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On a Sunday night in February 2007, a Texas mother left her two children at home with a babysitter & headed to work. It was an ordinary evening & Charity Lee had no reason to believe that anything was wrong. But before the night was over, her 4-year-old daughter Ella would be dead.
What happened inside that home wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t the work of a stranger who had broken in. The person responsible was someone who Ella knew, loved & trusted.
As investigators began piecing together the events of that night, they discovered something even more disturbing. Ella’s murder hadn’t happened in a moment of uncontrollable rage. It had been planned.
But it was the reason behind that plan that would make this crime almost impossible to comprehend, leaving Charity to confront a horrifying truth about someone she loved deeply.
When a 911 call came through the Abilene, Texas dispatch at 11:42 pm on Sunday, February 4, 2007, 13-year-old Paris Bennett was hysterically crying, telling the dispatcher that he accidentally killed somebody, his 4-year-old sister, Ella. She was laying in the bed, not breathing & bleeding all over because he stabbed with a knife in lots of places.
911 hadn’t been Paris’ first call after he stabbed his sister to death, as he previously made a six-minute phone call to a friend. He hadn’t told his friend what he did, only saying that he did something to make his mom mad. After he ended the call, he waited another two minutes before calling 911.
About six hours earlier, a babysitter came to watch Paris & Ella since it was Super Bowl Sunday & their mom, Charity Lee, was starting her shift as a waitress at Buffalo Wild Wings at 6 pm. She was a single mother who was working at the restaurant in conjunction with going to school for a master’s degree in education. Because her family was financially well-off from owning a lucrative Atlanta trucking business, Charity was able to give her children a comfortable upbringing.
As she was rushed to leave the house that evening, Ella was in the bathtub while the sitter was finishing her bath. She kept telling her mom that she wanted just one more hug, one more kiss. Looking back on that moment, Charity feels so thankful that she took the time to go back for that hug & that kiss despite running late for work, never fathoming that the next time she would see her daughter, she would be laying inside of a body bag.
When she said goodbye to Paris, although he accepted her hug, she knew he was angry with her after she scolded him for spending all of his money at the mall.
Charity’s life had been anything but easy up until this point. At only 6-years-old, her father was executed in the foyer of their home outside of Atlanta, Georgia. He was shot multiple times in the back of the head, a murder that her mom, Kyla Bennett, was charged for orchestrating, but later acquitted of, claiming she had been framed.
By 16-years-old, when Charity tried heroin for the first time, she found herself instantly addicted, realizing it erased all of the bad things she once felt. Since her mom was in a relationship with a very abusive man, she moved out during a time when she was using any drugs she could get her hands on.
At 18-years-old, when she was two years clean from drugs, Charity found out that she was pregnant with her son, Paris. Regardless of her sobriety, she had been in an extremely low place mentally, contemplating taking her own life. Realizing that she was pregnant, she said that everything changed, believing that Paris had essentially saved her life.
She never married Paris’ father & he left not long after she got pregnant. When Paris was 17-months-old & he suddenly showed back up, it was pretty clear that something wasn’t right. He ended up being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia with audio & visual hallucinations.
When Paris was 7-years-old, they moved to Alabama where Charity met & married a man named Jonathan Smith. He struggled with alcohol addiction & when a state trooper once pulled him over & asked him to get out of the car, he refused. As the officer reached his arm into the car, Jonathan drove off, dragging the man 75 feet up an exit ramp before the trooper shot him in the leg. Not wanting to raise her kids in that kind of environment, their marriage ended as quickly as it began, but it resulted in her second pregnancy.
Charity recalls that when she went to the doctor, Paris had been in the room with her, putting Legos together. When the doctor came in & told her that she was having a baby, he dropped the Legos, shattering the pieces across the floor. From that moment, she could see that he was instantly resentful of the idea of sharing her attention with a sibling & Charity felt him withdraw from her.
When Ella Lee Bennett was born in Georgia on April 12, 2002, Paris was 8-years-old. Although he’d been sullen about the idea of a sister throughout her pregnancy, Charity felt relieved to see that he immediately connected with Ella. When he first held her, he expressed how much he loved his baby sister. As they grew, they adored one another while family members described them as inseparable.
According to Charity, Ella was an extremely strong-willed, opinionated, but very loving little girl who fit a large personality inside of a tiny body.
