A Montgomery County jury will decide the fate of two men accused in a ‘murder-for-hire’ plot
The five-day trial of Chong Ling Dan and Ricky Vance ended Friday, as prosecutors argued the two planned a “well-orchestrated” plot to kill Ebony Pack, who was dating Dan’s ex-girlfriend.
The trial into an alleged love triangle murder ended Friday in Norristown with lawyers on both sides battling over the identities of the two suspects. But due to an unusual turn of events, the jury was sent home for the weekend, and will resume deliberations on Monday.
Attorneys for Chong Ling Dan, 50, painted him as a successful real estate mogul whose only true sin was having multiple, simultaneous relationships with women. Prosecutors, however, characterized Dan as a vindictive and calculating man who arranged the killing of Ebony Pack, 30, two years ago to send a message to his ex-girlfriend, who had disrespected him and moved on to Pack.
And his codefendant, Ricky Vance, 54, was either a willing participant in the murder-for-hire plot, or a casualty of his own goodwill, set up to take a fall by a longtime friend to whom he lent his car.
Both men are charged with murder, conspiracy, and related offenses in Pack’s death.
“This is about [Dan] and his desire to send a message,” Assistant District Attorney Brianna Ringwood said during her hourlong closing argument. “He wouldn’t kill his ex, because he wanted her. He just needed to get her in line.”
Dan’s attorney, Brian McMonagle, fired back during his own address to the jury, saying that the case against his client was built on little more than “speculation, innuendo, theory, and nonsense.”
“It’s a theory, it’s suspicion,” said McMonagle, who called the trial “a farce and a nightmare” for Dan and his family. “And we now live in a time when theory or a suspicion can ruin a life.”
The six men and six women on the jury will have to decide which version of events is more credible in a twisting narrative involving stolen money, toxic relationships, and layers of inconsistent, contradictory stories.
The group spent about four hours deliberating Friday afternoon, but had to stop when one juror abruptly told a clerk working for Judge William Carpenter that she didn’t understand much of what was said during the trial. Carpenter suspended deliberations for the weekend, and the juror in question will be replaced with an alternate Monday morning, when the jury’s work will resume.
Ringwood said Pack was “collateral damage” in a feud between Dan and Jasmine Stokes, who had stolen $9,000 from Dan and who had started dating Pack shortly after breaking up with him. As Pack sat at a red light in Lansdale two days after Thanksgiving 2020, she was shot eight times with a 9mm handgun by a gunman in a black Cadillac.
That car belonged to Vance, who asserted in testimony Thursday that he had given the vehicle to a third man, Terrence Marche, on the night Pack was killed. Vance said he stayed in Philadelphia after giving the Cadillac to Marche. During the time the Cadillac was seen by Pennsylvania Turnpike cameras closely tailing Pack from her home in Feasterville to Lansdale, Vance was, by his own admission, “trapping” in the city’s Mount Airy section — selling marijuana, playing dice, and drinking.
“I know what murder is: Murder is life [in prison],” Vance said. “I did 20 years, I understand. I didn’t want no part of no murder.”
He said he initially hid this alibi when questioned by police months after Pack’s slaying because of an unspoken “code of conduct” between him and Marche, whom he had met years earlier in federal prison. Still, Vance testified that Marche “lined him up,” and asked to borrow the car to distance himself from the crime.
Vance’s attorney, John I. McMahon, urged jurors to acquit Vance and accept his insistence that he is innocent. He argued that Vance, who worked as a union construction worker, had no need for the money allegedly promised by Dan in the plot to kill Pack.
Meanwhile, Marche, a central figure in the case, and the only clear link between Dan and Vance, has been missing for more than a year. The 48-year-old is Pack’s suspected killer and the man prosecutors say rode along with Vance to confront and kill her at that red light in Lansdale.
Marche was last seen boarding a plane to Honduras after grand jury subpoenas were issued in the investigation, according to Ringwood. He planned to meet Dan, who had already been there for several weeks. But McMonagle cautioned jurors from seeing that as evidence of a conspiracy, despite insistence from prosecutors.
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“They want you to convict an innocent businessman because he’s friends with a suspected murderer,” he said. “That’s it.”
Cell phone records presented during the trial show that Marche and Vance called each other frequently, including before and after both were questioned by police in connection with Pack’s death. On the night of Pack’s death, their cell phones show they met up in Mount Airy, and then were silent for more than two hours, including during the time of her killing.
Their cell phones resumed activity afterward, and showed the two going their separate ways. But before heading back to his home in King of Prussia, Marche stopped at a boathouse along the Schuylkill, Ringwood said. It was the only time, in nine months of data reviewed by investigators, that he made such a trip.
On that same night, Dan’s cell phone showed him traveling among three of his girlfriends’ homes, nowhere near Lansdale, which those women later confirmed to police. McMonagle told jurors that that clearly shows his client had nothing to do with Pack’s slaying.
But Ringwood argued, instead, that his movements were key to the conspiracy between the three men.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a coincidence. This is not hard,” she said. “This pattern of events is evidence of a murder of a woman who didn’t deserve it.”