HE SEEMED like the perfect older brother, cuddling and playing with his little sister and selflessly caring for her when she was poorly.

It made their mum, Charity, who had brought them up as a single parent, so pleased and proud.

Paris Bennett and Ella, his younger sister, smiling.
Ella was stabbed 17 times by her brother, Paris Bennett, who was 13 at the time.Credit: facebook
 

Charity Lee and her son Paris Bennett in a kitchen.
Paris pleaded guilty in juvenile court to murder and received the maximum sentence of 40 yearsCredit: Facebook
So, when the police arrived at her work place on February 4, 2007, and told her that her 13-year-old son, Paris had murdered his four-year-old sister, Ella, she was in a state of disbelief.

To her astonishment, she was to learn from Paris that he had hated his sister from the moment she was born and had just been pretending to like her all along.

“I saw no signs of that at all,” says Charity. “His love for her seemed totally authentic to me.

“From the moment that Paris killed Ella, I had to become a divided mother. Nobody prepares you for when it’s the two people you love most in the world and one kills the other. What do you do then?”

Paris Bennett, who murdered his 4-year-old sister.
Charity revealed she was in a state of disbelief when she first found outCredit: Facebook
 

Charity Lee and her son Paris Bennett posing with their arms around each other.
Charity opened up about the guilt she felt for years after her daughter’s murderCredit: Facebook
Charity rakes over the horrors of her past in the TV documentary, Evil Lives Here: My Child The Killer.

As a teenager, Charity Bennett became addicted to drugs. She found herself pregnant and about to be a single mother.

“That’s when I got sober,” she says.

“I had a purpose. When Paris was born, I had no idea that there was an actual real love like that, but I had dreamed about it my entire life, hoping that it was real. I’d never seen anything so perfect in my life.

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“I told him, ‘I have no idea what the hell I’m doing, but I promise I will always love you and I will always be there for you, no matter what’.

“I saw it as a new chapter. Well, stories don’t always go the way you want them to.”

As he got older, Charity thought Paris was a sweet, well-adjusted boy.

She explains: “I would drop him off at his daycare centre on my way to work and everything was fine.

“When I collected him later, his face would light up and he would shout ‘Mum’ and run across the room and jump into my arms.

“When your kid looks at you like that, it is the best feeling in the world.

“He laughed a lot. He wasn’t dark or troublesome. There were no signs of anything of concern.”

When Paris was seven, Charity married, although the marriage ended quickly, and she was left pregnant.

“Paris was with me the day I found out I was pregnant with Ella,” she says.

“He was playing with this Lego that he had built and when the doctor came in and said, ‘Congratulations, you’re having a baby,’ he dropped it and it just shattered everywhere.

“Paris hated the idea. He didn’t want to share his mum.”

But, to her relief, he fell immediately in love with his baby sister and was a protective elder brother. Or so Charity thought…

“The day Ella was born, he came into the room, and I was so worried, hoping it would go well,” the mum remembers.

“And then, he saw Ella and I asked him if he wanted to hold her. He said, ‘Yeah,’ and he took her and he looked down at her and he had had this look on his face and he was like, ‘Oh, Mama. She is beautiful. I love her.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, thank God!’ It really felt authentic to me.”

The bond continued as they got older.

Proud mum, Charity filmed Paris singing to Ella and kissing her in her high chair. The footage can be seen in the documentary and appears totally loving and natural.

“I remember Ella got colic and for months was just screaming,” she says.

“She had this toy plastic phone she could push the buttons on and it had princesses that would talk to her. And Paris figured out that if he put this phone to her ear and he kept it ringing, she would lay there and gradually fall asleep.

“I remember thinking, ‘What an amazing big brother that he’s willing to do that for his sister’.

“People think that I sat and watched him turn into a psychopathic monster over the years and never did anything to save my daughter. They are wrong. He was a really good big brother.”

When Paris was 12, Charity relapsed after more than a decade of sobriety.

“I think that all children have a point where they realise for the first time that their parents aren’t God-like, they’re human,” she says.

“But I think it was almost like culture shock for Paris because he had never seen the addict part of my personality.

“He now saw me acting erratically and impulsively. It had to have been hard for him. He was starting to isolate more. He became moodier and it got pretty ugly.

“One day, I asked him to sit down and I was trying to have a conversation with him but the entire time he was just looking at me, with no expression on his face. Deadpan. And he’s saying, ‘Bch, wre, slt, c**,’ – over and over.”

“I had never seen him act like that before. I definitely believe my relapse played a role in what he did to Ella, but I never would have thought he had homicidal thoughts. He hid it pretty damn well.”

