Anatomy of Murder - Close to Home (Pam & Helen Hargan)

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

A mother and daughter are found dead in their home. A surprise phone call to detectives would lead to who did this, and why.For episode information and photos, please visit: anatomyofmurder.com/close-to-home Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

I remember every single one of my murder victims, everyone. And there's not a day that goes by that I don't think of them. Closed case, open case, it doesn't matter. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anasiga Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murder. If there's one thing we've learned on this show and in our long careers in law enforcement is that the motives for murder can take root just about anywhere.

Greed, envy, revenge. They aren't exclusive to one race, religion, class, or creed. And that's why, tragically, violence can visit anyone, even in a quiet and wealthy suburb like McLean, Virginia. McLean is located just outside Washington, D.C., and has a reputation for being home to many of the more successful professionals of the nation's capital. In fact, according to medium income and housing prices, McLean was recently listed as the third wealthiest zip code in the United States. Traditionally, McLean also has a very low crime

rate, so you can only imagine how shocking it must have been for neighbors to witness the scene that transpired on the afternoon of July 14, 2017. At about five o'clock on what was otherwise a typical quiet summer afternoon, Fairfax County police officers were trying to make entry into a large house on a leafy street lined with multi-million dollar homes. Police were there to respond to a 911 call, and if the caller was to be believed, time was of the essence. The home's locked.

They're knocking, they're announcing, they're getting nothing from the inside, so they finally decide to breach the front door. Detective Brian Byerson was one of the detectives from Fairfax County later assigned to the case, and the one responsible for uncovering the truth behind what those officers found when they finally got into the home. They breached the front door. First, they locate Pam Hargan, who is face down on the floor of the mudroom on the first level, covered by a quilt. It appeared that the 63-year-old homeowner, Pamela Hargan, had been shot twice in the head and left to die where she fell, just a few feet inside the locked front door of her own home. But incredibly, that was not the end of the horror that the officers discovered,

because according to the 911 call, Pamela Hargan had not been alone in her home. They clear the rest of the house and they locate Helen Hargan in her bedroom bathroom. The body of Pamela's daughter, 24-year-old Helen Hargan, is slumped against the bathtub. She had suffered significant trauma to her head, and there was a rifle still clutched in her hands. It was a Remington.22, like a squirrel gun. So that was found leaning up sort of between Helen's legs, right? Barrel pointed upwards, and the buttstock was resting on the tile floor. The mother dead from gunshot wounds on the first floor, the daughter dead from a parent's self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. For the responding officers, it would have been pretty clear what this crime scene suggested. The murder-suicide thing, understandably, that's what patrol thinks this is.

But when detectives arrived on the scene, they weren't as convinced. Once we get there, patrol gives us a quick rundown of basically, this is what we saw in the house. This is why we called you. With my team and with the crime scene lead, Detective Julia Elliott, her and I, once the search warrant gets there for the house, we take an initial walkthrough, just me and her.

And we just take note of things we see in the house that may be interesting. So we can brief our respective squads when we come out as to what our plan is going to be. And as they combed a large house and examined the two crime scenes, there were several things that caught their attention. We have seen a lot of death scenes. And so Julia and I, when we walked through, we noted that there were problems with the scene right off the bat. The fact that Pam is covered with that quilt is interesting. Her cell phone is on top of that quilt and on top of a pool of blood, also interesting. Both the quilt and the phone appear to have been deliberately placed,

which is more common in a scene that had been staged than a crime of passion like a murder-suicide. And then once we got upstairs, there were some things that bothered us about Helen's death scene as well. Mainly her cell phone that was sitting on the bathroom counter was suspiciously clean. And the rifle and the positioning of the rifle where it was, Mainly her cell phone that was sitting on the bathroom counter was suspiciously clean. And the rifle and the positioning of the rifle where it was, we would have expected to see quite a bit of blood on that rifle. And there was none. There was also no void underneath the rifle where blood had collected and been expirated. So those are the initial things that did make a lot of sense to us.

And it won't be the last thing in this case that doesn't make sense, not the least of which was why a successful businesswoman and mother of three like Pamela Hargan or her 24-year-old daughter Helen would fall victim to such horrific violence. As in all homicide investigations, the search for answers started with the victims themselves. Pamela was a retired executive who had worked for some pretty big companies in the northern Virginia area. After her divorce, she had raised her three daughters, Helen, Megan, and Ashley, as a single mom. And by many measures, she had done so very well. Here's part of a recorded phone call between a detective and Pamela's middle daughter, Megan. My mother gave us everything.

