A Wisconsin woman who stabbed her classmate to please the fictional horror character Slender Man over a decade ago will be released from a psychiatric hospital, a judge has ruled.
Morgan Geyser, 22, has been at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute for nearly seven years after being convicted in the 2014 stabbing attack of Payton Leutner.
Geyser was sentenced to 40 years but was granted release in January. However, the ruling hit a last-minute roadblock after the staff at the institution filed a petition last week asking the judge to revoke the release due to new concerns, which included Geyser’s reading material and her contact with an older man with unnatural interest in the crime.
At the hearing on Thursday, several staff members testified on behalf of the state, revealing that Geyser was in possession of a book described by the program supervisor as a “dark novel that revolves around murder and the selling of body parts on the black market along with sexual sadism.”
One of her therapists, Lisa Portmann, along with Dr. Kenneth Robbins, who had previously testified in the case, both told the court that despite new concerns raised in the petition, they believe Geyser is not a danger to herself or to others and should still be conditionally released.
Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Michael Bohren denied the petition filed by the institution and approved Geyser’s release, saying in court that the state had not met the burden of clear and convincing evidence that she needed to stay in the mental health facility.
Geyser and her classmate Anissa Weier were 12 in 2014 when they lured Payton Leutner, who was also 12, to a Waukesha park after a sleepover. Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times while Weier egged her on. Leutner barely survived.
The girls later told investigators they wanted to earn the right to be servants of the fictional Slender Man and that they feared he would harm their families if they didn’t carry out the attack.
A plan for Geyser’s release will be discussed at a hearing on March 21.
The Slender Man stabbing
The plan to kill Payton Leutner in 2014 was fueled by the girls’ desire to please Slender Man.
According to a criminal complaint, the plan was initially supposed to be carried out on May 30, 2014, the night of Geyser’s sleepover to celebrate her 12th birthday.
But then they changed the plan and decided to kill her the next morning at a nearby park in Waukesha. Once at the park, Weier suggested they go for a walk to play hide-and-seek in nearby woods, she told investigators.
The girls then forced Leutner to lie down on the ground and with a kitchen knife Geyser had brought from her home, she began to repeatedly stab her while Weier egged her on.
Leutner suffered 19 stab wounds and barely survived, according to medical staff who treated her.
She was left for dead but then crawled onto a bike path and was found by a passerby. Police captured Geyser and Weier later that day as they were walking on Interstate 94 in Waukesha.
Geyser pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree intentional homicide in a deal with prosecutors and a judge sent her to the psychiatric institute after determining she had a mental illness. She was diagnosed with early-onset schizophrenia after being taken into custody, according to Rolling Stone.
Weier pleaded guilty to attempted second-degree intentional homicide and was also sent to the psychiatric facility after a jury found she was suffering from a mental illness at the time of the attack.
In December 2017, Weier received the maximum 25 years in a mental health facility after pleading guilty to being an accomplice to second-degree intentional homicide.
In February 2018, Geyser received 40 years in a mental hospital after pleading guilty to attempted first-degree intentional homicide. In 2021, Weier was granted a conditional release to live with her father and was ordered to wear a GPS monitor.
After the attack, Leutner underwent 25 surgeries to repair her heart, liver, stomach, and pancreas after the attack, her mother Stacie Leutner told ABC Action News.
But her emotional trauma was just as scarring, as she later revealed that she slept with scissors under her pillow for protection.
Who is Slender Man?
Slender Man is a fictional supernatural character, typically depicted as a spidery figure in a black suit with a featureless white face, that originated as a “creepypasta” – or horror – internet meme created in 2009 by Something Awful forum user Eric Knudsen under his username “Victor Surge.”
When Geyser and Weier discovered Slender Man on Creepypasta Wiki, they apparently believed he was real and decided to become what they called “proxies” of the character, thereby proving their dedication to him and his existence to skeptics, according to the criminal complaint.
But to fully prove their dedication, the girls believed they had to kill someone. They decided that person would be their friend Payton.
The stabbing sparked a fear of Slender Man in parents across the nation.
Russell Jack, who was the police chief of Waukesha at the time, warned that the incident “should be a wake-up call for all parents” and that “the internet is full of dark and wicked things.”
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