Home From Texas: 1

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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 14, 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,

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

I just want to hear their voices. I just, like, I, just... 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. 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 keeps speaking under his breath, trying to convince Steve that he's probably the strongest one to tell the rest of the family what happened.

I'm really sorry.

Steve absorbs the information. Thank you for letting me be the one to tell my daughters. He waits until both his daughters are together before he shares the devastating news. 20 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.

And when the officers found the shooters that located your sister in the bath, the rifle was still in 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 need to see them. No, stop. Relax. I really need to see them. They took them to the medical examiner.

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.

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

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

It's the kind of place where political power players have large homes and a yard, without too long of a commute to D.

It's a million-dollar home.

Detective Byerson 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 details. Every chair is perfectly spaced along their long dining room table. Each throw pillow has its own place on the couch. Nothing looks amiss until they get to the back half of the house. Here's Detective Byerson again.

As you walk through the kitchen, you encounter a mudroom that connects the kitchen to the garage. So in that mudroom, we discover Pam, Pamela, Hanson Hargan. She is laying on the floor of the mudroom.

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 is 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 sort of 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 sort of 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'd 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. 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 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 mudroom, 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?

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

Well,

So you want to check for fingerprints and DNA? Yes. What do you find on this phone?

Nothing.

Nothing. Detective Elliot 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.

As the family would later tell detectives, Pamela seemed willing to spend on whatever her daughters needed. Cars, houses, and even office furniture.

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 Byerson.

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, you know, four women at the same time.

And 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?

Okay.

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.

My mom and dad had a horrible divorce.

Okay.

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. Like, 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. Like, 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 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 Helen thinking? I'm so angry right now.

I have shit like I did.

My mom told her about the house this morning. She told her.

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 Gutierrez.

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 Byerson. 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 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 says she's concerned about Helen, maybe using some other type of narcotic or whatever.

And what did you, 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,

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. And I said, what do you mean? Knowing full well immediately what she meant by that. And she's like, Ashley, I'm just sick of it all.

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, you know, cars and how it doesn't mean shit to you. You're just sad.

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 Byerson 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 told, 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.

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 live, not far from the caution tape.

In 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 McLean 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.

We're learning more tonight about the mom and daughter found dead inside a McLean, 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 Byerson.

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 and Fire, how may I assist you?

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

Hi,

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