The first full account of the Slenderman stabbing, a true crime
narrative of mental illness, the American judicial system, the trials of
adolescence, and the power of the internet
On May 31, 2014, in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, Wisconsin, two
twelve-year-old girls attempted to stab their classmate to death. Morgan
Geyser and Anissa Weier's violence was extreme, but what seemed even
more frightening was that they committed their crime under the influence
of a figure born by the internet: the so-called "Slenderman." Yet the
even more urgent aspect of the story, that the children involved
suffered from undiagnosed mental illnesses, often went overlooked in
coverage of the case.
Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of
Two Midwestern Girls tells that full story for the first time in deeply
researched detail, using court transcripts, police reports, individual
reporting, and exclusive interviews. Morgan and Anissa were bound
together by their shared love of geeky television shows and animals, and
their discovery of the user-uploaded scary stories on the Creepypasta
website could have been nothing more than a brief phase. But Morgan was
suffering from early-onset childhood schizophrenia. She believed that
she had seen Slenderman long before discovering him online, and the only
way to stop him from killing her family was to bring him a sacrifice:
Morgan's best friend Payton "Bella" Leutner, whom Morgan and Anissa
planned to stab to death on the night of Morgan's twelfth birthday
party. Bella survived the attack, but was deeply traumatized, while
Morgan and Anissa were immediately sent to jail, and the severity of
their crime meant that they would be prosecuted as adults. There, as
Morgan continued to suffer from worsening mental illness after being
denied antipsychotics, her life became more and more surreal.
Slenderman is both a page-turning true crime story and a search for
justice.
