Slender Man stabber who attacked 12-year-old classmate in 2014 is granted release from psychiatric hospital
Morgan Geyser, now 22, has been at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute for nearly seven years after being convicted in the 2014 stabbing attack of Payton Leutner
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A Wisconsin woman who stabbed her classmate to please the fictional horror character Slender Man is set to be released from a psychiatric hospital, a judge ruled on Thursday.
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 and another 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.
Geyser pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree intentional homicide and was sent to the psychiatric institute due to mental illness in 2018.
Weier pleaded guilty to attempted second-degree intentional homicide. She was also sent to the psychiatric center but was granted release in 2021 to live with her father and was ordered to wear a GPS monitor.
Geyser previously filed a petition with Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Bohren seeking her release from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. The petition marks the third time in the last two years she has asked Bohren to let her out of the facility.
Bohren decided to grant her release after a day-long hearing Thursday, finding that she had maximized her treatment options at the facility and was no longer a safety risk.
He said that her crime was a “brutal, terrible offense” but Geyser has since grown up and to be truly rehabilitated she must exist as part of society.
“She’s done what she’s supposed to do,” Bohren said. “She appears to have a good attitude.”
He ordered the state Department of Health Services to set up a plan to house her in a group home and supervise her for his consideration at a hearing within 60 days.
The plan to kill Leutner in 2014 was fuelled 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.
“They just wanted to go on a walk,” Leutner later told ABC News. “And I didn’t think much of it. It’s just a walk. It’s in Waukesha. What bad stuff happens in Waukesha, Wisconsin?”
But Weier told Leutner to lie down 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. The girls left Leutner for dead but she 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 in Tampa Bay, Florida.
But her emotional trauma was just as scarring, as she later revealed that she slept with scissors under her pillow for protection.
She was 17 years old when she finally told her story, explaining that she had worked hard over the last five years to heal and rebuild a normal life.
Who is Slender Man?
Slender Man is a fictional supernatural character that originated as a “creepypasta” – or horror – internet meme created in 2009 by Something Awful forum user Eric Knudsen under his username “Victor Surge.”
The creation was part of a Photoshop challenge in which users were asked to manipulate real photos to give them a paranormal edge.
Slender Man is typically depicted as a spidery figure in a black suit with a featureless white face and regarded alternately as a sinister force and an avenging angel.
Geyser and Weier discovered Slender Man on Creepypasta Wiki, 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.
Following the 2014 attack, Mr Knudsen released a statement to the media: “I am deeply saddened by the tragedy in Wisconsin and my heart goes out to the families of those affected by this terrible act.”
The stabbing of Payton Leutner 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 Slender Man stabbing “should be a wake-up call for all parents” and that “the internet is full of dark and wicked things.”