The Boy Who Killed His Twin

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0:42I just killed my sister. Oh my God. Tell me what your name is. Benjamin Elliott.

0:54Okay, tell me exactly what happened. I thought it was a dream. I kicked my wife and I stabbed her.

1:04Please, I don't want her to buy her. She's trying to get her back. How old is she? 17. We're twins. Is she awake? Yes. She's, like, barely alive. Is there anyone else there in the house with you? There is. It's my parents, but they're asleep. OK, I need you to go wake them up. Mom! Barrett! We're going to have to start CPR right now. One, two, three, four. One, two, three. Keep up in your chest just like that, OK? Where's your son? Where's your son? Please help me. OK, OK, we got EMS is coming.

1:42OK, slow down a little bit. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Can we take over? Can you come out? Thank you. What happened, son? It was a dream. He said it was a dream, honey. What the ? I don't know what. I don't know what. Sheila, it was just a dream and then it wasn't. I'm going to do a search of you real quick and then I'm going to put you in the back seat and I'll just rain, okay? What was your first reaction when you heard about the case? I was skeptical. Why does he have a knife next to his bed at night? This is the first study that we did on Ben. I'm Dr. Gerald Simmons. I'm a neurologist, sleep disorder specialist.

2:26See, these are rapid eye movements. I was asked to review the case of Benjamin Elliott. The claim was that he was sleepwalking and stabbed his sister. We have a video of him right here. Oh, there he is? Yeah, okay. You are convinced this was a sleepwalking incident? Yes. Are you saying then that he did kill his sister, but he didn't intend to kill his sister? I wouldn't say that it's impossible for someone to commit a crime while sleepwalking. I just don't think that was the case with Benjamin Elliott. Were you able to find any evidence that there was a problem with these twins? No, we definitely looked into it and tried.

3:09The biggest thing that they're hanging their hat on is the lack of motive. My name is Megan Long. I'm one of the prosecutors on the case.

3:22This is really hard, isn't it, Mike? I hate this. I hate that she's gone.

3:31This was not Benjamin's fault. I've never thought of him as somebody responsible for this. What makes you so sure that you stabbed your sister while you were sleepwalking? I would never have done that. I loved her. She was my best and closest friend.

3:56Aaron Mariardi reports, the boy who killed his twin.

4:07On the morning of September 29, 2021, 17-year-old Benjamin Elliott was in a Harris County Sheriff's interrogation room in Houston, Texas. So what happened, Benjamin? Do you ever have like a really realistic nightmare? where, like, just everything feels real, but also off at the same time. Benjamin told Detective Frederick Munoz that he stabbed his twin sister once with this knife, but had little memory of what had happened. So you go to sleep. What's the next thing you remember? The next thing I remember is, like, the feeling of stabbing something. I was in her room, and I turned on the light, and I was panicking, and I tried to stop bleeding with the pillow.

5:09So I run in my room, and I unplug my phone, and I dial 911. 911, what's the location of your emergency? I stabbed my sister. How many times did you stab her? Just once. I heard the 911 call and I screamed. What's going on? I was just saying, you what? And I went to go move into the bedroom. As I moved, I saw Megan. And she was, uh...

5:39She was, uh, gray, you know? Michael Elliott remembers calling out to his wife, Kathy. I heard Michael yell. Oh, my God! I was trying to figure out what was going on. and Michael said, the police are here. Where's the brother at? And I just...

5:59Arriving paramedics took over CPR. They took Benjamin out of the house. He was shocked. He said it was a dream. What the... What did you make of that? I don't, I mean, I just, I couldn't believe it. I mean, I couldn't... Not the Ben you knew, so it would have to have been that he was. Something would have had to happen. Benjamin, his parents say, sat handcuffed in a police car for three hours while police, confronted with an apparent homicide, took control of the crime scene. I just need to see her. I need to see her. We can't. I need to see her. Nobody would tell us if Megan was okay, what's going on.

6:35Take a picture for me. Let me see something. Can we see something? No, sir. The Elliott say they felt isolated by the police and eventually called a longtime friend, who is also an attorney. He went and got some information and he told us that Megan had died. It was news police didn't share with Benjamin. Is she okay? Benjamin asked Detective Munoz several times if his sister was alright. She is okay. But the detective withheld the truth. Yeah, last time I know about she was being checked out by the EMS. Authorities say this is a textbook police technique to keep a suspect talking, and they wanted Benjamin talking about his feelings for his sister.

7:22So how's your relationship with Megan? Good. She's my twin sister. I'd do anything for her. No rivalry there? No. You guys have any recent fights or anything like that? No. We're pretty close for siblings. Benjamin, who spoke to police without a lawyer, said he loved his sister and describe what he says he remembered before the stabbing. Phone records show he was scrolling the web, and Benjamin says he thinks he fell asleep somewhere around 2.30 or 3.30 in the morning. Where would that phone be at right now? Somewhere at the crime scene. Benjamin provided Munoz with his iPhone password and permission to search his phone.

