A Virginia woman convicted of killing her mother and sister and staging it as a murder-suicide has been sentenced to two life consecutive sentences.
Megan Hargan, 41, was convicted for the second time in September in the deaths of Pamela Hargan, 63, and Helen Hargan, 23, in 2017, as CrimeOnline previously reported. Prosecutors said she staged the murders to look like her sister killed her mother and then herself.
A judge threw out the first conviction after learning a juror conducted his own, personal test of a .22 rifle to determine if Helen Hargan could have killed herself and then shared the results with the jury. But the results of the second trial were the same.
CA Descano announced today that Megan Hargan, 41, was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for the 2017 killings of her mother, Pamela, and her sister, Helen. pic.twitter.com/Tk3rodpweT
— Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Descano (@FairfaxCountyCA) January 26, 2024
Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano said that Megan Hargan was angry because her mother was helping Helen by a house but not her. On the day before the July 14 shootings, she tried to transfer several hundred thousand dollars from her mother’s bank account to pay for her new house, which was closing that day. But the bank flagged the transaction as fraud.
The next day, she shot her mother and then tried the same wire transfer again before killing her sister, who had been upstairs at the McLean house at the time.
“Megan Hargan’s actions in July 2017 go beyond what most of us can imagine,” Descano said. “On a quiet Friday morning in her mother’s home, she made an irreversible decision — one that would devastate her family and tear the community apart.”
Descano said the case was a complicated one to prosecute but that the “sentence reflects the graity of the defendants crimes.”
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[Featured image: Pamela, Megan, and Helen Hargan/Fairfax County Police Department]
