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- [00:00]
Wit Misseldine
This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services.
- [00:19]
Charity Lee
I felt like somebody had just obliterated me into like a billion microscopic pieces of meat that would never be found again. Then took all those pieces and stomped on them until it was just dust.
- [00:47]
Wit Misseldine
From wondery. I'm wit misseldine. You're listening to this is actually happening, Episode 395. What if your son murdered your daughter?
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Charity Lee
My parents met when my father was married to my aunt, my mother's sister. The marriage between my father and my aunt didn't work. And then my mother and my father got married. She was 16, I think he was at least a decade older than her. My father worked with his dad, my grandfather who ran a junkyard. They also were involved in some criminal related activities. I was born in 1973. My mother was 22. They were running a trucking company, hauling U.S. mail for the post office. Some time before I turned 6, my parents divorced. And then in March 1980, they went to Las Vegas on a Friday and got married again. And then that Monday, my father was murdered. I was about to turn 7. I had no idea what had happened. My mother was being investigated. All of this information about their lives was coming out. It was all over the news and in Atlanta, my father being such a womanizer. The criminal activity that consisted of, you know, stolen car part rings, drug smuggling, and because it was US mail and some of those trucks were used, you know, federal offenses. So she was indicted, arrested, put on trial. It was a big story. But then, you know, at the end of it all, she was acquitted. You know, my mother had talked to people, you know, about killing her husband. So I feel like she was involved. I don't know exactly how, but I don't think she was wrongfully accused. I was pretty okay during all of that whirlwind of murder investigation. You know, I was with my grandparents in North Carolina and I loved my grandparents. But at some point my mom did come to North Carolina and like sit down and explain to me that the reason I had to leave so fast was, you know, my father was dead and my. What I remember feeling at the time was being glad it wasn't her who had died. My father wasn't around that much. And at 6, I don't think I had the concept that dead meant dead and just not around that much. I think it took a while for that concept to sink in. After my mother was acquitted of murder, you know, we were back together and we moved into a new house. My mother remarried. He was physically abusive. He was a drug addict and a drug dealer. I think that was the first time that I ever heard my mother get hit. My mom was much less accessible emotionally. When I would, you know, begin to ask questions about my father, she wouldn't answer questions about him except to tell me how bad he was. So I think somewhere along the line, I started thinking that I was half bad. My mom wasn't well beneath the surface, but we made it through. You know, it was like, on the outside, everything looked great, but once the door closed, my mom became a different person. I remember around the age of 11 or 12, I was trying to talk to my mom about something, and I looked at her and the thought hit me for the first time. I'm like, I am never going to be able to breach whatever wall that is. And that really was definitely devastating to me. When your parent gets stuck and walled off, and then you're like, I need help. They're trapped in all of their own. So I guess I'll find ways to help myself deal with adolescence and questions and identity issues and sex and like, she was not there for me, you know, between 13 and 15, it was like smoking pot and taking pills, and then like, 15, doing Coke for the first time and acid and like, you know, pretty much any drug under the sun. And became quite addicted to heroin. I had finished school. I was no longer living at home. I moved out when I was 16. This drug journey was an attempt to figure out a way to deal with the ever increasing amount of pain and puberty and the witness of physical trauma. The daughter of the mother, who may or may not, in fact, had her husband killed after, you know, years of drug use and almost overdoses and a really bad infection from dirty needles. Like, I knew if I didn't quit, I was going to die. I'm almost 18 years old and, you know, just begged to go to treatment. So I detoxed off of everything. I finally got out of there sober, and I went home to the exact same situation that I left. So, you know, how do you deal with that? You do drugs. And I rationalized it as it wasn't as bad this time because I was shooting cocaine and not heroin. It was Christmas Eve. My mother gave me $100 and told me not to come back ever again unless I was sober. I decided to take 50 bucks and buy coke and 50 bucks to spend on gas and go beg a place at this halfway house up in Tennessee. I enrolled in college, started taking, you know, college classes and going to AA meetings and rebuild my life. I had been sober a little over a year, and I was absolutely miserable. I had made a deal with myself that. That I was going to give this whole sobriety thing three more months, and if I was still miserable, I was going to go buy heroin and just overdose. I was so tired and felt so hopeless. But about three weeks before that deadline, I found out that I was pregnant with Paris, my first child. It's like the sunshine came out, right? Like, wow. And like the clouds parted. And I immediately just fell in love with this baby. Paris's father left maybe three weeks after finding out about the pregnancy. So Paris was born October of 1993. Even though the