On July 23, 2007, two home intruders entered the home of the Petit family in Cheshire, Connecticut, United States. The perpetrators, Linda Mai Lee (known as Steven Hayes at the time) and Joshua Andrew Komisarjevsky, initially planned only to burgle the house, but went on to murder Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters, 17-year-old Hayley Petit and 11-year-old Michaela Petit. Their father, Dr. William Petit, managed to escape despite sustaining severe injuries.
Upon entering the Petits' home, Komisarjevsky beat William with a baseball bat, and he and Lee restrained him in the basement, along with Jennifer and her daughters. Lee later kidnapped Jennifer and forced her to withdraw money at a bank. After returning to the home, Lee raped her and strangled her to death. Komisarjevsky raped 11-year-old Michaela. The invaders then decided to burn down the house to destroy evidence. The invaders tied Hayley and Michaela to their beds, doused them and the house with gasoline, and set it on fire, leaving them to die of smoke inhalation.
The case garnered significant attention in Connecticut, with the Hartford Courant citing it as "possibly the most widely publicized crime in the state's history". The murders received national and international attention, and had a significant impact on Connecticut's death penalty, ultimately delaying its abolition.
Lee and Komisarjevsky were convicted of the murders and sentenced to death. Their sentences 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.
Background
On the evening of Sunday, July 22, 2007, 48-year-old Hawke-Petit and her daughter Michaela went to a local Stop & Shop grocery store in Cheshire, Connecticut. They picked up food for a family dinner Michaela planned to prepare. During their trip to the grocery store, Komisarjevsky noticed and took interest in them, proceeding to follow them home.
Prosecutors argued at the trial that Komisarjevsky was motivated by money and his interest in Michaela, whom he later sexually assaulted.
Shortly afterwards, Lee sent a text message to Komisarjevsky that read, "I'm chomping at the bit to get started. Need a margarita soon." Lee then texted, "We still on?" Komisarjevsky replied, "Yes." Lee's next text asked, "Soon?", to which Komisarjevsky replied: "I'm putting the kid to bed hold your horses". Lee replied: "Dude, the horses want to get loose. LOL."
Home invasion
According to Lee's confession, Lee and Komisarjevsky had planned to rob the Petit house under the cover of darkness, leaving the family bound but otherwise unharmed. Both attributed the grisly outcome to a change of plan. Upon their arrival in the early hours of July 23, they found William asleep on a couch in the sun room. Komisarjevsky entered the basement through an unlocked door and took a baseball bat he found leaning on the basement stairs. Komisarjevsky then entered the sun room and used the bat to strike William four or five times. Komisarjevsky and Lee bound William's wrists and ankles with plastic zip ties and rope. William remembered one perpetrator telling the other, "If he moves, put two bullets in him." The children and their mother were then bound in their respective rooms. Lee and Komisarjevsky tied them by their wrists and ankles to their bedposts and placed pillowcases over their heads.
After restraining the victims, Komisarjevsky and Lee ransacked the house for cash. They then took William to the basement, where they tied him to a support pole. Lee and Komisarjevsky continued ransacking the house for money but were not satisfied with what they found. They then found a check register with $40,000. They decided to steal $15,000.
Surveillance video from a gas station shows Lee purchasing $10 worth of gasoline in two cans that were taken from the Petit home. After returning to the house, Lee took Hawke-Petit to the bank. The prosecution later claimed that this was evidence of premeditated murder. Lee forced Hawke-Petit to withdraw $15,000 from her line of credit when the bank opened. Hawke-Petit informed the bank teller that two men were holding her family hostage in their home and threatening to kill them all. Bank surveillance cameras captured the transaction. The bank manager called 9-1-1 and reported the situation to police while Hawke-Petit was still with the teller. The manager reported to the 9-1-1 dispatcher, in real-time, as Hawke-Petit left the bank. The manager told the dispatcher that Hawke-Petit had indicated that the home invaders were "being nice" and that she believed they only wanted money. The Cheshire police responded to the bank's report by assessing the situation and setting up a vehicle perimeter, without revealing their presence.
While the police were outside the house, Lee and Komisarjevsky aggravated the nature of their crimes. Komisarjevsky sexually assaulted 11-year-old Michaela, which he later confessed to when interrogated. Evidence that Komisarjevsky raped Michaela came from her autopsy, during which State Medical Examiner Dr. Wayne Carver found his semen in her body. Komisarjevsky photographed the assault and rape on his cell phone. In his interrogation, he claimed that he believed Michaela was 14 or 16. Forensic testing results showed that there was bleach on Michaela's clothes, indicating that Komisarjevsky may have tried to eliminate DNA evidence from the assault. According to Lee' confession, Komisarjevsky provoked Lee into raping Hawke-Petit.
William was able to hear his wife's assault upstairs. He yelled up and heard one of the invaders say, "Don't worry. It's all gonna be over in a couple of minutes." William then managed to escape. He later said, "I thought, it's now or never because in my mind at that moment, I thought they were going to shoot all of us."
In confessing, Lee said that while raping Hawke-Petit on the living room floor, Komisarjevsky entered and announced that William had escaped. Lee then strangled Hawke-Petit. Lee and Komisarjevsky doused her lifeless body and parts of the house, including the daughters' bedrooms and daughters themselves, with gasoline. Investigators would later find the accelerant on the Petit sisters' beds and on the clothing they were wearing. Lee and Komisarjevsky started a fire and fled the scene. Hayley and Michaela both died of smoke inhalation. Hayley managed to escape her restraints and run out of her bedroom and into the hallway where she collapsed and died. Her body was found at the top of the staircase. Third- and fourth-degree burns on her feet indicated that she got very close to the fire around the time she died. The medical examiner who performed an autopsy on her could not determine if the burns occurred before or after her death. Michaela's body was found in her bedroom. She was still in her bed, her hands tied to it and her lower body hanging off it. Like with her older sister, Michaela's burns may have occurred while she was still alive.
