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of these new bottles and more places, and that's thanks to you. Because when we get more bottles back, we can use less new plastic. Learn how our bottles are made to be remade at made-to-be-remade.org. This episode contains graphic audio and references to family violence. Please listen with care. Perfect. Can I please inspire? How may I assist you? Yes, sir. Have an emergency. More than a thousand miles from where he believes a crime is unfolding, Carlos Gutierrez
is desperately trying to save his girlfriend's life. This was back in the summer of 2017. Hello. Are you there? Yes, I'm here. These calls are from emergency services in northern Virginia. That's where the love of his life Helen Hargan lives. I am speaking to my girlfriend right of an danger. His girlfriend's life isn't danger, but Carlos feels like the 911 operator isn't taking him seriously. Why aren't they responding with concern?
Okay, sir. What I need you to do then is contact your local jurisdiction, follow a report with them and tell them that Fairfax County requires a teletype in order to do a welfare check. Okay, I think this is like life or death, like I think something like dead. Carlos is trying to make sure the operator understands the seriousness of the situation, but instead of quickly dispatching police, the 911 operator tells him to call someone else.
Contact your local jurisdiction, follow the report, have them send a teletype, and then we will go and check on her. Okay, how do I get a hold of my jurisdiction? How do I do that? Well, sir, if you don't have their non-emergency number, if you dial 911, you'll get your emergency center. Okay, thank you. Bye-bye. I would play this 911 call for Detective Brian Byerson of the Fairfax County Police. He told me this first operator no longer works at the call center.
Yeah, this one is incontrovertibly horrible. We do not require a teletype number to report a possible homicide. Yeah, that's completely ridiculous. Carlos would call, speak to an operator, and then be told he needed to call someone else again and again. Listen closely, because this 911 tape is not exactly easy to understand. Is it offering it home right now? Well, that's the thing she wrote into her phone. According to Carlos, hours earlier, Helen had called him to say her mom might be dead.
And then she stopped answering her phone. She hadn't called 911. Carlos didn't hear from her, and now he was worried Helen was in danger. In her race against time, Carlos keeps calling the police. We're here in New York to call your local police department. And... All right, they're still not there. I'm sorry? They're still not there. How are we supposed to get there? We didn't give us an address. You can't look at the name. Pam Harlan and McClellan.
We looked at the name. Pam Harlan and McClellan. We don't list individuals by name. We don't record information that way. Okay, I'm sorry. I'm just having a high time. Finally, more than an hour after his first 911 call, police tell Carlos that they're sending officers to Helen's home. Detective Brian Byerson didn't find out about Carlos' calls to 911 until after he walked through the Hagen House and saw the two bodies for himself.
Ultimately, what Carlos had to say would blow a hole in the theory that this was a murder suicide. And that meant a killer could still be on the loose. If true, you have a brutal, vicious killer in this community who could kill again. That is correct. I'm Peter Vance sent. From 48 hours, this is Blood Is Thicker, the Hagen Family Killings, Episode 2, The Boyfriend. Carlos Gutierrez is on the phone with a 911 supervisor out of Fairfax County, Virginia.
She asks him more about his relationship with Helen Hargan. Carlos and Helen had been dating for a year. They first met in Dallas. They were working at a local restaurant together and there were sparks. They hit it off. This is Michelle Sagona. She's a producer for 48 hours and has spent years following the case. There are cases we will spend months, years on, and then they will air. This is one of those that we spent an incredible amount of time prior to it airing.
Carlos was in his early 30s when he met Helen. She was 23. He said that, you know, although maybe he wasn't technically formally living with her per se in Texas, he was at her house 24-7. So they were living together essentially. Helen was attending Southern Methodist University and said on her resume that her goal was to work for a defense contractor, just as her mom Pamela had once done. According to Carlos, they fell in love and were inseparable.
It seemed like Carlos was planning to include Helen in his long-term future. The couple were planning to leave Dallas and build a new life together in Northern Virginia. He was so dedicated to Helen that Carlos was ready to leave his life in Texas and move to Virginia. As Carlos calls 911 the day of the tragedy, he tells the story of the life they had planned. Look at that, we got a house of children's fields. He even mentions the house in Aldi, Virginia that Helen's mother was buying.
He said they were serious, committed. According to Carlos, he had big plans for their future. He was planning to propose to her at some point. After Helen made the move back east, the couple video-chatted, texted and called every day. He said the night before the shootings, they missed each other so much that they spent nearly four hours talking on the phone. It's a long time to talk to anyone. Ten days before Pamela and Helen's deaths, Carlos went to see Helen in Virginia.