She bought our cars for us. She did everything for us. She paid for our colleges and, you know, never took out a loan. She worked so hard. Yeah. And just took care of it. Sir, if I needed anything, I could go to her and say, Mom, I need this, and she'd just give it to us.

I mean, anything we needed, she gave it to us. Mom was very good at taking care of her daughters financially. She had quite the nest egg that she had earned, that she had worked to establish. 24-year-old Helen Hargan was Pamela's youngest daughter. She had recently returned home from college in Texas with degrees in math and management science and seemed destined for a successful career in business, just like her mother. Now, making a notification for a crime scene like this, it's always hard. But considering that we're talking about two people, two family members, a mom and her daughter, this must have just been devastating for Pamela's two surviving children. And tough for the detectives who had to make that notification to Pam's ex-husband.

So Detective Vickery notifies their father first, Steve. He tells them, hey, back at the house, we don't have good news as far as what they've both been found deceased. And then he allows Steve to make that notification to his daughters in his presence. The family expressed shock and difficulty comprehending what had happened. But it was especially disturbing for Pamela's middle daughter, Megan, who lived with her mother and had actually been at the house with her five-year-old daughter on the morning her mom and sister were killed. She even made some statements that I was just there. My mom and I were going in and out of the house. We were doing watering that morning. I mean, it was a normal morning, you know. But despite

her shock, Megan was still able to give investigators some details about that morning to help fill out the timeline of the deaths and start to understand what could have happened. The door to her office was closed while I was packing and everything. So I just left with Molly. That's when I saw Helen on the porch. The office door was closed. When my mom's office door is closed, you don't go in there. She's on the phone.

That's the only time it's ever closed. And so I don't know what's happened. I don't know. I don't know. I have no idea what's happened. But when she left out the front of the house that her sister Helen was on her cell phone talking to who she thought was Carlos and that she was crying. Carlos was Helen's boyfriend back in Texas, someone that no one in the family had met but knew only from reputation.

According to Megan, their mom Pamela did not fully approve of her youngest daughter's relationship with Carlos, and this had led to some serious friction between the mom and daughter. Helen just, I mean, almost immediately became a different person when she started dating him. And my mother was concerned. Ashley and I were not as concerned, but my mother was extremely concerned. Every time we talk about Carlos, she's painting this picture for us about how what a terrible person this is and how the family hated him. Megan went on to say that the fights between them had taken a visible toll on her sister Helen, who recently had been displaying some erratic, even some self-harm behavior. She's also talking about her sister's mental health struggles and how the family's been worried about her.

Not coming out and saying that Helen did this, but she's suggesting it. Megan's description of the situation at the family home lent credence to the possibility, at least, that an argument between Helen and Pamela had turned heated and then fatal. And by 8 p.m. on that day of the murder, local police went as far as to making a statement to the media that the tragedy at the Hargett home looked to be the result of a domestic dispute leading to a murder-suicide. But according to Brian, that conclusion was premature. Because the closer he looked at the crime scene, the more he was convinced that the evidence would tell an entirely different story. A story about not just homicide,

but betrayal, bank fraud, and one person's twisted plot to get away with murder. In July of 2017, police discovered the bodies of 63-year-old Pamela Hargan and her 24-year-old daughter Helen inside the Hargan family home. Both had been victim of fatal gunshot wounds. Found with the murder weapon still positioned between her legs, the barrel pointing towards her head, Helen appeared to have shot her own mother before taking her own life. But there were also some inconsistencies in the crime scene

that caused Detective Brian Byerson to question that theory. For example, Helen's phone was appeared to maybe have been wiped clean. I mean, it was pristine. I mean, just picture anyone picking up their iPhone or Android. You leave some print every time you touch it. There were no pools of blood under the gun, and that phone was on top of the bloody blanket. And again, it appeared clean. Yeah, and you're talking about a blanket there, Anastasia. Let's talk about the fact that what does it mean, in a sense, by covering up a victim?

It has some meanings in some cases, especially around the area of the face. And that is indicative of someone who may feel or is likely connected to the victim. And it's believed the reason to cover the victim, it may signify some sort of emotional attachment to that victim. So that may mean to a detective that this case is very personal. And if it wasn't the murder-suicide, at least that was first believed, then we're talking about maybe a possible home invasion or even something planned by someone who may even have been known to the victims.