8:06Have you ever been diagnosed with an email to illness? No. Benjamin said there were no problems at home and said that he was looking forward to college. I'm thinking about mechanical engineering. I'm taking the SAT, I think, Friday? No, Saturday. Let me ask you, the knife that you had in your hands, where'd you get it from? From my dad. He had given it to me that day. It was like an Air Force survival knife. I was really enamored with it. Benjamin and Megan's parents had a big collection of knives and gear. The family is big into camping. Kathy is senior manager with the Girl Scouts of America.

8:50Michael is a stay-at-home dad. I know that if I had not given him that knife, this would not have happened. And I, um...

9:07After two hours in that interrogation room, at 11 a.m., Munoz finally revealed that Megan was dead. I'm sorry to be the mayor of Benny. Megan did not make him.

9:25He and Megan are so close, you could never picture anything bad happening between them. Long-time friend Drew Whitaker was stunned to learn Benjamin was in police custody. He was very protective of her. She says her family and the Elliots have been closed since 2005. Ben was very engineering-focused. Whitaker, herself an engineer, described Benjamin as soft-spoken, smart, funny, and a bit nerdy, while Megan was sensitive, wrote poetry, and loved to draw. As a teenager, Megan had been diagnosed with autism. And how did she feel about Ben? She loved him. She looked up to him. You would see her walk up next to him when she would feel uncomfortable and just kind of stand by him.

10:14Did he ever get tired of having to take care of Megan? I think he was proud of it. He liked being a protector. The Elliotts say the twins seemed happy in the weeks before the stabbing. With their eldest child, Elizabeth, already off at college, the twins toured separate universities. Megan at this point had started coming out of Michelle as well. She was finding her voice. And she had found friends online. And she had a YouTube channel where she was doing art. The night before Megan's death, father and son spent hours playing popular video games, such as Survive the Nights. It was in that video game that Benjamin noticed a military-style knife that his father said resembled one that he owned.

11:00Michael offered to give it to Benjamin. Unfortunately, I went and got the knife out. The Elliott's remember heading off to bed. Was there any, you know, any problem at all between the twins? The Elliott's, like police, couldn't make sense of why Benjamin stabbed Megan. But police had the teenager's confession, the bloody knife he used, along with a disturbing detail discovered at autopsy. Megan hadn't been stabbed just once. She had two stab wounds. Benjamin Elliott was charged with the murder of his twin sister.

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12:58After several days on suicide watch, 17-year-old Benjamin Elliott was released on bail.

13:10His parents were there waiting for him. I saw them put him out and he just kind of stood there on the sidewalk. And I went, sorry. I went up to him and he seemed, I told him, I said, Ben, you know, and he seemed like he didn't see me. He was surprised to see me.

13:31We started driving and we were asking him if he was okay. And we were getting very, very quiet, sort of quiet, like, you know, single word answers. So Michael pulls the car over and stops and he gets out, comes around and takes his face in his hands and he says, he's like, hi, hi, we love you. Hi. And he just. Yeah. And I saw him kind of, I'm sort of waking.

14:09And then he just hugged us. Yeah. The Elliott's knew they could never sleep in their home again and had already moved in with Kathy's mother. Ben was worried that he might walk around and he was worried that he might do something and he wanted to make sure everybody was safe. The Elliott's were worried too. The first two nights I slept in a chair in front of the door. The couple even installed an alarm on Benjamin's door. Because his attorneys had asked them not to speak with their son about the night Megan was killed. They couldn't ask him the burning question, why? There's never been anything wrong with him at all.

14:47Where my bandwidth was a mental health something. Kathy's father was schizophrenic. She now feared her son might be. So did Benjamin's lawyers, Wes Rucker and Carrie Hart. So we had a psychiatrist sit down with him. I fully expected her to come back and say, he's got schizophrenia or he's severely bipolar. When she calls me up, she said, Wes, he's fine. It blew my mind. They came to suspect that Benjamin experienced something else entirely. He was actually sleepwalking when he killed his sister. Had either one of you ever had a case quite like this? Never. No. You have a twin causing the death of the other.

15:33And the last thing you think of is just a sleepwalking case. But Benjamin had told police the night he stabbed his sister. It felt like a dream. And his lawyers say that sleepwalking defenses have been used successfully in the past. In 1987, Canadian Kenneth Parks drove his car 14 miles to his mother-in-law's home, beat her to death with a tire iron, and stabbed her. He claimed he was asleep the whole time, and a jury believed him. And in North Carolina in 2010, Joseph Mitchell strangled his four-year-old son and attacked two of his other children, all while sleepwalking. A jury also found him not guilty.

