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Join me, 48 Hours Correspondent Erin Moriardi on my podcast, My Life of Crime, as I take on true crime investigations like no other. This season, I'm looking into the secrets within family families, cutting straight to the evidence and talking to the people directly involved. Enjoy My Life of Crime on the WNDRI app or wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on WNDRI Plus. Get one of the most successful broadcast in television history. On your schedule with the 60 Minutes podcast, hard-hitting investigative reports, news and culture-maker interviews, and in-depth profiles are waiting for you in Every episode. Listen to 60 Minutes, ad-free on WNDYRI Plus.

This episode contains graphic audio and references to family violence. Please listen with care.

I can't believe this is happening, dad.

Well, honey, we don't know what's happening, okay?

In the early evening hours of July 14th, 2017, Steve Hargan is trying to comfort his oldest daughter, Megan.

This is not real. I am just praying to God. This is a sick joke, the sickest joke ever.

They've received terrifying news. Gunshots have been fired at the house Megan shares with her mother, Pamela Hargan, in McClane, Virginia. No one yet knows what has happened inside.

I just need to see them, dad.

Please. First of all- And now, to make matters worse, no one can reach her mom or Megan's youngest sister, Helen.

I just want to hear their voice. I know.

Steve and Pamela Hargan divorced years ago. Everyone is meeting up at his house while they wait for news. Ashley, the middle sister, is racing there from her home in Pennsylvania.

Ashley and I have been calling my mom and the house and Helen. No one's answering.

The tape you're hearing was recorded by Detective John Vickery, who arrived at Steve Hargan's house.

I'm going to record this because there's a lot going on.

The Detective is staying with the family and updating them.

I'm going to get information from you, and as things start coming in, I'll be able to tell you a little bit more.

Megan explains that she had moved in with her mother a few years back with her eight-year-old daughter, Molly. Pamela was helping raise her granddaughter.

They go to the nail salon together. She does all the gardening with my mom. They're best friends.

Megan's youngest sister, Helen, who is 24, had just moved back in, too. She recently graduated from Southern Methodist University with degrees in math and management science. Here's Megan again.

She was actually in the regular master's program in Dallas before she moved, and then she quit it.

Detective Vickery asked to speak to Steve alone.

I wanted to get a little bit more information from your dad. If I could do that in private. Okay.

Detective Vickery whispers to Steve, hoping that his daughters don't hear him.

He says, I don't have good news.

I don't have good news, the detective says, and keep speaking under his breath, trying to convince Steve that he's probably the strongest one to tell the rest of the family what happened. About my daughter. About this They were both found shot to death.

I'm really sorry.

Steve absorbs the information.

Thank you for Thank you for letting me be the one to tell me to do this.

He waits until both his daughters are together before he shares the devastating news. Twenty minutes later, Ashley arrives, and she's distraught.

This has been the longest ride of my life. I understand. I just want to hear my mom and my sister's voice.

I want to see them. I want to make sure they're okay.

Steve decides this is the moment to tell them what he knows. I'm sorry, you took girls.

Oh, my God.

What's happening?

Then, detect collective, Vickery, finds his voice and shares some of the gruesome details.

Someone matching the description your mother was found deceased on the main level. She did have a gunshot. When the officer was coming upstairs, it located your sister in the bathroom. The rifle was still on the bathroom.

He's saying the rifle was in the bathroom with Helen. What could that mean? Oh, God, what are we going to do? Jesus, what are we going to do? I don't know. No, stop. Relax.

I really need to see them.

They took him to the medical exam. There's an investigation going on, honey. Who would want to kill their mother and their little sister? Before this tragedy, the Hargan women didn't seem to have it all.

From the outside, looking in, we were blessed. My mom was amazing.

They were close and had everything to look forward to. But as detectives would soon learn, there was a lot going on inside the Hargan household. In my 25 years reporting stories like this, the Hargan case is one of the few that sounds like something made up by a Hollywood screenwriter. A story of betrayal you would struggle to believe if it wasn't true. I'm Peter Vansatt from 48 Hours. This is blood is thicker, the Hargan family killings.

My sister was not my sister for many months.

Episode 1, Home from Texas.

There were several aspects of this case that were extremely unique that I have not seen before.

Earlier in the afternoon, Detective Brian Bierson gets a call to head to Pamela Hargan's house.

There were two bodies in a house in McLean, and I was to respond to Dean Drive.

Now, on your way there, what have you been told about what's inside that house?

Very little. We know that when we get up there, that patrol has been in the house, that they had to force entry through the front door, so the house was locked, and that inside the house, there were the bodies of two women.

