A sadistic killer serving life for the brutal murder of a mother and her two daughters has received a sympathetic profile in Newsweek that has sparked outrage. In the interview, Steven Hayes, who is now calling himself Linda Mai Lee, blamed his “gender identity” woes for the killings, and promoted “gender affirming care” for inmates.
Hayes is currently serving six life sentences and a maximum sentence of 999 years, plus 99 months and 999 days, at Oregon State Penitentiary for the Connecticut home invasion and slaughter of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two young daughters. The 2007 killings, which shook the country due to the brutality, has come to be known as the Cheshire murders.
In his interview with Newsweek, Hayes told reporter Joshua Rhett Miller that he was “happy to be alive” since he began claiming to be a transgender woman and started taking female hormones in 2018. Hayes said that he has been provided with makeup, jewelry, and women’s underwear, including bras. The fetish items, Newsweek states, “eliminated [his] thoughts of suicide,” and Hayes is now seeking to undergo a breast augmentation and hair replacement procedure.
“My whole life I hid who I truly was and tried to deny it to myself,” Hayes said. “I had so much hate for who I was pretending to be, I stayed high and always wanted to die.”
Referring to the violent killer with feminine pronouns, Newsweek reported that “her former anger” which led to the slaughter of the Petit family “had been fueled by the question of her gender identity,” and that Hayes was now participating in Equality-8, a club for “LGBTQ” inmates.
When speaking with Miller, Hayes claimed to have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria at the age of 16, but curiously was not told of the diagnosis at the time – leading to a storm of “intolerance” brewing inside of him, and resulting in the killing spree for which he was convicted.
“I hurt, so I hurt others,” Hayes said. Newsweek, while portraying the convicted rapist and murderer sympathetically, added: “According to research by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, transgender people are over four times more likely than others to be victims of violent crime.”
In the early hours of July 23, 2007, Hayes, along with accomplice Joshua Komiserjevsky whom he met at a halfway house, broke into the Petit family’s home in Cheshire, Connecticut. The two men would then enact a horrific seven-hour crime spree that would result in the sadistic killings of mother Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters, Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17.
Upon entering their home, Komiserjevsky proceeded to beat Dr. William Petit with a baseball bat before restraining him in the basement. Hayes and Komisarjevsky bound Jennifer, Michaela, and Hayley by their wrists and ankles to their bedposts and placed pillowcases over their heads.
The two men then ransacked the Petit home in a frenzied search for cash. Hayes was spotted on a gas station surveillance camera purchasing $10 worth of gasoline. Dissatisfied with the spoils of their burglary, Hayes abducted Jennifer and drove her to the bank in the morning, forcing her to withdraw $15,000 from her line of credit.
Hawke-Petit was able to inform the bank teller that she and her family were being held hostage by the men, and that they were threatening to kill them. The bank manager called the police while she was still with the teller. The Cheshire police then dispatched a crew of officers, who sent up a vehicle perimeter around the Petit’s house, while concealing their presence.
After Hayes returned from the bank with Jennifer, both he and Komiserjevsky escalated their brutality. Komiserjevsky raped 11 year-old Michaela, who he had spotted at the supermarket the day before. Prosecutors would later argue in court that the entire spree had been motivated by Komiserjevsky’s interest in sexually abusing the young girl. Komisarjevsky photographed the assault and rape on his cell phone.
Hayes raped Jennifer’s corpse after strangling her to death with a pair of stockings, and the two men doused her lifeless body in gasoline. They also poured gasoline on the two girls, who were still alive and bound in their rooms, before setting the house ablaze. Hayley managed to break free of her restraints and ran out of her bedroom, but collapsed and died of smoke inhalation in the hallway. Young Michaela’s body was found in her bed, her hands tied to the frame.
William Petit was the sole survivor of the slaughter. He had successfully freed himself, exited the house through the basement, and crawled to a neighbor’s house.
Both confessed to their crimes when questioned by police, and both would write letters boasting about the murders. Hayes was convicted in October 2010, and sentenced to death that December. Komisarjevsky was found guilty the following year and received the death sentence, as well, but the two killers would later have their sentences revised to life terms in prison.
Ultimately, the revised sentence would come even after claims made by Hayes in October 2011 that he had murdered 17 other women, including hitchhikers, run-aways, and sex trafficking victims. During Komisarjevsky’s trial Hayes had been conducting written correspondences in which he had made the claims, which local press described as a “twisted pornographic fantasy,” in a three-page handwritten letter on notebook paper.
“Yes, I’ve killed before,” Hayes bragged. “I have 17 kills throughout the Northeast United States. Perfect victims and well-executed, controlled endeavors.”
The letter stated that Hayes was willing to provide details about “every victim, all 17, and where they can be found and the whole life story behind it.” He also claimed to have taken pleasure in forcing the victims to write goodbye letters to their loved ones in such a manner as to make their disappearances seem voluntary.
