Sitting on death row in 2009, John Jacobson Jr., known as the "Yacht Killer," talked about murdering married couple Thomas and Jackie Hawks to obtain the money for a sex-change surgery. Five years earlier, Jacobson lured the Hawkses onto their boat off the California coast, tied them to the vessel's anchor, and threw them overboard before grabbing a beer from the fridge and starting to fish.
"I wanted the surgery, and I knew I 100 percent wanted the surgery," Jacobson told ABC News.
Last year, Jacobson’s dreams came true when California taxpayers footed the bill for his gender transition surgery, a move made possible thanks to policies and precedents set during Kamala Harris’s time as the state’s attorney general.
"I did receive gender affirming surgery and breast augmentation on April 5th 2023," Jacobson, who now goes by Skylar Deleon, wrote in a letter to the Washington Free Beacon. That letter was sent in response to a Free Beacon inquiry into the status of his transition. Jacobson said he is now awaiting transfer to a women's prison from San Quentin.
Harris's support for inmates like Jacobson emerged as a campaign issue when a CNN report revealed that she pledged in a 2019 ACLU questionnaire to support taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries for illegal immigrants and prisoners in federal custody. But her history on the issue dates back to at least 2015, during her stint as the Golden State's top cop—a period that Harris has cited on the campaign trail as proof of her tough-on-crime approach.
California began offering hormonal treatments for prisoners who claim to be experiencing gender dysphoria before Harris was elected as California's attorney general, and Jacobson said in his letter to the Free Beacon that he started receiving hormone treatment when he arrived at San Quentin in 2009. But the state's treatment of transgender inmates changed radically during her tenure.
In 2015, Jeffrey Bryan Norsworthy, who was serving a prison sentence for murder, sued the state's prison system to compel it to pay for a sex-change operation. A federal judge ordered the state to foot the bill for the surgery, arguing it was part of the medical care the Constitution requires states to provide prisoners.
Harris initially oversaw the state's fight to block Norsworthy's access to that surgery, arguing that it wasn't medically necessary. When a district judge ruled against the state, Harris pledged to appeal to the Ninth Circuit. But the appeal never came, and then-California governor Jerry Brown (D.) allowed parole for Norsworthy before the state had to cover the cost of the procedure.
When another inmate, Rodney Quine, who was serving a life sentence for murder, filed a similar lawsuit amid the state's battle with Norsworthy, Harris negotiated a settlement in which the state paid for Quine's sex-change surgery and hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys' fees. Quine made no concessions to force the state's hand.
When California publicly announced the settlement, it also announced a wholesale policy change: "California has become the first state with a policy of providing sex reassignment surgery for some prison inmates," the New York Times reported. Going forward, the state would pay for mastectomies and genital reconstruction surgeries.
Harris talked about the Norsworthy and Quine cases during her first presidential bid in 2019, apologizing for her initial opposition to Norsworthy's lawsuit and telling reporters she took "full responsibility" for the legal briefs her office had originally filed.
"I was, as you are rightly pointing out, the attorney general of California for two terms and I had a host of clients that I was obligated to defend and represent and I couldn't fire my clients, and there are unfortunately situations that occurred where my clients took positions that were contrary to my beliefs," Harris said, casting the blame on the state's Department of Corrections.
The former attorney general outlined her beliefs more clearly in subsequent interviews and statements. In a 2019 interview with the National Center for Transgender Equality, Harris said she ensured that California changed its policy "so that every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access to the medical care that they desired and need."
"I worked behind the scenes to not only make sure that that transgender woman got the services she was deserving—so it wasn't only about that case," she said. "I made sure they changed the policy in the state of California so that every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access to the medical care that they desired and need."
"I believe, actually, it may have been one of the first, if not the first, in the country, where I pushed for that policy in a Department of Corrections," Harris continued. "So you can just look at all the work I've done over the years … I feel very strongly about this, and at its core … it's an issue of humanity."
The ACLU questionnaire highlighted her commitment to the policy: She pledged that if she became president, she would use "executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care—including those in prison and immigration detention—will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care."
Harris's campaign, which did not respond to a request for comment, has since muddied the water on whether she still supports those policies. A spokeswoman for Harris told CNN in September that "as President, [Harris] will take that same pragmatic approach, focusing on common-sense solutions for the sake of progress."
The gruesome nature of the Hawkses' murders made the case a tabloid sensation and the fact that Jacobson had been an extra in the series Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers gave the story a Hollywood twist.
On the afternoon of Nov. 15, 2004, the Hawkses boarded their 55-foot yacht with Jacobson, who had reached out about purchasing the boat.
After the ship left a dock off the California coast, Jacobson attacked the husband and wife using a stun gun. After tying the couple up with the anchor and forcing them to sign over their bank account information and the title to the boat, Jacobson, along with accomplices, threw them overboard.
Jacobson then returned the boat to port, but not before he and his pals fished and drank beer from the fridge below deck.
Police later realized that Jacobson was responsible for killing another man in Mexico. Jacobson murdered that individual, his former cellmate, in a scheme that netted him $50,000. Jacobson was convicted of all three murders in 2008.
Jacobson told the Free Beacon he expects to transfer to a female prison "fairly quickly."
"I should transfer fairly quickly but the prison makes us go to committee to determine whether or not [sic] which prison we go to even though I have had both surgeries," Jacobson told the Free Beacon. The California prison system didn't respond to a request for comment.
Family members of his victims, meanwhile, are gobsmacked. "I don't know what right [Harris] had to decide that he gets surgeries now. I mean, why should they get all these benefits?" Jackie Hawks's mother, Gayle O'Neill, told the Free Beacon. "They killed people, right? Took people's life. He killed my daughter and son-in-law, and now he gets what he wants."
A 2015 feature on Jacobson in Orange Coast magazine found that, as of that year, "385 transgender inmates are taking hormones; all but 22 of them are in men's prisons." That number of transgender or "nonbinary" inmates in California prisons and jails was 1,617 in 2022, a 234 percent increase from 2017. The high number of California inmates requesting sex-change surgeries has led the system to become backlogged. The state's projections estimated that 462 inmates would request sex-change procedures in 2024, even as its staff could only handle 3 requests per week, CalMatters reported last year.
"I was a registered Democrat, but I've changed since then," said O'Neill, the mother of Jacobson victim Jackie Hawks. "But I think the Democrats have just gone berserk, all of them. Harris is just too lenient."
You can read Jacobson's letter to the Free Beacon below:
