2007 Cheshire, Connecticut murders
Rape and murder committed by two men in 2007
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.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1947382. Authority coordinates are 41.512, -72.904. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “2007 Cheshire, Connecticut murders” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.