sunshine came out and the, you know, skies parted like it's parenthood. And I'm young now. I'm also in college and the mother of a newborn baby and single. And in a town where I don't have any family living, it's not easy. But when it came to parenting, I was completely in love with my child. As a child, Paris was very precocious, very intelligent. He learned easily. He really would take these deep dives into topics that interested him, but he was, you know, a happy child. He was very affectionate child. He obviously had his days just like any child. But under the circumstances of growing up underneath buying my mom's toxicity, you know, he seemed to be a pretty normal kid. When Paris was a little over two, I met a man in one of my college classes. And then when Paris was four, we married after I graduated, and then we divorced six months after we got married. You know, at this time, I'm working at my mother's trucking company. I've been made co owner, and I'm going to work, and Paris is going to school, school, and he does really, really well in school. And I was still a very involved mom. Around the age of seven, I met another man named Jonathan. You know, we got married. It wasn't too, too long after that we found out that I was pregnant with my second child, Ella. It was toxic as hell. Fortunately, that toxicity only lasted about again six months after we got married. And I have sworn off marriage and have held to that vow since. Paris did not want anything to do with my pregnancy. He was not happy when he found out that I was having a baby. He just was upset that he was no longer going to be an only child. But on the day that she was born, I handed Ella to him, and then he looked up at Me. And he was just like, she's beautiful. I think I'm in love. It was fine after that. The best thing that I can say about my family is not so much to compare it to others, because I know all families are insane in their own way. But, like, my life has been defined by murder. You know, I was raised in an environment that was not conducive to healthy thoughts or behaviors, and that carries through. Children inherit the issues that their parents never resolved. And so, you know, with Paris and Ella, I did my best the majority of the time to insulate them as much as possible, to try to provide them with some sort of emotional buffer zone that would keep them safe psychologically, but that doesn't mean that they were unscathed. I got sober. I thought I resolved the issue, and I had. But what I hadn't resolved was the toxicity between my mother and I. My mother and I had a very toxic relationship. And so there came a point when Paris was around 11 that things had gotten really bad in my life, and I relapsed. I relapsed after I started a concert promotion business. It's an industry that is highly infused with drugs. And, you know, it started off like all addictions. I just was super, super tired. One night, somebody offered me something to help me stay awake. And then, you know, because I am an addict, it completely spiraled out of control for about nine months. I knew I needed help, and I knew that it was going to take a minute, so I had moved in with my mother and stepfather. It changed Paris. He became enraged, like, really angry with me. And, you know, there's another way that drama got handed down. My children had never known me as anything but sober. And then all of a sudden, you know, their mom is completely a different person. You know, that's trauma that I handed down to them. It was a really hard nine months, but we got through it. So I got sober around the time Paris was 12. You know, during this time, Paris really did what he shouldn't have had to do, which was help take care of Ella. He spent a lot of time with her and helped look after her. And he also, at the same time, you know, was obviously very angry with me. And also, being an adolescent, he would yell at me and tell me off. And I can't really say that I blame him. You know, so much of what was going through his head was completely unknown to me. Now, when he reached a Point at 12 where he was angry with me, he grabbed a knife, and he never threatened to kill me. He Brandished it at me and was like, stay away, stay away. But he was having, like, an emotional breakdown. Everything had finally come to a head for him with everything we had gone through. And I didn't feel that his intent was to hurt me, but I put him in a hospital for evaluation. He stayed at that hospital for about two weeks. It was over a Thanksgiving holiday. I wasn't getting a lot of feedback from the hospital. Paris wanted to come home. You know, it wasn't very high quality care, so I checked him out. And to be honest with you, I really understood why my son was so angry at me. Like, I messed up big time. And I understood what feeling that kind of rage at a parent felt like. Paris and I have a much different relationship than the one that I had with my mother. And I had faith that because I had been sober a year and we had the relationship that we had and he had been able to have his meltdown, we could then start the conversations and begin to. Now, I hate the word heal, because you don't heal from trauma. You learn to live with it. But. But that we could, you know, come back together as a family again, no longer at war with one another. So Paris got out of the hospital. December of 2005, I moved Paris and Ella and I into a smaller house in a different city. I started grad school, got two jobs, one as a teaching assistant and one as a server at Buffalo Wild Wings. Things were getting better. There obviously were still tense moments. Paris, I mean, he didn't trust me, and I earned that. There's trust to rebuild, right? Like, it's an ongoing process, just like all of life. But I felt like