Death Hits Home: The Hargan Killings
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[dramatic music] There were two bodies that were located inside of this home, and that's really all we knew. Is there a little adrenaline when you're pulling up? Always. Your blood starts to get pumping a little bit, and you start to think about how this is going to play out. What did you see as you entered this home? Well, it's a very nice home in a great neighborhood. Fairfax County is located just outside of Washington, D.C. It is an affluent area of Northern Virginia. It was a million dollar home. As you walk through the kitchen, you encounter a mudroom that connects the kitchen to the garage. In that mudroom, we discover Pamela Hargon. How was she positioned on the ground? She was laying face down, and she had a blanket laid over her. It's like a quilt. Her cell phone is actually laying on top of the quilt. And there was a pull-up blood coming from the area of her head onto the floor. What else do you find? We go upstairs, and then we encounter Helen Hargon inside of the bathroom that's in her bedroom. She had appeared to have been sitting on the toilet when she was shocked. She was fully clothed. She has some kind of trauma to her head. There's a rifle in between her legs. She's got a tremendous amount of blood in her mouth. Finding two deceased persons with one with a gun on their body might have been a murder-suicide. Suicide, possibly. What are we looking at here now? This is the main room of the basement that set a book for photo albums. And I wanted to see what my victims may have looked like in life. Pam Hargon was a woman in her 60s. An incredibly successful business-minded woman. She was generous with her money. This was a woman who built an $8 million estate. She poured her life into her family. Helen, the youngest daughter, had returned home from college. Helen was the kind of daughter I think that everybody would want. She was a lovely. She had a number of friends. She had a boyfriend. Helen never struck me as having a dark side.
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Megan Hargan was suspected of killing her mother and sister. Her defense had an unusual theory: her sister was the one who pulled the trigger – with her toe. "48 Hours" correspondent Peter Van Sant reports.