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The Horrifying Story Of Paris Bennett, The 13-Year-Old Who Fatally Stabbed His 4-Year-Old Sister
Charity LeeParis Lee Bennett and his younger sister Ella.
“My son is a monster, and because he is a monster, I have lost my daughter,” Charity Lee wrote in her private journal. Less than a month earlier, on Feb. 4, 2007, her 13-year-old son Paris Lee Bennett had done the unthinkable: He had brutally murdered his 4-year-old sister Ella in the family’s Abilene, Texas home.
That wasn’t all, though. In the hours before the fatal stabbing, Paris had been viewing graphic porn, searching for “S&M,” “bondage,” “sadism,” and “snuff films.” He would later reveal, to his mother’s horror, that he had been sexually abusing his sister before killing her — it was, in part, why he had committed the murder. If she was dead, she couldn’t tell anyone about it.
This was well beyond any parent’s worst nightmare. Why would anyone think that their own child could harbor such darkness?
Paris Bennett did harbor darkness, though. And it didn’t take long before his mother, and the world, came to know the full extent of the evil that dwelled within him. The truth was shocking and horrifying.
Inside Charity Lee’s Troubled Life
Charity Lee hadn’t had an easy journey. Growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, she had become addicted to heroin by the time she was 17 years old. Still, she was a bright student who graduated from high school with honors, later attending the University of Tennessee to study human ecology.
During college, life grew even more complicated. She became sober, but found it difficult to deal with life without anything to “take the edge off,” as she put it in a 2017 interview, published in Good Housekeeping. She debated killing herself via overdose. Then, she discovered that she was pregnant.
“I finally had something to live for, something to look forward to, and I learned how to be happy,” she recalled.
Charity LeeCharity Lee, pictured with Paris Bennett shortly after he was born.
In October 1993, she gave birth to her son Paris Lee Bennett, but it quickly became clear that her son would grow up without his father. As it turned out, Paris’ father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and so Lee made the decision to cut off contact. After all, she had seen firsthand how turbulent relationships and marriages could disrupt lives.
As Lee told the New York Post in 2020, back when she was just six years old, her own mother was charged with killing her father. Although her mother was later acquitted of the crime, the experience had certainly left a mark.
Lee was determined to provide a better life for her child. She was sober, working odd jobs to pay for school, and getting by with some financial support from her family. At the end of it all, she graduated from college and eventually met the man who would become Ella’s father.
But addiction can be hard to kick, and for a period of six months, after Lee, Paris, and Ella had relocated to Texas, Lee ended up relapsing on cocaine. Paris, 11 years old at the time, knew about this — by all accounts, he was a notably smart child. In fact, he was later found to have a “genius” IQ of 141.
And aside from one incident in 2005, in which he broke a stick Ella had been playing with and then ran off after grabbing a knife, he didn’t seem to have a violent or dangerous personality. Lee wrote she “never, at any point, had any indication that he could kill.” She and Paris argued from time to time, but it didn’t seem to be anything other than typical mother-son tensions.
Then, in 2007, Charity Lee’s life fell apart.
Paris Bennett’s Horrific Murder Of Ella Bennett
Charity Lee/The Family I Had/Investigation DiscoveryParis and Ella Bennett playing together.
Charity Lee left for work around 4:30 p.m. on Feb. 4, 2007, leaving Paris and Ella Bennett in the care of a babysitter. She and Paris had an argument over how he’d spent his allowance at the mall. She had kissed Ella goodbye.
2007, Charity Lee had determined, was supposed to be the year she turned her life around. A week prior, she had written a journal entry, which she shared in her memoir How Now, Butterfly?:
“My vow is to make 2007 better than 2006… I feel as though I finally remember who I am and what I can do. I am Charity. I know who I am. I know I am good. I know I am strong.”
When police arrived at her job at Buffalo Wild Wings to speak with her, she had no clue about the horror that transpired in her Abilene, Texas home.
