Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Staging a Murder-Suicide -The Familial Murder of Pamela and Helen Hargan

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

Pamela Hargan and her daughter Helen were found dead in their home in McLean, Virginia, the victims of an apparent murder-suicide, in July 2017. Once police investigated further, they realized that the crime scene had been staged and this was a homicide that they were looking at. Eventually, police narrowed it down to one prime suspect - Pamela’s oldest daughter Megan.  In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss how the police realized the crime scene was staged, the significance of where the gun was found, blood spatter patterns, how they came to suspect Pamela’s oldest daughter Megan, and much more. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 1:32 - Background and overview of the case 3:35 - How did the police know that the crime scene had been staged? 7:05 - The significance of the location where the gun was found  10:08 - The forces of gravity and homicide v. suicide investigations 15:45 - Gunshot residue 19:30 -  Blood spatter pattern 25:20 - After recreating the crime scene, what did they discover about Pamela’s death? 29:55 - What happens when someone is shot in the head? 34:30 - Pamela’s oldest daughter, Megan, is charged with the murder 38:35 - Megan’s phone call to her boyfriend 40:00 - After the police realized the crime scene was staged, how did they start investigating the case as a homicide? 44:25 -  Wrapping up and final details of the caseSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. You're a parent that works hard, I mean, weary to the bone hard, day after day, to try to make a life for yourself. You finally reach that point in your life where you're rolling through your 60s and you think that all is right with the world. You've provided a home. You've got your kids kind of in a position where they can take care of themselves. And you want to enjoy life. But one of the oldest motives in the world begins to kind of sneak in to your family circle.

They used to refer to it as the green-eyed monster. It's the idea of greed and jealousy, wanting to possess those things that you haven't worked for throughout your life, but you want them given to you, and you want them given to you now, even at the expense of the ones that you supposedly love. Today we're going to talk about a staged murder-suicide in McLean, Virginia. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. Jackie Howard, executive producer for Crime Stories with Nancy Grace is joining me. Jackie, I got to tell you, when you walk onto a scene where you've got more than one body, there's always this little voice in the back of your head as an investigator where you're thinking, you know, I got to make sure that I get this right.

Because as bad as homicide is in its singular form, when you've got two people that have died, you know that you're walking into an environment that has just been occupied by fear and total violence. That someone would bring about the deaths of two individuals. And you begin to think about all kinds of things. Is this a suicide? Is this a suicide? Is this a homicide? Is this a double homicide? Do you have a madman running around out in the neighborhood somewhere? Because, you know, the public, they hear this. It gets out there. They want to know that they feel safe. And in McLean, Virginia, you know, it's not known for a huge crime rate there. Now, people want to feel safe. And when the police rolled up to this $1.3 million home, I have to imagine they were kind of scratching their head.

Pamela Hargan, as you said, Joe, was a very successful woman. She and her three daughters lived in a $1.3 million mansion. Now, she was a single mom as her daughters grew up, Megan, Ashley, and Helen. There was a 15-year difference between Helen and Megan, the oldest and the youngest. When police arrived on the scene, they found Pamela Hargan, 63, dead in the laundry room.

And then they found Helen, again, 23, the youngest, in her bedroom, also deceased. When police arrived on the scene, Joe, they immediately knew and recognized that this was a staged scene. How? Well, you begin to try to assess the environment in which the bodies are found in. Does everything appear to be consistent with what is being portrayed before you? There was an old forensic pathologist that I used to work with, and he had this kind of saying that he would say, and it comes off of Madison Avenue, he would say we would be in the morgue and he would, you know, we'd be standing over a body to do the examination. He says, we need to make sure that everything is as advertised. And I've always kind of kept that

in the back of my mind. It's one of those little phrases that helps me stay focused, you know, when I was certainly conducting an investigation. As a collection of investigators, we're a bunch of doubting Thomases. You have to prove it to us in order for us to buy it. And I think that that's probably what the police were thinking. It's kind of an interesting thing when you begin to think that mom is found in one area of the house, and she has been shot in the head. There's multiple casings, spent casings, which are.22 caliber. And.22 caliber are one of the very smallest calibers that you can acquire that are in common usage. There's other things that are out there, and we've talked about that before on Body Bags. But it's one of the smaller calibers that's out there.

