By Courtney Wood
Paris Bennett was born on October 10th 1993, in Abilene, Texas. The Bennett family consisted of Paris, his mother, Charity, and his half sister, baby Ella; there is nothing known about either child’s biological father. During his adolescence, Paris began showing signs of psychopathy as he started abusing animals and has since been accused of threatening his family members; both were a horrific glimpse into the future. As an adult, he was formally diagnosed with several psychiatric disorders that seemed to go unnoticed when he was younger, including Bipolar Disorder, ADHD, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, and Psychopathy. Paris’s mental instability can be seen in some of the family’s home movies, as he is shown being playful and protective of his little sister in some, but in others, he is unnecessarily rough and even vows to kill her, saying “Kill All Charity’s Children. It is possible that he was able to keep the full extent of his psychopathy hidden, as Paris is a bright young man with an I.Q. of 141, and most individuals with that high of an I.Q. are capable of keeping their true intentions from those closest to them.
His mother, Charity, also had a troubled past that started during adolescence and continued through adulthood. When Charity was only six years old, her mother, Kyla Bennett, was charged with conspiring to hire someone to kill her husband, Bob Bennett. Kyla was quickly acquitted of all charges due to a lack of sufficient evidence, but most in the family had their suspicions of her innocence. Unsurprisingly, this strained her family relationships and sadly set her on a path that would make her crave unconditional love as well as a release for her pain. As a young adult, Charity became addicted to heroin. Despite all the years of abuse, she was able to remain sober for the first 12 years of her son’s life until she relapsed for around six months using cocaine. In his first confession, Paris told detectives he had decided to “punish her for not staying clean and putting drugs before him”. The pain caused by Charity’s relapse would have a result no parent could have ever foreseen: the murder of her daughter.
“I think I killed someone. No, I know I did. I feel so messed up.” -Paris Bennett’s 911 call
On February 5th, 2007, at only 13 years old, Paris Bennett killed his 4 year old half sister, Ella, by beating, choking, and stabbing her to death a disturbing 17 times. That night was Super Bowl Sunday, and his mother, who was in college earning a Master’s degree in education, was working a late double shift as a waitress at Buffalo Wild Wings. Despite his mother having to work late as it was the biggest sports day of the year, Paris still convinced their babysitter to leave early. After the heinous crime, he staged the house to look like a break-in and then called a friend who he spoke to for over six minutes before calling for emergency services. Experts have since theorized that this disconnection from the reality of the situation is a huge sign of psychopathy.
Shockingly, Paris almost immediately confessed to the unspeakable crime and took full responsibility, saying: "I chose to do my crime and I take full responsibility for my crime. I wouldn’t say there was a predisposition to what happened. I’m not insane, and I don’t suffer from any mental illness." Experts felt this was another sign of his high I.Q. because he would be smart enough to tell people what they want to hear, despite it not being true. However, given his very apparent lack of empathy, anyone listening to him saying these words can tell he is not emotionally affected by the crime and has failed to grasp the severity of his actions.
Surprisingly, examiners found traces of DNA inside the very young victim. This news would horrify any parent, but Charity said she was not shocked by this, saying she knew her son was a fan of “violent” and “deviant” pornography. She addressed this years later in 2010, writing this in her diary: “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.” Interestingly, the nature of the stab wounds, deliberate, slow, methodical, and seemingly devoid of rage, indicated a calculated and sadistic approach, which ruled out that this was a sexually motivated crime of passion.
The biggest question surrounding this unusual case was why had this young boy had decided to kill his own baby sister? What motivation could be so strong to make a child hurt such an innocent baby? Paris answered these difficult questions by confessing that he had considered killing his mother and the babysitter, too, but chose to only kill his sister because it would hurt his mother the most. He stated: "One of the reasons why I chose to kill my sister and not someone else is because I knew that by doing that I could hurt my mother in the worst possible way, because I had always known, as a child, that the most devastating thing to my mother would be the loss of one of her children, and I found a way to take away both her children in one fell swoop." It would be impossible for anyone to understand what all Charity was going through at this time and unfortunately, her son would continue finding ways to cause her pain. Paris verbally hurting his grieving mother would be a common occurrence in their visits following the murder. Perhaps the worst incident of consistent verbal assault occurred just two weeks after the murder when they were in the local District Attorney's office and her son told her: "You used to say that you would never be able to kill anybody unless they hurt one of your kids. I bet you didn't think it was going to turn out like this." adding “By the way, I enjoy watching your pain”.