we were on a good track. Paris and I were getting back the closeness that we had before. Ella was doing great always. She was very cheerful and extroverted, and Ella was a happy little girl. The only issue I was having with Paris at that time was Paris was acting just like a teenager would. He spent more time on his own. He snuck out of the house to go to the skate park. He started dressing more Goth. Just the teenage attitude. But he also had a group of friends. He did really well in school. His teachers all loved him. They. Things were getting better at home. There was one other incident. And I know that this is controversial to a lot of people, depending on their thoughts about gender, but we have always been a very strongly supportive family when it comes to the LGBTQ community. But there was a day where I was putting laundry away into his dresser, and I found a pair of my underwear. My first Reaction was, obviously, these should not be here. His mother's underwear should not be in his drawer. My second reaction was, but I wonder why they are. And so when he came home, because I believe in dialogue with your children, I sat down with him and was like, listen, first, I was not snooping, I promise. I was putting your laundry away. And when I did, this is what I found. And I'd like to, you know, talk about this. He, you know, told me that sometimes he wondered what it felt like to be a woman. And it's a completely viable possibility that a man may think they are a woman or transition to be a woman. Your child gender identity is just something that they're going to go through. I mean, some kids know beyond a shadow of a doubt, right? Some kids question. And so that's where my brain was. I was like, listen, I'm okay with you being curious about that. On the other hand, it's not anything I really have any experience with. You might want somebody else to talk to along with me. And he agreed that that would be nice. So I found them a therapist and made an appointment. So it was February 4th, Super Bowl Sunday. It was the day before Paris's first appointment with the therapist. That weekend had also been hard because I had started giving him $75 a month to learn how to budget money. And he had gone to the mall, and he spent all of his money at once. And then he had snuck out to the skate park when the babysitter was there, and he got grounded for that. He was pretty angry with me about that. So when I got called into work that day, I was getting ready for work. I started to give Ella a bath. The babysitter arrived, and Ella was a very confident little girl. But on that particular day, she kept telling me to come back and give her one more hug. Just one more hug, Mama. Just one more kiss. She did that, like, four times to the point where I knew I was going to be late for work. But I didn't. Paris was mad at me. Paris tends to, like, shut down and ignore you when he's mad. But I gave him a hug, and I said, I know you're mad at me, but when I get back, we'll sit down, we'll talk, we'll work it all out. We've gone through worse. So I go to work. Around midnight, as the restaurant is closed, everything's locked up, there's a knock on the door. It's one plainclothes detective, a uniformed officer, and a police. Police chaplain. They go back to the Manager's office. We're all like, what's going on? And then the manager comes out and he says my name. So when I go into the manager's office, they said, your daughter Ella has been hurt. So I was like, where is she? Take me to her now. And they were like, well, actually your daughter is dead. I'm like, what do you mean? I didn't believe him. I kept saying, what do you mean you're not. Like, you're wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. And like, she was at home with the babysitter and her brother. And I was like, where is her brother? If she's dead, where is her brother? Is he okay? Take me to him. And they were like, he. He's fine. He's with us. And I'm like, what do you mean he's with? Like, why is he with you? The police, they said, well, because your son is the one who called 911 and he's the murderer. Whoever I thought I was, whatever I thought my life was, whatever personality I have, I. I felt like somebody had just obliterated me into like a billion microscopic pieces of meat that would never be found again, then took all those pieces and stomped on them until it was just dust. I demanded to be driven to my house. They wouldn't take me to see Paris. And so I demanded to be where my other child was being processed as a crime scene. I needed to be near her. So for the next six hours, I sat in front of my house in my car. It's freezing cold. It's February. The major news outlets knew before I did that Ella was dead. They were all at my house when I got there. And I sat in my car, tried not to have my photograph taken and tried to find out what was going on. And nobody would tell me anything. Finally, the police chaplain comes out and tells me that they are going to bring Ella's body out of the house. That she has convinced the lead detective that in order for my mental health, my sanity, like I was really ever going to have that again. She felt like I needed to see Ella. Not just her body bag, but to see Ella, because she thought that I needed to see the reality. Because I was in shock and in disbelief. The police requested that media turn off all their cameras. And they did, surprisingly. And I remember being in the front yard next to the sidewalk, and they bring Ella out. She's in this child sized body bag, which I didn't even know existed. I guess the best way to describe it is that Expression tunnel vision, where I am not hearing anybody. The only thing that I can see is Ella. I am not feeling the people touching me. And the only thing that I