Last week, Newsweek received heavy criticism online for publishing a tone-deaf, sympathetic piece about a convicted rapist and murderer, which conspicuously omitted several of the most gruesome details about his crimes. Yesterday, in response to an inquiry by NewsBusters, the magazine made a number of modifications to that piece, including adding several paragraphs which contained those previously-absent details.
Context: The Cheshire Murders
On July 23, 2007, Steven Hayes (the subject of the Newsweek story) and Joshua Komisarjevsky broke into the Cheshire, Connecticut home of Jennifer and William Petit. The accomplices forced Jennifer to withdraw $15,000 from a bank, after which Hayes raped her and strangled her to death. Komisarjevsky, meanwhile, raped their 11-year-old daughter Michaela. The pair then tied her and her 17-year-old sister Hayley to their beds, doused the house and gasoline, and burnt it down. The girls were found to have died of smoke inhalation. Dr. William Petit Jr., the only survivor, was brutally beaten with a baseball bat.
For this series of atrocities, which came to be known as the “Cheshire Murders,” both Hayes and Komisarjevsky were sentenced to death, though their sentences were later reduced to life without the possibility of parole.
Newsweek’s Initial Recounting Of Events Comes Up Woefully Short
There’s an old joke that goes something like: A Democrat and a Republican are walking down the street when they spot a mugging victim lying in the road, savagely beaten. The Republican exclaims, “We’ve got to find the guy who did this!” to which the Democrat replies, “Yeah! Wherever he is, he needs our help!”
If ever there were a living embodiment of the Democrat in that joke, it would be Joshua Rhett Miller, Newsweek’s chief investigative reporter and the author of the bizarre January 31 puff piece about Hayes, titled: “Exclusive: Transgender Connecticut Killer on Life in Prison: ‘Happy to Be Alive’.”
The article’s tone was best exemplified by the following passage:
“I hurt, so I hurt others,” she said. Had Lee [Hayes] accepted herself earlier, Hawke-Petit and her daughters may still be alive, she said.
Blame-shifting, in other words. It wasn’t Hayes’s fault that he raped Jennifer Hawke-Petit, tied her daughters to their beds, and burnt their house down; it was society’s fault that his internal struggle over his identity forced him to do it!
Miller’s nearly 2,000-word article painted Hayes as a sympathetic but troubled individual. He was laughably credulous of the 61-year-old convict’s assertion that he had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria “at the age of 16,” (which would have been in 1980 — 33 years before gender dysphoria was even added to the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).
The piece was very light on the gruesome details of Hayes’s crimes. For example, Miller failed to note that it was Hayes who had raped Jennifer Hawke-Petit, nor did he mention that Hayes and Komisarjevsky had tied the two Petit daughters to their beds before setting the house ablaze.
Miller also excluded from his piece any details which might have demonstrated Hayes’s gleeful attitude at the time. Those include the series of photos that Hayes and Komisarjevsky took throughout the massacre, and the eager text messages that Hayes had sent his accomplice in the hours leading up to the attack:
HAYES: I’m chomping [sic] at the bit to get started. Need a margarita soon.
…
HAYES: We still on?
KOMISARJEVSKY: Yes
HAYES: Soon?
KOMISARJEVSKY: I’m putting [my] kid to bed. Hold your horses.
HAYES: Dude the horses want to get loose. LOL
NewsBusters Inquiry Yields Results
On Monday, February 3, NewsBusters reached out to Newsweek with a number of questions about Miller’s piece, particularly inquiring why so many damning details were absent from it. A few hours later, a spokesperson responded: “The story has been updated.”
And indeed it had been. The article is now front-loaded with a myriad of formerly-missing facts about the 2007 atrocity, and several portions had been tweaked to the same effect.
Take these modifications to the opening paragraph, for example:
The idiotic blame-shifting portion is still in there, but at least the story now sufficiently conveys the extent of Hayes’s depravity.
The magazine also was forced to address Hayes’s preposterous claim that he was diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 1980. At the end of the paragraph dealing with that assertion, they tacked on a sentence which read: “Newsweek was not independently able to verify the statements.”
Given that the article was unchanged for several days before we reached out, and considering how soon it was updated following our inquiry, we’re taking credit for this one. It looks like Joshua Rhett Miller still has a job, but at least for now, we’ll take what we can get.