So until an autopsy is completed and gunshot residue tests are returned from the lab, police can only speculate and gather more evidence in their process. But in their initial canvas of the neighborhood, they turned up no witnesses that saw or heard anything suspicious, not even the gunshots. No one heard anything. No one heard a gunshot. No one reports any suspicious activity. No one reports any cars speeding away. But as it turned out, there was a recent tip to police that suggested that the Hargan home might have been targeted. The only thing that's reported around this time that would be considered suspicious is by Megan Hargan. She calls in a suspicious person report to a Fairfax County police or to the 911 center and describes a black male and an Asian male in aviator sunglasses that are, she thinks,

walking around, maybe casing the neighborhood. So let's talk about that call to police. It was made just a day before the murder. And according to Megan, the presence of the two suspicious men were so unnerving to her and her mother that she had retrieved her husband's rifle out of storage. And she would later tell us that because of these two guys, she moved the rifle from the basement area to the main floor of the residence.

It was the same rifle found next to her now-dead older sister. Part of her description of that to us was that when she called to report these two suspicious individuals in the neighborhood, that the call taker told her that you're not the only person to have called about these guys today. So armed with this pretty strong lead and physical descriptions of the two possible suspects, investigators go looking for any other neighbors that could potentially help identify those individuals. But unfortunately, they didn't have much luck.

In fact, according to police, Megan's was the only complaint. That's the only call ever received about these two people. And so I also keep coming back to the fact, and stay with me for a moment, that responding officers had to forcibly breach the house because all of the doors and windows were locked. And to me, that indicates that the person responsible was breached the house because all of the doors and windows were locked. And to me, that indicates that the person responsible was still inside the house and perhaps never left. Or they had keys and locked up behind them. And so those are the two scenarios that detectives start to zero in on. And interestingly, their best witness is actually a thousand miles away in Texas. Because as it turned out, it was actually Helen's boyfriend, Carlos, that was the one that called 911.

It was Carlos that had alerted Fairfax police of a potential volatile situation occurring at the Hargan home. So you may be asking, how did Carlos know? Because Carlos was actually on the phone talking to Helen on the morning she and her mother were killed. It's a normal morning conversation, according to Carlos, between those two. They're just talking about life. And at some point, that changes. And according to Carlos, Helen told him that Megan had come upstairs and told her that she had killed their mother. She tells Carlos this, and then Carlos spends the next hour or so trying to get her to leave the residence, or to at least call 911. But according to Carlos, that's not what Helen did at all. In fact, she

even told him to stay on the line and not call the police. It seemed to him that she was determined to try and defuse the situation herself. Helen is telling him to try to remain calm, act like he doesn't know anything is going on. And Carlos relayed to us that he had thought she was worried about Molly. And she was trying to figure out how to get her niece out of the house without making it a bigger deal than it clearly was. But when Helen went silent, Carlos had a sinking feeling that the worst had happened. But from so far away, he had no way to be sure exactly what. Carlos calls 911 several times and he expresses that she won't answer her phone. He says that he thinks something might have happened to her. With so few details, Carlos

had trouble conveying the seriousness of the situation. And to make matters worse, he had trouble even identifying the right local authorities to call. He calls Texas 911. He calls directly into Fairfax County 911. He ends up calling, I think, Falls Church Police Department, maybe Arlington. He calls all over the place. It takes a long time for people to take what he's reporting

as seriously as they should have the first time he called. You know, on a scene, it's obvious that when you dial 911, especially from a cell phone, the tower directs that call to the local jurisdiction, which totally makes sense and is designed to send you help whether you can complete the call or not. Data comes up at a 9-1-1 center, which is an enhanced system. But if you tell them that you're calling from a location that's not within their jurisdiction, they have to reroute you and basically handing it off to a completely other 911 center.

And I could really go both ways on this because we just don't know. Was it someone who was kind of passing the buck and wasn't taking him seriously and just didn't do their job, which is to get help to at least a potential violent situation as quickly as possible? Or was it just, again, trying to find the right location to send help to? At this point, without knowing more, it's really hard to say. But we all have heard about prank 911 calls. And of course, all of them are taken very seriously. There are ones that are even more serious. They're called swatting calls, where they send response to what could be someone being held against their will. But there's no really way

to tell without just responding. So each of those calls need to be responded to, even if someone, Anastasia, is a thousand miles away. And so, Scott, you could almost see on that one side of it how it seems almost fantastical. Here's this guy hundreds and hundreds of miles away reporting a possible crime that may or may not have happened. Because it sounds so outlandish, right? It's somebody calling in from out of state saying that their girlfriend called them and said that her older sister shot her mom and now he can't get a hold of the girlfriend. Not only that, but so far investigators only had the account of one surviving Hargan daughter, who was telling the police that Carlos wasn't a good guy and that he couldn't be trusted. We had Carlos' statement to 911 about this shooting.