was trying to do was hold her and kiss her. And that's the one thing they didn't want me to do because she's evidence to them. I remember telling her over and over, I'm so sorry. I should have been there. I didn't know. I should have protected you. I didn't know. How could I have known? Like there was never ever any indication, not even the slightest bit of a thought, that this was a result of my son. The thought never entered my head that he would hurt his sister. I remember being restrained, I guess because I wouldn't stop trying to touch Ella. And then she was taken away. She was put in the back of her hearse and she was taken to Dallas to their crime lab. What I remember is my house was so quiet. When you have kids, a 4 year old and a 13 year old, your house is never quiet. And that quiet. And seeing a school bus pull up across the street and a kid get on the school bus to go to school, it hit me fresh, full force. Nothing is ever going to be the same again, ever. I will never have that again. By 10:30 that morning, I was sitting in the office of a criminal defense attorney listening to him tell me that Texas was probably going to try to execute my child. And repeatedly saying, but he's only 13, but he's only 13. But he's only 13. And then him going, wait, he's 13. Oh, he can't be executed. And after he said that, I remember looking at a spot under his desk. And the entire time that I'm supposed to be listening to this attorney, I am trying to will my organs into shutting down. I just wanted to get up, lie down under his desk, desk and die. Ella died a little before midnight on February 4th. And then I saw Paris for the first time around 5:30 on February 5th. I'm at the juvenile facility. Like I'm in shock. I am not well. Mentally. I cannot stop crying. No matter what I'm doing. I'm crying. I was broken. I don't know how to describe shock. Like I couldn't speak without a stutter. All I knew was that I needed to see my son. I needed to see my son and know that he was physically sound, that he was still alive. They bring him to the visitation room first. Then they come and get me. The whole thing just felt so surreal. Like the day before. I was giving My child a hug and telling him, I love you, and I know we'll get through this because we've gone through worse times before. And now I'm sitting here looking at him through this pane of glass in prison clothes. And when I saw him, I just felt this sense of relief that he was okay. And I know that sounds insane, like he obviously was not okay, but just to put eyes on him and know that he was alive and breathing and I still had him. I remember going over to him, and he stood up, and he, at the time, was the same size as me. And I just. I remember giving him, like, this huge hug, feeling his arms in his head and, like, assuring myself that he was physically sound and alive. And then I realized after a moment that. That he wasn't hugging me back and that he was quite, quite stiff. And I pulled away from him, and he wasn't crying. He wasn't angry, he wasn't emotional. He wasn't anything. And I pulled away, stepped back, and he looks at me, no emotion. And he's like, what are you going to do now? And I'm like, what do you mean, what am I going to do now? And he goes, well, you always said the only way you would ever kill somebody is if they hurt one of your children. So what are you going to do now? It was the first time I realized this is not who I knew. And so I told him I was going to do what I had always tried to do, which is to be the best mom under any circumstances and stand by him, support him. So the first couple of months after Ella died was just a flurry of investigations. I was being investigated by Child Protective Services. Paris was being investigated. I was having to have all these meetings with the defense attorney, but also the district attorney. I want him to get help. Y' all worry about defending him and prosecuting him. And, you know, I was really so torn emotionally because on the one hand, my daughter was murdered, and I was falling apart with grief. On the other hand, my son is a murderer, and he's a child, and he needs help, and I have to try to get him that. But in doing so, I'm advocating for the person who murdered my child, realizing that for the rest of my life, I'm going to live with this horrible dichotomy inside me when it comes to my children. I, on a physical level, lost 30 pounds in 14 days. I spoke with a stutter for a couple of weeks. I don't remember sleeping very much. I remember writing a lot. I was having Panic attacks. I didn't want to go out in public. I couldn't stop crying. I was trying to avoid the media. I mean, that's what the first couple of months were like. And I was learning more and more every day about who my son was, how he thinks internally. I also was grieving the loss of Paris, because on that day, I did lose both of them that day, and not just his physical custody, but I lost who I thought he was, who I hoped he'd be. And now I had this other son that I had to learn about. And the things that I were learning were horrifying. Up until this time, all I knew was that Ella had been stabbed, because they wouldn't tell me anything until the final autopsy came back. It was around her birthday time. They asked me to come to the district attorney's office. They sat me down, and they gave me a copy of a final autopsy. And they explained to me what had happened to my daughter and what my son did. First, he went into the room where Ella was sleeping, and he started to beat her. Then he began to strangle her, and then he stabbed her 17 times. When I found that out, I went out to my car in the police parking lot, rolled up the windows, and just started screaming at the top of my lungs, hitting the steering wheel and