He He drives to Pamela Hargan's neighborhood, unsure of what he's about to encounter.

Where this took place was an affluent section of McClane, Virginia.

It's the place where political power players have large homes and a yard. Without too long of a commute to DC. Presidents, senators, CIA agents have all called McClane home. The Hargans live on a tree-lined street. Their home is a nearly 5,000 square foot colonial with a covered porch and six bedrooms.

It's a million dollar home.

Detective Bierson and Julia Elliott, a crime scene Detective and forensics expert, arrive at the house.

It certainly didn't look like someplace where two homicides potentially had occurred.

They enter through the front door into a foyer. There's a wooden staircase with carpeted steps up to the second floor and a hallway with panel molding and black photo frames lining the cream-colored wall. It seems idyllic.

It was immaculate. I've never seen a more organized home in my life.

As detectives, they're trained to notice the detail. Cells. Every chair is perfectly spaced along their long dining room table. Each throw pillow has its own place on the couch. Nothing looks a miss until they get to the back half of the house. Here's Detective Biersen again.

As you walk through the kitchen, you encounter a mud room that connects the kitchen to the garage. In that mud room, we discover Pamela Hansen-Hargen. She is laying on the floor of the mud room.

Pamela Hargan has been shot twice in the head. The top half of her body is wrapped in a quilt with her legs sticking out, and her head is covered.

And she has a dog bed laying on her head, covering her.

A dog bed on her head? What do you mean?

Like a small dog bed that you would see in your house that maybe your dog would lay in, was actually covering a portion of her head.

Detectives then make their way upstairs.

If you come up that staircase into the long hallway and make your second left, that would be into Helen's bedroom. And once you get into Helen's bedroom, it's her bathroom, and that's where her body was found.

She's leaning back, and her head is laid back into the bathtub. So she's laying on both the toilet seat and the bathtub. And then her legs are pointed straight out towards the door as you walk in.

This is Helen, her 24-year-old daughter.

Yes. There was a rifle that was laying between her legs.

Patrol, when they arrived, finding two deceased persons, one with a gun on their body, assumed or thought that there might have been a murder-suicide.

Detectives, though, aren't so sure.

A lot of these cases are like huge jigsaw puzzles that you can never fully put together.

What did you learn about the dynamic within this family? Were they a close group? I know that Megan and Helen, for instance, were about 10 years apart in age.

It seemed like they were all relatively close.

Pamela had worked hard to establish herself in a community of overachievers.

She had been divorced for several years. She was very successful on her own.

She got her start at 17 and worked her way up to the executive suite, holding big jobs at companies like Lockheed Martin, and more recently, a tech firm. Pamela saw herself as a provider.

She loved her daughters. She had a granddaughter that she absolutely adored.

People thought Helen, the youngest, took after her mom. She was smart, talented, and ambitious. What's your gut telling you as as you take a look at these two bodies?

Wait. Wait and do the job.

The clues investigators found they'd mull over for years.

We have two bodies, two different rooms, but it's one house.

Some puzzles are hard to solve. Others are hard to prove. Detective Elliott has worked in the crime scene department for about a decade.

I'm looking for anything that may have been left behind by the person that did the crime.

Such as?

Blood, fingerprints, trace DNA, like hairs or fibers.

Detective Elliott notices how Pamela's body was positioned.

I believe where she was shot physically on her body and how she was laying in the mud room, I believe someone came up either to her side or from the back and shot her.

Then there's the odd fact that her face is partially covered.

Generally, that's done in cases that I've worked because Someone known to the victim may be the suspect in these cases, and they're either ashamed or they can't look at what they've done, so they choose to cover the bodies.

So sometimes it's someone very close to the deceased that's done this.

That can be a clue to maybe where we should be going or what we should be looking at.

And then there was Pamela's cell phone.

That phone was sitting on top of the quilt that was covering her, and it was also sitting on top of a pool of blood.

That seems very strange, doesn't It is strange.

We know that it means that that phone was placed there sometime after she died.

Well, I want to know what fingerprints are on that cell phone, if anything at all. I want to find out who put that cell phone there in that particular place.

You want to check for fingerprints and DNA? Yes. What do you find on this phone? Nothing. Nothing. Detective Elliott isn't sure if that meant the phone had been wiped clean.

Not everything holds fingerprints very well.

But Pamela couldn't have put her own cell phone on top of her body. It seemed to suggest the killer had placed the phone on her. But could it have been Helen? Megan would later tell police their little sister had been in crisis.

I love Helen, but something has really changed in her over the last few months, and my mom was concerned.