So according to court testimony, Carlos said he came to the area. He did not stay at Pam's house. That he and Helen stayed at a hotel nearby. Carlos said he had no idea that Helen's family had any animosity toward him until after the shootings. But there were signs. None of Helen's family came out to meet him when he and Helen stopped by the house for blankets for a fourth of July outing. The blankets were put outside, but Carlos said he didn't think anything about it.
Helen's older sister, Megan, would bring this up to police. She was in the driveway, which he came to get blankets for the July. And she said Megan, wait, they're in the driveway. She sane, her mom told her not to go out and meet him. Pamela had bought Helen a house, but was now having second thoughts because Carlos might move in with her daughter. Here's Megan in a police recording taken hours after the shooting.
This morning, my mom let Helen know that she was canceling the contract on the house she's building her, because she truly believed that Helen was going to try to move Carlos into the house. And my mom didn't want him being there. After that, she said Helen was furious. Her mother had changed her mind, but also said her kid's sister was even mad at her. Why? Megan said she and her husband closed on a house of their own in West Virginia.
So while Helen's dream was taken away, Megan was still getting hers. She got mad at me and thought the house was my fault. And, you know, mom was like, it has nothing to do with her. You know why Helen? I can't trust you. And I'm not letting that Carlos move into that house. Megan said that she was leaving to drive to West Virginia that morning. Before she left, she said the door to her mom's home office was closed. And I was leaving.
Like I said, I saw her off his door closing that usually means she's on the phone, so I just left it be. She remembered how Helen was out on the front porch very upset. I think it was this afternoon when I was leaving the house. She was crying. And I went up to the porch and they said, who are you on the phone with? And she was like, Carlos. And I was like, you okay? And she's like, and I said, and I said, are you, are you, are you okay? I was like, she was crying.
Police had been given two versions of that deadly morning, one where Helen was scared for her life, and another where she was the likely killer. But which one did the evidence support? Worried about letting someone else pick out the perfect avocado for your perfect, impress them on the third date guacamole? Well, good thing Instacart shoppers are as picky as you are. They find ripe avocados like it's their guac on the line. They are milk expiration date detectives.
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Detectives Brian Byerson and Julia Elliott, a forensics expert, looked over the two rooms where Helen and Pamela were shot. Helen was found upstairs in her bathroom. Pamela in the mudroom found on the floor under a quilt. Oddly, her phone was sitting on top of the quilt in a pool of blood. We know what that means. We know that it means that that phone was placed there sometime after she died. But this wasn't the only strange clue.
Helen's cell phone was set on the bathroom counter near the sink, and yet didn't have a spot of blood on it. And I want to find out who put that cell phone there in that particular place. So you want to check for fingerprints and DNA? Yes. What do you find on this phone? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing on Helen's phone. She'd find the mother's phone was also clean. On the front, we will typically see fingerprints or at least smudges of fingerprints.
On this one, we were able to see smears as if someone had wiped it from side to side. The bathroom was in disarray, with toiletries scattered on the floor. But detective Elliott noticed that the rifle was neatly placed. Why hadn't it tumbled away when she shot herself? The rifle was still laying perfectly within her legs. That to me tells me that if she's moving enough to move things off of the back of the toilet, I would expect that gun to have fallen down to the floor.
I also have seen suicides done with long guns, where they are not able to retain control of the gun. But for detectives, the rifle's perfect placement wouldn't be the only red flag. You have a scene that's relatively small. Detective Byerson told me that if Helen had killed herself in such a small bathroom, there'd likely be blood on the rifle. There is blood everywhere. It's all over the place.
However, there doesn't seem to be any blood on the rifle itself, which is sitting in the middle of all of this, even though there's blood underneath. So that is a huge problem. To the detective, this just didn't make sense. We had a generally clean weapon, and then underneath the weapon, there was blood where there shouldn't have been, if the weapon was there. So that suggests perhaps someone else shot Helen.
It suggests that the weapon wasn't there until later on, which doesn't sound like a murder suicide to me then, right? It does not. And in the basement, another strange site. Detective Elliott found couch cushions that looked like they'd been slashed with a knife. I wasn't sure if someone was taking out some anger or what they were doing. Was it a tear kind of cut or was it a puncture cut? It was a stabbing puncture-type cut. Like someone had what practiced on it?
Yes. And is it true that there was a long knife found in the house? Yes. The knife was in plain sight. She took a photo of it still down there in the basement. This is the knife, and it's sitting on a bookshelf that was just to the left of the couch cushions in the same room. Detective Elliott believed the killer may have considered using the knife as a murder weapon instead of the rifle. And then, when Detective Elliott turned to look at Pamela Hargan's bookshelves, she spotted something else.
