Before joining the defence contractor SAIC, Pamela Hargan was a top HR executive at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. Due to her successful job, the divorced mother of three purchased a $1.3 million home in McLean, Virginia, a wealthy area of Washington, D.C.
Until the summer of 2017, the three Hargan women—Pamela and her two children, Megan and Helen—seemed to be leading the ideal existence. According to reports, on July 14, 2017, Megan, then 37, fatally shot her mother Pamela and younger sister Helen, 23. Anger, jealousy, and greed all contributed to the murder.
Megan Harlan attempted to blame her own deceased sister Helen for the passing of their mother, but that wasn’t all she did.
The accused in the Hargan killings, Megan Hargan, was found guilty in March 2022. In a future edition that will run on Saturday, October 1, 2022—months after the horrible double homicide—CBS 48 Hours will examine the incident. The Death Hits Home: The Hargan Killings episode will show at 10 p.m. ET.
Prior to the airing of the episode, here is all you need to know about Pamela Hargan and her seemingly ideal family (at least till 2017).
Even though the Hargan women appeared to be a perfect family, it was later uncovered that they had problems far before the murders.
Even a relative called it a “troubled” connection. Megan supposedly harboured jealousies toward Helen, her younger sister, and frequently believed that their mother preferred Megan.
According to sources, Pamela Hargan, age 63, was eager to leave her job. Her eldest daughter Megan Hargan, who had been living with them in their McLena house for several years with her seven-year-old daughter, was residing there at the time. Megan was married to a West Virginian.
Helen, Pamela’s youngest child, graduated from Dallas, Texas’ Southern Methodist University in the spring of 2017 and moved back into the family home. She allegedly awaited the building of a new house that her mother had purchased for her before Helen left for graduate school. This allegedly caused Megan to feel intense jealousy.
Over the years, Megan allegedly grew close to Helen Hargan, according to Pamela Hargan’s sister Tamara North. She continued by saying that despite the fact that Megan and Ashley, their second sister, assisted their mother in parenting Helen while she was away on business, the animosity only intensified with time.
When police arrived at the Hargans’ home on July 14, 2017, following a 911 call about a possible shooting, friends and family understood that something had gone horribly wrong.
When police broke through the door, they found Pamela Hargan’s bloody body in her laundry room. She had been shot in the head, and that shot had killed her. Helen was discovered dead in a bathroom on the second floor.
According to Pamela’s sister, Megan informed authorities that Helen killed her mother and then committed suicide, so she was astonished to receive this information. Even still, North referred to the allegation and the event as “awful.”
North claimed that even though Helen was initially found guilty of murder-suicide in this case, she immediately realised “something was horribly wrong.”
Authorities discovered evidence against Megan, who is accused of staging the crime scene and blaming her deceased sister, confirming Tamara’s suspicions. About a year after the killings, she was detained in 2018. A finding that suggested she had attempted to fraudulently wire transfer $400,000 from her mother’s bank account led to her detention.
According to reports, the accused’s aunt claimed that not even in a million years could she have predicted something like this.
As previously mentioned, CBS 48 Hours airs this Saturday, October 1, 2022, at 10 pm ET.
