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Speaker 1: You are now listening to True Murder, The most Shocking
Speaker 1: Killers in True crime History and the authors that have
Speaker 1: written about them Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK. Every
Speaker 1: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 1: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 1: journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Speaker 6: Good Evening. This is the program True Murder, The most
Speaker 6: shocking Killers in true crime History and the authors that
Speaker 6: have written about them with your host stan Zepansky. The
Speaker 6: affluent suburb of Chesshire, Connecticut, seemed like the perfect place
Speaker 6: for doctor William Pettitt and his wife, Jennifer Hawk Pettitt,
Speaker 6: to raise their two lovely daughters until July twenty third,
Speaker 6: two thousand and seven, when, according to the police, two
Speaker 6: ex cons invaded the Pettitt home, hoping to embark on
Speaker 6: a routine robbery, one that would ultimately prove deadly. One
Speaker 6: unfolded at three hundred Sorghum Mill Drive was a tragic
Speaker 6: and horrifying sequence of events that shocked the community and
Speaker 6: made headlines across the nation. Before the morning was over,
Speaker 6: missus Hawk Pettit and one of the daughters would be
Speaker 6: sexually assaulted and the entire house would go up in flames,
Speaker 6: and only doctor Pettitt, his head bloodied, his legs bound,
Speaker 6: would manage to escape with his life with the help
Speaker 6: of neighbors and local police. The two success two suspects
Speaker 6: were soon found captured. Now Joshua Commisarjeski and Stephen Hayes
Speaker 6: away trial for murder. The book this evening that we
Speaker 6: are featuring is in the Middle of the Night with
Speaker 6: my host, journalist and author Brian McDonald. Thank you for
Speaker 6: intervening to this agreeing to this interview, Brian, and welcome
Speaker 6: to the programme Brian Donald.
Speaker 7: Hey Dan, how are you Tony?
Speaker 6: Very well and thank you for agreeing to this interview.
Speaker 6: A great book, by the way, no problem.
Speaker 7: Thank you.
Speaker 6: Now, first off, let me ask the question I usually
Speaker 6: asked the guest because I'm always interested in it. Usually
Speaker 6: it's to an interesting answer. What made you decide to
Speaker 6: write a book about this particular case?
Speaker 7: Well, I mean, I mean, first of all, because of
Speaker 7: how shocking it was. I'll give you, I'll give you
Speaker 7: a little bit of the background. I didn't. I didn't
Speaker 7: open the paper. Now this was front page news. I
Speaker 7: live in New York City. This was front plate page
Speaker 7: New York Times news. This murder in Connecticut. For for
Speaker 7: a while after it happened. And it wasn't like I
Speaker 7: opened the paper and said, Jesse, I want to write
Speaker 7: about this. And it didn't unfold that way at all.
Speaker 7: I had written a book from my publisher, a true
Speaker 7: crime book called Safe Farber. It was about a woman
Speaker 7: that was murdered on Nantucket. And so I have a
Speaker 7: little bit of a track record with Saint Martin's True
Speaker 7: Crime and my agent and my editor from the first
Speaker 7: true crime book I did, conspired and called me and
Speaker 7: asked me if I would be interested in in writing
Speaker 7: about the Cheshire murders. So I didn't jump into it
Speaker 7: right away. It was such a heinous crime. It was,
Speaker 7: you know, I mean, it involved children's sexual abuse all
Speaker 7: you know, things that can keep you up at night,
Speaker 7: you know, And so I but after after reading about
Speaker 7: it and doing some initial you know, investigating into it,
Speaker 7: I decided that it was a story and it was
Speaker 7: a story that resonated so so clearly with in cold blood,
Speaker 7: you know, the granddaddy of all true crimes. That it
Speaker 7: was an opportunity that I thought I couldn't I couldn't
Speaker 7: pass up, So so I did it.
Speaker 6: Now, let's go back and set the he's seen for
Speaker 6: where this crime takes place. The community to doctor William
Speaker 6: Pettitt and his wife and the daughter lived. Give us
Speaker 6: that background, give us to what the life of doctor
Speaker 6: Pettitt would be and his family. What were they like typically,
Speaker 6: what was the community like? How big is the community
Speaker 6: and where is it geographically to a bigger city where
Speaker 6: we might recognize.
Speaker 7: Okay, it's a it's a bedroom community Cheshire, Connecticut. It's
Speaker 7: a beautiful, bucolic New England town. It's like the towns
Speaker 7: you see in UH in movies about about New England.
Speaker 7: That's uh. There's some farming elements still there, but it's
Speaker 7: been built up through uh, you know, several waves of
Speaker 7: affluence and uh. It's a bedroom community to Hartford, not
Speaker 7: only Hartford where the insurance companies, uh, you know, the
Speaker 7: big insurance companies UH have their headquarters, but also to
Speaker 7: Yale Yale University and a lot of people that work
Speaker 7: at four the university live in Cheshire. Connecticut. Now. Doctor
Speaker 7: Pettitt was the endochronologist. His wife was a nurse worked
Speaker 7: in a local private school, Cheshire Academy, a very well
Speaker 7: known in the area of private school and she was
Speaker 7: the school nurse. Doctor Pettitt had a private practice and
Speaker 7: also worked out of a hospital up there. He was
Speaker 7: very well known in the community, very well respected in
Speaker 7: the community. They had had two daughters, Hayley who was
Speaker 7: about to enter Dartmouth. She was going to follow her
Speaker 7: father's footsteps. He had graduated from Dartmouth. She was going
Speaker 7: to study pre law and michaela who was eleven at
Speaker 7: the time. And michaela precocious young lady who was a
Speaker 7: fan of Rachel Ray and wanted to be a foodie,
Speaker 7: a chef, celebrity chef and what have you. So they
Speaker 7: were really the idyllic family. I mean, it was a
Speaker 7: perfect little block. They lived on. Sorgham Mill Drive is
Speaker 7: a you know as a block replicated thousands of times
Speaker 7: throughout North America. It's the kind of block you want
Speaker 7: to live on, you want to raise a family on.
Speaker 7: It's something like this happening on a street like that
Speaker 7: is so incongruous. It's uh it's it's absolutely shocking. So
Speaker 7: it was like the perfect setting for a family, for
Speaker 7: a for the doctor Pettitt's family.
Speaker 6: Now, let's go to the main characters in this tragic tale.
Speaker 6: Joshua Comas a Cooma's art.
Speaker 7: It's commis ar Jefski. Yeah, it's a mouthful, it's yeah Jefski. Okay,
Speaker 7: we got it. That name. First of all, Dan, let
Speaker 7: me just give you a little background. I mean, the
Speaker 7: name itself is was you know, it's a famous Russian name.
Speaker 7: His Joshua was a adopted into the family. But I mean,
Speaker 7: you're not alone tripping over that name. Everybody trips over
Speaker 7: all the journalists do, all the law enforcement people throughout
Speaker 7: his life, everybody associated can't get this name out. But
Speaker 7: the name, you know, it's Russian. That's that's snow shock.
Speaker 7: But it's a very famous His grandfather, his adoptive grandfather,
Speaker 7: Joshua was adopted, was a Russian uh director, a very
Speaker 7: well known director, Russian director in the in the Bolshoi Theater,
Speaker 7: the famous Bolshoi Ballet, the Bolshoi Theater, moved to emigrated
Speaker 7: to the United States, and uh you know, uh, well,
Speaker 7: I'll tell you a little bit about how how Joshua's
Speaker 7: family came out. But go ahead, I'm sorry to throw
Speaker 7: up what was your question?
Speaker 6: No, no, I just uh, it's Joshua's life.
Speaker 7: You met.
Speaker 6: You've already alluded to that he's adopted, So tell us, uh,
Speaker 6: go just back a little bit to how he came
Speaker 6: to be adopted into this a wealthy, affluent family.
Speaker 7: Okay, he was, you know, he was adopted at birth.
Speaker 7: He didn't know his birth parents. His he found a
Speaker 7: little bit out about them later on. And his mother
Speaker 7: was only sixteen. His biological mother was only sixteen. His
Speaker 7: father was just a little bit older, maybe nineteen twenty.
Speaker 7: There was the indications that there was, you know, that
Speaker 7: there might have been drugs involved in the biological parents,
Speaker 7: and that's why they put Joshua up for adoption. But
Speaker 7: that didn't do anything to give him a bad life,
Speaker 7: because he traded He traded up by being adopted. He
Speaker 7: was adopted the Commissar Jeski's. His parents, his adoptive parents,
Speaker 7: Ben and Jude Commercer Jessky, were by all indications, a lovely, lovely,
Speaker 7: lovely couple. There were Christians, they were fervent Christians. Joshua
Speaker 7: had blown to a series of of I want, I
Speaker 7: don't want to say fundamentalist churches, but in that vein,
Speaker 7: you know, very very religious people and and they were also, uh,
Speaker 7: the surroundings were just amazing. His his grandfather, not the
Speaker 7: Russian grandfather, because his grandmother married. It gets a little
Speaker 7: convoluted here, but his grandmother married the Russian grandfather died
Speaker 7: as grandmothers married a man by the name of Chamberlain
Speaker 7: who was a actually a pretty well known writer. He
Speaker 7: was columnist for several big magazines and also a book
Speaker 7: reviewer for the New York Times. And he owned a
Speaker 7: sixty five acre estate in Cheshire, and it was surrounded
Speaker 7: by horse farms. It was it's beautiful. It's a wooded streams,
Speaker 7: babbling brooks, you name it. It was just a beautiful place.