So that set a book that are kind of gray with the red band, those are photo albums. And I got a little nosy, and I wanted to see what my victims may have looked like in life or as they grew up. So I pulled out one of the center photo albums to look at it and open it up, and behind it was a piece of evidence that ended up being quite important. What was found? It was a photocopy of Pamela's spreadsheet that she used for all her accounts, account numbers, and pass codes.
It was also a photocopy of Pamela's bank statement. This was still the night of the shootings, and while Detective Elliott wanted to dig in and learn more about this bank statement, financial documents were not on our search warrant, and so therefore I could not take it. We photographed it as we found it that night, and eventually a couple days later came back with a search warrant to recover those papers, and they were not there. They were not there.
You found yourself a pretty interesting piece of evidence, right? Yes, at the time we weren't exactly sure what we were dealing with. Detectives were becoming increasingly convinced that both the Harkin women had been murdered, but by who and what was the motive. It would turn out that Helen's boyfriend Carlos had shared a theory with Ashley. Here's Detective John Vickery asking the father Steve Harkin about it. How many again, what Carlos says to her?
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Earlier that July morning, Carlos had woken up to some messages from his girlfriend Helen. One text read, I wanted to see if by chance you were awake. Call me when you do wake up. Love you. To Carlos, nothing out of the ordinary. Everything appeared to be okay. Our producer, Michelle Sagoana, read through Carlos' court testimony about that morning. He was at home in Dallas and had slept in. The two played phone tag until after 11 Eastern time.
When Carlos finally caught her, Helen was beside herself. Later in the morning, Carlos says specifically that Helen sounded frightened and scared. He used words like, Helen was trembling, she was sobbing, she was very frantic. She immediately told him why and Carlos would tell 911. If X-Tenning police enviroment how may I assist you? I'd go up and tell me that Mr. killed his mom. And now my girlfriend won't answer herself.
Carlos explained to the operator that Helen told him her sister Megan came upstairs to her room and said that she killed her mother Pamela. So if you let that sink in for a minute, she told me that her sister had killed her mother. I can't imagine being in Dallas, Texas, while talking to my girlfriend on the phone who was inside this home were something horrific has happened and not really knowing what to do. Carlos even said Helen told him she could hear her mother gasping for life.
Things sounded dire. He was trying to get to the heart of what was happening in all of this. Carlos told Helen to leave immediately. He was trying to tell her to get out of the house to call police to do something. But Helen had hesitation. According to Carlos, Helen was very nervous and possibly scared for her niece, who apparently was also in the home. Helen wanted to protect her niece, Megan's daughter Molly, and that she was worried what her sister might do if the police showed up.
She didn't want her niece to see her mother getting arrested. Soon after, Helen stopped responding and he called for help. But Carlos couldn't recall Pamela Hargan's address. And OK, where do you live? I would have been jealous. She was in the Queen. OK, what's her address? I don't know. She's got her mom's house and mom's name is Pam Hargan. Carlos thought his future wife's life was at risk. But this lack of details only left emergency services with more questions.
They asked Carlos to call back when he had more information and kept having him speak to different operators, rehashing what Helen had told him. Finally, the public safety supervisor in Fairfax County, Virginia, called Carlos herself. Her name is Lisa Wagoner-Smith. She wanted to know how this alleged murder had unfolded. OK, was this looked out of the blue? Did she say how she did it or why she did it? I thought she shot her. She said she woke up and her sister closed. She shot her mom.
So your girlfriend is sitting in a house with a dead woman. The 911 supervisor sounded skeptical. Why would Helen stay put if her sister had killed their mom? Carlos would call back with the right information and reach a 911 operator. I have reported a murder earlier and I mean, have the address more have the address? So we need you to report it a murder earlier. Do you think something happened here? Well, I'd know for a fact that her sister shot her mom.
And this morning, it's where I'm going to tell you that. Yeah, this morning. She called me and told me that her sister shot her mom. She ended up doing that. I told her to call the cops. You get the kid and you call the cops. The operator passed Carlos back to Lisa, the supervisor. With the address and some information confirmed after multiple calls from Carlos, 911 was finally able to send help. We are sending an officer out there. Is there anything else you can think of that we need to know?
No, I'm just freaking out. I'm thinking something bad happened like that. In case you didn't catch that, Carlos said he was freaking out and worried something had happened to Helen. Before they end the call though, Carlos did think of something else officers needed to know. If you need it, I need it like I have some incriminating text that her sister sent me. Carlos thought Megan was texting him not his girlfriend. What does that say?