So we had to establish whether or not Megan was in the house that morning, as opposed to just going with what Carlos is reporting. With the family's description of Carlos, investigators were not ready to just take his word for it. They had to ask, was he lying? Was he concocting a story to deflect blame away from his girlfriend, Helen, and onto Helen's sister, Megan? Or was he telling the truth? In which case, Megan Hargan was not just a surviving family member of two murder victims, but possibly at least the killer herself. So one of the first things we were trying to do was establish whether or not Megan was home that morning. And in talking to her, she told us that she had left the home off of Dean Drive that

morning to head to West Virginia. So by her own statement, we know that she's in the house that morning. As you all know, placing a suspect at the crime scene is not a small step in a homicide investigation. Also at the home with Megan was her five-year-old daughter. So we now know at this time that that morning, Helen Hargan, Pam Hargan, Megan Hargan, and Molly are at home. And at some point, Megan and Molly leave the residence, and Pam and Helen are shot. So the question becomes whether Helen and her mother were alive when Megan left, or were they already dead?

Brian believed the answer lay hidden somewhere in the crime scene. Initially, we thought that her wound was interaural or inside of her mouth because of the way that her body looked to us on scene. It was hard to determine where the wound was. But the medical examiner had made an interesting discovery that shed light on a theory that Helen's wound was self-inflicted. I distinctly remember Dr. Posthumus calling us over to the table and saying, hey, this is the wound, and she's got the x-ray up on the backlit board,

and now we can see the travel of the projectile. And we find out that the wound is actually sort of in the top of her head, and that that wound path, we can follow the fragments go straight down to right to the base of her neck. We knew wound path, we can follow the fragments, go straight down to right to the base of her neck, knew right away that we had a problem. The autopsy determined that the gunshot wound on Helen's head entered through the top and then exited through the bottom. This meant Helen would have had to hold the rifle above her head to pull the trigger,

which is not only unlikely, but for many, physically impossible. Just trying to think of the positioning of how you would have to be to even make that happen was just so outlandish. As someone who's been to hundreds of scenes, specifically suicide scenes, not even talking about homicide, but just scenes involving the death of a person

via gunshot wound, this was a problem for me. Brian was convinced that Helen had not taken her own life, which also meant that she was likely not the person who killed her mother either. So does that mean that Carlos's version of events might actually be the truth? And if so, what reason would Megan Hargan ever have to coldly and systematically kill both her mother and sister and then try to cover it up? The next clue to this mystery came from a surprising place and revealed a plot even darker than investigators ever imagined. Friday is our initial call out. Saturday, we get the autopsy where we know we have a problem with Helen's scene. And then I get to the office on Monday morning and I have a

voicemail on my landline phone. So I play the voicemail and it's the fraud investigators from Capital One saying, hey, we saw the news. We think you guys should know that we have an active fraud investigation involving your victim Pamela Hargan's accounts. You should probably give us a call. Someone claiming to be Pamela Hargan had called the bank the day before the murder, requesting a wire transfer of over $400,000. Here is audio of that exact call. Can you please confirm the amount of the wire that you'd like to send out today? $418,826. And they say, furthermore, on the 13th, we called the account holder, Pam Back, on her cell phone, and she claims that she has no idea about any of this and that she

didn't do a wire transfer. But whoever the fraudster was, they didn't stop there. And then they said, furthermore, the morning of these murders, like the next day, the 14th, there's a second attempted wire transfer. We feel by the same person, again, trying to send money to this title company in West Virginia. And I said, OK. And they said, we have these calls recorded. We would love to send them to you. Theft of over $400,000 certainly sounds like a motive for murder. So you can imagine the detectives' excitement over the thought of these recordings. Because it was really likely that they contained the voice of whoever was behind not just the fraud scheme, but the murders of both Pamela and Helen Hargan. So they sent us those

calls. We listened to those calls and we realized quickly we had talked to Megan Hargan at this point. So we knew what she sounded like and we were of the opinion on Monday that she was making these phone calls. And at that point, now we have this huge motive and we can hear the motive play out over a course of two days. I have to advise you this call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance. And may I have your first and last name, please? Pamela Hanson-Harkin. Thank you. I understand you want to complete a wire transfer with us today? Yes, we attempted to yesterday and there was a bit of a mix up. please? Pamela Hanson-Harkin. Thank you. I understand you want to complete the wire transfer with us today? Yes.