Speaker 7: And that's where Joshua grew up. His his parents had
Speaker 7: a small house. They called it the homestead. It makes
Speaker 7: it sound like it's a bigger place than it actually was,
Speaker 7: you know. And it was kind of ramshackled when when
Speaker 7: I went up and start But the I mean, he
Speaker 7: had he had every every advantage. Now, early on he
Speaker 7: started to show some he started to show some behavioral
Speaker 7: problems and and and they had to take him out
Speaker 7: of uh public schools, and his mom homeschooled him. But
Speaker 7: that that didn't inhibit any any education at all. I
Speaker 7: mean he he his mother was a librarian. His a
Speaker 7: grandfather who lived on the estate with this, was a writer.
Speaker 7: His grandmother was a ballet dancer. I mean, they had
Speaker 7: all of this influence of arts and and and and
Speaker 7: letters and and uh. His father was Ben Commercer Jeesky.
Speaker 7: He was a carpenter and an electrician, so we had
Speaker 7: you know, tutelage in in uh, you know, working with
Speaker 7: his hands and everything. I mean, had a wonderfull childhood.
Speaker 7: It was just it was just great. But around the
Speaker 7: age of twelve he started to get he had this
Speaker 7: and you know, I'll tell you a little bit. I
Speaker 7: actually spoke to him on a number of occasions and
Speaker 7: had a correspondence with him via letter letters for many
Speaker 7: months leading up to the trial. But I'll tell you
Speaker 7: that later. So that's how I have all that This
Speaker 7: information comes firsthand. It comes from him. You know, when
Speaker 7: he was around twelve, he broke into a house he
Speaker 7: was coming home. He used to he used to leave
Speaker 7: the house like he'd wait till his parents went to sleep,
Speaker 7: and about twelve o'clock at night one o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 7: he'd get out of the house. He'd go out his
Speaker 7: bedroom window and jump on the garage and then go
Speaker 7: into the woods, you know, and spend the night in
Speaker 7: the woods. And they'd always make it back in time
Speaker 7: before six o'clock and when his father would wake up,
Speaker 7: So his father never knew he was out of the house,
Speaker 7: but he was. He was doing these night night voyages
Speaker 7: or whatever through the woods by himself, you know. And
Speaker 7: one day he got he ventured father than he thought,
Speaker 7: and the son was coming up, and he knew he
Speaker 7: was going to get caught, so he broke into a house.
Speaker 7: He's twelve years old. He broke into a house, stole
Speaker 7: a set of keys for a car, and took the
Speaker 7: car out of the driveway and drove it home so
Speaker 7: he could beat his father getting up so he wouldn't
Speaker 7: get caught. And that's how his life of crime started.
Speaker 7: And it was pretty big was for a twelve year old.
Speaker 7: There was a pretty big entrance to the last year
Speaker 7: rhyme stealing a car. But something he realized how and
Speaker 7: this is according to him, and you know how much
Speaker 7: of it is. You know, Joshua has a tendency to
Speaker 7: exaggerate a little bit. I think it doesn't his but his.
Speaker 7: I mean, the crimes that he would commit over the
Speaker 7: next fourteen years leading up to the murders in Cheshire
Speaker 7: were just enormous. I mean, even if only fifty percent
Speaker 7: of them were true, it was an enormous life of crime,
Speaker 7: and an amazing life of crime. He he found out,
Speaker 7: he said to me how easy it was to break
Speaker 7: into the house. So he started breaking into the houses
Speaker 7: when he was twelve. He'd get on his bicycle he'd
Speaker 7: have he'd go out the window of his bedroom, like
Speaker 7: like I said, he'd get on get on his bicycle.
Speaker 7: He had a camouflage outfit that he sent away for
Speaker 7: you know, like a male mail order camouflage outfit. He
Speaker 7: had a dark skull cap. Later on he bought night
Speaker 7: vision goggles, you know, from the back of a magazine
Speaker 7: something like that. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I'm laughing,
Speaker 7: but I'm not. It's not It's not funny at all.
Speaker 7: I don't I don't mean, I don't mean to diminish
Speaker 7: what what would happened. But you can imagine this kid
Speaker 7: at twelve, thinking that he was, you know, the burglar,
Speaker 7: you know, par excellence, and and and he was. He
Speaker 7: started breaking into houses by the dozens when he was twelve.
Speaker 7: He broke into houses all over this town of Cheshire
Speaker 7: and middle in central Connecticut. He broke into houses around
Speaker 7: the Pettit neighborhood where the you know, the murders would happen.
Speaker 7: Many years later, he by his own account, broke into
Speaker 7: at least two hundred houses during his teens. Sometimes he
Speaker 7: wouldn't take anything. He would sit in the house. He said,
Speaker 7: he wrote this whole letter of explaining how it was
Speaker 7: being in a house with the people sleeping upstairs and
Speaker 7: them not knowing he was there, and the feelings that
Speaker 7: he had. He'd listened to the sounds of the house,
Speaker 7: the pipes, the house settling, the wind in the eaves.
Speaker 7: I mean, it was really really creepy. He had this,
Speaker 7: you know, long, long explanation. Sometimes he wouldn't, like I said,
Speaker 7: he wouldn't take anything. Sometimes he'd just take a picture
Speaker 7: off the wall, just to like screw with the people's
Speaker 7: minds a little bit, you know. I mean there was something.
Speaker 7: I mean, obviously there was a something was something was
Speaker 7: a miss he or something was wrong with his you know,
Speaker 7: with his psyche early on, but he didn't get caught.
Speaker 7: He wouldn't get caught. He finally, when he was about
Speaker 7: I want to say, sixteen years old, he started a
Speaker 7: fire in an abandoned car dealership in Cheshire and he
Speaker 7: got caught for that. And because he got caught for that,
Speaker 7: some of the prior crimes came out. Either he gave
Speaker 7: it up himself or I'm not really sure how it happened,
Speaker 7: but he faced the first of a series of judges
Speaker 7: in his late teens that would he had like a
Speaker 7: he had this he has this way about him now
Speaker 7: when I interviewed him, I sort a lot. You know.
Speaker 7: It's that he comes across so likable, so polite, so
Speaker 7: soft spoken. So you know that people wanted to believe
Speaker 7: throughout his life that there was something in there worth saving,
Speaker 7: you know, there was something He has these uh, a
Speaker 7: way of looking at you that that that has an
Speaker 7: innocence about it, you know, and uh and and and
Speaker 7: he started to get breaks. You know, one judge after
Speaker 7: or another gave him you know, uh, you know, put
Speaker 7: him in like the parents. The first time, the first arrest,
Speaker 7: the parents talked the judge into letting them put him
Speaker 7: in a Christian Christian camp, and and he went into
Speaker 7: a Christian camp and up up in New Hampshire, and
Speaker 7: he spent some time up there, and then he got
Speaker 7: caught for something else, and the judge said to him, uh,
Speaker 7: you know, uh, you need some psychological help. So they
Speaker 7: put him in this cycle this it wasn't a mental hospital,
Speaker 7: but it was a hospital for trouble teens, a place
Speaker 7: for trouble teens, but it wasn't jail. And then the
Speaker 7: third judge, he got caught for something. The third judge
Speaker 7: said to him, you know, either go in the army
Speaker 7: or now he's nineteen, either go in the army or
Speaker 7: we'll put you in jail. So he joined the army.
Speaker 7: He would ultimately go a well from the army Army
Speaker 7: reserves about a year later, or less than a year later.
Speaker 7: But you know, there was so many missed opportunities early
Speaker 7: on where and in the meantime he amassed this like
Speaker 7: enormous number of burglaries, and you know, people were looking
Speaker 7: the other way. People kept thinking that there's something about
Speaker 7: this guy that's that's not you know, that's you know,
Speaker 7: he's too nice of a boy to be worried about,
Speaker 7: you know, But he wasn't, you know, he had already
Speaker 7: started to formulate a personality that wasn't a nice boy
Speaker 7: at all. It wasn't a nice boy at all.
Speaker 6: So one of the things that you didn't talk about
Speaker 6: we could talk about a little bit later. But I
Speaker 6: think it's fair that at least fair to his character.
Speaker 6: Not that I put that much weight on it, but
Speaker 6: but the fact is that, again, a lot of this
Speaker 6: stuff is coming from his perspective. He's telling you this,
Speaker 6: so you have no way to really verify. But in
Speaker 6: the same instance, to be fair, he says that at
Speaker 6: six years old.
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Speaker 6: It's old that there was two more adopted children and
Speaker 6: there was an older boy.
Speaker 7: Yeah yeah, Chares.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he characterizes not as moles station, So anybody's gonna
Speaker 6: He said it was outright flat out rape and was
Speaker 6: torturous for him for I don't know how much time.
Speaker 6: Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: because I mean there's anything, if there's anything about his
Speaker 6: background that seems amiss. This is really this, really is it,
Speaker 6: and it can be considered fairly well, very serious bite
Speaker 6: his idyllic.
