The Boyfriend: 2

Wondery Plus. subscribers can listen to this podcast ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app today.

Hi, this is Jill Schlesinger, CBS News Business Analyst, Certified Financial Planner, and host of the Money Watch Podcast. This is the show where your money is not scary, and it's not boring. It is a show that's all about you. It's your questions that make it possible for me to provide unconventional and entertaining insights on your money, and, maybe more importantly, on your life. I'm going to be your financial coach.

Hey, everybody. Jon Stewart, here. I am here to tell you about my new podcast, The Weekly Show, coming out every Thursday. We're going to be talking about the election, earnings calls. What are they talking about on these earnings calls?

Fairfax County Police and Fire. How may I assist you? Yes, I have an emergency.

More than a thousand miles from where he believes, a crime is unfolding, Carlos Gutierrez is desperately trying to save his girlfriend's life. This was back in the summer of 2017..

Hello? Are you there? Yes, I'm here.

These calls are from emergency services in Northern Virginia. That's where the love of his life, Helen Hargan, lives.

I'm thinking my girlfriend's life is in danger.

His girlfriend's life is in danger. But Carlos feels like the 911 operator isn't taking him seriously. Why aren't they responding with concern?

Okay, sure. What I need you to do, then, is contact your local jurisdiction, file a report with them, and tell them that Fairfax County requires a teletype in order to do a welfare check. Okay, I think this is like life or death. I think someone might be dead.

Carlos is trying to make sure the operator understands the seriousness of the situation. But instead of quickly dispatching police, the 911 operator tells him to call someone else.

Contact your local jurisdiction, file the report, have them send us a teletype,

and then we will go and check on her.

Okay, how do I get a hold of my jurisdiction? How do I do that? Well, sir, if you don't have their non-emergency number, if you dial 911, you'll get your emergency center.

I would play this 911 call for Detective Brian Byerson of the Fairfax County Police. He told me this first operator no longer works at the call center.

Yeah, this one is incontrovertibly horrible. We do not require a teletype number to report a possible homicide. That's completely ridiculous.

Carlos would call, speak to an operator, and then be told he needed to call someone else again and again. Listen closely, because this 911 tape is not exactly easy to understand.

Is your girlfriend at home right now? Well, that's the thing. She won't answer her phone.

According to Carlos, hours earlier, Helen had called him to say her mom might be dead. And then she stopped answering her phone. She hadn't called 911.. Carlos didn't hear from her. And now he was worried.

We're going to need you to call your local police department. And... They're still not there. I'm sorry? They're still not there.

Finally, more than an hour after his first 911 call, police tell Carlos that they're sending officers to Helen's home.

That is correct.

I'm Peter Van Sant. From 48 Hours, this is Blood is Thicker. The Hargan Family Killings. Episode 2, The Boyfriend.

They were working at a local restaurant together and there were sparks. They hit it off.

This is Michelle Segona. She's a producer for 48 Hours and has spent years following the case.

There are cases we will spend months, years on and then they will air. This is one of those that we spent an incredible amount of time prior to it airing.

Carlos was in his early 30s when he met Helen. She was 23..

He said that, you know, although maybe he wasn't technically formally living with her per se in Texas, he was at her house 24-7.

Helen was attending Southern Methodist University and said on her resume that her goal was to work for a defense contractor, just as her mom, Pamela, had once done. According to Carlos, they fell in love and were inseparable.

It seemed like Carlos was planning to include Helen in his long-term future.

The couple were planning to leave Dallas and build a new life together in Northern Virginia.

He was so dedicated to Helen that Carlos was ready to leave his life in Texas and move to Virginia.

As Carlos calls 911 the day of the tragedy, he tells the story of the life they had planned. He even mentions the house in Aldi, Virginia, that Helen's mother was buying. He said they were serious, committed.

According to Carlos, he had big plans for their future. He was planning to propose to her at some point.

After Helen made the move back east, the couple video chatted, texted, and called every day. He said the night before the shootings, they missed each other so much that they spent nearly four hours talking on the phone.

That's a long time to talk to anyone.

Ten days before Pamela and Helen's deaths, Carlos went to see Helen in Virginia.

So, according to court testimony, Carlos said he came to the area. He did not stay at Pam's house. That he and Helen stayed at a hotel nearby.

Carlos said he had no idea that Helen's family had any animosity toward him until after the shootings. But there were signs. None of Helen's family came out to meet him when he and Helen stopped by the house for blankets for a 4th of July outing.

The blankets were put outside, but Carlos said he didn't think anything about it.

Helen's oldest sister, Megan, would bring this up to police. They were in the driveway when she came to get blankets for 4th of July. And she said, Megan, wait, they're in the driveway. She's saying her mom told her not to go out and meet him. Pamela had bought Helen a house but was now having second thoughts because Carlos might move in with her daughter.

