Conn. Triple Murderer's Ex-Girlfriend Blames Religion for Lack of Moral Compass

Man Who Killed Mother Jennifer Hawke-Petit and Her 2 Daughters Faces Sentencing

By Katherine Weber, Christian Post Reporter Tuesday, November 29, 2011

The ex-girlfriend of convicted killer Joshua Komisarjevsky testified in court Monday, telling the jury that the strict Christian upbringing she and Komisarjevsky experienced was "harmful."

Fran Hodges told the New Haven, Conn., court that after she left her evangelical church, she had "no idea what morality looks like in an applicable, culturally acceptable way."

Hodges and Komisarjevsky met in their teen years while living in New Hampshire, and both considered themselves "misfits" in their fundamentalist families who strictly followed the Evangelical Bible Church.

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"Everything was built on this apocalyptic worldview. I had absolutely no moral conscience after leaving. I felt like I was damned to hell," Hodges said.

Hodges went on to say her parents often spoke of the end of the world and she expected to die as a martyr.

"I had a very strong image of my mother being burned to death and my father just standing by," Hodges told the court.

Joshua Komisarjevsky has been convicted of 17 counts in the 2007 home invasion and triple murder of Connecticut resident Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters, Hayley and Michaela Petit. Komisarjevsky's defense lawyers are seeking life in prison without parole as opposed to the death penalty.

Accomplice Steven Hayes was sentenced to the death penalty last year for the invasion and murders.

Komisarjevsky's defense lawyers have used their defendant's dysfunctional childhood and strict religious upbringing as an argument for his actions.

In early November, lawyers showed the court a clip from the 2006 documentary "Jesus Camp" as well as a video clip of Bill Gothard, whose ultra-conservative Christian home-schooling program was used on Komisarjevsky as a child.

The nine-minute documentary clip showed distraught children crying as a verbally aggressive camp leader urges the children to repent from sin.

Defense lawyers also argue that Komisarjevsky's parents refused to seek psychological counseling for their son after he was sexually molested by older foster child Scott Reetz.

The defendant's parents also refused when doctors suggested Komisarjevsky be put on medication after he set a vacant gas station on fire during his teenage years.

"I wouldn't give that to an enemy," Jude Komisarjevsky, mother of Joshua, told the New Haven court in late October. "I've seen the effects of it."

Hodges also told the court that she does not condemn Christianity in general, but rather considers her ultra-conservative Christian upbringing as “on the extreme fringes" of the faith.

"I'm not implying that Christianity is not beneficial to people," she said. "The community that I experienced was on the extreme fringes of Christianity, and the dynamic in that community, I would say, is not healthy, is not productive, and it was harmful. It was harmful to me."