16:23The big question here is just whether Ben Elliott, in fact, killed his sister while he was sleepwalking. Correct.

16:35So Benjamin's lawyers reached out to Dr. Gerald Simmons, a neurologist and a sleep disorder expert. When I first was approached, I was very skeptical. The next question is, did I even want to deal with this? My first reaction to this is, you know, well, who else are they going to go to? I mean, within the field of sleep medicine, this is what I do. Simmons wanted to do a sleep study with Benjamin to test if it's possible Benjamin could experience something called a parasomnia. In general, think of a parasomnia as an abnormal behavior that occurs during sleep. Like sleepwalking. Sleepwalking would be a parasomnia.

17:17Simmons asked if Benjamin had a history of sleepwalking, and his lawyers say he did. When he was about 10 years old, Benjamin's older sister Elizabeth found him sleepwalking by her bedroom door. There was also a sleepover with childhood friends the night this photo was taken. When Benjamin was found asleep on a couch, eating a donut, when they woke him, he seemed surprised and confused. Simmons also learned that there were other members of the Elliott family who sleepwalked. The likelihood genetically is higher to have parasomnias, specifically non-rem parasomnias, if there are other family members that have had that.

18:01My uncle apparently used to sleepwalk when he was a teenager. He would go out into the garage with the tools, and apparently he walked in on my mom one time when she was in the shower. Kathy also had an aunt who once walked out of her house while she was asleep. Ran out into the woods in the middle of the night. He was waking up in the middle of a thunderstorm outside. You know, here's a video of him right here. Simmons conducted two sleep studies with Benjamin in his sleep lab six weeks apart. In each, Benjamin was hooked up to machines that monitored just about everything his body did as he slept.

18:38This is brainwave activity here. So we did the sleep study. I saw that he had obstructive sleep apnea. Obstructive sleep apnea, says Simmons, is where the airway becomes partially blocked, creating a disturbance in the sleep pattern. So he's sleeping, struggling a bit to get breath, and that could be the trigger. Yes. A trigger that Simmons says could cause a sleepwalking episode, particularly when Benjamin's brainwaves enter what is known as a non-REM slow-wave sleep. Now we've been slow-wave sleep. This is slow-wave sleep. Sleepwalking will typically occur in non-REM slow-wave sleep. During the sleep studies, Benjamin did not sleepwalk, but Simmons observed how quickly Benjamin entered that non-REM slow-wave sleep.

19:31So it was 11 minutes from the time we turned off the lights until he was in slow-wave sleep. This is important because on the night Benjamin stabbed Megan, his phone activity stopped at 4.17 a.m. It was just 24 minutes later that he was on his phone calling 911.

19:55Simmons says the fact that Benjamin is able to reach slow-wave sleep so quickly means it's possible Benjamin was sleepwalking during that period of time his phone was inactive. I thought it was a dream. Do you believe Ben killed his sister without even realizing he was doing it in his sleep? Yes. Ben definitely killed his sister. He did it. There's no question. He's the one that had the knife and he stabbed her. But I believe it was part of a parasomnia. He didn't do this voluntarily. There was no motivation. Dr. Simmons' findings took Benjamin's parents by surprise. It's scary as hell. If that can happen to us, then that could happen to anybody with a sleep problem.

21:04He realized he was sinking the knife into something or someone, and then woke up and realized it was his sister. After sleep expert Dr. Gerald Simmons made his assessment that Benjamin was sleepwalking when he killed his twin sister. The Elliots were hopeful prosecutors might drop the case. At that point, we thought it might not go to trial. But in April 2023, a year and a half after Megan's death, a grand jury indicted Benjamin Elliott, then 19 years of age, a first-degree murder. We just didn't think that what we saw was sleepwalking. Megan Long and Maroon Khutani would handle the prosecution.

21:52It wasn't Long's first sleepwalking case. In 2019, she successfully convicted a man who claimed he was sleepwalking when he shot and killed his wife. And Long told us she herself was a sleepwalker, as were her children. Still, Long disputes the Elliott's claim of a family history, since she says neither of Benjamin's parents have been sleepwalkers. From our conversations with our sleep expert, family history of sleepwalking is a factor. It's more prevalent when it's like first-degree family members, so your parents. The prosecutors hired their own sleep consultant, psychologist Dr. Mark Pressman, who concluded Benjamin was not sleepwalking when he stabbed Megan.

22:42He says sleepwalkers become aggressive only when someone physically interferes with them. And they respond by hitting or kicking or throwing furniture, but that's like a reflex, you know, an instinctive reflex to protect themselves. And he points out that Benjamin would have had to have unsheathed the knife before he used it in the stabbing. which Pressman believes is a complex conscious action, not an unconscious one. The next thing I remember is the feeling of stabbing something. He also says it's unusual for a sleepwalker to recall details the way Benjamin did to authorities after he stabbed Megan.