Investigations across politics, news, and entertainment on your schedule. Listen to 60 minutes ad free on Wondry Plus.

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

Detectives, Brian Byerson and Julia Elliott, a forensics expert, looked over the two rooms where Helen and Pamela were shot. Helen was found upstairs in her bathroom. Pamela in the mudroom, found on the floor under a quilt. Oddly, her phone was sitting on top of the quilt in a pool of blood.

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

But this wasn't the only strange clue. Helen's cell phone was set on the bathroom counter, near the sink and yet didn't have a spot of blood on it.

And I want to find out who put that cell phone there in that particular place.

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

Nothing.

Nothing. Nothing on Helen's phone. She'd find the mother's phone was also clean.

On the front, we will typically see fingerprints, or at least smudges of fingerprints. On this one, we were able to see smears, as if someone had wiped it from side to side.

The bathroom was in disarray, with toiletry scattered on the floor. But Detective Elliott noticed that the rifle was neatly placed. Why hadn't it tumbled away when she shot herself?

The rifle was still laying perfectly within her legs. That, to me, tells me that if she's moving enough to move things off of the back of the toilet, I would expect that gun to have fallen down to the floor. I also have seen suicides done with long guns, where they are not able to retain control of the gun.

But for detectives, the rifle's perfect placement wouldn't be the only red flag.

You have a scene that's relatively small.

Detective Byerson told me that if Helen had killed herself in such a small bathroom, there'd likely be blood on the rifle.

There is blood everywhere. It's all over the place.

To the detective, this just didn't make sense.

We had a generally clean weapon, and then underneath the weapon, there was blood where there shouldn't have been, if the weapon was there.

So that suggests perhaps someone else shot Helen.

It suggests that the weapon wasn't there until later on,

which doesn't sound like a murder-suicide to me, then, right?

It does not.

And in the basement, another strange sight. Detective Elliott found couch cushions that looked like they'd been slashed with a knife.

I wasn't sure if someone was taking out some anger or what they were doing.

Was it a tear kind of cut or was a puncture kind of cut?

It was a stabbing puncture type cut.

Like someone had what, practiced on it? Yes. And is it true that there was a long knife found in the house?

Yes.

The knife was in plain sight. She took a photo of it still down there in the basement.

This is the knife, and it's sitting on a bookshelf that was just to the left of the couch cushions in the same room.

Detective Elliott believed the killer may have considered using the knife as a murder weapon instead of the rifle. And then, when Detective Elliott turned to look at Pamela Hargan's bookshelves, she spotted something else.

So that set of books that are kind of gray with the red band, those are photo albums. And I got a little nosy and I wanted to see what my victims may have looked like in life or as they grew up. So I pulled out one of the center photo albums to look at it and open it up. And behind it was a piece of evidence that ended up being quite important.

What was found?

It was a photocopy of Pamela's spreadsheet that she used for all her accounts, account numbers and passcodes. It was also a photocopy of Pamela's bank statement.

This was still the night of the shootings. And while Detective Elliott wanted to dig in and learn more about this bank statement.

Financial documents were not on our search warrant and so, therefore, I could not take it. We photographed it as we found it that night and eventually, a couple of days later, came back with a search warrant to recover those papers, and they were not there.

They were not there?

They were not.

You found yourself a pretty interesting piece of evidence, right?

Yes, at the time we weren't exactly sure what we were dealing with.

Detectives were becoming increasingly convinced that both the Hargan women had been murdered. But by who? And what was the motive? It would turn out that Helen's boyfriend, Carlos, had shared a theory with Ashley. Here's Detective John Vickery asking the father, Steve Hargan, about it.

There's some questions that have to be asked and need to be answered.

I'm an innocent man and I hope the whole world can see it now. Catch the latest episodes of 48 Hours wherever you get your podcasts.

Everything appeared to be okay.

Our producer, Michelle Sagona, read through Carlos' court testimony about that morning. He was at home in Dallas and had slept in. The two played phone tag until after 11 Eastern time. When Carlos finally caught her, Helen was beside herself.

Later in the morning, Carlos says specifically that Helen sounded frightened and scared. He used words like Helen was trembling. She was sobbing. She was very frantic.

She immediately told him why and Carlos would tell 911.

Fairfax County Police and Fire. How may I assist you? My girlfriend told me that her sister killed her mom. And now my girlfriend won't answer her phone.

Carlos explained to the operator that Helen told him her sister Megan came upstairs to her room and said that she killed her mother, Pamela.

So if you let that sink in for a minute, she told me that her sister had killed her mother. I can't imagine being in Dallas, Texas, while talking to my girlfriend on the phone, who was inside this home where something horrific has happened and not really knowing what to do.

Carlos even said Helen told him she could hear her mother gasping for life. Things sounded dire.

He was trying to get to the heart of what was happening in all of this.