just losing it. That time period, up until he was sentenced, was this domino effect of finding out new things. I came to find out that around the time after Ella's birth. He has admitted that he began to have homicidal thoughts around the age of nine. Finding out that what he did was intentional, like he had a plan, and he kept telling different stories. Sometimes he would say, I, you know, was sexually abusing her. And then he was like, oh, I was just kidding. I wanted to see how you would react to that. I know you want a reason for why I did this. I also found out during that time that his original plan was to murder the both of us. And found out that after he killed his little sister, he called a friend and talked for six minutes. She said Paris sounded a hundred percent normal after murdering his little sister. And she's laying in there on the bed, dying. Every new piece of information that I found out about my son, I would go down a little lower on this escalator, deeper into hell, the depths of just despair and fear. I was afraid of my son. And it took years to learn about this new person and reconcile that this was now the person my son is. Harris was sentenced to 40 years. 40 years in prison, and he received that sentence nine months after the murder, and then was transferred to the Texas Youth Commission to begin serving the first six years of his sentence. He was charged as a child, not an adult. But that first two years after the sentencing, it continued to be hell. But, you know, different levels of hell, like Dante's Inferno, you know, there was different rings of hell, different places to go, different new hells to learn about hells you didn't even know were an option. And it was tearing me apart. During his juvenile years and his time in the juvenile system, Paris was very actively gaslighting, lying, telling me and his caseworker that he did sexually assault his sister. And in the next meeting, he would see, like, oh, I was joking. I just wanted to see how that would make you feel. Feel. And it's like, okay, whether you're joking or not, do you not see if it's true? It's horrible. If it's not true, it's still horrible because you're telling me that you molested my daughter, and then you're like, ah, ha ha ha ha ha. So to this day, there's that thought in my head. Was she? Did he. I know that when he murdered his little sister, you know, it caused a feeling of sexual gratification in them because there was sperm on my bed. But then he sexually assault her. More like, did he actually physically assault her, or was it just a murder that got him off? Like, I went to go see him one time. He was 15, and we're sitting at a picnic table outside. There was a little girl at visitation to see her brother. And there was about the same age difference between this boy and his sister as between Paris and Ella. And you could tell he was really happy to see her. And I just could not stop crying. And Paris is trying to talk to me. He looks at me and he's like, she's been dead two years. Get over it already. I remember at that particular moment, I had this vision flash in my head of me lunging over that picnic table and hurting my child as much as I possibly could. I wanted him to feel the pain that he created in me. But instead, I looked at him and I said, I'm leaving. I love you. I want to hurt you. And so I'm walking away, and I will let you know when I can come back and visit next. I also found out at this point in time that he decided not to kill me because he wanted me to suffer, that it was a lot harder to kill somebody than he thought it was physically, and he wasn't sure if he'd be able to kill me. And then he realized that if he had killed me, I only would have suffered for 15 or 20 minutes, but that by letting me live, he would ensure that I suffered for the rest of my life. I had two processes going on. I had the process of discovering the fact that my child is most likely a psychopath. And then I also had the process going on of knowing that my child had been brutally murdered by somebody who's most likely a psychopath. And then at the same time, I'm desperately trying to find out what the hell happened to my son. Is it my fault? Did I miss something? Did something happen to him that I don't know about? Am I a fool? Do I hate them? Do I love them? It was every emotion, all the time, all at once. It was debilitating. There were so many voices in my head trying to figure out, how do I honor my daughter? How do I get the help my son needs? How do I grieve? How do I deal with being investigated? How do I. How do I do any of this? There is no guidebook for parenting, but there is especially no guidebook when your son brutally murders your daughter. My only place of sanctuary was alone, away from everybody. One of the things I would do is take long drives. I would drive west and just imagine myself driving away from all my problems. I was not able to talk to a therapist because I was told by Paris's defense attorney that anything I said to a licensed therapist could be subpoenaed and that if I said something that was detrimental to Paris's defense, it could be a problem. So I didn't go to therapy until about three years after the murder. I felt all alone because how many people are in this situation? There were very few people outside of my inner circle or closest friends who weren't judging me. I had red wine and Xanax and music and writing and just the determination to get my son help. I wanted to commit suicide every single day. I wanted to die. You know, drove too fast, smoked too much, drank too much. What I call, you know, sideways suicide. I am not a religious person, but I just had this sense that if I committed suicide, I would never see my daughter again. But after about three years, the pain