On the evening of February 4, 2007, Charity left her home in Texas and headed out to work, leaving her two children in the care of a babysitter.

She shares: “I was running late for work because Ella was in the bathtub.

“The sitter was in there with her and Ella kept saying to me, ‘One more hug, Mama, one more kiss’.

“She said it three or four times and I wasn’t going to give up the opportunity to hug her.

“I’m so glad now that I gave her every single one because that’s the last time I ever got to do that.”

She also remembers her last interaction with Paris that night.

She says: “He was angry with me when I left for work.

“I remember giving him a hug by the front door, and telling him, ‘I know you’re mad at me right now and you don’t want to talk to me. Just remember I love you and we can get through anything together.’ And he was just looking at me, with that calm, cold stillness.

“When I left, he had already made-up his mind to kill somebody.”

In the early hours of February 5, 2007, police appeared at Charity’s work to tell her the awful truth that her son had murdered her daughter.

She says: “I passed out for a while in shock. It didn’t seem to make sense. I drove to my house and there were media vans outside and when I saw the stretcher come out with Ella’s body in a bag I lost my hearing.

“I didn’t hear a thing. I could see people talking at me, I could see their mouths moving, but I couldn’t hear a thing they were saying.”

After they took away Ella’s body, Charity’s mind turned to Paris.

“I was the mother to them both,” she says.

“I am the mother of the victim and I am the mother of the murderer. Even though I knew he was the reason for the pain I was in, he is my baby too and I needed to have hands on him to know that he was okay.

“I asked so many times for somebody to take me to him but they said I couldn’t, because he hadn’t asked for me.

“Everybody left and there was nothing I could do but just sit on the couch as everything fell apart. The house was so quiet. I hadn’t lived in a quiet house for 13 years.”

Later that evening she finally got to see him.

“He was sitting in the corner of the room, looking at me like he was just waiting to see what I was going to do,” Charity recalls.

“I walked over to him and, pulled him out of the chair and hugged him. I was shaking, crying, panicking. Just shell-shocked. I can’t even begin to explain it.

“And then I realised that as I’m hugging him, he’s not hugging me back. I mean, he wasn’t doing anything. Just dead.

“I pulled away and he said, ‘So what are you going to do now? You always told me that the only way you could ever kill somebody is if they hurt one of your children. So, what are you going to do now?’

“And I remember thinking, ‘Who is this person and where is my Paris?’ I was so unnerved. He was a different person. It was the very first time I saw behind that mask.

“I told him. ‘I have no f clue what we’re going to do now, but I made you a promise when you were born, that I was going to love you no matter what. And I’m always going to do the best I can to be a good mum to you. I don’t know what that looks like now, but that’s what I’m still going to do’.”

The account that Paris gave to police of what happened and forensic analysis of Ella’s body, was to add even more terrible anguish to Charity.

“He told the police he laid down with Ella to help her go to sleep and then he must have fallen asleep also,” she says.

“And then at some point he woke up and he looked over and saw a pumpkin-headed demon, instead of Ella, and that he thought he had to kill it in order to protect his sister. But that is not the way it happened at all.

“What really happened to Ella that night was Paris convinced the babysitter to leave and then went into the kitchen, got a knife and went into the room where Ella was sleeping.

“The first thing he did to her was hit her because he told me later that he wanted her to be awake so she would know who was hurting her. And he stabbed her 17 times after beating and choking her. And he really, really enjoyed it.

“There was semen found on the inside of Paris’s underwear. The theory is that the act of murder caused him sexual pleasure. After I learned that he derived pleasure from seeing people suffer for the first time, I started to wonder, ‘Is my son evil?’”

Paris pleaded guilty in juvenile court to murder and received the maximum sentence of 40 years.

For the first few years, Charity regularly visited him in prison, honouring her promise to always be there for him, but his relentlessly cold and ruthless behaviour eventually made her stop going.

“For the majority of the visits, I cried and he was cruel. It was a challenge to keep my promise to Paris,” she says.

“I once asked him if he remembered holding the toy telephone to Ella’s ear so she would fall asleep and I said that such things made it so hard for me to understand why he killed his sister.

“And he laughed and said, ‘Yeah, I remember that. You know what I was honestly thinking? I was thinking, ‘Why won’t she just shut the f*** up?’”

“Guilt was really, really heavy on me for the longest time. It’s been 19 years and I still don’t really enjoy being in public. When I see a brother and sister that look like they have the same age difference as Paris and Ella, I think to myself, what the hell happened?