In 2009, sitting on death row, John Jacobson Jr., notoriously dubbed the “Yacht Killer,” openly discussed his brutal 2004 murders of Thomas and Jackie Hawks, a married couple whose deaths helped fund his dream of undergoing gender-transition surgery. Five years earlier, Jacobson lured the Hawkses onto their yacht off the California coast under the pretense of purchasing the vessel. Once on board, Jacobson attacked them with a stun gun, tied them to the boat’s anchor, and threw them overboard. After ensuring the couple was gone, he casually grabbed a beer from the fridge and began fishing on the yacht.
“I knew 100 percent that I wanted the surgery,” Jacobson told ABC News at the time, speaking from death row. Last year, that goal was realized when California taxpayers funded Jacobson’s gender reassignment surgery, which was made possible by policies and precedents established during Kamala Harris’s tenure as California’s Attorney General.
In April 2023, Jacobson, now going by Skylar Deleon, underwent gender-affirming surgery and breast augmentation, a fact confirmed in a letter to the Washington Free Beacon. Deleon also mentioned awaiting transfer to a women’s prison. “I did receive gender-affirming surgery… I am being housed in the hospital for my