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Take true crime with you on your shirt, mug, or hat with official 48hours merchandise at paramountshop. Com. You can take 20% off with code Hours 20. That's 20% off at checkout on all 48hours products with code Hours 20@paramontshop. Com. As the family would later tell detectives, Pamela seemed willing to spend on whatever her daughters needed: cars, houses, and even office furniture. To her.

Ashley just called her last week and said she needed file cabinets, and my mom ordered file cabinets.

Here, Megan was on the phone with Detective Bierson.

They're supposed to be delivered this week. I mean, anything we needed, she gave it to us.

The girls were little when their parents divorced, and Pamela had raised her daughters on her own.

We always made the joke that that's why they got divorced because my dad couldn't handle women at the same time.

Even when Pamela's children became adults, they still relied on her. Megan, for one, was 34 and had been living with her mother for years, even though she was married. Her husband served in the military.

My husband deploys often, so I've always stayed with my mom.

At the time of the shootings, Megan wasn't working.

Where are you working now?

I'm not right now. I have to I'm an event planner, but I have to finish my clients up here, and I'm moving everything out to Morgantown. Okay.

Megan told the police that she and her husband were buying a new house in West Virginia, and were about to finally move in together. While there was love in the Hargan household, the daughters also said there was arguing. They'd air their grievances and move on.

It's family. That's how it is.

Ashley agreed. She told Detective Bierson as much.

My mom and dad had a horrible divorce. Coming from a family of females, we fought a lot. Okay. Argued a lot. Okay? It's just how it was. What may seem really bad to other people was normal to us. We would have our screaming matches. Five minutes later, we were fine.

But according to Megan, her little sister Helen had been furious lately. Then Megan revealed that the morning of the shootings, Helen and their mom had been arguing yet again.

Helen has been so angry. Just so angry all the time over everything.

It's unclear when Ashley and Megan, put two and two together. But at some point, they started contemplating the macabre possibility that Helen might have killed their mother and then herself. Detective Vickery had told their dad her wound appeared self-inflicted, but all Megan and Ashley had been told was that the rifle was found in the bathroom with Helen. They tried putting pieces of this part of the puzzle together, why Helen might have done something like this? You can hear Megan's daughter playing in the other room.

What the fuck is the house making? I'm so angry right now.

Mom just told her about the house this She told her.

She told her what? She was breaking the contract with the Aldi house.

According to Megan, their mother had been planning to buy Helen a house in Aldi, a small town in Virginia. But then, the morning of the shootings, Pamela told Helen she decided against it. Megan suggested that it might have had something to do with Helen's new boyfriend, an older man she'd been dating in Texas, someone her mother did not approve of. His name was Carlos Gutiérrez. Helen had unexpectedly dropped out of graduate school, and Pamela thought her boyfriend was a bad influence. Megan said her mother didn't want Helen's boyfriend to move into any house she was going to buy. Pamela seemed willing to go above and beyond for her girls. But that morning, she had apparently gone back on her promise to one of them.

Because she truly believed that Helen was going to try to move Carlos into the house, and my mom didn't want him being there.

And now, both sisters seem to be suggesting that maybe Helen, frustrated by her mother, somehow broke, turning to violence to settle a score and end her own life.

She was so excited about this house that my mom was getting for her.

So your mom was buying her a house? Mm-hmm.

In the days after the shootings, Ashley spoke with Detective Brian Bierson. He'd been assigned the lead on this case, and you'll recall he'd searched her mother's house.

Why was your mom buying her house?

That's what my mom did.

Had she done it for everybody?

Not for me. My mom offered to buy my house. And my husband and I said no.

Ashley said her mom did buy her a Jeep, but that she didn't want to live in a house that was owned by her mother.

My husband and I talked about it, and I said, I don't want to do that. I want to try to Even though we live paycheck to paycheck, I want to try to do this on our own.

But Helen had accepted her mother's offer of help. Ashley thought the offer for Helen's house in Virginia came with strings attached.

But you You need to get a job. You need to continue to get your master's degree. Yada, yada, yada.

Ashley also said the family was worried about Helen's well-being, that maybe she was using drugs.

She said she's concerned about Helen maybe using some All that type of narcotic or whatever. How did that conversation end?

With my mom and I? Yeah. She said that she wanted to take all of us to the Outer Banks for two weeks, and she wanted all of us to be together.

She told him that Helen had a history of depression and thoughts of self-harm. When was the last time that Helen had ever talked about hurting herself?

With me? It was probably last year, I want to say.

Ashley described a call she got from her sister while Helen was still attending university in Dallas, about a year before the shooting.

Helen gave me a call, and she was clearly drunk, and she said, I just don't want to do it anymore. I said, What do you mean? Knowing full well immediately what she meant by that. She's like, Ashley, I'm just sick of it all. I said, Helen, I'm right here. There's no reason for you to say that. I'm like, I will fly out to Dallas right now if you need me to.

The detective asked if Helen gave her any reasons.

She was just sad. She's like, I have no friends. She was just sick of everything and nothing going right. Again, when you have depression, no matter what you have in life, especially cars and how it doesn't mean shit to you, you're just sad. I said, You have all your dogs to look after. They love you. I said, I love you.

Ashley said she kept calling to check in on Helen every 10 minutes until her sister sobered up.

I was the only one who was able to calm her down, and that's why it's killing me. She did not call me on Friday. I would have been able to calm her down.

Ashley was racing through all the what-ifs, all the things that might have happened differently that day if she'd been able to speak to Helen to calm her down, to stop her before she did anything rash. Detective Biersen asked if Helen had ever attempted suicide.

I think when she was a teenager, she tried to take pills.

Was it reported? I don't think so, How do you know about that?

She had said, mentioned something like that because I have been talking about it because I tried to commit suicide by taking a bottle of pills when I was about 15.

Both Helen and Ashley had thoughts of ending their lives when they were teenagers. But Ashley was now 32 and beside herself.

Every single emotion right now. Hearing about this, finding out about this from Helen's piece of shit boyfriend.

It turns out Carlos had been the one to call Ashley and tell her shots had been fired at her mother's house. Again and again, the sisters blamed Helen's spiral on the boyfriend they'd never met. The family seemed to accept that Helen's depression could have pushed her over the edge. The day of the shooting, local reporters set up to go lie Drive, not far from the caution tape.

Fairfax County police broke down the door of a home there and found two women dead. This happened on Dean Drive. That is not too far from McClane High School.

Reporters asked the police if they thought a killer could still be on the loose.

We asked police a short time ago, Is there a danger to this community? Is there a suspect that is still at large out there? The answer to that question, a resounding no. The working theory here is a murder, followed by a suicide in Fairfax tonight.

The Fairfax County police told the family and the community that, initially, this looked like a murder suicide.

We're learning more tonight about the mom and daughter found dead inside a McClane, Virginia, home on Friday. Police say Helen Hargan shot her mom, Pamela Hargan, before turning the gun on herself.

But those were first responding officers at the scene, not Detective Bierson.

It's unfortunate. It certainly didn't come from the investigators who were actually doing the work on the ground.

Right from the start, they had a major clue that something very different had happened to Pamela and Helen Hargan. That's because Helen's boyfriend Carlos, who was more than a thousand miles away, had been talking to her on the phone right before she died. It turned out not everything the police had been told about Carlos was true. He had been trying to get his girlfriend help for hours, trying to save her, in fact. Fairfax County Police on fire. How may I assist you? Yes, I have an emergency. My girlfriend was in the corner. Her sister is acting really weird. Coming up on blood is thicker.

This particular case, there were things about the scene itself that were concerning to us on day one.

If you are in crisis and need to talk to someone, call the suicide hotline at 1-800-273-8255, or you can simply dial three digits, 988, to talk to a trained counselor. From 48 Hours, this is Blood is Thicker: The Hargan Family Killings. Judy Tigard is the executive producer of 48 Hours. Original reporting by 48 Hours producers, Sara Ealey, Michelle Sagona, Lauren White, and Josh Yeager. Jamie Benson is the senior producer for Paramount Audio, and Mora Walls is the Senior Story Editor. Recording assistance from Allan Pang and Marlyn Polycarp. Special thanks to Paramount podcast Vice President, Megan Marcus, and 48 Hours Senior producer, Peter Schweitzer. Blood is Thicker is produced by Sony Music Entertainment. It was written and produced by Alex Schumann. Our executive producers are Katherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. Our associate producer is Zoe Kolken. Theme and original music composed by Hansdale Shee. He also sound designed and mixed the episodes. We also use music by Blue Dot Sessions. Katherine Nuhann is our fact checker. Our production managers are Tamika Balanskollasny and Samantha Allison. I'm Peter Van Sant. If you're enjoying the show, be sure to rate and review. It helps more people find it and hear our reporting.

You can listen to Blood is Thicker: The Hargan Family Killings early and ad-free right now by joining WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening. If you like Blood is Thicker: The Hargan Family Killings, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go tell us about yourself by a short survey at wndri. Com/survey.