Speaker 7: Background, considering considering what would happen on Sorgum Mill Drive,
Speaker 7: which we'll talk about, you know, in a little bit,
Speaker 7: but considering what happened in the house that night. Yeah,
Speaker 7: you're absolutely right. I mean, it has a huge, huge,
Speaker 7: and no doubt Joshua goes to trial next next year,
Speaker 7: early next year, and no doubt that's going to play
Speaker 7: a large part in the defense of of of him
Speaker 7: and what you're talking about his mother. It wasn't an
Speaker 7: adopted it was a She brought in two foster children
Speaker 7: and one of them was Joshua was six or seven
Speaker 7: at the time, maybe even younger. I don't I can't remember.
Speaker 7: Six yeah, six years old at the time. And this
Speaker 7: there was a boy and a girl of the foster children,
Speaker 7: and the boy was sixteen and according to Joshua, and
Speaker 7: it's and it's the court records, because Joshua would would
Speaker 7: be arrested when he was twenty two and and in
Speaker 7: those records, in testimony from that from that trial, he
Speaker 7: uh it came out that he had in fact been
Speaker 7: uh sexually assaulted by by this this forster Forster boy,
Speaker 7: you know, And Joshua, you're right, Joshua says, and I
Speaker 7: think the quote is merciless rape that he was and
Speaker 7: that it went on for months. You know, there's no way,
Speaker 7: I mean, even though it's court records, doesn't it I
Speaker 7: guess there's no way short of putting his parents on
Speaker 7: the stand. And I you know, I don't really know
Speaker 7: whether they were completely because it went on for so
Speaker 7: long to substantiate it completely. But there's you know, there's
Speaker 7: I think there's there's also court records from psychiatrist, psychologists
Speaker 7: and what have you that interviewed Joshua. So it's pretty
Speaker 7: there's a there's a pretty good chance that it actually
Speaker 7: occurred that he was raped when he was five or
Speaker 7: six by the by the older foster boy. So you're right.
Speaker 7: And and like I said, what what would transpire on
Speaker 7: sorgum Mill Drive would would certainly uh, you know that
Speaker 7: that is certainly a huge, huge part of his formative uh,
Speaker 7: his formation as a as a as a as a
Speaker 7: human being, but also as a as a criminal and
Speaker 7: as a you know, a criminal that committed one of
Speaker 7: the most heinous crimes in Connecticut state history. So you're right, yep.
Speaker 6: Now, the other perpetrator here, the other character in this
Speaker 6: is a man named Stephen Hayes, a lot more, a
Speaker 6: lot less interesting, but still for for the official record,
Speaker 6: Who is Stephen Hayes.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Stephen. They were like a Mutton Jeff combination. They
Speaker 7: met on and they met in a halfway house. Stephen Hayes,
Speaker 7: it was is quite a bit older than Joshua. He
Speaker 7: was a lifelong criminal. His first arrest was in his
Speaker 7: early twenties. It was believe it was a drug arrest,
Speaker 7: and then he would go on to have I think
Speaker 7: twenty twenty it's either twenty three or twenty six more
Speaker 7: arrests during his lifetime. So he was an habitual criminal.
Speaker 7: Most of the arrest had to do with drugs and
Speaker 7: money for drugs and what have you. He was, no doubt,
Speaker 7: by the time he met Joshua, almost institutionalized because he
Speaker 7: had spent you know, a large majority of his adult
Speaker 7: life behind bars, you know, in a dozen or more
Speaker 7: different prisons in and around the state of Connecticut. So
Speaker 7: he was, you know, and and during his trial, Hayes
Speaker 7: has already gone to trial, and his trial, there was
Speaker 7: a lot came out about his childhood. It wasn't it
Speaker 7: wasn't to leave it to Beaver. It wasn't you know
Speaker 7: the Huxtables by any stretch of the imagination. He had
Speaker 7: a rough childhood. His father was a uh you know,
Speaker 7: his father was in the wind early apparently left the
Speaker 7: family and the mother and uh, you know, they had
Speaker 7: it was it was a hard, hard, hard, hard, hard
Speaker 7: luck life, you know that he had. But he did.
Speaker 7: He also had two brothers who who went on and
Speaker 7: did just fine, you know, So it wasn't you know,
Speaker 7: there's no excuse there for the life that he chose.
Speaker 7: And you know, like I said, it was it's kind
Speaker 7: of a boring story. I mean, it's like he'd get
Speaker 7: out of jail, it'd start to work, it'd start to
Speaker 7: smoke crack, he'd start to steal to to perpetuate his
Speaker 7: his habit, and then he'd get arrested and go back
Speaker 7: to jail. And that's that's the That was the life
Speaker 7: from Stephen Hayes. He met Joshua in a halfway house.
Speaker 7: Uh it's called Stillman House, I believe, And it was
Speaker 7: on one of the many times he was in the
Speaker 7: parole process being paroled out into the into the world.
Speaker 7: And I always say this that you know, however you
Speaker 7: feel about that. I mean, there were so many there's
Speaker 7: so many parts about this crime that have like an
Speaker 7: evil aura aura or an element of of of evil
Speaker 7: to it. And the date that they met each other
Speaker 7: was kind of like one of those one of those things.
Speaker 7: They met on June sixth, two thousand and six, which
Speaker 7: is six sixty six, and that was you know, it
Speaker 7: probably means nothing, but it also was gave me a
Speaker 7: chill when I saw the when I saw the date,
Speaker 7: and they they hit it off right away. Hayes was
Speaker 7: kind of happy, go lucky guy if you can be
Speaker 7: as a as a lifelong convict, and he he was,
Speaker 7: uh a where Joshua was kind of a quiet, quiet guy.
Speaker 7: But somehow they hit it off. They liked each other,
Speaker 7: and uh, you know when they did end up going out,
Speaker 7: they uh I mean being let out of the halfway
Speaker 7: house into the into the world. They remained friends and
Speaker 7: and at first they were, you know, they were trying
Speaker 7: it looked by all appearances like they were trying to
Speaker 7: do uh, you know, live a straight and narrow you know,
Speaker 7: was clean and straight, straight and clean life. They uh
Speaker 7: both will going to uh cocaine anonymous meetings. They were
Speaker 7: they both became employed right away. They were doing some
Speaker 7: uh working for contractors. Joshua was putting roofs on on houses. Hayes.
Speaker 7: He got Hayes a job with this company. Hayes was
Speaker 7: also doing other things. And so it looked for a
Speaker 7: very short time like they were, you know, trying to
Speaker 7: actually you know, you know, there's a right to you know,
Speaker 7: live their life in a law abiding manner.
Speaker 6: So now, what did they plan to do? I mean,
Speaker 6: you say they were working for a little bit that
Speaker 6: was somewhat brief, But what was their original idea? Well,
Speaker 6: why did they even hook up? I mean, Joshua liked
Speaker 6: the guy, and obviously Hayes was impressed with Joshua a
Speaker 6: very charismatic guy of very organized and besides, Steve needed
Speaker 6: a break from Joshua. Was there something it sounded like
Speaker 6: originally that the most that maybe Hayes could have come
Speaker 6: up with is some kind of robbery of some sort
Speaker 6: or some burglary. He knew that this guy could break
Speaker 6: into places. So what was what was your research? What
Speaker 6: did you find was the at least their initial plan.
Speaker 7: Well, like I said, initially they were he were working
Speaker 7: legitimately together. There were you know, Hayes had a plan
Speaker 7: to buy his own. He was borrowing cars he didn't have.
Speaker 7: He had to borrow his mom's car. He was living
Speaker 7: with his mother in a small town called Winstead Up
Speaker 7: in central Connecticut, not too far from Cheshire, and he
Speaker 7: had to borrow his mom's car and friend's cars. So
Speaker 7: he was saving up for a truck. And part of
Speaker 7: his parole agreement was that he'd have a place to stay,
Speaker 7: and his mom signed off on that, and lord knows
Speaker 7: why she did, because he had, you know, so many
Speaker 7: times before put her in a position where, you know,
Speaker 7: where he didn't follow through on his promise. You know,
Speaker 7: he'd get high or something like that. So but this
Speaker 7: time it looked like he was going to do the
Speaker 7: right thing. He had saved a couple of thousand dollars
Speaker 7: to buy a car or a truck, and he was
Speaker 7: paying his mom rent, I think, and you know, he
Speaker 7: was trying to live the right thing. But then and
Speaker 7: he was going to these meetings he was going to
Speaker 7: he was staying clean and sober and uh, but then
Speaker 7: he got high. I mean, it was as simple as that,
Speaker 7: because all of a sudden that there were the two
Speaker 7: or three thousand dollars that he had and a bank
Speaker 7: account was gone, and his mother got wind of that.
Speaker 7: His mother found out about that, and she gave him
Speaker 7: an ultimatum. Han't been through this so many times before
Speaker 7: with him, that that he had to get out of
Speaker 7: the house. So now he was going to violate his parole.
Speaker 7: If his mother throw him out of the house, that
Speaker 7: meant the violation of his parole. He was going to
Speaker 7: go back to jail. So that was his impetus to
Speaker 7: to pull a crime. Now. Joshua, on the other hand, had, uh,
Speaker 7: you know, told Hayes about his exploits, you know, about
Speaker 7: how what kind of a burglar he was, and we
Speaker 7: haven't talked about that, but he was. He was. He
Speaker 7: was an incredible burglar.
Speaker 5: He was.
Speaker 7: He was uh, you know, they used to call him
Speaker 7: cat burglars. But he could break into uh, he could
Speaker 7: break into anything. He knew how to disarm alarm systems,
Speaker 7: He knew how to get into the most fortified houses.