However, it is lethal, and it is highly effective. And as it turned out, these rounds had been fired from a rifle and not handgun, you know, which, you know, there are people that certainly do take their own lives with rifles. I've seen it over and over again because in many homes, you're going to find that people will have a small caliber rifle like this for what they call varmint hunting or just, you know, in-home protection. It's easy to wield. It doesn't take a lot of strength. But, you know, back to the bodies. Mom was found in one area of the house and then the daughter, Helen, was found in another location. And in my experience with

murder-suicides, and this is not always the case, but just hear me out. In many cases with murder-suicides, you will find individuals that when they commit the murder, they immediately take the weapon and turn it on themselves and then shoot themselves. And in this particular case, that's not what they were seeing. So automatically, you're going to think that something is wrong here. Why would she be in another location of the home? And so that begins the wheels to begin to spin. And I think that probably what they were looking at also were the injuries. She was found in her bedroom with the butt of the weapon wedged, as the police say, between her feet and the muzzle of the weapon resting against her abdomen.

And for them, this seemed rather atypical, you know, as they began to dig deeper into this case. A big clue would have to be the location of that rifle in Helen's bedroom. As you said, it was wedged between her legs. First thing I wanted to know, I'm learning from you, Joe, is where the wound is in the abdomen, because that's where the muzzle of the gun was. And then we find out that her wound was not in the abdomen. And was she wearing her shoes? Because if she had done this, more than likely, considering where the gun ended up, she would have had to have used her feet. That's one of the things that you want to look for. And I know what you're going for here,

was the trigger mechanism of the weapon actually actuated by utilizing toe because when you think about if somebody is going to inflict a self-inflicted wound with a long arm which our shoulder fired arm which this a rifle is you have to place the butt of the stock into your shoulder and pull the trigger with your hand being clasped adjacent to forward of the butt and actuating the trigger with your finger. That's going to be hard to do for certain people depending upon their arm length. That's one of the reasons at autopsy, it's a good idea to always measure the arms. We'll do it from shoulder to the tips of the fingers and from the elbow or what's called the ACF, the antecubital fossa, which is essentially just a fancy term for the bend in your arm to the tips of the fingers and also to the thumb. Because you can manipulate a weapon with the thumb as well. But what kind of turns this whole thing around is that when

the police begin to examine Helen's body, and I would imagine the ME that was at the scene, they noticed something odd about her wound. Her wound was not in the abdomen. The muzzle was merely resting against her abdomen. The police had stated that the actual gunshot wound was to the top of her head. Now, that's very difficult to do, particularly given the stature of an individual, particularly a female whose arms tend to be a bit shorter than a male. Do they have the arm strength, the upper body strength in order to hold the weapon, in order to facilitate that? And then you have to account for overall length in order to pull the trigger. Can you actually imagine, can anyone actually imagine what kind of contortionist you would have to be in order to

place the muzzle of a rifle adjacent to the top of your head, and then in some way attempt to pull the trigger with even your toe or your thumb or maybe an index finger. I think that it would be very difficult. Now, there have been cases where people have used items such as paint sticks. I've had a couple of cases involved, well, one case involving paint stick, where the paint stick is actually used to press the trigger in order to actuate the weapon, but there's no evidence of that in this case. I've also had cases where individuals have rigged triggers with strings and ropes and those sorts of things in order to pull it, but there has to

be a lot of thought that goes into that in order to facilitate that and make that happen. And in this case, there was no evidence of that. And let's be realistic, Joe. Just the dynamics of gravity in itself, it would have had to have been a one in a million. Even if you had tried to kill yourself holding the gun, I mean, just let's walk through this. You're laying on the bed. You're going to shoot yourself in the top of the head with a rifle. So you're trying to figure out how to hold it to get it done.