“With most, a second and third note would be written, by the girls themselves, and I would mail these weeks and months later. The notes would be detailed and disarming. This was key because while the girl would be gone within hours, the notes gave the appearance of what I wanted, a runaway or a girl who left her boyfriend, or a hooker drug addict who went to greener pastures,” Hayes said. “Easy pesy.”
In the letter, Hayes also criticized his partner in crime for not being “worthy” of him. “I’ve searched my whole life for someone who could embrace and had the capacity for evil as I possess,” Hayes said. “I thought I finally found it in Josh… But events show Josh, while (he) had the proper evil intent, lacked in the most serious aspects, commitment and control.”
“So yes,” Hayes wrote, “the Petit home invasion was a dry run in the partnership between Josh and myself. I do now realize that had we gotten away, I would have killed Josh. He was not even close to being worthy of my partnership.”
Hayes would later recant the claims, saying he fabricated them in an attempt to be killed more swiftly. Bizarrely, while already on death row, Hayes said he wrote about killing 17 other women because he wanted police to grant his request for soda, a pepperoni pizza, and oysters with hot sauce. Hayes has a lethal allergy to oysters and therefore the letter confessing to over a dozen murders, he said, was an elaborate rouse to commit suicide.
The death sentences doled out to Hayes and Komisarjevsky were vacated in August 2015, when the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional and retroactively commuted all death sentences to life imprisonment.
While incarcerated at SCI Greene, a state prison in Pennsylvania, Hayes told Newsweek that he first became aware of transgenderism via an inmate named William Scott, who Hayes refers to as “Kim.” According to Hayes, Scott slipped information for a transgender support group into his cell in 2018.
Hayes told the outlet that the Cheshire murders would never have happened if he had “accepted” himself earlier.
“Every moment of that night haunts me because that is not who I am as a person… What happened goes against everything I believe and will haunt me forever. What makes it worse is knowing that I would never have been in that situation if I had accepted who I am sooner. I could have prevented years of pain I caused everyone if I had only accepted myself.”
In 2019, Hayes told listeners of a podcast hosted by Joe Tomaso that he had begun identifying as woman while in SCI Greene, and that he had been cited for contraband because he had a hand-fashioned bow in his hair and altered his prison gear to be more “feminine.” It was while he was at SCI Greene that Hayes changed his name, noting that he adopted the surname “Lee” in honor of a man he had been in a sexual relationship with at the facility.
“I did finally openly admit my personal truth that I am transgender and lived a life of severe gender dysphoria,” Hayes said. The inmate is currently proceeding in an ongoing lawsuit demanding $150,000 from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections for having previously confiscated his “gender affirming” items. In 2023, he was transferred to Oregon State Penitentiary, which he described as being “amazing by comparison” to Pennsylvania.
However, Hayes’ repeat claims of “gender dysphoria” are somewhat contradicted by expert testimony that was given by forensic psychiatrist Dr. Eric Goldsmith for the defense team during Hayes’ trial. According to Goldsmith, Hayes was motivated by a sexual fetish, not by “gender dysphoria.”
Since the age of 16, Hayes had been in and out of prison for charges ranging from writing bad checks to petty larceny. From a young age, Hayes learned how to manipulate those around him. While being held at the Cheshire Correctional Institution at the age of 17, Hayes penned a letter to prison officials seeking to have his sentence reduced.
“I feel that in the three months I have been here at Cheshire I have learned that I cannot go around breaking the law and expect to get away with it. I know what I did was inexcusable, but I will promise anything that it will never happen again,” Hayes wrote. “You have probably heard promises before, so all I can ask is that you accept my promise as the truth.”
During Komisarjevky’s trial in 2011, his legal counsel said Hayes checked out 24 fictional books in prison the year before the home invasion. Komisarjevsky’s attorneys said the majority of the books, according to the Connecticut state Department of Corrections, “pertain to very violent murders to include strangulation, rape, arson, serial killing, satanic torture and the burning of victims. Most victims are women.”
Currently, the Wikipedia entry on the Cheshire murders lists Hayes under the name “Linda” and refers to him with feminine pronouns. The site’s “talk” page for the article, which provides guidelines for editors, advises that the article “should adhere to the gender identity guideline because it contains material about one or more trans women.”
“Precedence should be given to self-designation as reported in the most up-to-date reliable sources, anywhere in article space, even when it doesn’t match what’s most common in reliable sources,” read the Wikipedia recommendations. Any person whose gender might be questioned should be referred to by the pronouns, possessive adjectives, and gendered nouns that reflect that person’s latest expressed gender self-identification.”
The issue of referring to Hayes as though he were actually a woman named Linda is a contentious one, with disapproval being expressed by Wikipedia users and editors. “This is a rapist and a murderer, and he only started identifying as a woman decades after his crime, yet you call him ‘she’ when talking about the rape and murder. This is ridiculous and an insult to the victims,” one critic remarked.
“Groomers supporting rapists and murderers. I stopped financially supporting Wikipedia years ago. I don’t regret it,” replied another individual.
