Gulf Coast Confidential with Mollye Barrows

Bloody Nightmare: Sleepwalking teen Benjamin Elliott stabs twin sister to death in waking ‘nightmare’

Mollye Barrows Season 7 Episode 9

Send us a text

What goes on in someone else’s mind is a mystery, unless they let you in on the secret. 

Benjamin Elliott was a studious, intelligent teen who was “enamored” with his dad’s sword collection and a survival knife his dad gave him. 

Pretty normal hobbies for a young man from Texas, but what was not normal was what he did with the knife. 

He unsheathed it in the middle of the night, then walked across the hall to the bedroom of his sleeping twin sister, Meaghan, where he stabbed her twice in the neck.

As she bled to death, he placed a pillow on her face to stifle any effort she made to scream, prosecutors said.

But Benjamin says he didn’t do it any of it on purpose, that he was experiencing parasomnia, or sleeping walking, when he killed her. 

He controlled the situation so well he didn’t even wake up his parents when he attacked her. 

His dad awoke when he heard the voice of a 911 operator on the phone with his son who had called in the emergency without any sense of urgency or panic. 

And the case only gets crazier from here. 

Join us for this bizarre episode of the Gulf Coast Confidential podcast, “Bloody Nightmare: Sleepwalking teen Benjamin Elliott stabs twin sister to death in waking ‘nightmare.’”

Support the show