And when you actually activate the trigger, it's a one in a million shot that that gun is actually going to fall directly between your legs laying on the bed. Gravity just doesn't work that way. Most of the time, that constant force in nature, which we're all subject to and plays a big part in death investigation, is in fact gravity that's going to dictate everything that occurs. You know, because at the close of the day, when you're deceased, you are your body. Let me be very careful in saying that your body is now completely subject to all of the forces of nature that are impacting every other inanimate object in your environment, you know, whether it's a chair or a shoe or, you know, a weapon or your body, you become literally, you know, that's where that,

you know, that term that is used in our vernacular over and over again called dead weight. If no one has ever attempted to carry a deceased individual, to move a deceased individual, you can't fully appreciate that term because people, when they're alive, when you're carrying them, they kind of help you. They kind of give you an assist. But with dead weight, the human body is so oddly distributed where weight is distributed throughout the body that gravity is going to dictate where the body comes to rest. And certainly it's going to impact where the weapon is going to come to rest. So the fact that she was in this position, given the evidence that you have initially, is that the gunshot wound, the GSW is in the top of the head. You know, it gives you pause as an investigator. And one other thing that's kind of very telling here, I think, is, you know, when the police

initially released information from the scene about this case, they used the term murder-suicide, okay? And then, you know, as, you know, time goes by, you can see them saying in press releases that, well, the investigation is ongoing. They're taking a longer look at this, and they've got other information coming in and whatnot. But you know who never said that was the M.E.? The M.E. had stated that Pamela's manner of death was a homicide. But here's what's key. The ME did not say, did not say that Helen's manner of death was suicide. They initially left this thing as undetermined. So that tells me that when they received these bodies at the morgue and they began to do the examination, the ME began to do a very close look or give Helen's body a very close look.

They were able to determine that gunshot wound that has been alleged to have been self-inflicted. It didn't marry up with the things that we look for. And I would imagine that there is going to be evidence relative to the distribution of powder, perhaps. That is, the unburned powder that is emanating from the end of that muzzle when the weapon is fired. My suspicion is that they saw something that gave them an indication that there was some range of distance between the end of the muzzle and the top of the head. Because here's a fact that's really hard to escape if you investigate suicides. And I'd like to just kind of stop here and tell people that in the medical legal world, we investigate more suicides than we do homicides. If you watch the media,

you think that everything's a homicide. Homicides are kind of, they're on the low end as far as the number of those that we actually look at. Suicides generally are going to outpace homicides two to one. Some cases, depending upon where you are, three to one. So, you're looking at a lot more suicides and you begin to get kind of a feel for them. The things that you're looking for as tells, if you will. And with a long arm like this, when you take a weapon and you place it in a specific location, it's going to be tightly pressed. Most suicides, self-inflicted gunshot wounds, people are not wanting to miss, okay? So, you will have like a hard, what some people refer to as a hard contact gunshot wound where you have the muzzle, the end of the muzzle of the weapon where it's tightly pressed against

the surface and the weapon is discharged into the body. The more distance you get, remember what we talked about length of arms and being a shoulder-fired arm? Now, if you've got a gap in between the target area and in the muzzle, you're again extending out the distance that's involved here and the probability for this happening. You talked about one in a million. It goes up astronomically because we know that it's almost a physical impossibility for this to have been self-inflicted. And I think the ME saw that. Do you have the same kind of gunshot residue

on your hands, whether it's a long gun or a handgun? Yeah. Gunshot residue is an interesting thing. First off, for these tests, they're not always, you get what are called false positives lots of times, and they're not always absolute. I think that everybody looks at that and says, oh, there is no GSR, gunshot residue, so that's definitive. Or, you know, we have this gunshot residue, and that is definitive, and there's no guarantee you're going to get a positive hit every time. They did an interesting study many years ago, I think, where there was a gentleman that they had used as kind of a test subject for some of these GSR tests early on when people had begun to use these. Remember, years and years ago, they used to use what's called a paraffin test. If you can imagine this, you'd put your hand down into warm wax and they would peel that off and the wax would contain any kind of particulate matter that was still in the hands. And then they began to come up with a chemical test for this. And this one fellow, I think if I'm recalling this correctly, worked in a munitions factory and they would get negative hits on him and some of the other workers there. And that's kind of an anecdotal story just to try to drive home the point that you're not always going to find it. But it is something that is swapped for