By 2005, when Paris was ten & Ella was two, Charity & the kids had moved back to Texas to be closer to her mom. She hoped they could repair their relationship since her mom had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. They moved to Kyla’s sprawling Seymour, Texas ranch, but sadly, the dysfunction in their relationship ended up reaching a breaking point.
During the documentary about this case, The Family I Had, Kyla admits that she wasn’t always there during her Charity’s childhood, distracted by as many as seven or eight husbands, dabbling in drugs while nannies took care of her daughter. According to Charity, nothing was ever good enough for her mom & she grew up believing that her mom didn’t even like her.
In 2006, when Charity started working long nights to get a concert promoting business off the ground, she found herself falling back into her old addictions. When she relapsed for the next six months, using cocaine & occasionally meth, Paris was 12 while Ella was 3 ½-years-old.
Through the relapse, she could see that Paris was isolating himself, growing very moody. When she sat down to talk with him one day, he sat expressionless at the table before he began repeatedly calling her derogatory names in a monotone voice, acting in a way he never had before.
Realizing that her drug use was causing major fractures in their family, not to mention, she was missing moments of Ella & Paris’ childhood, Charity got herself together. Looking back on the tragedy of what ended up happening in February 2007, she admits that her relapse likely played a role. However, Charity also indicated that she never suspected that her son was experiencing homicidal thoughts.
However, when Kyla was interviewed during The Family I Had, she said that in November 2006, only three months before Ella was murdered, 12-year-old Paris was playing with Ella & another little girl when he broke a toy that they were playing with. Seeing that her daughter was upset, Charity scolded Paris & put him in timeout.
After she stepped away for a moment, she heard the housekeeper shout that Paris had grabbed a knife from the kitchen & had run from the house. When she & her mom eventually found him, Paris began waving the knife in their direction. As Kyla took hold of the knife, Charity was able to wrap her arms around her son who fell into a hysterical heap.
Not knowing what was going on, Charity admitted Paris to the nearby Red River Hospital psychiatric unit in Wichita Falls, Texas where he remained for the next week. According to Charity, she never once spoke with a doctor there & nothing had been done during his stay; no counseling, no assessments, no diagnosis.
Not long after this incident, Charity, Ella & Paris moved to their new home in Abilene, Texas for a fresh start, a place where everything would come to a devastating end in February 2007.
It wasn’t until more than a year after Ella’s murder when Charity finally got her son’s medical records from Red River Hospital. She was shocked to see that the doctors had written, He is obsessed with shooting & killing.. homicidal/suicidal ideation.
On the other hand, according to Kyla, although her daughter had been told about these homicidal tendencies when she came to pick Paris up, she chose not to continue his in-patient treatment.
Kyla went on to say that they knew that Paris was different from other children from the time he was little, insisting that this was something Charity saw as well. He was never very affectionate or social & he always resented his little sister since he felt that she could do no wrong while he could do no right in the eyes of his mother.
Kyla could see that her grandson was crying out for help, sometimes hitting his head against the wall until he was bleeding. Since they were all caught up in their own turmoil, she felt that Paris got left to the wayside.
On Sunday evening, February 4, 2007, Charity hired a 21-year-old student from Hardin Simmons University to watch the kids while she was at work. The babysitter later indicated that the evening had been very typical. She took the kids out for Chinese food, then they watched Alice in Wonderland before Ella went to sleep in her mom’s bed while Paris went to his room to work on some homework.
At about 10 pm, Paris convinced the babysitter that she could leave since Ella was asleep, insisting that his mom said it was okay, that she felt he was old enough to take care of himself until she got home from work.
Since it was Super Bowl Sunday & the Indianapolis Colts were playing the Chicago Bears at Dolphin Stadium in Miami, Florida, Charity’s shift had been especially busy. When the police arrived at Buffalo Wild Wings at about 12:30 am, she & her co-workers were cleaning up after the last patrons had left for the night.
After they led a confused Charity to her manager’s office, they initially told her that Ella was only hurt. She immediately asked to be taken to wherever she was, which was when they finally told her that Ella was dead. Charity immediately fainted & as she came to, she heard the words for the very first time, your son murdered your daughter.
Investigators wanted to know about Paris, what his life had looked like up until that point. She said that at 13-years-old, he had been an extremely intelligent middle schooler who adored his little sister. Although she asked to see her son, officers told that until he specifically asked to see her, she wouldn’t be able to.