We attempted to yesterday and there was a bit of a mix up, so we would like to do it again now. Okay. That wire. They need it today. In July of 2017, Detective Brian Byerson was leading a double homicide investigation that was quickly gaining steam. An investigation that was now centered on someone's attempt to steal $400,000 from Pamela Hargan's bank account just a day before her murder. Is it a domestic or an international wire?

Domestic to a title company. Okay, great. Are you going to buy a house? For my daughter. Wonderful. And how much did you want to send today? Okay, let me get the exact amount. It's $419,034.77.

Once that wire transfer is attempted, Capital One Bank calls back Pam Hargan, who is not in the home at the time of this attempt. She's on her way to Pennsylvania to visit Ashley Hargan, her middle daughter. Oh, I'm a little panicked at this point. No, I understand that. I do have your account in front of me. And so I hear that somebody tried to do a wire out of your account for $400,000. What? I have done none.

Those accounts are not to be touched. Period. Can you freeze all my accounts? Pam then calls Megan to let her know that someone was trying to get access to her accounts and sends Megan over to the brick and mortar Capital One Bank to try to figure out what's going on with her accounts. And there was, in fact, video of Megan's visit to the bank. And I just have to point out the irony of what Megan's wearing in that video. It's a t-shirt with the word cash emblazoned across the front. Talk about wearing your motive

on your shirt sleeve. When Brian listened to those recorded phone calls, he was convinced that the caller was not Pamela, but rather her daughter Megan, pretending to be her mom. I have to advise you this call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance. And may I have your first and last name, please? Pamela Hanson-Harkin. And then we can also hear Pamela's reaction when she is contacted. Because remember, on the 13th, she's out of the house. She's on her way to Pennsylvania to meet Ashley for lunch with Molly.

I'm trying to pull off. I'm in traffic. I apologize. So the only person in the house is Megan. And the call to initiate that wire transfer comes from the house phone. So we know it's her. So who was Megan Hargan? And was she really capable of not just stealing from her own mother, but also committing murder to cover her own tracks. Out of the three daughters, Megan was kind of the one that just wasn't succeeding at life.

She was the oldest. She's living at home. Going back through her financials, she had no real income. She would claim to have been a party planner, and she would say all these things when we talked to her about how she's opening this LLC out in West Virginia and all this stuff. We found no evidence that she ever planned a single party. According to the oldest daughter, Ashley, their mother had been incredibly generous with all of her kids, even offering to buy houses for both Ashley and Helen. But with Megan, her generosity did have limits, which I can imagine at least was a source of a lot of resentment and envy. But again, we don't know all the facts of why she gave to one and not the in-kind to another. And so maybe she decided to get her hands on her

mom's money another way, by stealing it. But to prove that money was indeed her motive, investigators needed to collect some hard evidence. So they went to the title company, which was supposed to be the recipient of that $400,000 wire that was a transfer for Megan's purchase of this new home. And when they looked at their proof of funds document, it was pretty clear that Megan had attempted a pretty poorly executed forgery. Now we're like, hey, remember those documents, Julia, that you took pictures of, but we didn't see because we couldn't. Let's pull those up again. She pulls them up on the computer. We're looking at the documents and we're realizing, OK, get that other document that we got

from the title company. OK, she superimposed her name over this document. It's the same document. So at this point, for me, I'd be thinking, you need to get Megan into the station or somewhere we can talk to her and confront her about these strong suspicions that she was the one behind the attempted fraud and whether that somehow led to the tragic events at her mother's home a day later. And that was exactly Brian's plan. But five days after the murder, he didn't need to execute that part of his plan because it was Megan who reached out to investigators. She's kind of demanding this update on the case.

And we basically say, hey, look, would you be willing to come in? We'd like to grab some DNA from you and some fingerprints. And we can just kind of knock all that stuff out. That way you're only down here one time. We can get everything we need. And then we'll give you this update that you're asking for. And incredibly, she agrees, which is either proof that she had nothing to hide or she was blinded by her own arrogance in thinking she could get away with murder. She comes to our headquarters building on the 19th, 6 o'clock p.m. Detective Elliott is the first one to interact with her. She basically takes a buckle swab of her cheek for the DNA.

She takes her fingerprints. And then Megan sits down with us and we start this update that she's requested that turns into like a four and a half hour interrogation. You know, Scott, to hear that they talk for hours, and that is the gift that keeps on giving. Almost doesn't matter what this person of interest slash suspect says. It's just you just want to get to the truth. So the more they talk, the more you can try to ferret out what is truthful, what's a lie, and maybe something in between. You know, to me, it sounds like right off the top, some type of fishing expedition that Megan has just embarked on.