at autopsy. One of the reasons when you see bodies, many times you'll see images of bodies and morgues and that sort of thing, or maybe even at scenes, if you happen to catch a glimpse of these. The hands will be bagged. They'll be in paper bags. You don't put them in plastic because they begin to sweat, and, of course, that spoils things. But you'll see them wrapped in brown paper bags. And we do the gunshot residue at the morgue, and you're looking for two things. Looking for primer residue. And primer is the little cap that's in the base of the bullet. If you think about how the base of a bullet looks,

it kind of looks like a bullseye. However, this is a.22 caliber weapon. There's not a primer cap. It's a rimfire. So that means that the primer is going to be around the edge. So you'll look for primer, which is more unstable chemically, but it creates this kind of ferocious blast. And that ignites the other substance, which is propellant. And they both have very distinctive chemical signatures. So it's important to understand that when the weapon is discharged you're holding it in your hand as opposed to being on the receiving end of the discharge of the weapon if you're holding it in the crook of your hand

you can get primer residue say in between your thumb and your index finger and then coming out of the other end, you're going to get propellant, which is the gunpowder that's propelling the projectile out of the end of the muzzle. So there's a couple of different things you look for. And at autopsy, we take a lot of time to try to be as careful as we possibly can be to swab the hands. And you swab all over. You swab the back of the hand and the palm and in between the webs of each one of the fingers. You try to capture each one of those areas and you do each hand separately.

And that way you kind of got this controlled at this point and you submit this test at State Crime Lab and they'll come back and tell you if it's yay or nay, if it's there or not. It's not what's called a quantitative test. It's not where you apply a number to it. You just say thumbs up, thumbs down, that it's there or it isn't there, and then they can tell you if it's primer or propellant. And then you have the blood spatter pattern, because if you look at killing yourself, at committing suicide on a bed, then you would expect the majority of the blood to be pooling underneath you and soaked into the pillow or the mattress.

Yeah, to a certain degree. And again, there's not a one-off for each one of these things. A lot of it's going to have to do with, first off, where the round strikes the body. Okay. So let's just say, and that's not the case in this case, but with lots of self-inflicted gunshot wounds, you'll have an oral gunshot wound where people will place a muzzle into their mouth and pull the trigger. And if the round has sufficient energy, it will burst out of the back of the head.

Okay. And that creates a different type of dynamic relative to the bloodstain pattern that you're going to have. And you can find, you know, if, say, someone is seated upright, which you get lots of times with the self-inflicted oral gunshot wounds, if they're up against a wall, for instance, which is very convenient for the investigator, you can kind of see this high velocity kind of staining that's going on behind the wall. And sometimes it'll have almost a fan-like pattern to it, if you can imagine that. And the droplets will be, I like to refer to them as almost histamine-like, you know, like if you think about spraying an aerosol canister on a mirror and it gives you those tiny, tiny little droplets.

Because of the velocity, you only achieve that high velocity from gunshot wounds. We rate these things relative to their velocity, high velocity, medium velocity, low velocity. And one of the things that you're looking for is that blast that you'll get. It has enough power that it's going to generate that fine little particulate spray. And then, you know, you have these other things that will happen. There's an infamous videotape of Bud Dwyer that has floated around for years and years. And he was the Secretary of Treasury for the state of Pennsylvania. And he took his life live on air. And people are – it's a ghastly thing to watch. But one of the interesting takeaways that you have is the blood dynamic in that event because he uses a high-caliber weapon that's in his mouth. And you'll have this initial blast where you have this kind of fine particulate spray. But afterwards, because it's an oral gunshot wound, he's disrupted

all of the structures within the heart palate, which is the upper portion of the mouth, that bony floor that we have in the skull up there. All that's been fractured. You've got blood gushing out of his mouth and out of his nose. Well, that blood pattern will look completely different because it's a different dynamic. You've got this kind of gravitational flow of blood out of his mouth and out of his nose. Well, that blood pattern will look completely different because it's a different dynamic. You've got this kind of gravitational flow of blood that's pouring out of his mouth and his nose. And what happens in the instance when the thing is discharged, you get that kind of, it's almost like a bloody flashbulb going off where it just kind of imparts the spine histamine behind his head. And you can see those two things played out on camera.