Speaker 7: He did. He broke into businesses, he broke He says
Speaker 7: that he was a hired to burglarized places, lawyers offices
Speaker 7: and stuff like that. He was just so no doubt
Speaker 7: he was telling Hazel of this these stories when they
Speaker 7: were in the halfway house. So I think it's so
Speaker 7: the way, although this hasn't didn't come out in the trial,
Speaker 7: but it'll probably come out in Joshua's trial. The way
Speaker 7: I see it, at least is that Hayes approached approached
Speaker 7: Joshua with the with the idea. Now he said, he
Speaker 7: said to him, you know, why don't we do why
Speaker 7: don't we do a job together? Now by this time Joshua,
Speaker 7: who also had a history of drugs and a pretty
Speaker 7: pretty extensive history of drugs. I don't know whether Joshua
Speaker 7: was using by this time, by the time Hayes approached
Speaker 7: him with this, with this idea to pull a job together,
Speaker 7: but he must have been. You know. I know that
Speaker 7: soon after he was at a party where he was drinking,
Speaker 7: and that that's an indication that maybe he was not
Speaker 7: too far if if he wasn't already back on drugs.
Speaker 7: So Joshua said, yes, you know, he said, all right,
Speaker 7: we'll pull a job together. But they you know, they
Speaker 7: had this idea, Joshua, I guess Hayes put a dollar
Speaker 7: amount on it. He said he needed a big score.
Speaker 7: You know, he had to get an apartment. He had
Speaker 7: to get a car or he was going to be
Speaker 7: sent back to jail. He was going to have to
Speaker 7: he was going to violate his parole. So, you know,
Speaker 7: apparently they were they were going to do something that
Speaker 7: was out of even Joshua's ordinary, you know, they they
Speaker 7: came up with an idea. Whether it was Joshua, and
Speaker 7: I'd have to believe it was Joshua because he was
Speaker 7: infinitely smarter than Hayes and what have you. He came
Speaker 7: up with an idea to take a family hostage. He
Speaker 7: was going to break into the house and he was
Speaker 7: going to you know, neutralize whatever had to be neutralized,
Speaker 7: and he was going to tie whoever was up in
Speaker 7: the house, and he was gonna, you know, spend that
Speaker 7: time to ransack the house for money and and what
Speaker 7: have you. Now that's how it started. However, Joshua's motive
Speaker 7: for this crime wasn't just about money. If about money
Speaker 7: at all, I think that he was more or less given,
Speaker 7: you know, humoring Hayes about the about the idea to
Speaker 7: get you know, to make that they would find this
Speaker 7: kind of money in the house. But I don't I
Speaker 7: don't think that was Joshua's motive at all, and I'll
Speaker 7: talk about that if you'd like.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Well, tell us, uh, Joshua was the person that
Speaker 6: winds up spotting the victim or picking the potential victim
Speaker 6: for his this job idea. So a lot there's a
Speaker 6: lot of credibility or a lot of credence to the
Speaker 6: idea that he's the guy that came up with it. Now,
Speaker 6: tell us how we picked out the potential victims for
Speaker 6: this robbery idea, And tell us about who you think
Speaker 6: was the target. It wasn't just about robbery, And tell
Speaker 6: us why and and who this person was.
Speaker 7: Okay, the crime happened in Cheshire. The murders in Cheshire
Speaker 7: happened on a Sunday night, Monday morning. You know, actually
Speaker 7: it was Monday morning by the time they broke into
Speaker 7: the house. The night before, Hayes and Joshua had gone
Speaker 7: out looking to rob a house, and they actually broke
Speaker 7: into two houses in Cheshire. And from the way Joshua
Speaker 7: explains it the way court court, I mean information that
Speaker 7: came out through the trial of Hayes's trial, it was
Speaker 7: more like a dry run. They were like, Joshua was
Speaker 7: the burglar, Hayes wasn't he wanted to see how Hayes
Speaker 7: would react going into the houses and stuff like that.
Speaker 7: He wanted to put him through his paces a little bit.
Speaker 7: And that's what they did. They robbed two houses the
Speaker 7: night before. I'm not saying that it wasn't listen to
Speaker 7: people that those houses that they burglarized. Believe me, they're
Speaker 7: breathing a sigh of relief that what happened on siorgam
Speaker 7: Mill Drive didn't happen to them. I'm not diminishing that
Speaker 7: at all. But but but from Joshua's perspective, it was
Speaker 7: more or less a you know, like a dry run.
Speaker 7: He wanted to see how Hayes would react under the
Speaker 7: pressure of robbing a house, et cetera, et cetera. So
Speaker 7: they robbed two houses and they got nothing that they stole.
Speaker 7: A couple of credit cards they stole there with some
Speaker 7: cash laying around, some odds and ends, not a lot
Speaker 7: of stuff, you know. They did, however, take pictures from
Speaker 7: the house, you know, family pictures of the house, and
Speaker 7: and I believe a knife. They stole a knife out
Speaker 7: of one house. It was scary stuff, but it wasn't Luckily,
Speaker 7: it wasn't, you know, even close what would happen the
Speaker 7: following night. The following night, he Joshua had plans to
Speaker 7: meet Hayes to go out again looking for a place
Speaker 7: to rob and that day, either that afternoon or maybe
Speaker 7: it was the afternoon before, Joshua went to stop and
Speaker 7: shop or a sporting goods store. He bought a pellet
Speaker 7: gun that uh, you know, handheld the pistol, pellet pistol.
Speaker 7: He bought rope, clothesline rope. He bought uh zip ties.
Speaker 7: He bought other things to to that that he would
Speaker 7: use on sorga mill drive. Was there a couple of masks, Well,
Speaker 7: they made the masks out of ski ski hats, you
Speaker 7: know nit hats. They put eyes in the you know,
Speaker 7: the cut eyes in the in the in the holes.
Speaker 7: So they didn't they didn't actually buy the masks, but
Speaker 7: they bought, you know, he bought the other stuff, and uh,
Speaker 7: he was Joshua has five year old daughter, or she
Speaker 7: was five back then when the crime happened. So she's
Speaker 7: older now and he he had just gotten custody of her.
Speaker 7: Now he was only out of jail, I mean, Hayes
Speaker 7: was Hayes was out of jail about a month. I
Speaker 7: think Joshua was out of jail, out of the halfway
Speaker 7: house even less time. So these guys weren't weren't oh no, no, Actually,
Speaker 7: Joshua was out a little bit more time. So these
Speaker 7: these you know, they were they hadn't been out in
Speaker 7: the population all that long. But Joshua somehow had gotten
Speaker 7: custody of his of his five year old daughter from
Speaker 7: from her mother, who was apparently having drug problems at
Speaker 7: the time, was in some rehab or something, so he
Speaker 7: had custody of his five year old. He was living
Speaker 7: at his mother's house where he grew up in his
Speaker 7: mother and father's house, And before he met Hayes the
Speaker 7: knight of the murders, he gave his daughter a bath,
Speaker 7: he read her Bible stories, put it, tucked her to bed,
Speaker 7: tucked her in, tucked her, put her to sleep, made
Speaker 7: sure she fell asleep. And all the time Hayes is
Speaker 7: texting him saying, you know, come on, let's go, you know,
Speaker 7: I'm ready, and Joshua's texting them back, hold your horses
Speaker 7: and putting the kid to bed, you know, and you know,
Speaker 7: considering what would happen several hours later, it's just it's
Speaker 7: just it's I'm sing, Yeah, it's mind boggling. It really
Speaker 7: is mind boggling. So finally he puts his daughter. His
Speaker 7: daughter goes to sleep. He also had a Joshua had
Speaker 7: a girlfriend who had just moved to Arkansas and her
Speaker 7: you know, I partly I think her father moved the family,
Speaker 7: although I guess it was had to be more than this,
Speaker 7: but to get away from him. She was sixteen years old.
Speaker 7: Joshua had a series that the girl that the mother
Speaker 7: of his daughter was fifteen when he impregnated her. He
Speaker 7: had a sixteen year old girlfriend when the murders occurred.
Speaker 7: She had just moved to.
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Speaker 7: So he was attracted to, you know, almost children, very
Speaker 7: very young girls. And by this time he's twenty six.
Speaker 7: So he's dating a sixteen year old and now she
Speaker 7: moves to Arkansas. But there she's on the computer sending
Speaker 7: him pictures of herself and they're having cyber sex on
Speaker 7: the phone. And this is after he put his girl,
Speaker 7: his daughter to sleep, and finally he gets dressed and
Speaker 7: his mother said. His mother said to police that when
Speaker 7: I saw him put on the dark he had like
Speaker 7: a dark sweatshirt, hooded sweatshirt. She said, I knew some
Speaker 7: there was, that there was trouble, that he was headed
Speaker 7: for trouble, you know. And Joshua left the house, left
Speaker 7: his daughter sleep asleep. His mother worried and got in
Speaker 7: the family van and went to meet Hayes. Now I
Speaker 7: jumped ahead a little bit. That afternoon, before all of
Speaker 7: this happened, Joshua was in the stopping shop parking lot
Speaker 7: in Cheshire. It was about six o'clock at night. He
Speaker 7: said he was waiting to get paid from a contractor
Speaker 7: he had done some work for. He was supposed to
Speaker 7: meet him in the parking lot. While he's waiting there,
Speaker 7: the Pettit family car, a Chrysler PACIFICA pulls up right
Speaker 7: next to him. In the car is Missus Pettit, Missus
Speaker 7: Jennifer Hawk Pettitt, doctor Pettitt's wife, and they were eleven
Speaker 7: year old daughter Michaela. Now Michaela was tall for her age.