For the next six hours, Charity sat in her car outside her home that was lined with crime scene tape, police officers as well as the media & curious neighbors. She was in shock, knowing that her daughter’s body lay somewhere inside, trying to make sense of what happened as she felt her world crumbling around her.
Charity was there when Ella’s body was removed from the house on a stretcher in a body bag. As she ran to her, she wanted to see her face so detectives lowered the bag to her neck. This allowed her to see a large bump on her forehead as well as a black eye while blood was coming out of her mouth. She sobbed over her baby girl’s body, apologizing over & over for not being there, for not realizing that Paris had been capable of something so horrible.
After the investigators left, Charity found herself dazed, sitting on her couch, alone in a completely silent house, something she hadn’t experienced since having children thirteen years ago. As the school bus pulled up outside her house on Monday morning, she watched an ordinary moment of parents seeing their children off to school, realizing that she would never experience something so normal ever again.
When she first saw Paris at the juvenile detention center the evening after Ella’s murder, he wore an orange jumpsuit & sat in the far corner of the room. As she clung to him in a tearful hug, he held stock still with his arms down at his side, not returning the affection. She was shocked by his change in demeanor, basically unrecognizable to the child she’d always known.
Paris claimed that he was experiencing hallucinations on the night he killed his little sister, seeing her as a burning demon, something he’d also told the 911 dispatcher as well as the police. He told Charity that he climbed into her bed so he could lay with Ella to help her fall asleep, something he had never done before. After falling asleep himself, he said he woke up & saw a demon with a pumpkin head that was on fire, making a horrible cackling sound.
Terrified, he began to hit, choke & then ultimately stab the demon as a way to protect Ella, not realizing it was her until it was too late. He told her details that didn’t fit with what she’d seen in her bed, that he stabbed her, pushed her away & then stabbed her again, this time in the back. Charity recalled there being only one spot on the mattress that was covered in blood. She also couldn’t understand why he would have brought the knife to the bedroom in the first place.
If Paris had ever had hallucinations in the past, he had never once mentioned them to her.
According to Charity, her son had always been well-liked at school & other than typical sibling squabbles, he had never been cruel to his little sister. As a young child, he was a silly boy who laughed a lot & Charity insisted there had been no signs that something dark had been going on inside his mind.
However, in later interviews, she did admit that Paris had voiced homicidal thoughts toward her when he was as young as 8 or 9-years-old. When Charity once took his Play Station away, he told her that he was going to decapitate her so that he & Ella could live at home without her, doing whatever they wanted. There were also home movies that depicted Paris getting rough with his baby sister, using her hands to punch herself in the face.
Now she sat across from Paris in the locked detention center, realizing that she both loved & hated him at the same time, struggling to believe that he was telling the truth about the hallucination.
When investigators questioned Paris, although he appeared to be crying, they never once saw actual tears in his eyes.
On March 8, 2007, one month after Ella was murdered, he was charged with capital murder in a juvenile court.
Meanwhile, Charity struggled to find a will to live, having lost both of her children in a single night. She was left with the solitude of her thoughts, wondering what her daughter’s last moments entailed, how much pain she had been in, if she’d known it was her brother, who she loved so dearly, who was hurting her. As time went on, she felt convinced that there had been no hallucinations & Paris had intentionally killed his sister.
She couldn’t understand what led her son to murder his sister so she hired a psychologist, paying $15,000 for an evaluation, indicating that he found absolutely nothing wrong with Paris.
On March 23, a detective told her that Paris had initially hit Ella, then tried to strangle her before stabbing her a total of seventeen times. She was also told that just before he’d gone into the room to murder her, he had been searching the internet for snuff films, watching disturbing, violent porn. Charity was baffled since she couldn’t wrap her head around how her 13-year-old even knew what snuff films were.
During a visit with Paris days later on March 28, when she pushed him further about that night, he looked her in the eye & said, You’re right. I did kill her. She believed he murdered Ella because he was angry with her for telling on him after he snuck out the night before to go to the skate park when Charity was working & the babysitter was with them. He was also mad at his mom for lecturing him about spending all of his allowance money at the mall that weekend as well as for making him apologize to the babysitter for lying to her about sneaking out.
Moving forward to April 3, another devastating piece of the puzzle was presented to Charity when detectives told her that they found semen inside the shorts Paris had been wearing, as well as on her mattress & most devastating of all, on Ella’s body.
