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A trans-identified male serving a 22-year sentence for the violent murder of his own mother was quietly transferred into a minimum-security Illinois women’s prison with a mother-baby unit. John Wesley Finnegan began calling himself “Hannah Dagny” in 2014, approximately five years into his prison term, and was transferred to Decatur Correctional Center within the past five years.
Finnegan pleaded guilty but mentally ill to strangling his mother in 2008. After entering his plea to first-degree murder, the then 20-year-old Finnegan was sentenced to 22 years in prison.
Prosecutors said 43-year-old Mary Finnegan was found dead at her home on Friday, July 24, 2008. Her other son, David, found her body, which had been stripped naked and wrapped in bed sheets. The murder had occurred sometime the day before when John Finnegan entered his mother’s room, found her sleeping, and “swiftly killed her emotionlessly,” according to Peoria County State’s Attorney Kevin Lyons. Lyons told the court he was quoting from a statement Finnegan gave to law enforcement.
Lyons noted that Finnegan claimed to have been in a “peculiar” incestuous sexual relationship with his mother that had been ongoing for about four years, and that Finnegan told investigators he had had intercourse with his mother the day before he killed her.
When confessing to the murder, Finnegan reportedly told police that he sexually abused his mother’s corpse before attempting to kill himself.
Finnegan accused prison officials of “systemic discrimination” by housing him in a men’s correctional center, a circumstance he described as placing him “in harm’s way.”
According to the complaint, Finnegan has been “on hormone therapy” since 2014. He describes himself as “fully developed” and having “noticeable breasts,” while claiming to have also been born with a male disorder of sexual development (DSD) which resulted in a “feminine bone structure and voice.”