Speaker 7: She was eleven years old. I mean, there's no getting
Speaker 7: away from that, but she was. She was taller than
Speaker 7: most of her peers and what have you, and precocious
Speaker 7: and bouncy. And Joshua watched MICHAELA get out of the
Speaker 7: car and go into stopping shop. She was going to
Speaker 7: buy some groceries for dinner that night. She was cooking,
Speaker 7: Like I said, she was a foodie, so she was
Speaker 7: cooking family dinner. And he waited for them to get
Speaker 7: out of the do the shopping, get back into the
Speaker 7: family suv, and Joshua followed them to sorgam Mill Drive.
Speaker 7: Now he saw the house, he said to me. When
Speaker 7: I talked to him, he said, the reason that he
Speaker 7: followed the Pacifica was that because the car said to
Speaker 7: him that the family had money. Now that's ludicrous. Cheshire, Connecticut,
Speaker 7: although it's not it's not the top affluent town. You
Speaker 7: can imagine it is very affluent, and Chrysler Pacifica is not.
Speaker 7: Is doesn't say money in Cheshire, Connecticut. I mean, you're
Speaker 7: talking about a parking lot that's filled with Mercedes and Bmwsuv's.
Speaker 7: It's not it doesn't save money at all, So that
Speaker 7: it shoots big holes in that in that excuse Joshua has.
Speaker 7: But so he had followed the He had followed the
Speaker 7: Pacifica to the Petitt home sorgum Mill Drive. He knew
Speaker 7: the area. He had robbed houses in the area there
Speaker 7: when he was just twelve years old, twelve fourteen years old.
Speaker 7: So later on when he picks up Hayes, when he
Speaker 7: meets Hayes, Hayes asks Joshua, do you have any ideas?
Speaker 7: And Joshua says, yeah, I do. So they went out
Speaker 7: and they went to a bar and they did some
Speaker 7: drink and they went they looked for houses to rob
Speaker 7: up by this bar in Bristol, Connecticut, which is about
Speaker 7: fifteen miles north of Cheshire. And then about three o'clock
Speaker 7: in the morning, Joshua said, come on, I got Let's
Speaker 7: go to the place that I wanted to go to.
Speaker 7: And they drove back to Cheshire, Connecticut, and on it
Speaker 7: was two thirty three o'clock in the morning onto Sorgam
Speaker 7: Mill Drive. And you know Sorgum Mill Drive that time
Speaker 7: of the night, you can hear a pin drop. I mean,
Speaker 7: it's the most it's it's you know, the quintessential quiet
Speaker 7: suburban block. And they rolled up in front of the
Speaker 7: house or a couple of houses down from it. They
Speaker 7: put their masks on. They walked along the gravel street.
Speaker 7: It was paved, but there was loose gravel on it.
Speaker 7: I was on the street. There was loose gravel on it.
Speaker 7: You can imagine their feet crunching on the gravel. And
Speaker 7: they went up alongside the house, up the driveway, and
Speaker 7: Joshua noticed a light on in the porch was an
Speaker 7: enclosed porch, and there was a man sleeping on the
Speaker 7: couch who was docked the Pettitt. Joshua told Hayes to
Speaker 7: wait in the in the shadows in the trees. It
Speaker 7: had started to rain a little bit, and Joshua went
Speaker 7: around the back of the house. There were bulkhead doors.
Speaker 7: He opened the bulk had doors and was able to
Speaker 7: jimmy the door into the basement open. He uh, he
Speaker 7: had a small little flash light with him. He swept it,
Speaker 7: swept the basement with the light and found saw a
Speaker 7: Louisville Slugger baseball bat at the at the foot of
Speaker 7: the stairs. He climbed up the stairs. And now this guy,
Speaker 7: he was as stealth as you could be, you know,
Speaker 7: I mean, he had nobody was gonna hear him come
Speaker 7: and come and walking on the on the floor or
Speaker 7: anything like that. He was able to sneak up to
Speaker 7: the couch where doctor Pettitt slept. He he raised the
Speaker 7: bat and and he and he told me that he
Speaker 7: swung it as hard as he could. He hit doctor
Speaker 7: Pettitt in the head as hard as he could. Now
Speaker 7: he has this man who had played golf that afternoon,
Speaker 7: had a family dinner, his two daughters, and his wife
Speaker 7: is sleeping upstairs. I mean, it had to be like
Speaker 7: this is this is the worst movie that could have
Speaker 7: ever played it. And it was so unlikely that something
Speaker 7: like this could happen to this man. Joshua hit him
Speaker 7: about Joshua hit him about six times, five or six
Speaker 7: times as hard as he could. Doctor Pettitt has some
Speaker 7: kind of a heart disorder, and he was on this
Speaker 7: stuff komit In, which is a blood thinner. So there
Speaker 7: was blood everywhere. Joshua told me that the blood was
Speaker 7: all over the all over the room, and all over
Speaker 7: him and all over doctor Pettitt. But doctor Pettit didn't die.
Speaker 7: He he was able to. Uh. Joshua sat him up
Speaker 7: on the on the bed and told him exactly what
Speaker 7: he was going to do, you know, and tied him up,
Speaker 7: and then he let Hayes into the house. And once
Speaker 7: that happened, they had control over the house, you know.
Speaker 6: So and he asked. He asked doctor pettit too. It
Speaker 6: was amazing that he got whacked six times as art
Speaker 6: as Joshua could. And then he got him up and said, listen,
Speaker 6: who's in the house.
Speaker 7: We want to right upstairs, Joshua. Joshua said he was
Speaker 7: worried about that. He knew, he knew the girl, the
Speaker 7: girls were in the house, but he thought maybe there
Speaker 7: was you know, a uh they had a son, he said.
Speaker 7: He said to me, he was worried that it was
Speaker 7: a thirteen year old, I mean eighteen year old wrestler
Speaker 7: in the house or something like that. So he was
Speaker 7: worried about that. But then him and Hayes walked up
Speaker 7: the stairs, you know, and they first went into the
Speaker 7: older daughter's room. Haley woke her up, you know, with
Speaker 7: the hand over the mouth so she wouldn't scream, and uh,
Speaker 7: you know, they had the pistols, so you know, doctor
Speaker 7: Petitt was tied. Of course, they tied him up, gagged
Speaker 7: and uh, they had the pistols, so it looked like
Speaker 7: a real gun, you know, the pelic gun looks like
Speaker 7: a real gun that somebody that doesn't know. And they
Speaker 7: were able they were able to tie Haley up with
Speaker 7: the to the bed and bind her hands. And then
Speaker 7: they walked into the master bedroom where Michela had gone
Speaker 7: to sleep with her mother, and uh, they woke you know,
Speaker 7: the the mother and Michaela up, and they also tied them.
Speaker 7: They brought Michaela back to her bedroom and tied her
Speaker 7: to the bed in her bedroom. And now they had
Speaker 7: the family held hostage, just like that, you know, just
Speaker 7: like that, they had dominion over the house.
Speaker 6: You know what they do next?
Speaker 7: Well, I mean they were in the house for six hours,
Speaker 7: and you know, at some point Joshua got the came
Speaker 7: across the check book. I mean they ransacked the house.
Speaker 7: I mean I'm not ransacked, but I mean pulled out
Speaker 7: drawers and looked for money and stuff like that. And
Speaker 7: at some point Joshua saw a checking account that had
Speaker 7: money in it, and I guess he came up with
Speaker 7: the idea then that they were going to bring missus
Speaker 7: Pettitt to the bank and withdraw money from it. And
Speaker 7: you know, to wait till nine o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 7: So they got in the house. It's at three. You
Speaker 7: had six hours that they were in this house. Can
Speaker 7: you imagine the terror of this family? Uh, these these
Speaker 7: girls you know, went through We're thinking and uh you know,
Speaker 7: at some point Joshua sent Hayes out for uh for
Speaker 7: to Phillip. They found gallon uh win your wipe or
Speaker 7: fluids containers in the garage and empty the fluid out
Speaker 7: of the containers, and he sent Hayes to a gas station.
Speaker 7: So as soon as that, as soon as they made
Speaker 7: that move, they had decided that nobody was going to
Speaker 7: live in that house, you know. I mean, there was
Speaker 7: a whole lot of things said in the trial that,
Speaker 7: you know, they were going to take the family out
Speaker 7: of the house and burn the house down for DNA
Speaker 7: evidence and stuff like that. But that's all that's all nonsense.
Speaker 7: As soon as they as soon as Hayes went to
Speaker 7: the gas station, they had made up their minds that
Speaker 7: they were going to kill everybody in the house, you know.
Speaker 7: And when Hayes was at nine o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 7: things started to really spin, spiral out of control, descent
Speaker 7: into like a hell. Hayes brought Missus Pettitt to the
Speaker 7: to the bank at at at nine o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 7: Now it's raining pretty hard outside. While Hayes is uh
Speaker 7: in going to the bank with Missus Pettitt. Joshua was
Speaker 7: in Michaela's room. He stripped her, He took pictures of
Speaker 7: her naked with his with his cell phone. He had
Speaker 7: at least he at least sexually assaulted her, although in
Speaker 7: the Haz's trial it came out that in fact it
Speaker 7: wasn't it was much more than just assault. Joshua told
Speaker 7: me that he masturbated on her, and in Hayes's trial
Speaker 7: it came out that it was much worse than that,
Speaker 7: to an eleven year old girl bound and tied on
Speaker 7: her bed. Apparently he took pictures of Haley too, the
Speaker 7: eighteen year old girl. When Missus Pettit came back from
Speaker 7: the bank, Stephen Hayes raped and strangled her. She was
Speaker 7: the first her them that morning. Uh uh. And then
Speaker 7: they took the gasoline and spread it all over the
Speaker 7: uh the the main floor of the house, all the
Speaker 7: way up the stairs, around the beds where the girls were.