of it all just got to be enough to even override that thought. And, you know, I tried to kill myself. I've come to think that the majority of people who commit suicide, they don't want to die. They're just tired. I don't think most of us truly Want to die. What we want is respite from pain. And so I took a whole bunch of sleeping pills, drank half a bottle of Bailey's, and I'm pretty sure that I died. And then I heard my daughter's voice. I turned around, and Ella is still standing there in front of me in all of her glory. And it was as real as real could be. And she was mad at me, and she looks at me. And when Ella would get mad at me or mad, she would put her hands on her hip, and she would look at me, and she would go, charity and, like, use my name, right? And she was standing there in front of me, and she stomped her foot and had her hand on her hip, and she was like. Like, you cannot come this way. Wherever all this is happening is very, very realistic. Like, it is a real experience for me. And I got down on my knees, and I'm sobbing, and I'm like, I have to. And she's like, you cannot go this way because if you go this way, you know, you and I won't see each other again. You cannot go this way. And I gave her a hug. And I'm filled with shame because I knew I was going to stand up and walk around my daughter, even though it meant I would never see her again, because I was that damn tired of being in pain. But as I stood up, Ella goes, fine, we'll do it a different way. And she steps forward, and she pushes the hell out of me. Like, pushes me hard. And I remember thinking, like, what the hell, little girl? And that's when I woke up on the floor of my bathroom and I limped. After my suicide attempt, I was still absolutely miserable. I just accepted the fact that death was not an option. I tried to commit suicide over a weekend, and it didn't work. And Monday morning, I got up and cleaned my house, went right back to doing what I had been doing in terms of work, which was advocacy work for the juvenile justice system. After my son was sentenced, he was sent to. At the time, it was called tyc, the Texas Youth Commission, for the first six years of his sentence. And they were under federal indictment for the physical and sexual abuse of children in their care. And I believe that the advocacy work that I started doing is one of the things that helped to save me, because I took all that rage that I felt about what my son had done and who he was becoming and channeled it into advocacy work. It started out as advocating for Paris, and then at some point, I realized, I'm doing all of this stuff to help all of these people and myself. So why don't I just start my own nonprofit foundation? Because what I realized doing the advocacy work is there was the side of the perpetrator and the side of the victim. So when it came to perpetrators, the primary goal was to get them a lighter sentence or get them off. And then the goal on the victim side was to make sure a lot of times that this person, you know, was just locked up. And I didn't really feel comfortable with either system. I felt like people were missing the mark and that what we needed was an organization that would address the trauma behind all of it. And so, kind of my tagline was, it doesn't matter what side of the crime scene tape you come from, we will help you. So I did that for 13 years. I traveled all over the world. I gave speeches about empathy and compassion and forgiveness and the effects of incarceration on individuals, both the people that are locked up and the people that work there. I poured everything. It was the only thing I could do. I could advocate. I could drive. You know, mental health drives is what I call them. Just to get in my car by myself. Even to this day, there is a piece of me inside that is gone. I did all the advocacy work to try to fill up that part of me that was gone. It helped to a point, but I still had absolutely no personal happiness. You know, I felt like for the longest time, I was holding on by the skin of my teeth. And then around seven years after the murder, I decided that I had gone to enough therapy finally, because I did start going to therapy after I tried to kill myself. I had set boundaries in my toxic family. You know, my mother was no longer in my life. My son and I, after six or seven years, had kind of reached an impasse. You know, it's like we both had kind of retreated to our corners. But I decided around seven years after the murder that I thought that I was in a place, emotionally, where I was ready to try to have another child. I got pregnant, and my youngest was born with a congenital heart defect. Around the same time, I learned that my eldest was going to be transferred to the adult prison system. So since the day of the murder, my relationship with Paris has obviously been very complicated. You know, on the one hand, I love my son, and I still love my son. I have always loved him. I always will. You know, if. If it had been anybody but Paris, if it had been just some dude or a family friend, you can bet your ass I would have been in that courtroom and been like, kill him. I probably would have wanted to do it myself, but here I am, faced with this dilemma. And no matter how much rage I had felt, no matter what new horrible detail, I had to constantly just remind myself, you were his mom first, and you'll always be his mom, and that's what you need to be his mom. Now, when I say that I advocated for him, don't think for a second that I didn't call him out on his shit all the time. Like, I am not a doormat. I can practice radical acceptance and set boundaries at the same time. The best word I've ever come up with is bittersweet. That word took on a whole new meaning for me the day that Ella