William had been able to free himself of his restraints, exit the house, and crawl to a neighbor's yard for help. The neighbor initially did not recognize him due to the severity of his injuries. Meanwhile, Lee and Komisarjevsky fled the scene in the Petit family car. They were immediately spotted by police surveillance, pursued, and arrested one block away after crashing into a police car. The home invasion had lasted seven hours.
Both Lee and Komisarjevsky confessed to the murders. Detectives testified that Lee smelled of gasoline throughout her interrogation. Each assailant claimed that the other was the driving force and mastermind behind the home invasion. Komisarjevsky also blamed William for the murders. In Komisarjevsky's diary, which was later entered into evidence, he called William a "coward" and claimed that he could have saved his family if he wanted to.
Victims
Hawke-Petit was a nurse and co-director of the health center at Cheshire Academy, a private boarding school in Cheshire. She met her husband at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh in 1985, when she was a new oncology nurse and he was a third-year medical student at the University of Pittsburgh. She and Dr. Petit married in 1985.
The Petits' elder daughter, Hayley, had just graduated from Miss Porter's School, where she played varsity cross country, basketball, and crew and was a high honor roll student. While at Miss Porter's, she was elected to the senior leadership position of Athletic Association Head. She also won a school award for "exceptional community service". Hayley was scheduled to attend Dartmouth College where she wanted to study medicine. Hayley had been an active fundraiser for multiple sclerosis research, following her mother's diagnosis with that disease. She captained a Walk MS Team called Hayley's Hope.
The Petits' younger daughter, Michaela, attended the Chase Collegiate School before her death. After Hayley left for college, Michaela planned on taking over Hayley's Hope and renaming it "Michaela's Miracle". Michaela often cooked for her family and had done so the evening before the murders.
William, the sole survivor of the home invasion, was an endocrinologist in Plainville. He was also the medical director of the Joslin Diabetes Center at Connecticut's Central Hospital. He survived when he escaped via a direct external exit from the basement despite his injuries. William has not returned to his medical practice since the murders, stating his desire to be active in the foundations set up to honor the memory of his family. He contemplated running for Congress as a Republican, but later decided against it. In the following election cycle, he successfully campaigned for the Connecticut General Assembly and served as a state representative.
Perpetrators
Linda Mai Lee
Lee, born Steven Joseph Hayes, was first convicted for burglary in 1980 at age 16, and tried as an adult. She was paroled in 1982 but violated her parole conditions seven weeks later. During the time between this incident and the Cheshire murders, Lee was arrested nearly 30 times and spent most of this time incarcerated. Lee's last arrest before the Cheshire murders was in 2004 after she smashed a car window with a rock and stole a woman's purse. She was paroled in 2006 and was sent to the Silliman halfway house where she met Komisarjevsky.
Lee was found guilty on 16 of 17 counts related to the Cheshire murders on October 5, 2010. On November 8, 2010, the jury returned with a recommendation for her to be executed. Lee was formally sentenced to death by Superior Court Judge Jon C. Blue on December 2, 2010.
Lee was an inmate of the Connecticut Department of Correction. Subsequent to sentencing for the Petit murders, and up until August 16, 2016 (when she was transferred to a correctional facility in Pennsylvania as part of an interstate corrections compact), she was incarcerated in the Northern Correctional Institution, which housed the state's death row for men, in Somers, Connecticut. The method of execution employed by Connecticut was lethal injection, and the state execution chamber was located in the Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers. This sentence became a life sentence when the Connecticut Supreme Court vacated the sentence in 2015.
While incarcerated, Lee came out as a trans woman and began hormone therapy as part of her gender transition. In an interview in October 2019, she said she had been diagnosed with a gender identity disorder at 16, but never treated.
By 2025 she had changed her legal name from Linda Hayes to Linda Mai Lee and was imprisoned at the Oregon State Penitentiary.
Joshua Andrew Komisarjevsky
Komisarjevsky, originally from Torrington, was Lee's co-conspirator in the home invasion and murders. He was born to a 16-year-old girl impregnated by a mechanic who was "barely out of his teens", according to adoption officials. He was adopted by Benedict Komisarjevsky, the son of theatrical director Theodore Komisarjevsky and dancer Ernestine Stodelle, and his wife Jude (née Motkya). He was sexually abused as a child, also burned and tortured.
In the early 1990s, Komisarjevsky's sister accused him of sexually assaulting her. He was convicted, and, during the penalty phase of his trial, Komisarjevsky's father conceded that it was probably true. Komisarjevsky committed his first burglary when he was 14. In 2002, he was arrested for 18 home invasions. Komisarjevsky's defense attorney at the time says that Komisarjevsky told him about every burglary he committed in perfect detail. Komisarjevsky told his attorney that, after robbing the houses, he would go to the rooms where the occupants were sleeping and listen to them breathe. He said he did this because he enjoyed the feeling of invading people's homes and violating their security. Komisarjevsky was convicted of 12 counts of burglary in December 2002. He was sentenced to nine years in prison with six years of special parole. During his sentencing hearing, Judge James Bentivegna described Komisarjevsky as a "calculated, cold-blooded predator". Komisarjevsky was paroled in April 2007. Under Connecticut law, prosecutors were supposed to send the parole board a transcript of the sentencing proceeding. But the parole board that released Komisarjevsky never received the transcript and was not aware of all the details regarding his case. After being paroled, Komisarjevsky stayed at the Silliman halfway house, where he met Lee.