Mum reveals moment she heard her four-year-old daughter was murdered by her son

WARNING, DISTRESSING CONTENT: A devastated mother whose son murdered her daughter, has spoken about the night her life changed forever.

A new documentary called “The Family I Had”, which recently aired in the US, details the horror that mother Charity Lee went through on the night of and in the years after her 13-year-old son Paris Bennett murdered his four-year-old half-sister Ella.

Ms Lee was at work waiting tables at a sports bar in Texas on February 5, 2007 when police called her to tell her Ella had been choked and stabbed to death, The New York Post reports.

Police told her Bennett was in custody – he had murdered his half-sister with a kitchen knife.

Bennett, who is now 24, was a highly intelligent teen with an IQ of 141.

After he was sentenced in 2009 , an assessor told Ms Lee that Bennett was a sociopath who had confessed to having homicidal thoughts since he was eight and often expressed violent urges through drawings.

On the fatal night in February, he convinced the babysitter she could go home before calmly walking into his little sister’s bedroom.

He then began beating and choking her before stabbing her 17 times.

Bennett rang a friend afterwards and chatted for six minutes before calling police.

He pretended to carry out CPR before admitting what he’d done.

At first, Bennett claimed he was suffering hallucinations and Ella had appeared as an inflamed, demonic creature laughing maniacally at him.

He later admitted he woke that morning wanting to kill someone.

Ms Lee said Ella was an easy target for him because he was a predator and the little girl was smaller than him.

The teen told investigators his original plan involved also murdering his mother when she returned home from work, but Ms Lee believes he didn’t go through with it because by just murdering Ella she would suffer for the rest of her life instead of “5, 10, 15 minutes”.

Ms Lee was a heroin addict who had kicked the habit shortly before having her son, but she relapsed into cocaine use about a year before the teen murdered Ella.

The mum said she regretted her relapse, but Bennett’s choice to murder his half-sister was just “another indication that he is a sociopath”.

He has since refused further psychological evaluations and remains in jail where he is serving a 40-year sentence.

In the documentary he says he isn’t insane and doesn’t suffer from mental illness.

He has also taken responsibility for Ella’s murder and “wouldn’t say there was a predisposition to what happened”.

Ms Lee has since had a third child, Phoenix, in 2012, but still regularly visits her son in jail.

She told the New York Post she had forgiven her son, not wanting to be "that parent who abandons her kid", but admits if he was free she “would be frightened of him."

In 2011, Ms Lee founded the non-profit ELLA Foundation in the hope of helping others affected by trauma. The name is an acronym for Empathy, Love, Lessons and Action.

“On the night that Ella died, I vowed to do something meaningful in her memory,” she said.

“It also gave me a place to direct my rage, other than at my child.”