died. And every time I think about my oldest two kids, that's always how I feel. A lot of bitter, a lot of sweet. In our case, I think the word would be sweet. Bitter. Because after all this time, I'm able to enjoy the memories because we had a whole life together before this happened, and we've had what felt like 1800 lifetimes since this happened. And it's just I had to keep being his mom. It's who I am. It's what I do. I mean, I can't think of any other thing that I would have done. He was a child. He needed his mother while he was in the juvenile system. And then when he became an adult, we had to readjust how our relationship worked. You know, sometimes I ask myself, like, why did you stay? Are you crazy? Like, why did you absorb all of that? And what I always come back to is I have always felt like I needed to understand my son so I can find him the help he needed, even if that meant it was killing me, because I wanted him to find help that would figure out how to, I guess, turn him into somebody else. Because now, 19 years later, I've accepted the fact that that's just who he is. Here's the thing that I need people to understand about inmates, and also people like Paris who are incapable of remorse is they're all human. He's not a monster. He's a human being that has a mental illness. I mean, if you were to meet him, you would probably like him. He's very intelligent, very charming, and like any human being, we can be cruel and we can be kind. My son is capable of doing kind things, and he has done kind things. And there are glimmers of what I call my Paris, but he's also capable of what he did at the age of 13 it is very confusing, and nobody can really explain why, even on an existential level, like, why do people like this exist? But he's also dangerous to me, and I haven't spoken with him since 2020. At the beginning of the pandemic, we were living in Savannah, and I found out that my son was dating this woman. He has a whole lot of women, like these prison groupies that want to date inmates. He usually has four or five of those at any given time. And I found out that this particular woman was out on bond, something to do with threats of a mass shooting. I found out that she was like, pen pals with Dylann Roof and some other controversial murderers. And I completely fell apart. The PTSD that I thought I had learned to deal with came raging back. Thought that in any minute, I was going to open my door and this woman who wanted to kill somebody anyway was going to come do it for Paris. But I went. I bought a gun. I taught myself to shoot very, very, very well. And I told my son that I could no longer do this. I came to the conclusion that, a, look at me. I'm falling apart again, and B, I have another son to protect. I always said when I gave birth to my last child that he would always be first. The protection and safety and raising of my last child is the primary important thing. And so I just cut them off. I told him I couldn't do this anymore. I'd reached my limit. My empathy stopped when I felt like my life, and mostly my youngest child's life could be in danger. This was a conversation that needed to be had face to face. I sat down with Paris in the warden's office, and I told him all my reasoning, why. I was like. And I just, you know, I can't. And I love you very much. I've done everything I know to do for you. He just looked at me and he's like, so you're done? And I'm like, yeah, I can't. I can't live like this anymore. And he was like, okay. And he just got up and walked out, and I haven't heard from him since. So after almost 19 years, I've learned to analyze better my role in what happened to Ella. And just, like, everything to do with my situation is rather complicated set of feelings. That relapse when I was an adult. I'm 52 now, and that is the only thing that I hate myself for still. Like, I wish I had that nine months back to be with my daughter, to not have put Paris through that. I Mean, it wasn't pretty and it wasn't healthy, and I wish I really had that time. That being said, I don't think my relapse is the reason that he killed his little sister. Did it add to his anger? Yes. Do I know now that that homicidal rage had been there since 8, when I was very sober? Yes. So I have learned to accept the mistakes I made as a parent. I understand why I made those mistakes, and I understand that I'm human. So I've learned to live with my role. I don't feel that overwhelming guilt anymore. I don't believe in the word healing. When it comes to trauma, we don't heal. We adjust. When something like this happens in your life, I mean, yes, I physically lost Ella and I physically lost Paris. But you're also losing your ability to show them how much you love them every day. You're losing your ability to have hopes and dreams for them. You've lost the idea that your child is this one person, and you find out he's a complete different person. Like, you lose everything that made you who you are up until that point. And now you take all those pieces of your life and you try to pick them up and you put them back together. But it's like a jigsaw puzzle when you put it together and you get down to the. And you're like, I can't find the last piece. And now I've got this jigsaw puzzle, and it's just always going to have this hole in it. That part of me that's missing is still missing. It's never coming back. But I have learned to accept that it's part of who I am. Now people don't know why people like Paris are the way they are. God, Himself, herself, whatever, could poof up in my office right now and be like, hey, I'm going to tell you why, and give me a reason. And I probably would still be like, well, that is a shitty reason. Because there is no reason that justifies a little girl being beaten and choked