When she confronted him about this, he became enraged, pushing the table into her chest repeatedly, pinning her against the concrete wall behind her to the point that she struggled to breathe until the guards finally rushed in to restrain him.
Charity could see that he was no longer trying to hide his true self, saying that she was so f**cking stupid to have ever thought that he was intelligent, gifted or creative. He told her that he was proud of himself for tricking everyone around him, saying that when a boy in his class had annoyed him, he used to wonder what it would feel like to stab a pencil into an artery in his neck, to watch him bleed out & die. He told her that he enjoyed watching her pain.
As time continued on, Charity began to learn more & more about the night her daughter was murdered. According to a boy at the skate park, Paris had been talking about a pumpkin headed demon for months before the murder, something he had read in one of his books.
She learned that Ella had been tortured before her death as detectives & blood experts determined that of the seventeen stab wounds to her body, not all had been deep. Most had been shallow jabs & puncture wounds across her chest, abdomen, legs & back with 75% of them being non-lethal wounds.
Paris told the detectives that when he had stabbed his sister, he pulled the knife out slowly & it felt as if he’d been stabbing a mattress or a marshmallow. He’d struck Ella violently in the head & based on the fact that there were defensive wounds to her body, with cuts along her fingers, wrists & forearms, she had been alive, awake & no doubt terrified as her brother attacked & murdered her.
Based on the fact that there was no blood spatter, when Paris had stabbed Ella in the neck, her heart had slowed enough or it had already stopped.
When the 911 dispatcher instructed Paris to move his sister from the bed to the floor to begin CPR, he was initially very resistant. When he finally agreed, although he could be heard counting out the compressions along with the dispatcher, a detective who responded to the scene found Ella lying face-down on the floor.
He told his mom that he had picked Ella up like a dead deer & dropped her on the floor, saying he hadn’t wanted to do CPR since she was all bloody. He didn’t want to get dirty & he felt disgusted by the idea.
Investigators came to the conclusion that he had only pretended to help his sister as he hadn’t even been in the same room with her while he was counting compressions, something Paris later admitted to.
Six months after Ella was murdered, Paris confessed to the crime & pleaded guilty to capital murder in juvenile court. In August 2007, he was given the maximum sentence possible for his age of 40 years in state custody with the possibility of parole after 20 years.
Two months before his sentencing, he punched a peer several times in the face when they were together on the basketball court while the boy never fought back. Later that month, he flooded his room & then lunged at responding staff members.
He began his sentence at a juvenile facility before he was transferred to an adult prison after turning 19.
During a visit with Paris in 2010, he told his mom that he had been molesting his little sister since early 2005 when Ella would have been only 2-years-old while Paris would have been 11. He said he killed her so she wouldn’t tell on him. He admitted that he sexually abused her on the night of her death, admitting that the more violent he became, the more excited he became.
In 2011, Charity created The ELLA Foundation to provide education to those with a mental health diagnosis, those who have experienced trauma & to those who have criminal justice involvement. After thirteen years, she permanently shut the foundation down while remaining focused on writing & speaking events.
Following Paris’ arrest, mental health experts conducted an evaluation which proved that he exhibited both extremely high intelligence with an IQ of 141, placing him in the 99.6th percentile of the population, as well as significant psychopathic characteristics as he has shown little to no regret for his actions. One doctor wrote in his file that he is at moderate risk for developing psychopathic traits, characteristics & tendencies.
Paris reportedly scored 32 out of 40 on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), a clinical & forensic assessment tool designed to measure psychopathic traits & behavior in adults. This placed him in a category of individuals who profoundly lack empathy, have a grandiose sense of self-worth & a tendency for pathological lying.
A score of 30 or higher is the standard clinical threshold to diagnose someone as a psychopath. The average person scores near zero while many non-psychopathic incarcerated criminals score in the low 20s. Serial killer Ted Bundy scored a 39.
Charity realizes that although she still loves her firstborn as much as she did the moment she realized she was pregnant with him, she also accepts that because he’s a psychopath, she’ll never be able to do anything to help him.
The idea that psychopathic tendencies can be detected in children is a controversial subject as there is no accepted standard test for psychopathy in children. Some psychologists argue that it’s nearly impossible to diagnose children & teens because their brains are still developing & normal behavior at those ages could be misinterpreted as psychopathic.
There are a small, but growing number of psychologists who believe that psychopathy, like autism, is a distinct neurological condition that can be identified in children as young as five. According to Dan Waschbusch, a psychologist at Florida International University, those who lack affect, remorse or empathy are at risk for becoming psychopaths as adults.