And that's what you get in these self-inflicted gunshot wounds many times. A lot of it is dependent upon where the weapon is placed anatomically, the load, the type of ammunition that is being used, the angle at which this thing is being discharged. Because when you think about that projectile passing through the structures of the skull, there are some areas of the skull that are more robust. Okay. If you think about, for instance, if people will just kind of touch the back of their head and you've got that knot on the back of your head, literally in your skull right there, that's called the occipital protuberance. And it's one of the thicker areas.

You also have it in the frontal bone, you know, where your eyebrows are. But if you go around to the temporal area, you know, just kind of forward and above your ear, that bony area is very thin. So that will give way much easier when you have the power of this weapon, as opposed to something that's going to strike in the back of the head. In the case of Helen, though, if you've got a gunshot wound whose entrance has been identified at the top of the head, that trajectory is going downward. So I would think that there will be less blood staining when you begin to think about the dynamic of that and it'll remain kind of self-contained in that environment as opposed to where it was going up

and out. This case, Jackie, is so very complex because of what had happened in this environment and the family dynamic where you've got three kids. You've got a mom that's at home in this beautiful, you know, million dollar residence. And the fact that the bodies are found in these kind of desperate locations within the structure. In my reading, and I found this quite fascinating, did you know that actually Fairfax County contacted a separate agency to come in and actually do the crime scene reconstruction because the data that was at the scene was so very dense when it came to reconstructing this thing.

They didn't have enough manpower, apparently, to put their agency to work on this. They had to give it to an outside contractor in order to bring all of the pieces together just to try to figure it out and, of course, eventually present it in court. As these specialists begin to recreate the scene that you're talking about, what did they discover with the mom, Pamela's death? She was found in the laundry room, shot multiple times in the head. When you're in this environment, you know, we can think about what our own laundry rooms might look like. There's many people that keep them neat as a pen. There's other folks that, you know, that might have dirty laundry that's laying around. For all I know, in my case,

I might have clean laundry that's laying around that I haven't folded yet. When you're working inside of an environment like a laundry room, if it's common in appearance to others, it's kind of very tight spaces with little nooks and crannies where you begin to think about, well, where do I need to look for evidence? And the evidence that I'm seeing, does it actually marry up with the evidence that I have on the bodies? Okay. The wounds, perhaps the number of spent casings, all of those. And am I going to be able to piece this back together? And it's a very tight space. I've worked in environments like this where you're in there with one other person in a very tight location and you're trying to document everything. And many times what happens is you

document position of the body, you document spent shell casings, which there were, and they've never actually said how many, but there were spent shell casings at the scene surrounding Pamela, the mother, her body. And then, of course, you've got no weapon in there. So, automatically, you know, you're thinking, well, she's been the victim of a homicide at this point because we don't have a weapon to indicate that this is a suicide, that it's somewhere else. There's any number of scenarios that they have to consider in this tight space. First off, can someone actually access the interior of the home through the laundry room, what they're calling the laundry room? Is it a point where people would egress into and out of? Many times people have a laundry room and a mudroom together. That is a place where you're going to take off your dirty shoes and do all that sort of thing. Is it a place where

somebody could have laid in wait and hidden and taken the individual by surprise? They step out, they shoot the individual one time, they go down to the ground, and then they're going to have to readjust, firing on a flat plane, maybe initially, where you initially hit them. They go down to the ground and then you move to a position of dominance over them and fire down into the body another round. And all of that has to be taken into consideration at that point of time. That's when you see, you know see crime scene reconstructionists who actually took over this case. We'll bring out laser markers. You'll see it. Some agencies still use string in order to pull what we call pulling trajectories, where you go from the point where the round entered the body and go back, pull the string back or shoot the laser back to a point of origin, if you will. And again, it's very difficult because it is, I keep using this term, but that's the case. It's

