On the morning of May 31, 2014, three 12-year-old girls awoke to a breakfast of strawberries and donuts. It was a Saturday in the sleepy town of Waukesha, Wis. The night before had been a slumber party at Morgan Geyser’s house to celebrate her 12th birthday. Morgan didn’t have a lot of friends, and the two who stayed over were her closest: Anissa Weier and Payton Leutner, who went by “Bella.”
After breakfast, the girls went out to play, first in a nearby park, then in the woods, where Anissa told Morgan, “Kitty, now — go ballistic, go crazy!” and Morgan stabbed Payton 19 times before both girls ran off, leaving Payton for dead.
Upon their arrest hours later, Morgan and Anissa, in separate interrogations, would tell detectives conflicting accounts. Morgan said the plot to kill Payton was Anissa’s idea; Anissa said it was Morgan’s. After the attack, Morgan was surprised by how calm she felt, and Anissa was equally surprised that she felt on the verge of “a total nervous breakdown.” Neither girl seemed particularly concerned about the fate of the other, though Anissa did ask, “Where’s Bella’s body now?” and it took her a moment to absorb what the detective told her, that Payton was somehow still alive, in the hospital and conscious enough to tell the police who had done this to her.
Anissa and Morgan, however, had one consistent thread in their stories to police: They were driven to kill in the name of an internet apparition called Slenderman.
Also known as “The Tall Man” and “The White King,” Slenderman is the fictional creation of a then-28-year-old Floridian named Eric Knudsen. Slenderman’s first appearance was on an internet forum called Something Awful, as part of a 2009 contest to Photoshop spectral beings into regular pictures.
A mythology about Slenderman soon went viral, with aspects invented and augmented by random followers. The character’s look is part Edward Gorey, part Edvard Munch: attenuated, stratospherically tall, all in black except for his face, which is white and has no features. He has many arms, in some cases up to six. There are followers who believe that Slenderman protects children, while others believe he preys upon them.
Anissa and Morgan told police that they believed Slenderman was both protective and predatory and that the plot to murder Bella was meant to appease him. After the murder, they planned to run away to his mansion, where they’d live forever.
“Beware the Slenderman,” premiering Monday night on HBO, is the first in-depth look at the case, which is scheduled to go to trial this summer. “I wasn’t trying to come down hard with an agenda,” documentarian Irene Taylor Brodsky tells The Post. “I think if there’s one thing the film does clearly show, it’s how undeveloped their minds were.”
Those original police interrogations, shown in Brodsky’s film, depict two young girls who admit to planning for five months to kill Payton. They recount the plotting, the attack and their attempt to run away with almost no visible emotion.
After Morgan was brought into the police station, her clothes taken for evidence, her cheek swabbed for DNA, she asks Detective Tom Casey a question.
“Do you know what happened to Bella?”
“What happened to Bella?” Casey repeats. “Is Bella your friend?”
“Mmm, she’s the . . . she’s not Anissa. She’s the one who was stabbed.”
“Stabbed?” Casey says. “I’m not really sure.”
“Is she dead?” Morgan asks, voice flat and plain.
“I don’t know,” Casey says. “She was taken to the hospital.”
“I was just wondering,” Morgan replies.
In another interrogation room, Detective Michelle Trussoni questions Anissa, who says there were other plots to kill Bella, including one to do it during the sleepover.
“Originally, um ... we ... kill Bella, put her under some covers to make it look like she was sleeping and then we run.”
“And just leave her at Morgan’s house?” Trussoni asks.
“Mmm-hmm,” Anissa says. “Until it changed.”
Over the course of several hours, despite each girl blaming the other, a cohesive narrative emerged. Bella didn’t die the night of the slumber party because, Morgan said, “I wanted to give her one more morning.” Before leaving the house, Morgan grabbed a knife from her kitchen and hid it under her jacket.
The three girls walked to the park, where they played on the equipment, then went into the large public bathroom. Anissa thought that could be a good place to kill Bella, because, as she said, “there was a drain for blood to go down.” Anissa and Morgan backed Bella up against a concrete wall and Anissa banged Bella’s head on it.
“And you guys were doing this so you guys could knock her out and kill her in there?” Trussoni asks.
“Yeah,” Anissa replies.
“And you asked her to fall asleep so you could kill her in there?”
“Yeah. I don’t like screaming. That’s one thing I can’t handle.” Anissa takes a sip of water. “And then Morgan handed me the knife.”
Bella, detectives believed, had no idea that anything other than mean-girl junior-high bullying was going on. It certainly didn’t occur to her that her life was in danger.
“Morgan started freaking out a little bit,” Anissa continues. “She said, ‘I can’t do this. I’m too scared. You have to [stab Bella].’ So I had to hug her and calm her down. And then I had to start petting Morgan like a cat.”
“What was she freaking out about?” Trussoni asks.
“Killing,” Anissa says.
After the three girls calmed down, Anissa told Bella they were going to play hide-and-seek. Bella said she didn’t want to play that game, but Morgan said if Bella went along, the next game would be her choice. So off they went, into the woods, where Morgan said to Bella, “Don’t be afraid, I’m only a little kitty cat,” before they got Bella on the ground. Morgan sat on top of Bella’s legs and leaned into Bella’s ear.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. Then she began stabbing her.