Speaker 7: The girls watched them, you know, the girls saw them
Speaker 7: pour the gasoline around their beds. This whole time. Doctor
Speaker 7: Pettitt is still, according to his testament, he was going
Speaker 7: in and out of consciousness. They had moved him into
Speaker 7: the cellar and tied him to a post in the cellar.
Speaker 7: So he wasn't he wasn't He didn't have an eye
Speaker 7: view first person, you know, a clear view of what
Speaker 7: was going on. He heard things up in the house,
Speaker 7: but he he really didn't know. And then either Hayes
Speaker 7: or driving now in the meantime, Oh, I forgot this.
Speaker 7: This is this is the past part. The missus Pettitt, Well,
Speaker 7: she taking fifteen thousand dollars out of the bank rights
Speaker 7: on the back of the of the what you oral
Speaker 7: slipped and my family is being held hostage in my house,
Speaker 7: and that she's able to tell the teller that they're
Speaker 7: not going to harm my family if you don't call
Speaker 7: the police, And of course the bank manager right away
Speaker 7: notifies the police. The Cheshia police come, you know, the
Speaker 7: cavalry comes to the house and they their response was criticized,
Speaker 7: and I believe rightly so, I mean, they spend so
Speaker 7: much time trying to get just the right equipment, you know,
Speaker 7: the swat team you're talking about, I don't know, a
Speaker 7: twenty man police force in Cheshire, Connecticut, and they put
Speaker 7: helicopters in the air and everything and securing a perimeter.
Speaker 7: In the meantime, the people that they're trying to save
Speaker 7: are still alive, but wouldn't be for very long, you know.
Speaker 7: So they had the house surrounded and either Joshua or
Speaker 7: Hayes lit the match and dropped the match, and both
Speaker 7: of them ran out of the house. They were caught.
Speaker 7: They had a the house went up in flames, an inferno,
Speaker 7: and you know, you can imagine, you know, I mean,
Speaker 7: it was doused with gasoline. You dropped the match. The
Speaker 7: house went up like a like a tinder box, and
Speaker 7: Hayes and Joshua were caught. There was a roadblock at
Speaker 7: the end of Sorger Mill Drive. They tried to run
Speaker 7: right through it. They totaled the card. They were in
Speaker 7: the Petit Petit suvy trying to make their escape, and
Speaker 7: and you know they were they were apprehended, you know,
Speaker 7: one hundred and fifty yards from the house, so there,
Speaker 7: you know, they didn't get far. But by that time
Speaker 7: the house was just an inferno. And you know, they
Speaker 7: said that they heard the girls screaming. Neighbors heard the
Speaker 7: girl screaming, and you can't you can only imagine the
Speaker 7: horror that that would happen. Doctor Pettitt was able to escape.
Speaker 7: He was able to get out of the house. He
Speaker 7: crawled through the basement bulkhead doors, hopped to a to
Speaker 7: the neighbor's house next door. He's actually he testified at
Speaker 7: the trial. Now Hayes Hayes trial was just culminated, just finished,
Speaker 7: and Hayes was sentenced to nice. Yeah, yeah, Hayes was
Speaker 7: sentenced to death. The first death sentence in you know,
Speaker 7: probably fifteen years. There was an execution in two thousand
Speaker 7: and five, but that fellow was that criminal was sentenced
Speaker 7: ten years before. So it's the first death sentence in
Speaker 7: a long time. And Joshua's trial occurs in early February
Speaker 7: or mid February, actually it begins, so and you know,
Speaker 7: there's probably a very good chance that he's going to
Speaker 7: be sentenced to death also, so you might have a
Speaker 7: double execution in Connecticut, first time ever.
Speaker 6: Maybe you know, right right, Well, it's incredible tale. Now
Speaker 6: we've only got a few minutes, but you know, if
Speaker 6: you if you can, we can go a little bit longer,
Speaker 6: because what I found really fascinating was from the interview
Speaker 6: that you pointed me to was that and I've seen
Speaker 6: this myself and there have been a few other authors.
Speaker 6: I talked to Nick Prawn from The Lethal Marriage about
Speaker 6: Bernardo Hamalka case, and he said the same thing happened
Speaker 6: to him where people were really critical. It surprised him,
Speaker 6: but he said he had quite a few people calling him,
Speaker 6: you know, exploitive. Maybe tell us about your experience. I
Speaker 6: thought it was interesting the response from doctor Pettitt too
Speaker 6: as well.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, I mean the book came out, and the
Speaker 7: book was because I know, I had three Joshua. Not
Speaker 7: only did I carry on this letter of correspondence with
Speaker 7: him back and forth for over over three months. I
Speaker 7: had two hundred handwritten pages that he that he sent me,
Speaker 7: so I had an enormous amount of access to his
Speaker 7: life and what happened that night in the crime. And
Speaker 7: and then not only that, he invites me to come
Speaker 7: up and and and interview him. And this is months
Speaker 7: years before his trial, you know, I mean, and that
Speaker 7: the Department of Corrections didn't ask me what I was doing,
Speaker 7: who I was, and I put my name on a
Speaker 7: visitor's list and the next thing you know, I'm interviewing
Speaker 7: Joshua commercer Jeski and I've and I had three face
Speaker 7: to face interviews with him in in the maximum security
Speaker 7: prison he's being held. So I had all of this
Speaker 7: information and it was and it caused quite a star
Speaker 7: in Connecticut because the book came out before the trial,
Speaker 7: and they thought it was going to uh, it was
Speaker 7: going to you know, because so much of it was
Speaker 7: Joshua's story that that it thought that it was like,
Speaker 7: you know, it was going to help the defense. You know,
Speaker 7: that he that that it was going to show him
Speaker 7: in a sympathetic light. And so actually nothing could be
Speaker 7: father from the truth. I just told it the way
Speaker 7: it was. I mean, it wasn't and it I don't
Speaker 7: I don't believe, but it just tells his life story,
Speaker 7: you know, and in fact, he had every advantage, you know,
Speaker 7: like I said before, the way it didn't come from
Speaker 7: a bad background at all, you know. So so when
Speaker 7: the book came out, I got it was just a
Speaker 7: firestorm of reaction, mostly from people and uh, you know,
Speaker 7: in in in the neighborhood, in the area of Cheshire, Connecticut.
Speaker 7: But it was violent, it was vitriolic. I had phone
Speaker 7: calls and letters and emails and calling me everything under
Speaker 7: the sun, saying that I was worse than than than
Speaker 7: the criminals that I deserve worse than what they get.
Speaker 7: I mean, it was pretty and it was really personal.
Speaker 7: It was a very personal thing, and you know, they
Speaker 7: questioned my motives and my you know, uh you know,
Speaker 7: call me a you know, like you said, an opportunist,
Speaker 7: and you know, all of this stuff, and none of
Speaker 7: that was anything. It was a news story to me.
Speaker 7: I was I was covering it as a news story,
Speaker 7: you know. It was it was. It was a horrible crime,
Speaker 7: and it was a terrible thing that but it's a
Speaker 7: news story and it deserves to be written about it
Speaker 7: that deserves to be covered. And just because I got
Speaker 7: an interview with a guy that wasn't my fault, where
Speaker 7: was I going to turn it down? No, I'm not
Speaker 7: going to interview him, you know, I'm not going to
Speaker 7: interview the one of the only two people surviving that
Speaker 7: had a a a first hand view of what happened.
Speaker 7: I mean, doctor pettit too, but doctor pettib was in
Speaker 7: the basement. But there's only two people alive that could
Speaker 7: tell you what happened inside that house, and I talked
Speaker 7: to one of them, you know, and I'm going to say,
Speaker 7: I'm not going to use that of course I'm going
Speaker 7: to use it. So so, I mean, you could go
Speaker 7: on Amazon dot com and see the city. There's like,
Speaker 7: I don't know how many reviews there are, but there's
Speaker 7: quite a substantial amount of reviews, and like ninety five
Speaker 7: percent of them are the worst possible review you can really,
Speaker 7: but percent of them are they didn't read the book.
Speaker 7: They didn't read the book, and they say it and
Speaker 7: there in their critique, in their in their review with
Speaker 7: a book, how dare this person do that? And how
Speaker 7: dare him do that? And you know, I mean, you know,
Speaker 7: you can understand they needed to be mad at at somebody.
Speaker 7: You know, this was this would rip the hole in
Speaker 7: this community up there. It was just such a bad,
Speaker 7: bad crime, you know, and they needed somebody to be
Speaker 7: mad at. And I came along and I was the target,
Speaker 7: no doubt about it. And and doctor Pettitt, you know,
Speaker 7: I have nothing but respect and an enormous amount of
Speaker 7: empathy for the man. I mean, can you imagine what
Speaker 7: what You can't imagine what he went through. And but
Speaker 7: he was vocal about the book. He made no no
Speaker 7: secret of.