so very dynamic, Jackie, in this environment where you've got a lot of movement. It's not like you've got a rifle that's being fired into a static target and nothing is moving. You've got all kinds of motion and movement that's going on in this environment. If somebody is initially shot, they're not going to instantaneously die, per se. You might have an individual that begins to seize or they're falling to the floor and you can't anticipate what position they're going to fall in. And then you have to get into a position of dominance. And the other thing that you have to begin to think about, what if the individual has never killed anybody before? The lion's share of perpetrators out there

have not engaged in homicide before. So you've got that to factor into. You've got nerves at work, you've got anxiety at work, you've got rage at work. So you throw all of this into the mix and you try to take a snapshot, if you're the crime scene reconstructionist, that is going to, at best, give you some kind of scientific point of origin for a lot of these rounds. But sometimes it's a guess at best. We've brought up gravity several times today. I need to bring it up one more time. When you are shot in the head, most people, you know, we rely on television. We, you know, we thankfully don't have a lot of experience with getting shot in real life. So when you get shot in the head, are you propelled backwards by the momentum of the shot?

Do you just drop where you are when your body is no longer able to function? What happens? A lot of that is going to be dependent upon the position of the victim relative to the end of the muzzle of the weapon and kind of the orientation of the weapon. It's not going to be something so grand and over the top like you'll see. You know, I'm always picking on Hollywood on body bags, but you know, they, you see people blown back in these, you know, things that are staged in entertainment world. And that's, that's for the purpose of making something appear very dramatic. And there are many accounts out there where people are shot and they're not aware that

they've been shot. If somebody takes a shotgun blast to the chest at close range, just the energy transfer that you have alone is going to blow them back a bit, but they're not going to do somersaults, all right, contrary to what you see on television. With a round like this, where you're kind of taken unaware, if an individual is, say, shot from behind, say they're shot in the back of the head, they're going to take that round and drop like dead weight at that moment in time to the ground. That doesn't mean that they die instantaneously. If the brainstem is not clipped, you're still going to have things like agonal respirations and the heart will still be pumping for a little bit until you bleed out. But I don't know that in the conscious mind that they actually have an awareness that this has happened.

So you're not going to have an individual that is blown out of the room just because they're shot. The idea is to transfer the energy from that projectile into the body and that energy disperses into the body and it does massive destruction. And a lot of that is dependent upon the size of the ammo that's being used and the type of ammo that's being used you know you hear a lot about people talking about ball round ammunition which is you know a ball round is just kind of a catch-all

term that people use relative to a lead core projectile that's not modified necessarily in any way but then you talk about hollow point so-called hollow point ammunition that it, let's say you're firing a 40 caliber bullet that is hollow point. And when it strikes the target area, it expands out and it might expand out to from say 40 caliber, which is 0.40. It might expand out to say 0.48. So you get this expansion transfer of energy, the round stops in the body and they drop. But with 22 caliber ammunition, most of the time, it's going to be standard ball ammunition where you've got this little bit of lead that's transferring into the body and it's going to transfer that amount of energy that is being generated from the muzzle blast.

It goes without saying, as a death investigator, and I know I can speak for myself, I can't necessarily speak for my colleagues, but as a death investigator, I got quite jaded, particularly toward the end of my career. I stopped trying to figure out necessarily in a broader sense what had happened, what the motivations were. One of the issues that has always kind of left me scratching my head many times, you know me, I hate to ask the question why, because there's generally not a solid answer. No one will ever be satisfied with why.

But when you walk into an environment where a goodly portion of a family, and in this case, we're talking about Pamela and Helen, are dead. Their lives have been snuffed out. I don't know if there is any other question to ask. Why would you end their lives in this environment where seemingly, at least from a material sense, they had everything. And that may have been part of the problem here, Joe. Ultimately, police charged the eldest daughter, Megan. And what was revealed was a jealousy with the younger daughter over money.