You know, you show me your cards, I'll show you mine. But with Megan, what she didn't realize that she was dealing with a seasoned detective who was already Anisega, quite suspicious. Probably the first hour of this is just kind of letting her talk about whatever it is that she wants to talk about. We haven't confronted her as to that we think she did this. It's also important to note that she wasn't in custody in any way, so she wasn't Mirandized at that point, nor did she request any point to have a lawyer present. When we make this very clear to her, at no time during this four and a half hours is she under arrest. We make sure that she is well aware of how to exit this room

and how to exit the building and that we will take her downstairs if she'd like to. So when the subject of the Capital One calls came up, Megan insisted that it was not her, but her mother that initiated the bank transfer for filling a promise to help her buy a house like she had just done for her sisters. Now she spent an hour telling us how her mom was making those calls and her mom

was initiating this wire transfer. Her mom got confused about the amount was wrong on the 13th. So that was the whole problem with this thing that happened. That's why they had to do it again on the 14th. But everything's her mom's doing it. Little did Megan know that the police had recordings of those calls. Then we play her the call. I think she's very surprised that we have the calls. I could tell right away when we were kind of telling her, hey, we have this recording of the call.

I'm going to play it for you. I could tell immediately that she was like, oh, uh-oh. Her body language changed. She changed her posture in her chair. We played her the calls, and she initially is still trying to be like, it's mom. But when we press her on it, she ends up admitting that the voice on the call

from the 13th is her. But despite acknowledging that it was her on the calls, Megan maintained that she was only calling at her mother's request. And that's when she tries to weave this web of, now she's going to place herself in the storyline as Helen. Mom's buying my husband and I this house out here. She does this for all the girls.

But investigators were one step ahead, because when they pulled the paperwork from the title company, they made a pretty damning discovery. When we get the actual proof of funds document from the title company in West Virginia, it is a merger of Pam Hargan's bank statement and that name and address blank page had been superimposed over Pam's name and address on her account. The proof of funds document would purport to say this is Megan Hargan's account and she has six hundred and some odd thousand dollars. One by one, her lies were exposed.

It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse for her because she keeps trying to weave another story to explain the last lie that she was caught in. She says, Mom's standing next to me when all this is going on. And then we play her mom's call. And we tell her, this is what time this call is initiated. And they call her cell phone. And she's not in the house. As a matter of fact, on that recording, she says to the guy, let me pull over. And we talk about the callback that they do on the 14th, where they call back mom's cell phone. And she answers the phone. You know, Scott, I have to say here, while everything seems to be pointing in her direction, I really think the only thing that's clear is the fraud. You know,

you really have a lot of circumstances that in a circumstantial case, while I love them and we talk about them all the time, you need to make sure that all the pieces fit before you go ahead and make that arrest. This is the point where an investigator must use their intuition and their experience with that specific person of interest to determine what kind of flight risk they could be. Did he or she respond to the calls asking them to come in? Do they live at a specific address that you are able to confirm? So if you see them being a less of a flight risk, you can allow your investigation to play out a little bit longer to fill in more blanks before you make the decision

to arrest and charge. So now I think she knows she's in trouble here. She never will admit that she's done anything. She just tries to explain everything away, even when the explanations are completely ridiculous. Towards the end of her conversation with police, Megan had a surprising change of heart, or change in strategy, whichever you want to call it. So she appears to concede that all of this looks really bad. And she begins telling detectives to just blame her. I mean, those are the words that she used. Just blame her for the murders so that her family could move on. I know, know how bad it was.

I absolutely know. I know that. I told them I will take the blame for whatever. It's just that my family go. Saying I'm willing to take the blame isn't necessarily saying I'm the one that did it. And these are the reasons why. And we tell her that's not how this works. It's not that simple. We're not just going to say it's you. You know the severity of these charges, right? What I'm worried about, this is the time that you can direct the narrative about what happened and why. later on when we offer her a polygraph she gets so elated about this and she starts to berate us

like why didn't you offer me this in the first place i would gladly do this oh my god nevertheless megan took a polygraph test which she proceeded to fail three different times and while megan was still denying her involvement in her sister and mother's murder, investigators did think they had enough incriminating evidence to tell her family that she was a suspect. So while we were doing the interview, the other detectives were talking to the family and playing them these Capital One tapes so that they realize too, oh, this is her. They know what she sounds like. So we were going to make her as uncomfortable as we possibly could

in her own little world that she has spent years probably crafting. Right up to this point, the other surviving sister, Ashley, had believed Megan and the entire narrative that she had created. That their youngest sister, Helen, was depressed and that somehow her boyfriend, Carlos, was the cause of this friction between her and their mom. For Ashley, it was almost impossible to believe her own sister could have gone to such lengths

