You’re the judge: From pasta to pure horror
They’d been to the supermarket when evil followed them home ...
Pushing a shopping trolley, Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughter Michaela, 11, picked groceries for their Sunday dinner. It was 22 July 2007 and Jennifer was planning to cook pasta and bruschetta once her husband Bill got home from golf and their older daughter Hayley, 17, was back from the beach.
It’d been a relaxed weekend for the Petits, who lived in a detached home in Cheshire, Connecticut, USA.
Bill was a doctor, while paediatric nurse Jennifer didn’t let her multiple sclerosis hold her back from caring for her family.
But as Jennifer and Michaela loaded their Mercedes with shopping bags, danger lurked.
Joshua Komisarjevsky, then 26, and Steven Hayes, 44, were career criminals who robbed houses to fund their drug addictions.
They’d met in a halfway house, both had troubled upbringings, were on parole for burglary.
Hayes was using crack cocaine, was broke, homeless.
And the pair spotted Jennifer and Michaela. Followed them home. Saw their posh house and concocted a terrible plan.
As the Petit family ate dinner, watched TV and read that evening, Komisarjevsky and Hayes bought an air rifle and rope.
After Jennifer and the girls went to bed, Bill
dozed on the sofa.
It was 3am when he awoke in agony, blood gushing from his head.
Two shadowy figures were lunging at him with a baseball bat.
Komisarjevsky and Hayes.
Terrifying ordeal
They threw Bill in the basement, tying him to a pole.
Tied Jennifer, Hayley and Michaela to their beds, covered their heads with pillowcases.
For hours the robbers ransacked the house.
Found a bank book stating the family had thousands in savings.
So at 9am, Hayes drove Jennifer to the Bank of America, instructed her to withdraw $15,000 (around £11,000) or threatened that her girls would die.
Bank CCTV captured Jennifer conveying a desperate SOS to the cashier that she and her family were held hostage.
As she calmly left the bank and got back into the car with Hayes, staff alerted authorities.
Only, within 40 minutes, as police set up a cordon around the Petits’ home, it went up in flames. Screams were heard. Incredibly, Bill Petit managed to escape the basement, bleeding profusely.
But firefighters found three charred bodies inside.
Jennifer had been raped and strangled before petrol had been splashed around the house.
Set alight.
Post mortems found her daughters had died of smoke inhalation.
Horrifyingly, Michaela had also been sexually assaulted before she’d died.
And Hayley’s body was found at the top of the stairs – she’d collapsed there after escaping her bedroom.
Police arrested Komisarjevsky and Hayes as they fled.
Separate trials
Over the following months, as Bill Petit lived with his parents, recovering from his brain injuries, he’d awake in a panic every night at 3am – the time he was attacked.
A judge ruled Hayes and Komisarjevsky would stand trial separately.
And it was Steven Hayes, in September 2010, who appeared in court first.
He pleaded not guilty to 17 counts, including murder, kidnapping, sexual assault, burglary and arson.
Faced the death penalty if convicted.
Grieving Bill Petit went to court every day.
And during a trial as heartbreaking as it was gruesome, the prosecution described how Hayes and Komisarjevsky broke into the Petits’ home.
Held them captive. Eventually raping Jennifer and Michaela, dousing the bedrooms with petrol and setting it alight with the family inside.
Prosecution lawyer Michael Dearington argued Hayes and Komisarjevsky had committed these heinous crimes together.
He said, ‘What was a vibrant house of people at 9 o’clock became a house of terror.
‘There’s no way to recreate the fear, the terror, the horror that those girls experienced in their last few minutes.’
He told jurors they could ‘count the opportunities he [Hayes] had to walk away from this’.
Texts showed Hayes had messaged Komisarjevsky hours before the attack.
I’m chomping to get started. There was CCTV of him buying petrol used to torch the house.
Yet, Hayes’ defence lawyer, Thomas Ullmann, claimed Komisarjevsky was the mastermind.
Mr Ullmann told the court the plan was to break in, tie up the family, take money and get out.
Yet Komisarjevsky changed it by first beating Bill, then raping Michaela while Hayes and Jennifer were at the bank.
Hayes alleged Komisarjevsky then made him rape Jennifer to ‘square things up’.
‘No one was supposed to be hurt,’ said Mr Ullmann.
‘Steven Hayes is no angel. But he’s not the one who controlled the escalation of violence. That’s Joshua Komsarjevsky.
‘The psychopath in this case is Joshua Komisarjevsky, not Steven Hayes.’
Out of control
In his closing argument, Mr Dearington repeated the prosecution’s stance that Hayes and Komisarjevsky acted together.
‘He [Hayes] said, “Things got out of control.” It wasn’t things. It was them. They were out of control,’ Mr Dearington finished.
So did Hayes simply get swept up in his pal’s sadistic violence?
Had he really not wanted anyone to get hurt?
Or had he revelled in the cruelty, too?
The decision was down to the jury...
In 2010, the jury convicted Steven Hayes of 16 charges, including kidnap, murder, burglary and sexual assault. He was acquitted of arson but handed six death sentences, plus 106 years.
Just over a year later, Joshua Komisarjevsky was found guilty on all 17 counts, including kidnap, burglary, sexual assault and murder.
During his trial, he had also tried to unsuccessfully pin the blame on his accomplice, saying it was Hayes who had escalated the violence.
Komisarjevsky was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
In 2015, however, as both men waited on death row, Connecticut abolished the death penalty and they were sentenced to life without parole instead.
Since the brutal and merciless slaughter of his family, Bill Petit has worked tirelessly to honour their memory by founding a charity for victims of violence, the Petit Family Foundation.
He’s also found love with second wife Christine. The couple married in August 2012, with Jennifer’s family present, and have a son together.
Bill now works as a victims’ advocate and has launched a political career as a state representative.
Despite his new happiness, he says he copes with his loss by helping others, just as kind-hearted Jennifer, Hayley and Michaela always did.
‘We want to go forward with the Petit Family Foundation and create good out of evil,’ he has said.