She felt like the younger daughter was being favored. We know that the youngest daughter, Helen, had just graduated from college, and Pamela had paid for a house. Megan also wanted a new home. Megan and her daughter had been living with Pamela for several years, even though Megan was married and her husband lived in another state. With the recognition when police came onto the scene that this was staged, how did they start to look at Megan and what were the clues?

The first clue came from the 911 call, which came from Helen's boyfriend. She called him and told him that Megan had killed their mother. So that was the first clue. Even before they got to the scene and could recognize it, that was a big red flag. Are you kidding? You're absolutely right. Much of the time, you're going to be speaking with the principals in the case. That is, the individuals that have direct involvement that-suicide. But, you know, they walk in and things don't seem to add up, you know, to what you would normally think about the physical evidence that you're going to be

finding that would make it consistent with a murder-suicide. You document the scene, you go through everything that you have to go through, and then after you've left the scene and you begin to do follow-up investigation, you're canvassing one of the things, you know, you canvass neighborhoods and all that sort of thing, and then you look through, say, for instance, phone contacts for victims, and you see that Helen has been in contact with her boyfriend. And of course, he's the one that actually drew the police's attention to this. When you sit down and you begin to question him, can you imagine their shock when he reveals to them that, you know,

I've got my girlfriend on the phone. I couldn't get her back on. And this is after she tells me that her sister had killed her mother. And I can't imagine the horror that kind of ran through, you know, that ran through him when the phone went dead. That does sound like something that Hollywood would create. You know, it's bone chilling, you know, when you begin to think about it. And you think about where does this information lead us? And they have to be very, very careful at this point because they don't want to show their hand.

You know, they've got some kind of circumstantial comment that the boyfriend has made because, you know, he's kind of an ear witness, if you will, to this information that's coming in from, you know, his girlfriend who's now deceased. You don't want to do anything as an investigator that's going to frighten away a potential suspect. So, you continue to play your hand out as if it is, in fact, a murder-suicide just so that you can get information from them. And of course, when they begin to dig into the relationship that the daughter actually had with her mother, and you begin to understand that there's this issue of jealousy that's going on, that she's wanting money, that she wants to buy her own house, and these sorts of things, and none of that is happening for her. You know, pieces begin to fall into place at that point.

As usual, I'm going to back up on you a little. When the boyfriend called police, he told police. And during the course of the 911 call, we find that he had several conversations with his girlfriend, Helen, trying to convince her to get out of the house. But he mentioned that while Helen did not see the mother's body, through the cracked door, he could hear the mother gasping for breath. What does that tell you? Well, that means that we were talking about the power of the gunshot wound that she had sustained earlier.

And I'd mentioned agonal respiration, which is, it's almost, you know, some people will term it as a death rattle where, you know, people are right on the edge of succumbing to a disease or an injury that they have sustained. It's this gasp where they're still breathing. The heart is still pumping, but there's been so much destruction, particularly in this case to the head where the circumstances make it incompatible with life at that moment. And life is literally ebbing away from the victim. And the fact that he was, in fact, an ear witness to this, again, chills you to the bone because that's something that,

you know, he'll certainly never forget. And it's something he'll live with for all of his days. So combining all of this information, when police arrived at the scene, again, they recognize that it is not an actual murder suicide. They recognize that it is staged.