“It just sort of happened,” Morgan tells Detective Casey. “It didn’t feel like anything. It felt like air.” Here she mimes the act of stabbing someone.
“The last thing she said to me was, ‘I trusted you,’” Morgan tells Casey. “And she kept whispering, ‘I can’t see,’ over and over and over and over again. And I can still hear it. I can see it if I close my eyes.”
The girls left Bella, bleeding and weeping. Anissa told Bella “to lay down and be quiet. You’ll lose blood slower. And that we’re going to get help.”
“But you weren’t really going to get her help, right?” Trussoni asks.
“No.”
Violent crimes committed by young children, girls especially, are rare, but children as young as 3 have exhibited signs of psychopathic behavior.
In 2012, psychologist Paul Frick, who has studied psychopathy in children for more than 20 years, told the New York Times he worked with a boy who had been cutting off pieces of his cat’s tail for weeks. “When we talked about it, he was very straightforward,” Frick recalled. “He said, ‘I want to be a scientist, and I was experimenting.’” He was proud that it took weeks for his parents to notice.
In May 1968, 10-year-old Mary Bell strangled 4-year-old Martin Brown to death in England. Two months later, now age 11, Mary and her similar-aged friend Norma Joyce killed 3-year-old Brian Howe. Mary later returned to the scene to carve an “M” in the boy’s stomach. Mary Bell served 12 years in prison and in 2003 won a court order to protect her anonymity for life.
In a case similar to the Slenderman attack, two 16-year-old West Virginia girls in July 2012 lured a third friend, 16-year-old Skylar Neese, into the woods, stabbed her and left her to die.
Sheila Eddy and Rachel Shoaf were arrested six months later, after Shoaf had a nervous breakdown and confessed.
They killed Neese, Shoaf told police, because “We just didn’t like her.” Eddy is serving a life sentence; Shoaf was sentenced to 30 years.
New Zealand’s most infamous case inspired the 1994 film “Heavenly Creatures.” In 1954, Juliet Hulme, 15, conspired with her 16-year-old best friend Pauline Parker to murder Parker’s mother. Both girls served five years.
In “Beware the Slenderman,” Morgan’s mother admits that her daughter could be remarkably cold. “She didn’t have empathy,” Angie Geyser says. She recalls showing a very young Morgan the animated film “Bambi” and worrying that Morgan would be very upset when Bambi’s mother is shot to death.
“Morgan just said, ‘Run, Bambi, run! Save yourself!’” Angie recalls. “She wasn’t sad about it.” Such responses, Angie says, were common.
Anissa’s father, William Weier, makes no such claims in the documentary; he seems to be at a loss. Both girls, and their parents, maintain that the belief in Slenderman motivated the attack.
Yet studies have shown that children are able to differentiate fantasy from reality by age 3.
In a 2004 study published by the British Psychological Society, American professors Jacqueline Woolley and Tanya Sharon found that by that age, “children can distinguish a mental entity, such as a thought or an image, from the real physical object it represents ... they can track real and pretend transformations concurrently and, when their pretend play is interrupted, are able to flexibly step out of the pretense mode, then return to it.”
In July 2014, Woolley spoke to CNN about the Slenderman suspects’ defense claims. “I don’t think that a 12-year-old is deficient or is qualitatively different from an adult in their ability to differentiate fantasy from reality,” she said.
A judge in the case has ruled that the girls will be tried separately, as adults. Morgan’s attorney, who says she has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, has also called her belief in Slenderman a “mitigating circumstance.”
In a hearing last February, Detective Casey, who interviewed Morgan, testified that the family’s home computer showed a search for “how to get away with murdering someone.”
Morgan is being held at a mental facility until trial.
Anissa’s defense so far has been an underdeveloped brain, which goes to lack of impulse control. She is being held at the Washington County juvenile detention center.
Payton Leutner’s parents did not participate in the documentary. They have attended every court hearing. After Morgan and Anissa left Payton to die, their daughter dragged herself to the side of the road, where a passing bicyclist found her and called 911. She’d been a millimeter away from death.
“If the knife had gone the width of a human hair further,” operating surgeon Dr. John Keleman said, “she wouldn’t have lived.”
Payton’s parents fiercely guard their daughter’s privacy, but last Tuesday they released a photo of their daughter, now 14 and smiling, to the media. Payton may be called to testify in both trials. She will probably need plastic surgery. She has been buoyed by donations for her health needs and by the strangers who sent purple hearts for her bedroom wall.
Her family wants the world to know that Payton is a survivor. Her mother, Stacie, told ABC News that when she asked Payton how she managed to drag herself out of the woods, she said: “Because I wanted to live.”
Her father, Joe, said he believed his daughter survived because she’s “meant to do something special. She’s here for a reason . . . to show the world to treat other people better, for parents who maybe see — dig a little deeper about what their children are doing. Maybe she herself is supposed to be an inspiration.”
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