Speaker 1: What were her his.
Speaker 6: Points though, I mean what specifically, what what did he say, well,
Speaker 6: why did he criticize it.
Speaker 7: Well, I got a call from the victim's advocate right
Speaker 7: before the book came out. Now it was literally like
Speaker 7: a week before the book came out, and the victims
Speaker 7: advocate asked me to hold off on publishing the book
Speaker 7: until after the trial. And I said, you know, I
Speaker 7: don't think I can. First of all, I'm the author.
Speaker 7: You know how it is, you know this the whole
Speaker 7: machinery goes into effect. You know, these books get printed,
Speaker 7: and you know, it's like it's like once the writer
Speaker 7: sends it in, it's out of their hands, you know.
Speaker 6: So the publisher.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so, which is what I told him to talk
Speaker 7: to the publisher and I think she did. She you know,
Speaker 7: and I and I said, listen, I'll call my editor.
Speaker 7: I'll do what, you know, because I didn't have you know,
Speaker 7: I mean, yes, I knew it was going to be
Speaker 7: sensational and in in in the context of Connecticut, it
Speaker 7: wasn't a big story. I mean, the book didn't sell.
Speaker 7: There's much better selling books out there, but in Connecticut,
Speaker 7: this was the biggest story for for a month, my book,
Speaker 7: you know what I mean. It was front page Hartford
Speaker 7: Current News for for weeks, you know. So it was big,
Speaker 7: big stuff in Connecticut, and I knew that was going
Speaker 7: to get that reaction, but I didn't care. I would
Speaker 7: have held off on it. I would have said, all right,
Speaker 7: you know, I'll wait till after the trial. You know,
Speaker 7: I'll wait after. But my publisher publishers thought differently. They said, no,
Speaker 7: no way, we're going to capitalize on this. So the
Speaker 7: book came out, and you know, it did. It did
Speaker 7: inhibit It did upset the trial process because they were
Speaker 7: going to try Joshua commercer Jewski first, and because the
Speaker 7: book is so laden with information about him, they decided
Speaker 7: to try Hayes first. So in that sense, it did
Speaker 7: did cause a problem. But it was also they also
Speaker 7: said it was going to taint the jury pool. Taint
Speaker 7: the jury pool, can you imagine? I mean that the
Speaker 7: fact of the matter is is that that they insisted
Speaker 7: that I guess doctor Pettitt, But the prosecutor insisted on
Speaker 7: going for the death penalty here, so that both Hayes
Speaker 7: and commercer Jewsky were going to plead guilty to life
Speaker 7: without parole. They weren't going to contest it. They were
Speaker 7: going to go to jail for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 7: But the prosecution said, no, we want these guys we
Speaker 7: wanted we want to we want them sentenced to death.
Speaker 7: So because of that, they have a trial that gets
Speaker 7: covered coverage worldwide, coverage, absolute worldwide. I mean, doctor Pettt's
Speaker 7: going to be on Oprah tomorrow afternoon. I mean, the
Speaker 7: the the uh, the uh, the interest in this, the
Speaker 7: the coverage of this thing was just insane and and
Speaker 7: every lurid detail about what happened to the eleven year
Speaker 7: old michaela, her sister, uh Haley, and Jennifer Hawke Pettitt
Speaker 7: was displayed all over the newspapers, all over everywhere. I mean,
Speaker 7: it was just you couldn't you couldn't, you couldn't look
Speaker 7: at this, the testimony and evidence that was presented at
Speaker 7: this trial. And that's because of the decision by the prosecutor.
Speaker 7: And I would imagine doctor Pettitt to go for the
Speaker 7: death penalty. So the fact that no matter that my
Speaker 7: book was going to taint the cheryl, can you imagine
Speaker 7: them trying to get a jury for the next trial
Speaker 7: for Joshua's trial, Now it's going to be I mean,
Speaker 7: who's not gonna in Connecticut is not going to know
Speaker 7: about this case and know about all of the you know,
Speaker 7: so so you know, I guess that was that was
Speaker 7: doctor Pettitt's thought about it, you know, and you know
Speaker 7: him here too. I think he needed somebody to be
Speaker 7: mad at, you know, And and you know, if that's
Speaker 7: if that's the way it is, that's fine with me,
Speaker 7: you know, because you know, I, like I said, I
Speaker 7: don't you know, I never wanted to hurt this man,
Speaker 7: and I thought I portrayed his family with dignity and
Speaker 7: respect in my book. I know I did. I went
Speaker 7: out of my way to do it. I mean, there
Speaker 7: was nothing wrong, there was nothing bad there to do
Speaker 7: it anyhow, but I was not but I did not sensationalize.
Speaker 7: And I try to be as uh as as uh
Speaker 7: you know, to put them in the light that they deserved.
Speaker 7: And I and I think I did so, you know,
Speaker 7: but you know, what are you going to do? He's
Speaker 7: you know. So that's that's how that played out, you know.
Speaker 6: And let me ask you a couple of questions here
Speaker 6: about this specifically. I wanted to know because I was
Speaker 6: involved in our cases are similar, there's some parallels. Anyway,
Speaker 6: I provided evidence I had a correspondence with the the
Speaker 6: killer for a year and this was well before the trial,
Speaker 6: well well before the trial. But in that my particular case,
Speaker 6: he had said he had passed out and didn't remember
Speaker 6: any anything of the commission of the crime. But as
Speaker 6: despite that, even there was other evidence, documentary evidence that
Speaker 6: was given to me, so I in turn contacted police.
Speaker 6: Now was any part of the criticism and was there
Speaker 6: was about that that you potentially could have had some evidence?
Speaker 6: I mean, you're you're talking about the only living witnesses.
Speaker 6: So when joshu Wa talks about Hey and Hayes talks
Speaker 6: about Joshua, was there anything like that? And and did
Speaker 6: you have any responsibility to go to authorities? And was
Speaker 6: there any criticism because you didn't and you acted like
Speaker 6: a journalist and just held back the information. Tell me
Speaker 6: if there was anything like that in your.
Speaker 7: Particular Well, you're absolutely right, Dan, I mean there was.
Speaker 7: I mean, Joshua did focus some of the blame on Hayes,
Speaker 7: and Hayes would turned around in his trial and blame
Speaker 7: Joshua for it, you know, I mean there was a
Speaker 7: lot a lot of it about uh, you know, missus Pettitt.
Speaker 7: Now there was DNA evidence that that absolutely Hayes raped
Speaker 7: Missus Pettitt and then he admitted to killing her, you know,
Speaker 7: in in in court. So you know, there wasn't a
Speaker 7: lot of stuff, but there was. But where my hands
Speaker 7: were tied was there was a gag order on this
Speaker 7: on on on everybody involved. So the police couldn't talk
Speaker 7: to me, The lawyers couldn't talk to me. Hayes didn't
Speaker 7: wasn't going to talk to me. So there was nobody
Speaker 7: I could go to to uh corroborate Joshua's story. You know,
Speaker 7: there was nobody I could go to to say, well,
Speaker 7: what's what's your side because they couldn't do it. They
Speaker 7: were they were, they were, they couldn't they couldn't talk
Speaker 7: to me. So so but but that said, you know what,
Speaker 7: the way Joshua's narrative of the crime plays almost to
Speaker 7: the to the note, the way the prosecution uh uh
Speaker 7: portrayed the crime. The prosecution's narrative in their in their
Speaker 7: portrayal of the crime in court was like they were
Speaker 7: reading my book. I swear. There was like just there
Speaker 7: was just like a few points where it varied, you know,
Speaker 7: but all the things about Joshua hitting doctor Pettitt, about
Speaker 7: the tying up the girls, about going out for the gasoline,
Speaker 7: about uh, you know, Joshua's roll in the house, being
Speaker 7: being the the alpha of this of this duo, all
Speaker 7: of this stuff that that that I all of the
Speaker 7: information that I got from Joshua was substantiate, substantiated by
Speaker 7: the prosecution, you know, so you know he was, he was.
Speaker 7: He proved to be a credible, incredible, incredible uh source,
Speaker 7: He was a credible source. Joshua. Now, uh, he he
Speaker 7: never copped. He never admitted to killing anybody. He said
Speaker 7: that he didn't uh, he didn't want anybody to die
Speaker 7: in the house and stuff like that. And that's where
Speaker 7: his story starts to lose lose its validity, because there's
Speaker 7: no doubt that that you know, he was, he was.
Speaker 7: It was his plan to kill everybody in the house.
Speaker 7: I have no doubt I have I don't. I don't
Speaker 7: doubt that for a second.
Speaker 6: Well, how does he how does he how does he
Speaker 6: argue against that? The gasoline around the beds? Where did
Speaker 6: you get that inform? And how does he how does
Speaker 6: he argue against that?
Speaker 7: I mean, he can't he did, And and I asked
Speaker 7: him about it now. Now I'm in. I'm in when
Speaker 7: i'm when I'm interviewing it. It's not like I'm interviewing
Speaker 7: him on the phone or over you know, it's over
Speaker 7: coffee at Starbucks. I mean, he's in a maximum security prison.