Then they have to go about trying to figure out who did it. We know that the boyfriend said, according to Helen, that Megan had killed their mother. Police began to piece together the who, what, when, where, why, and how. How did they do that? Where did they start? I mean, we ultimately find out that Megan was caught or heard, I guess you would say, trying to impersonate the mother on the phone at the bank to transfer money to buy her own home. There was a text sent to the boyfriend on Helen's phone, which said, everything is fine. I'm not mad at Megan, which the boyfriend said he never thought that that actually came from his girlfriend. And then there's other evidence from the day before

where we know now that Megan was trying to get money from the mother because she would not pay for this home that she wanted. So what's the starting point? And do you just start and say, okay, let's check the phones, let's check the computer. I mean, what do you do? This is one of these interesting points in time where I think that the medical examiner really comes into play here, particularly when you begin to attempt to calculate post-mortem interval. You know, you were talking about this text that went out. Did the medical legal authorities do their due diligence at scene when they began to do body temperatures and the

state of rigor mortis and all those things relative to the bodies and compare that, say, for instance, that data would be given over to the police because they have a marker in time when this text that allegedly originated from Helen came out. So, that's a static marker in time when this text that allegedly originated from Helen came out. So that's a static marker in time. And one of the things you're trying to establish scientifically with the body, is it possible, given the timeframe of the changes post-mortem, for her to have sent this text? And that's one of the basic places you're going to start. And then there's time signatures relative to everything you do in the digital world. And in this case, you had this daughter going in and attempting to fake her mother or pretend that she was her mother, at least over the phone. And then secondly, there's a wire transfer that's

taking place that's actually sending monies to a title holding company for the daughter's home. And it's coming out of the mother's account. And this is upwards of $400,000. So, you know, the police are beginning to piece all of this together. You know, what's the motivation behind all of this? And your fallback position is, as an investigator, you begin to kind of look at these tried and true points along a continuum that we always default to. And that's, you know, motive, the means, the opportunity, and who would have this within the circle. Because you begin to look and you think, well, did some random stranger actually come in and bring about the deaths of these individuals?

We've already kind of eliminated at this point that it is a murder-suicide. The police are looking at this as they're working this now as a double homicide based upon the information that's coming in from the ME. And then you think about, well, where did they get a weapon from? Who does the weapon tie back to? Does the family have a history of having weapons? Is this a weapon that belongs to the family? Who had access to the weapon? Who had experience with a weapon? Who would have known where it was? So, you know, once you

establish the fact that your field begins to kind of narrow as to who the suspects could be in this environment, who would be motivated in order to do this? You know, I think that it's at that point that you're going to focus in on the daughter in this particular case. Because you know that this is not a randomized act of violence. You begin to look at the scene, you know that it's, again, our old adage about no signs of forced entry or struggle. There's no evidence of that at the scene. There's no indication that this is what happened, that it was a forced entry and a struggle, and that you've got these two individuals that have been killed in this manner. You've got kind of a controlled environment where everything's kind of self-contained in there, and you have to ask, you know, who would have had this ability?

Megan Hargan was brought in for questioning five days after the murders, but she was not arrested and charged for a year. So, if I understand this correctly, it took that amount of time for police to do their due diligence and investigation to find and connect the dots for the suspect in this case? It did. And, you know, this is, it's kind of a complex case because not only do you have the physical evidence at the scene, but you have all of this digital evidence and certainly the financial evidence. And it's actually a multi-jurisdictional case as well, which is kind of fascinating because they had partners in, I think, both West Virginia and Virginia. And I think probably to a certain extent, they called on resources from the feds as well.

So anytime you get that many people, if you will, pardon the term, but kind of dancing together in this environment, then you'll have varied interest. And you have to make sure, that's why it's so important that you have a strong leader relative to the lead investigator on the case, because they're kind of the conductor, if you will. And I mean that from a conductor of an orchestra. They have to make sure that everybody is playing on the same sheet of music. And then to get the courts involved as well, relative to all of the search warrants that have to take place. I can only imagine that when you begin to look at the case file on not just this case, but the multiple cases that

resulted from it, there's multiple charges involved in this and all of these various issues, it would look rather voluminous. You're going to have volume upon volume upon volume of data that's going to be analyzed and scrutinized in court. So, yeah, it would take some time to put this together. And plus, you know, this is a very high profile case where you've got multiple deaths in a very affluent area. I mean, let's just face it, it is. And they wanted to make sure that they had everything just right before they charged her. A jury found Megan Horrigan guilty on all counts, including first-degree murder in the deaths of her sister Helen and her mother, Pamela. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.