to murder her mom and sister. But the evidence was adding up. Once she hears the Capital One tapes and she realizes that her sister was trying to steal this money to buy this house, it's very easy for her to put two and two together. You say, oh, so it's just a coincidence then that there's this massive half a million dollar fraud going on the day before in the morning of these murders. Despite the mounting evidence against Megan Hargan for the murders of her sister and mother, investigators still did not believe they had enough to make an arrest. So they instead made a strategic choice. I mean, we tell her in the interview, it is our opinion that she killed her mom and her sister. We tell her that. And we tell her family that, that day. But we decided to take the route of the grand jury instead of going out and just getting the

arrest warrants, at least in Virginia and the Commonwealth here. One of the advantages to that is it wipes away a preliminary hearing. If we indict her, we don't have to put on a preliminary hearing, which gives the defense kind of a free shot at listening to some of the evidence. When you indict someone in Virginia, you skip that step and we go right to trial. The defense gets that one shot. Their decision to go for a grand jury indictment gave investigators time to build an airtight case. But there is a risk, namely, that their main suspect could flee.

We had a bunch of lab stuff that was out. We didn't know at the time about the GSR because that was still out. We had a bunch of stuff from the lab that hadn't come back yet. And they said basically, look, do you guys think you're going to have an issue finding her later on? I said, no, I don't think we are. As a matter of routine, Megan and the other members of the family had been swapped for gunshot residue right on the day of the murder. Now, the results of those tests were the linchpin in their case against Megan Hargan. And of course, later on, we get the lab results back for the GSR, and she has GSR present on both of her hands, which she shouldn't have. But you know whose hands did not have residue?

Her sister Helen's. And once all of that stuff came back, we presented the case to the grand jury and they returned indictments for murder on Megan Hargan for her sister Helen and her mother Pamela and also two counts of use of a firearm and commission of a felony. In November of 2018, Fairfax County Police traveled to West Virginia

and put Megan Hargan in custody. It would take another two years before she would finally stand trial. The biggest thing for us is there was no confession, right? And that we were going to have to do a really good job in walking people chronologically through the story as to why she's in here, why it's her. Circumstantial evidence is often misunderstood as conjecture,

that a circumstantial case lacks, quote, hard evidence. But circumstantial really means there is no eyewitness accounts or confession from a suspect or other direct evidence. There was so much circumstantial evidence to include the motive that we felt relatively confident that if we were to sit down with anybody and talk to them for an hour about what this is and why it's her, that anyone would come out and go, oh, she definitely did that. At the trial, prosecutors argued that Megan Hargan was attempting to steal over $400,000 from her mother, Pamela, as evidenced by the fraudulent bank calls. When her scheme was in danger of being exposed,

she murdered her mother to cover up her lies and maintain the fraud. They also argued that Megan's sister Helen witnessed the murder, just as she had told her boyfriend Carlos. And so Megan killed her sister and staged the scene as a murder-suicide. It's our opinion that that gun was wiped down along with Helen's phone. In the crime scene pictures, you can actually see white marks on the screen. There's not a single fingerprint on the iPhone screen, which is crazy. If anybody were to take their iPhone out of their pocket right now and look at it,

you would see prints all over it. The defense argued that, in fact, it was all about an unstable Helen who had killed Pamela in response to her mother's ultimatum to break up with Carlos. The defense team that Megan Hargan had is very experienced, and they are very good at what they do. I've had several trials against these two gentlemen. They are worthy opponents in the courtroom, to say the least. But the defense relied on a dubious recreation of the supposed suicide. The defense maintained that this was a murder-suicide, that Helen, for a myriad of reasons, was so depressed that she killed her mom and then took her own life with the toe-on-the-trigger theory.

With a sock on, of course, because that's why there's no DNA or there's no fingerprints. They went so far as to say that Helen had staged the murder-suicide to implicate her own sister in the crime. She hated her sister Megan so much that she does this elaborate murder-suicide to make it look like Megan did it. In March of 2022, a jury found Megan Hargan guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of using a firearm in committing a felony. And the jury recommended life sentences for the murders.