In June 2013, Charity had a third child, a son named Phoenix, who in 2026, would be 13-years-old, the same age Paris was when he killed his sister. Phoenix lived in the NICU for two months after he was diagnosed with critical aortic stenosis & had to undergo open heart surgery at only six days old.
Since Paris isn’t allowed to have visitors under the age of 18, although he & Phoenix would occasionally speak on the phone, they’ve never met in person.
A third psychologist that Charity asked to review her son’s file, suggested that she & Phoenix move away from Texas & change their names for their safety before Paris is eligible for parole.
In January 2021, Charity cut all ties with Paris when he was 27-years-old after he began dating a woman who was out on bond for planning a mass shooting. She went on to say, I finally accepted it is ok to love my son but really dislike the man he has become.
When Paris spoke with Piers Morgan in 2019 about his decision to murder Ella, he described a hot, flaming ball of wrath that he’d felt in his stomach for years that was directed at his mother. Knowing that he could hurt his mom in the worst possible way by losing not one, but both of her children, he decided he was going to kill his sister.
Since he knew his mom would be working late that night, he convinced the babysitter to leave, knowing he would have a good amount of time to do what he planned to do. He had fantasized about killing people before, but while they ate Chinese food that night, he decided he was going to kill his sister. While the sitter drove them home from dinner, he decided how he was going to do it.
He initially planned on killing the babysitter & then Charity when she came home from work, but since he wanted her to suffer for the rest of her life rather than just for a few minutes, he allowed her to live.
He told Piers Morgan that after he grabbed a large knife from the kitchen & went back to his mom’s bedroom where Ella had been sleeping, he stabbed her twice, causing wounds that wouldn’t have been fatal had he stopped & called 911. He said once he began, he felt he couldn’t stop since he had to see it through to the end.
Paris will first be eligible for parole in less than four months on February 5, 2027 when he’s 33-years-old. If he serves his full 40-year sentence, he’ll be 53-years-old on his release in February 2047. As his parole eligibility begins, Charity has been advocating to keep her son incarcerated.
Experts who have analyzed Paris have reported his mask of sanity; on the surface, he’s well-spoken, polite & very logical. Not only is he highly intelligent, but since he views people as objects or tools to be manipulated, makes him more likely to successfully manipulate his victims & therapists & more challenging to treat through standard rehabilitation programs.
In 2020, Charity Lee published a memoir about her journey through grief after losing her daughter titled, How Now, Butterfly A Memoir of Murder, Survival, and Transformation.
For Charity Lee, February 4, 2007 wasn’t just the night that she lost her daughter, it was the night her entire world was torn apart by the person she never imagined could be responsible. The person who took 4-year-old Ella’s life wasn’t a madman who broke into their home or a stranger lurking in the shadows, it was her big brother who should have been there to protect her rather than harm her.
Paris had achieved his goal that night, to force his mom to wade through the kind of grief that few people could ever begin to understand. She’s had to mourn the loss of her little girl while grappling with the complicated reality that her son was responsible. All the while, she’s had to find a way to keep living even though the life she once knew is gone forever.
Ella Bennett had been only 4-years-old & although Paris Bennett’s name will forever be associated with the terrible crime he committed, it’s her name that deserves to be remembered.
References:
- New York Post: Why my ‘monster’ son murdered & molested my daughter
- Medium: The tragic murder of Ella Bennett: From love to loss
- Prime Timer: 5 horrifying details about the murder of 4-year-old girl Ella Bennett from Texas
- Ati: Ella Bennett, the 4-year-old girl whose big brother murdered her because he was mad at their mom
- Amazon: How Now Butterfly? A Memoir of Murder, Survival & Transformation
- San Antonio Current: Murder destroyed Charity Lee’s family, forever altered her concept of justice
- IMDB: Evil Lives Here: My Child the Killer. S1, E5: The Child I Thought I Knew
- YouTube: Paris Lee Bennett – Psychopath with Piers Morgan – Ep. 3
- YouTube: Paris Lee Bennett – Psychopath with Piers Morgan – Ep. 4
- YouTube: YouTube Movies & TV: The Family I Had
- Fox 28 Savannah: Savannah woman turns tragedy into triumph through Ella Foundation
- Versarien: The case of Paris Bennett: A deep psychological analysis & case study
