Cheshire Murders Explained by Steven Hayes: 'I Just Snapped'
The man convicted of murdering three people in Connecticut in 2007 has spoken out in a new interview and offered an explanation for the brutal assault and murder. Steven Hayes is currently on death row for the murders of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters Hayley and Michaela.
"To this day I don't know why it happened," Hayes told the New Haven Register, "I just wanted money. That's all I was looking for. Nobody was going to get hurt – at least not by me."
Unfortunately, that changed when his accomplice, Joshua Komisarjevsky, admitted that he sexually assaulted 11-year-old Michaela while Hayes was gone with the girls' mother to get money from a bank. After Komisarjevsky's confession, Hayes strangled and sexually assaulted Hawke-Petit.
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"I started to lose it. Then I looked out the window and saw an unmarked police car, and I just snapped. I wasn't thinking right; I don't know what I was thinking. It was so unlike me. I'd never done anything like that. It took a year before I could even remember what happened in those last few minutes. I was told it was rage and stress or something. I'll never forgive myself for that."
The girls were burned alive and the house burned to the ground as Hayes and Komisarjevsky fled the scene. They accidentally crashed their vehicle into police cruisers and were taken into custody. Hayes and Komisarjevsky were both sentenced to death.
"There is never complete closure when you lose your wife and family, but the first part is over and we think justice has been served," Dr. William Petit, the sole survivor of the attack, told ABC after the verdict for Komisarjevsky was read.
Dr. Petit has managed to move on with his life and last month announced that he and new wife Christine are expecting their first child in December. They married last August and just recently celebrated their first anniversary.