“That night, the babysitter left our home without my consent,” she recalled. Paris had somehow convinced the sitter it was time to leave. “In her absence, Paris beat and attempted to strangle Ella. He ultimately stabbed her 17 times with a knife. She died, but not quickly, as I’d later find out.”
Charity LeeParis and Ella Bennett.
It wasn’t the only thing she’d later learn. Paris had not stabbed Ella in a frenzied or manic state of rage. He had been slow, methodical.
“He sexually abused her that night, and he admitted the more violent he became, the more excited he became, ending in death for her and climax for him,” Lee wrote in a 2010 journal entry. At the crime scene, semen was found on both Ella and the bed where Paris had killed her.
After the murder, Paris had called 911 on himself, reporting that he “accidentally killed somebody,” which is how police discovered the gruesome murder scene. Of course, it was clear that it was no accident.
Charity Lee had thousands of questions running through her mind, but one stood out above the others: Why had Paris done this? The answer was even more sinister than anyone could have thought.
A Psychopath Who Wanted To Hurt His Mother
Charity Lee/FacebookCharity Lee with Ella.
Paris Bennett initially claimed that he killed Ella because of a hallucination that made her look like a demon, but he later admitted to investigators that he had planned his sister’s murder. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison, the maximum for a juvenile murder conviction in Texas.
Ella was the victim of Paris Bennett’s sexual abuse and his murderous plot, but it wasn’t just about hurting her — it had also been about hurting his mother. And he had considered killing her too.
“He said the first reason he didn’t go ahead with it was because it was a lot harder to kill someone than he thought,” Lee said. “The second reason was the realization if he’d killed me, I only would have suffered for five, 10, 15 minutes. But, if he left me alive [without Ella], I would suffer for the rest of my life.”
When Lee went to visit her son in prison, she saw firsthand how violent he could be. He attacked her at one point, slamming a table into her and pinning her to a wall so forcefully she couldn’t breathe.
“I know he’s dangerous,” Lee told the San Antonio Current. “I know he’s different.” Doctors told Lee that Paris was a diagnosed psychopath.
Inside Edition/YouTubeParis Bennett as an adult.
Still, she visited him behind bars — even after Paris tried filing for emancipation and after she read a letter he wrote to a counselor, in which he described killing Ella in detail and elaborated on his resentment toward his mother for her drug use. He also wrote that he wanted to see someone die.
When Lee, crying, asked why he didn’t just kill her instead, his response was startlingly detached: “Goddamn it, Mom, just get over it already. It’s been almost two years already. People die all the time.”
As the years have gone on, however, even Paris himself has had trouble explaining exactly why he ended up the way he did.
“Part of me loved my sister and would have turned the world upside down for her,” Paris told Piers Morgan in a 2019 interview. But, he said, there was a part of him that was “wounded, twisted, dark.”
Paris claimed that if he were released from prison early, he would have no desire to hurt anyone else. His mother said that she would be afraid. She has another child now too, a son named Phoenix. For a brief period of time, she allowed Phoenix to speak on the phone with Paris, but by 2021, she and Phoenix had both stopped communicating with Paris entirely.
As Lee explained in a Facebook post: “I completely walked away from my eldest child and have not looked back. It is one thing to be a child who makes horrible decisions. It is another thing altogether to be a 27-year-old man and keep making decisions that put your family at risk. The final straw was learning he was ‘involved’ with a woman who lived 2 hours away from us and was out on bond for planning a mass shooting… I finally accepted it is okay to love him as my son, but really dislike the man he has become.”
Paris Bennett is currently held in the Ferguson Unit in Madison County, Texas, and he’s expected to be released in 2047, but he’ll be eligible for parole in 2027.
After reading the shocking, dark story of Paris Bennett, read the equally disturbing story of Eric Smith, the bullied 13-year-old who violently killed a 4-year-old boy. Then, read the tragic story of Maddie Clifton, the 8-year-old girl murdered by her 14-year-old neighbor.
The post The Horrifying Story Of Paris Bennett, The 13-Year-Old Who Fatally Stabbed His 4-Year-Old Sister appeared first on All That's Interesting.
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