Because after the fact that Helen told me that her sister killed her mom, right? Mm-hmm. She, I called her and she went and said she texted back Helen did. And it was like, hey sorry, I'm just arguing with my mom. She pisses me off and hate her. And this is after the fact that Helen told me that her sister killed her mom. I know that her sister got her phone and was sending me messages. Here's what one of those texts said. Everything is fine. I'm not mad at Megan.
I'm mad that my mom paid for her house. She and her husband should buy it themselves. Here is our producer, Michelle Sagona again. Based on these text messages he was receiving, they were a huge red flag for Carlos. He just wanted Helen to call him, but only got where text. And that started to feel suspicious. I'm not even mad at her really. The text continued just effing hate my mom. Carlos didn't think that sounded like the woman he loved. He kept calling Helen's cell.
Finally, he was able to reach someone, but it was not Helen. It was Megan on the other side of the phone. Here's Carlos again. Yes. And now I called my girlfriend and her sister and she's the phone's every evening to get me to call her. But Carlos persisted. And he kept asking. I need to speak with Helen. I'm having a bad day. I need to speak with Helen. And he's just getting some conflicting information. Carlos doesn't back down.
He said he stayed on the phone, pushing Megan to give the phone to Helen for nearly 10 minutes. He believes at this point that she is not okay. On that long call, Carlos said Megan told him that her mother didn't approve of him and that she wasn't going to let them move into the new house in Aldi. Carlos claims that Pam had never said that to him or to Helen. The call ended without him ever speaking to his girlfriend. So none of this is making sense to him.
This is why he decides to make a brave move and call 911. Carlos realized that he needed to be the one to call for help and would begin his agonizing journey to sound the alarm with the emergency services. My gosh. Can you imagine? I mean, not knowing what's happening inside of that house and trying to call 911 and being told you have to go through all these steps.
Megan told police she left the house around 130 that afternoon, headed for West Virginia and then turned around to go to her dads after she heard about the shooting. Ashley was racing to her dads too. Carlos had called her while she was in the car but Ashley had trouble believing his story. Here is Detective Vickery asking Ashley about the call after she arrived at her dads. We heard you received a call from Carlos. Yes. And I don't even know this kid. We've changed her off the street.
He was saying that my, this sister, shot my mom. By this sister, Ashley meant Megan who was sitting right there with them. She would never do that. Ever. Never. Okay. Obviously, I'm no more in a car like that. We've been through hell and bad together. I know my sister. Ashley told the detective she's been calling her mom and sister. Megan chimed in to say she has two. I left, we sales her mom. That looks great to talk.
Carlos was saying Megan killed her mother but in that moment, the sisters were dismissive of him. I don't know if this guy from Adam. That's what I, that's what I've been saying. Ashley made it clear. She didn't believe that Megan is a murderer. She would recall his exact words. Megan shot your mom and I was like, I'm sorry, what? They were together all morning. I knew, like, just nothing was adding up. Nothing was adding up. Ashley and her dad didn't seem scared of Megan.
Police didn't arrest her. And that day, law enforcement told the public that the killer was dead. Patrol officers thought Helen had done it. But given how the crime scene didn't neatly fit a murder suicide and Carlos's 911 calls, Detective Byerson asked himself the question. Was Megan the killer? Did she murder both her mom and Helen that morning? We have manipulated crime scene in multiple places. The wiped phone, the possibly wiped rifle, the placing of the rifle.
We have the fact that mom was covered and that her phone was laying on top of the quilt. A couple days later, they would hear about a suspicious call. It becomes very obvious to us that there is no other. There is no boogie man here. It is exactly who we think it is. From 48 hours, this is Blood Is Thicker, the Hargan Family Killings. Judy Tagard is the executive producer of 48 Hours. Original reporting by 48 Hours producers Josh Yeager, Sarah Ely Hols, Michelle Segona, and Lauren White.
Jimmy Benson is the senior producer for Paramount Audio and moral walls is the senior story editor, recording assistants from Alan Pang and Marlon Polikar. Special thanks to Paramount podcast vice president Megan Marcus and 48 Hours senior producer Peter Schweitzer. Blood Is Thicker is produced by Sony Music Entertainment. It was written and produced by Alex Schumann. Our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. Our associate producer is Zoe Colken.
Theme and original music composed by Hans Dail Shee. He also sound designed and mixed the episodes. We also use music by Blue Dot Sessions. Catherine Newhan is our fact checker. Our production managers are Tameka, balance Colossani, and Samantha Allison. I'm Peter Van Sant. If you're enjoying the show, be sure to rate and review. It helps more people find it and hear our reporting.
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