Suicide by Oyster? Petit Family Killer's Elaborate Plan - East Idaho News
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Suicide by Oyster? Petit Family Killer’s Elaborate Plan

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070212 StevenHayesPrisonShot?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1341255027093Connecticut State Police(HARTFORD, Conn.) — A Connecticut man on death row for the 2007 home invasion murders of a mother and her two daughters detailed an elaborate suicide plan involving oysters and lying about committing 17 other murders.

In October 2011, convicted murderer Steven Hayes wrote a series of letters bragging that he had killed 17 other women that included detailed and gruesome descriptions of the alleged murders. The letters were intercepted by the Connecticut Department of Corrections in early October and handed over to prosecutors.

The letters were written a year after he was sentenced to Connecticut’s death row for his part in the gruesome 2007 murders of Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her two daughters.

But in a recent interview with the Hartford Courant, Hayes admitted that he fabricated the stories of those murders as part of an elaborate ploy to commit suicide.

“I made it up,” Hayes told the paper.

Hayes, 49, said that he hoped authorities would intercept his letters and inform police. Once authorities believed he was a serial killer, he would offer them information on the killings in exchange for pizza, soda and a dozen oysters with hot sauce, he told the paper.

Hayes is deathly allergic to oysters.

“I planned to eat them and have them find me dead in my cell the next morning,” Hayes told the paper.

But police didn’t buy the notorious manipulator’s story and his plan failed.

Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her daughters 17-year-old Hayley and 11-year-old Michaela, were killed during a July 2007 home invasion carried out by Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky.

The mother was raped and strangled while the girls, tied to their beds, died when the house was set ablaze.

Husband and father William Petit was the only one to survive.

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