Speaker 7: It's being taped. He knows it's being taped. I know
Speaker 7: it's been taped. It's like, there's I can't I can't
Speaker 7: be as blunt in miche or nor can I guess
Speaker 7: I could be as blunt as I want, but he's
Speaker 7: not gonna be as as forthcoming and his answers as
Speaker 7: as as he might have might have been. Because even
Speaker 7: though he said to me, I don't care, he said,
Speaker 7: I I know they're going to execute me, and I
Speaker 7: don't care. I want to die, and Hayes said the
Speaker 7: same thing. You know, Hayes has said the same thing.
Speaker 7: But they're both they're both criminals, and they're both liars
Speaker 7: by by nature, you know. So so you know, I
Speaker 7: think that he got to the point where it where
Speaker 7: he could have said, yeah, you're right, I dropped the
Speaker 7: match and I sort of fire go up around the
Speaker 7: girls and I ran out of the house. But he
Speaker 7: never said he wouldn't say that to me. But it
Speaker 7: was it was, you know, it was it was. I mean,
Speaker 7: it's pretty certain that that that happened.
Speaker 6: You know, and he downplayed the rape motive too. You
Speaker 6: had said too that it seemed, you know, you get
Speaker 6: deduce logically that that's there was something else to it
Speaker 6: other than just robbery by the targeting with Mike Yila,
Speaker 6: but he denied that. So that's another thing that he denies,
Speaker 6: even though.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you're right, and there's a body of evidence that
Speaker 7: says that it's absolutely what happened. I mean, he's he's borderline.
Speaker 7: He's a better borderline pedophile. I mean he's had you know,
Speaker 7: I only mentioned two sixteen year olds, but he's got
Speaker 7: a whole history of it. Seems like he stopped maturing
Speaker 7: in his excuse me, his sexual appetite when he was
Speaker 7: sixteen because he had a girlfriend who was sixteen when
Speaker 7: he was sixteen, and then he's up dating anybody older
Speaker 7: than sixteen until he was twenty six and arrested the
Speaker 7: last time.
Speaker 6: You know, I wanted to ask you too, when you
Speaker 6: were criticized. I'm just very fascinated by this. Was it
Speaker 6: who were the main criticizer was the members of the
Speaker 6: public like indication like that. But was it the was
Speaker 6: it the police department at all, or was it the district.
Speaker 7: That I get criticized? Well, yeah, I got to tell you.
Speaker 7: In the in the trial, the Hayeses trial, something came
Speaker 7: up and it's you know, I don't you know, it's
Speaker 7: it's a little elaborate to tell the story. I don't
Speaker 7: know how much time we have, but I but I
Speaker 7: was embarrassed. But they they they actually introduced as evidence
Speaker 7: in the in the in the penalty phase of Hayes's trial,
Speaker 7: he had been found guilty and then it goes to
Speaker 7: penalty phase where they decide whether to put him to
Speaker 7: death or that. During the penalty phase, they used letters
Speaker 7: that Joshua had written to me because they had copied
Speaker 7: every Department of Correction copies all the letters, so they
Speaker 7: had letters. They introduced that source material into the trial,
Speaker 7: and they said things at that time that were that
Speaker 7: put me in a very bad light as a journalists,
Speaker 7: as a human being, you know, And and in court
Speaker 7: it came out so and it had nothing to do
Speaker 7: with Hayes's whether Hayes was should be put to death
Speaker 7: in that and I'm absolutely certain that it was done
Speaker 7: to humiliate me because I think that I had put
Speaker 7: the Department of Corrections. I mean, they came out looking
Speaker 7: you know that they let me in there to interview
Speaker 7: this guy three times. You know that they let all
Speaker 7: of that, They let me carry on this correspondence with
Speaker 7: this guy. This is, without a doubt, the highest profile
Speaker 7: criminal in Connecticut in twenty years. I mean, without it down,
Speaker 7: nobody's even close second, you know, And they absolutely they
Speaker 7: it was like I was visiting a relative, you know.
Speaker 7: I mean, I had such access to this guy and
Speaker 7: and and I no doubt ruffled, ruffled those kind of feathers.
Speaker 7: And I and and that the book came out before
Speaker 7: the trial. I think because doctor Pettitt was such is
Speaker 7: such an influential presence up there, and he really really was,
Speaker 7: you know, adoring the trial and what have you. I
Speaker 7: think that, you know, I think they went out of
Speaker 7: their way to to h to embarrass me, you know,
Speaker 7: and uh and and uh you know, I think that
Speaker 7: you know, and I probably I'm still there is still
Speaker 7: an investigation going on that. Uh it supposedly an open
Speaker 7: investigation by the Attorney General's office and to me and
Speaker 7: and how I got into visit uh Joshua, you know,
Speaker 7: and uh, you know that I misrepresented myself that there
Speaker 7: was there was other things that that came up that
Speaker 7: were discussed in trial. Like I said, if you want
Speaker 7: me to talk about it would be more than willing to.
Speaker 7: It's going to take a little time to explain it though,
Speaker 7: And you know, so I don't know what's going to happen.
Speaker 7: I might even be subpoena because for because Joshua's trial,
Speaker 7: because I'm the only journalist to have interviewed him. I mean,
Speaker 7: I'm probably outside of his lawyer, the only person that
Speaker 7: has this kind of information that that you know.
Speaker 6: So well, what one last question? Because we could go
Speaker 6: on for another couple hours, but I think it's more
Speaker 6: fascinating to us than maybe the audience. But anyway, what
Speaker 6: I wanted to ask was that the correspondence is copied
Speaker 6: by the Department of Corrections. You were saying, yes, it
Speaker 6: is okay, But did they alert the authorities like the
Speaker 6: district I'm sure right now, no, no, no, But when did
Speaker 6: they Did you come first or did they already? Was
Speaker 6: that an ongoing thing? And I find it strange that
Speaker 6: they would let you have this correspondence Meanwhile, they let
Speaker 6: you in seemingly like they didn't.
Speaker 7: Know who you were. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, I mean,
Speaker 7: you know you could you could very easily paint a
Speaker 7: conspiracy theory out of that. I mean, there's no doubt
Speaker 7: about it. But I don't think it. I mean, my
Speaker 7: my sense of it, the way I you know, haven't
Speaker 7: been you know, a principle in this, in this whole thing,
Speaker 7: I don't, I don't. I think it was just oversight
Speaker 7: on their part. I think they just they just dropped
Speaker 7: the ball. I don't think there was.
Speaker 6: No no I agree with you.
Speaker 7: I agree with you.
Speaker 6: I think they dropped the ball. But at the same time,
Speaker 6: I just wanted to get that one fact or that
Speaker 6: information from you. The Department of Corrections, unlike in my case,
Speaker 6: the Department of Corrections did not copy any of the
Speaker 6: written material. Oh, they would record, they would record visits.
Speaker 6: But so I knew that, and so to get around that,
Speaker 6: he sent me information via a letter and they didn't
Speaker 6: copy those letters. So I thought it was interesting that
Speaker 6: you said that the Department of Corrections would record all
Speaker 6: those letters or keep copies of those letters. But it
Speaker 6: seems like just to me that they didn't catch wind
Speaker 6: to what was going on till you came into the
Speaker 6: picture and then came forward, and then they said, oh listen,
Speaker 6: we better go back there. And like some people may
Speaker 6: read a letter, and some people may really read a letter,
Speaker 6: if you know, yeah.
Speaker 7: You know. And I'm not one hundred percent sure that
Speaker 7: they copied all of it, you know, I mean, maybe
Speaker 7: they only copied. You know, I got because in the
Speaker 7: in the in court if court testimony is any indication
Speaker 7: in court, they said that I had written that there
Speaker 7: were half a dozen or eight letters that Joshua wrote
Speaker 7: to me, and that's that's not right. Joshua wrote more
Speaker 7: than twenty letters to me. So maybe they didn't. Maybe
Speaker 7: they didn't do their job in that regard either, maybe
Speaker 7: they didn't copy.
Speaker 6: They probably caught on late, just like when they finally
Speaker 6: caught on and you were refused visit.
Speaker 7: So yeah, by that horse was the horse was out
Speaker 7: of the barn by that time. I mean, he had
Speaker 7: told me he had given me just about everything, but
Speaker 7: in the first in the first half a dozen letters,
Speaker 7: I know just about the whole story. So you know,
Speaker 7: I mean, it was like.
Speaker 6: I said, after the fact, yeah, it's very interesting. Well,
Speaker 6: I want to Thank you Brian for this very very
Speaker 6: fascinating interview and about a great book and a great
Speaker 6: story that's still continuing, as we can see that his
Speaker 6: trial's not even till next year. You said sometime. And
Speaker 6: I don't know if I'm a predictor of anything, but
Speaker 6: I wouldn't be surprised if they call your name up
Speaker 6: and have you involved even somewhat, because those letters are
Speaker 6: much better than any confessional ever ever be it's you know,
Speaker 6: it's much better when the perpetrator said this, and it's
Speaker 6: written very strong evidence for sure. But anyway, thank you
Speaker 6: very much, Brian. I really appreciate it. People who are
Speaker 6: listening to the program have been listening to Brian McDonald
Speaker 6: with his book In the Middle of the Night, the
Speaker 6: shocking true story of a family killed in cold blood
Speaker 6: in the middle of the night. Thank you very much,
Speaker 6: Brian McDonald for coming on the program and a great interview.
Speaker 6: Thank you very much. Thanks Dan, have a good evening,
Speaker 6: all right, bye bye bye bye. You've been listening to
Speaker 6: True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history
Speaker 6: and the authors that have written about them with your
Speaker 6: host Dan Sataski. Good evening.