Carlos told Helen to leave immediately.

He was trying to tell her to get out of the house, to call police, to do something. But Helen had hesitation. According to Carlos, Helen was very nervous and possibly scared for her niece, who apparently was also in the home.

Helen wanted to protect her niece, Megan's daughter Molly, and that she was worried what her sister might do if the police showed up.

She didn't want her niece to see her mother getting arrested.

Soon after, Helen stopped responding, and he called for help. But Carlos couldn't recall Pamela Hargan's address.

OK, where do you live? I live in Dallas. She lives in McQueen. OK, what's her address? I don't know.

Carlos thought his future wife's life was at risk. But this lack of details only left emergency services with more questions. They asked Carlos to call back when he had more information and kept having him speak to different operators, rehashing what Helen had told him. Finally, the public safety supervisor in Fairfax County, Virginia, called Carlos herself. Her name is Lisa Wagoner-Smith.

OK, was it just out of the blue? Did she say how she did it or why she did it? She said she shot her. She said she woke up and her sister told her she shot her mom.

The 911 supervisor sounded skeptical. Why would Helen stay put if her sister had killed their mom? Carlos would call back with the right information and reach a 911 operator.

I reported a murder earlier and I didn't have the address. Now I have the address. So what do you mean? you reported a murder earlier? Do you think something happened there?

When?

This morning. That's what I'm trying to tell you guys. Yeah, this morning. She called me and told me that her sister shot her mom. She didn't know what to do.

The operator passed Carlos back to Lisa, the supervisor. With the address and some information confirmed, after multiple calls from Carlos, 911 was finally able to send help.

We are sending an officer out there. Is there anything else you can think of? that we need to know? No, I mean, I'm just freaking out. I'm thinking something bad happened to my girlfriend.

In case you didn't catch that, Carlos said he was freaking out and worried something had happened to Helen. Before they end the call, though, Carlos did think of something else. officers needed to know.

Like. I have like some incriminating text that her sister sent me.

Carlos thought Megan was texting him, not his girlfriend.

What does that say? Because after the fact that Helen told me that her sister killed her mom, right?

Here's what one of those texts said. Everything is fine. I'm not mad at Megan. I'm mad that my mom paid for her house. She and her husband should buy it themselves.

Based on these text messages he was receiving, they were a huge red flag for Carlos.

He just wanted Helen to call him. But all they got were texts. And that started to feel suspicious. I'm not even mad at her, really. The text continued, just effing hate.

Finally, he was able to reach someone. But it was not Helen. It was Megan on the other side of the phone.

Here's Carlos again.

Yes, and now I called my girlfriend and her sister answers the phone and refuses to let me talk to my girlfriend.

But Carlos persisted.

And he kept asking, I need to speak with Helen. I'm having a bad day. I need to speak with Helen. And he's just getting some conflicting information.

Carlos doesn't back down. He said he stayed on the phone, pushing Megan to give the phone to Helen for nearly 10 minutes.

He believes at this point that she is not OK.

On that long call, Carlos said Megan told him that her mother didn't approve of him and that she wasn't going to let them move into the new house in Aldi.

Carlos claims that, you know, Pam had never said that to him or to Helen.

The call ended without him ever speaking to his girlfriend.

So none of this is making sense to him. This is why he decides to make a brave move and call 9-1-1..

Carlos realized that he needed to be the one to call for help and would begin his agonizing journey to sound the alarm with emergency services.

My gosh, can you imagine? I mean, not knowing what's happening inside of that house and trying to call 9-1-1 and being told you have to go through all these steps.

Megan told police she left the house around 1.

Do you recall his exact words?

Megan shot your mom. And I was like, I'm sorry, what? We were together all morning. Just nothing's adding up. Nothing was adding up.

We have manipulated crime scene in multiple places, the wiped phone, the possibly wiped rifle, the placing of the rifle. We have the fact that Mom was covered. And that her phone was laying on top of the quilt.

A couple days later, they would hear about a suspicious call.

It becomes very obvious to us that there is no other, there is no boogeyman here. It is exactly who we think it is.

From 48 Hours, this is Blood is Thicker, the Hargan family killings. Judy Teigard is the executive producer of 48 Hours. Original reporting by 48 Hours producers Josh Yeager, Sarah Ely-Hulse, Michelle Sagona, and Lauren White. Jamie Benson is the senior producer for Paramount Audio, and Maura Walls is the senior story editor. Recording assistance from Alan Pang and Marlon Policarp.

Paranormal Activity Redefined Horror. Now Katie and Mika, the iconic stars, examine real-life paranormal stories in the haunting new Audible original podcast.

Paranormal Activity, True Tales of Possession.

Brace yourself for spine-tingling accounts of unexplained phenomena that will leave you questioning reality. Don't miss it. Listen now at Audible.com slash Paranormal Activity.