However, a judge later vacated the convictions after defense attorneys revealed that a juror in the 2022 trial had gone home one day and used her rifle to see if a defense theory in the case was plausible. One of the jurors took a, I believe it was a shotgun that her spouse had in the house and tried to sort of recreate what the defense was laying out as maybe this is what happened with the toe. And the problem was, I think she came back the next day and relayed that she could not recreate this to the jurors in the juror room. The result of the juror misconduct was that the verdict would have to be thrown out and a date was set for an entirely new trial. And you know, I've never actually asked you this, Anastasia,

but has this ever happened to you? It has, but not with a rifle experiment, but with someone going outside of what happened in the courtroom to kind of do their own internal investigation. I don't remember right now whether it was by talking to people they knew that were in the field or using something else, some other means, but I have had it happen, but it did not end in a mistrial.

It was at a point that we were able to, we were still on trial, we were able to excuse the juror, put an alternate and start again. But just how frustrating for all and how difficult for those remaining in the Hargan family to have to go through this again. And I distinctly remember sitting there with my colleagues and with Ashley Hargan and hearing the judge say that he's vacating the verdict and we were going to have to retry her and how devastating that must have been for Ashley to hear that. But I also admire the strength that she showed and Carlos showed to relive that trauma for another multiple-week trial. It's really amazing, actually.

But when the second trial finally got started, the prosecution's case was still solid and strong, while Megan's defense was just getting harder and harder to believe. But that was basically what their presentation was, is that Helen did this, and Helen somehow is trying to put this on Megan. Completely ridiculous. If you're not going to plead the case out, you have to have something to tell the jury or something

to try to explain all of this circumstantial evidence. The eventual explanation that you end up giving inherently will be ridiculous because there's not an explanation for it. In September of 2023, Megan Hargan was again convicted on both counts of first-degree murder. She got two life sentences for each first-degree murder conviction to run consecutively. And then she also got an additional eight years for the two gun charges also to run consecutively. It's safe to say that she will never, ever see the outside of a jail cell. Ashley and Helen's boyfriend Carlos sat in the back of the courtroom during the entirety of both trials.

As the judge imposed sentence, they wiped away tears. To me, it's double devastating for Ashley, right? Because her whole immediate family is killed. The one survivor, her older sister, who made it out, ends up being the one that kills everybody. So she's effectively lost her family and she's losing her only surviving sibling to the justice system. In the end, the family of four women, mom and three daughters, was reduced to a family of one. Even Ashley's relationship with her young niece, Molly, is forever severed thanks to the cold-blooded actions of the young girl's mother.

Molly's father and Megan's husband sort of removed her from that side of the family. I don't even think that they know where she is. And while justice was ultimately delivered, at least in the courtroom, that is how this terribly tragic story of this family comes to an end. For Ashley, the loss of not just her mom and her sister, but her entire family. There's never closure for her. We like to use that word as like when these convictions, they're offered some portion of closure. I can tell you there's never closure for these families. There's always going to be that empty table at the holiday, or there's always going to be that thing that pops up now on your social media that

remind you of your loved one or whatever. And in truth, there's little closure for the investigator too. And for anyone who's worked a homicide, the reality is it's not just a job and the victims are not just another case. I remember every single one of my murder victims, everyone. And there's not a day that goes by that I don't think of them. Closed case, open case, it doesn't matter.

For those of us that have worked in this world of murder, especially over a long period of time, we're all forever changed by what we've seen. And forever somehow bonded to the many victims lost to this, the ultimate of crimes. And that certainly holds true for Brian, a veteran investigator who's seen more than his fair share. I've been in homicide now for 10 years and I drive around this county off duty, you know, going to the grocery store, whatever I'm doing. I'm to the point now where I drive by these scenes and you immediately get kind of pulled back to what that case was or a park or something, an open field or just a road where something happened. And it's just you can't escape it. It's just always there.

It's something that Brian said that really defines critical thinking early on in a fresh case as a homicide investigator. Before you jump to any conclusions, wait. You'll make mistakes if you make assumptions before you actually do the work. But I also want to mention the lasting impact this murder will have, particularly with Ashley Hargan. The pain is unimaginable. Losing not just a mother and sister, but also facing the betrayal of another sibling, Megan, who was found guilty of these horrific acts. It just compounds the grief and trauma. The weight of such loss, especially when it comes from within the family, is a burden that will be carried forever.

It's important to consider the lasting impact of these tragedies. Homicide isn't just a headline or a statistic. It's a devastating event that leaves families shattered and communities in mourning. It is a stark reminder of the importance of empathy, justice, and a relentless pursuit of the truth in every case we investigate, we highlight, each and every victim on AOM that we honor. Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media.

Ashley Flowers is executive producer. This episode was written and produced by Walker Lamond, researched by Kate Cooper, edited by Ali Sirwa, Megan Hayward, and Philjean Grande. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

No!