and stabbed and tortured by her own brother and putting their mother through this. So whatever reason you give me, it is shit, and I don't accept it. And so I realized that even if somebody put an answer in front of my face, it's still not an acceptable answer. I've learned to accept the fact that there is not an answer. There's research, there's correlations, but when you're dealing with somebody's mind, you don't get definitive answers. Learning to accept Is bittersweet, too, because sometimes what people forget to tell you is that when you accept, you also give up a little bit of hope. Hope. I mean, you can't live without it. You have to have this faith that things are going to get better or turn out different. You know, like, you couldn't live life without hope. But at the same time, when those hopes are dashed or destroyed and you have to learn acceptance, it's very devastating. But I have learned to live with the unknowability of it all. Ella's murder rearranged my beliefs about everything. I mean, I wasn't naive to the fact that, you know, bad people did bad things, But I was put into a whole new world that I had no context for. And three weeks after Ella died, I remember sitting at a red light. I remember looking to my left and then looking over to my right at the driver's, you know, and then I just had this thought. I'm like, you know, I don't really know anybody in the world, because if that guy to my left turned and looked at me, his first thought wouldn't be, oh, wow, three weeks ago, her son murdered her daughter, and she's sitting there in that car, absolutely falling apart. And so I realized you don't really know what's going on in people's worlds. What I realized about being human is it's very complicated. And it taught me to, instead of looking for fault or reasons, you know, look for things that can help. I've learned that being judgmental and close minded do not help. I've learned that it's very important to say what you think, to trust your instincts, to have a code of ethics and stick to it. And mostly what I've learned is in the face of all of this, you don't have to be this, like, you can be a good person. You can be better than what you came from or what you're in. The one thing that I'm really proud of myself for is growing up with all this toxicity and then having to deal with all this toxicity is that I felt the rage, but I didn't give into it. And so 19 years later, I'm able to say that I took a horrible situation. I always call it a beautiful nightmare, because I made something that I think my daughter would be proud of come out of her death. The nonprofit foundation was called the Ella foundation, obviously, and it stood for empathy, love, lessons and action. What people need after trauma. I did not want the way Ella died to be the last thing that people remembered about her. I Wanted people to remember who she was and what she taught me about love and to express that through the Ella Foundation. So now when people say Ella's name, they think of how somebody helped them. I think a lot of times where people find themselves in trouble is they want to take all that pain out of their lives and it causes a lot of pain to try to live a pain free life. What I've learned to do is to make friends with my pain. It's like the relationship of inverses, right? As far as you can go down, it tells you that you have the option of being able to go just as high up. Doesn't mean you will, but it is there, right, that you can't have one without the other. You can't have love without hate. You can't have dark without light. So I got to a certain point to this journey and I'm like, well, okay, I. I'm in my 40s. Some of this stuff obviously isn't going anywhere. So I may as well learn to just make friends with my demons. My entire upper half of my body is covered in this big elaborate art piece that honors my children. It's got butterflies and hearts with prison stripes and a phoenix for my last child. And. And in the middle of my back where it all starts is this giant, and I mean, big black heart. There's been all this darkness. It's giving me such a heavy, heavy heart and I can't stop that or take that from being the center of my life. I can't stop my dad's murder. I can't stop Ella's murder. I can't pretend that it didn't happen like, you know, my life is my life. But I was not content to just have that black heart. I wanted more. And so I did what I could to create Beauty Foreign.
- [68:30]
Wit Misseldine
Today's episode featured Charity Lee. Charity has authored a book entitled How Now a memoir of Murder, Survival and Transformation. Available for purchase anywhere books are sold. If you'd like to reach out to Charity, you can find her email and socials in the show Notes. From Wondery. You're listening to this is actually happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or on the Wondery app to listen ad free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host Wit Misseldine. Today's episode was co produced by me and Andrew Waits, with special thanks to the this Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The opening music features the song Sleep Paralysis by Scott Velasquez. You can join the community on the this Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook or or follow us on Instagram actuallyhappening on the show's website, thisisactually happening.com you can find out more about the podcast. Contact us with any questions, submit your own story, or visit the store where you can find this Is Actually Happening designs on stickers, T shirts, wall art, hoodies, and more. That's thisisactually happening.com and finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com happening even 2 to $5 a month goes a long way to support our vision. Thank you for listening.