obey. She talks to the hypnotist. She talks to the military interrogator. “She’s done everything that I’ve ever asked her to do,” Stephen says.

In the film’s telling, the cloud of accusation hanging over Ron and Margie simply shape-shifts into a cloud of amnesia and irresolution, as novel theories and persons of interest enter the frame. Hill is an excellent reporter, and so, in his way, is Stephen Pandos (except for when he is consulting a “body-language expert”). But their tunnel vision results in an airless series, one that isolates the Pandos case from its sociological, psychological, and criminal-justice contexts, which are bound up in generational trauma and the patterns of domestic abuse. Exploring those contexts—even acknowledging them—might have made “Burden of Proof” into more than an overlong, inconclusive whodunnit. It might have added empathic dimensions to Margie’s infuriating passivity. It might have told us the why of losing Jennifer, even if it couldn’t tell us the who. The physical and emotional abuse that Stephen describes is part of a dynamic that played a role in his sister’s disappearance and probable death, no matter whether she was killed by a family member, was lured from her bedroom, or had sneaked away with her shady boyfriend. That dynamic is the core of the whole mystery. Nobody runs away from a safe and happy home. ♦