Paris Bennett was officially charged with capital murder and would stand trial almost 2 years later in 2009. Since the crime occurred when he was 13 years old, and in the state of Texas, you have to be over the age of 14 to be tried as an adult, he was tried as a juvenile. Unbelievably, at the beginning of the trial, despite previously confessing, he tried to claim that on the night of the murder, he had a hallucination of his sister being an “evil pumpkin-headed demon” which forced him to kill her for his “own safety”. This ridiculous ploy was quickly dropped, and Paris entered into a plea deal with the state. In the end, he was convicted of first-degree murder and was sentenced to 40 years in Texas State prison. In exchange for pleading guilty, Paris will be eligible for parole in 2027, after serving only 20 years. If he is denied parole, he will remain in prison until 2047, after completing the entire 40-year sentence. He was moved to an adult prison when he turned 19, where he remains today. Dr Casey Jordan, who forensically analyzed some of Paris’ interviews, said: “Psychopathy can’t be cured. He will not, can not change. He can be managed which is why he is in a prison but it will never go away. In my opinion, he should never get out.” “I do not know how to stop loving my children.” -Charity Bennett
Unsurprisingly, the case would receive a lot of attention, most notably it was featured in the I.D. channel’s special “The Family I Had” and Piers Morgan’s shocking in-depth interview “Psychopath”. Morgan’s interview gave the world the most intimate insight into Bennett’s mind that it had ever gotten. For this interview, psychological experts were brought in to analyze the young murderer’s answers to Morgan’s very personal questions. In what could be the most telling set of questions in the entire interview, Paris was asked to articulate his feelings for his dead sister and give an example of unconditional love. Given his diagnosed psychopathy with “homicidal ideation from childhood”, it is not surprising that he was unable to answer these personal questions convincingly, despite trying his best to do so. The experts compared Paris’s inability to answer these emotional questions to asking a blind person to describe colors adding: “They can not do it because they have never experienced it, this is a hallmark of a psychopath.”. Another telling question asked was why he had such anger towards his mother, to which Paris answered: “I spent a lot of time feeling alone as a child. A lot of time feeling left out. Not only by my peers, but by my own family”. His mother would deny this claim and said she had no idea where that feeling would have come from.
Morgan’s interview also gave viewers an insight into what life has been like for Charity, who was also asked to react to her son’s interview. It was revealed that his mom frequently visits him in jail and claims to still love him no matter what. When asked if she forgave her son, Charity responded: ”Yes. Why? I hate what he did, but I can’t hate my son”. Perhaps the most surprising revelation of the whole interview was that in 2012, his mother had another son named Phoenix and she told Paris about him. Many experts have warned her of Paris’s potential to harm her youngest son when he does get out of jail. Charity said she would handle any potential danger when the day comes, and she will do everything to protect Phoenix. Finally, Charity addressed the mental pain everything had on her by admitting to drinking heavily and eventually trying to overdose on sleeping pills.
“Yes, I did commit a monstrous crime, but does that one mistake define my entire life … I don’t think it does.”- Paris Bennett
Despite warnings from experts and understandable judgment from her peers, Paris’s mother continued to visit him in jail even after he tried to kill her. She wrote about the incident in her journal, saying that: “He slammed the table into me, pinning me against the concrete wall behind me. He cut off my air. I was in shock, paralyzed. I thought I was going to die there. Then he pulled the table back, I caught my breath, and he slammed it into me again.”. In 2021, she would finally cut all ties with Paris after learning that he was romantically involved with a woman who was recently out on bond and living only two hours away from where she and Phoenix live. This could not have been an easy choice for her, but she did protect her son Phoenix as she had vowed to do.
Charity did eventually write a book about her unique experience entitled “How Now Butterfly?A Memoir of Murder, Survival and Transformation.” She founded the ELLA Foundation (Empathy-Love-Lessons-Actions) to aid those affected by ‘violence, mental illness, and the criminal justice system’ and also does public speaking tours all around the United States.
The case of child murderer Paris Bennett is one of the saddest stories in recent memory. His crime has caused unimaginable pain for his unsuspecting mother, who has the incredible misfortune of losing two of her children for no comprehensible reason at all. Although she has been able to make progress in her life, there is no amount of time or healing that can take away her pain.
Editor's note: this article ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. Paris Bennett has no entry in this archive's roster and will not get one: one death, one event, and he is not a serial killer by any definition the roster uses. The convictions are as described. He was thirteen when he killed his four year old half sister Ella in Abilene in February 2007, was tried as a juvenile because Texas requires a defendant to be fourteen to be certified as an adult, pleaded guilty and received forty years. The diagnoses quoted here, and the assessments of psychopathy attributed to experts on television, are clinical opinions offered about a child and should be read as opinions. Charity Bennett's own account of what her son admitted, quoted from her diary, is her testimony and not a court finding.