Megan Hargan (Fairfax County Police Department)
A judge previously tossed a woman’s murder conviction in killing her mother and sister in a staged murder-suicide, but the retrial did not go better for her.
The new panel of jurors convicted Megan Hargan, 40, the Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney’s Office announced on Friday. The charges were two counts of first-degree murder.
Today, CA Descano announced that Megan Hargan was convicted of first-degree murder for killing her mother, Pamela, and younger sister, Helen, in 2017. pic.twitter.com/Q0PW5fYf1k
— Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Descano (@FairfaxCountyCA) September 22, 2023
Prosecutors said that defendant Hargan resented how her mother, Pamela Hargan, 63, was helping Megan’s sister, Helen Hargan, 23, and not her, buy a house. All three women lived together with Megan’s daughter, then 8, in Pamela’s home in the community of McLean, Virginia.
On July 13, 2017, the day before the murders, she attempted to transfer up to $400,000 from her mother’s bank account to buy a home — the house was closing.
The transfer was flagged as fraud. Then, on July 14, 2017, Megan shot and killed her mother by using a .22 rifle that her husband had been temporarily storing in the residence.
Helen was upstairs. Frightened and sobbing, she called her fiancé, who was in Texas, the man testified in the first trial. He implored her to leave, but she was worried on behalf of Megan’s daughter. The girl was still in the residence.
The man then began receiving strange texts from Helen’s home, in which the author wrote that everything was fine.
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“I’m not mad at Megan,” a text stated.
The fiancé said he believed that Megan was impersonating Helen.
Defendant Hargan tried to make the deaths look like a murder-suicide, with her sister killing their mother before dying by suicide, authorities said.
The jury in the first trial convicted defendant Hargan, but her attorney successfully convinced a judge to throw it out because one of the jurors allegedly tested whether Helen Hargan could have possibility used the .22 rifle to kill herself.
An affidavit signed by a defense investigator says the juror “stated that she was unable to figure out a way that the sister [Helen Hargan] could have committed suicide” with a .22 caliber rifle – because of how long that particular gun is – and how much it weighs, according to The Washington Post. In order to essay the defense’s theory, the juror allegedly told the investigator, she used her own rifle to gauge the plausibility of that claim and then shared the results of her experiment with the rest of the jury.
“Clearly, a juror may not properly receive any information about a case he is hearing except in open court and in the manner provided by law,” Senior Assistant Public Defender Bryan T. Kennedy wrote.
This gave defendant Hargan another chance to beat the criminal case. It didn’t work. Sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 26, 2024. She faces life in prison.
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