Megan Hargan (Fairfax County Police Department)
The woman convicted of shooting her mother and sister to death and staging the scene as a murder-suicide has been sentenced to life in prison after jurors convicted her in a retrial.
Megan Hargan, 41, was ordered on Friday to serve two consecutive life sentences for first-degree murder and six years for two counts of use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, the Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney announced.
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
As previously reported, Megan Hargan was living with her sister, Helen Hargan, 23, at the home of their mother, Pamela Hargan, 63, in McLean, Virginia.
The defendant, however, was angry that Pamela was financially helping Helen, and not her, with buying a house, authorities said.
On July 13, 2017, she attempted to transfer up to $400,000 from her mother’s bank account, but it was flagged as fraud. The next day, using her husband’s .22 rifle, she shot and killed Pamela Hargan and Helen Hargan while her own daughter, then 8, was home.
Helen Hargan was upstairs when Megan killed Pamela. 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 for Megan Hargan’s daughter.
The man then began receiving strange texts from Helen’s phone, in which the author wrote that everything was fine.
“I’m not mad at Megan,” a text stated.
The fiancé said he believed that Megan was impersonating Helen.
The defendant attempted to set up the crime scene to make it seem like Helen had been the one to kill Pamela before dying of 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 possibly 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.
Prosecutors once again had to prove Megan Hargan’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and they managed to convince a second jury last year that she carried out the killings.
“Megan Hargan’s actions in July 2017 go beyond what most of us can imagine,” Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano said Friday. “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. First-degree murder is the most serious offense you can be convicted of in Virginia, and today’s sentence reflects the gravity of the defendant’s crimes.”
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