True Crime Review:Â Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls
In 2014, two young girls, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, lured a friend into the woods and stabbed her a total of nineteen times. It was intended to be a sacrifice to the internet Creepypasta figure, Slenderman, a figure that has become a known name in pop culture, particularly in horror. The victimâs name was Payton âBellaâ Leutner and against all odds, she survived. Geyser and Weier were picked up by police while they were making their way to the Slender Manson and were charged with both first- and second-degree attempted homicide, only thatâs not the end to this story.
To the world, the attempted murder, although to this day most mistake the attempt as a successful one, seemed too horrific to be real. How could twelve-year-old girls do this, and to a friend? There seemed to be no clear motive, at least not one people could wrap their heads around. Then came the facts, the trigger words that make the public go up in a frenzy: mental illness, horror, and the internet.
Lonely children, suffering from illnesses of the brain, kept to their own devices for company, which in this case, happened to be the internet. Its not a bad place, but it is a space full of varying ideas and opinions and itâs very easy to get swept up in one. The internet is also a place where people often go for self-diagnosis and to find answers to their own personal questions. Personality quizzes, I am gay tests, âwhat is wrong with me?â questions typed out into the search bar.
Well, what if that person is a sick little girl?
As a child, Morgan Geyser saw a figure appear to her in the mirror. A long, black shape of a man that had no face, and when her new friend Anissa showed her Slenderman on her favorite website, Creepypasta, Geyser thought, this is him, the dark shape who haunts me. He´s real. She thought she found an answer to one of her many questions. The shape was real, and worse, he had his eyes on her.
In the book Slenderman, author Kathleen Hale not only dives deep into the assault of Payton Leutner, but chooses to see the assaulters as they are, as children who were confused, and not thinking clearly, in this true crime novel that I believe stands very strongly beside Capoteâs In Cold Blood.
Hale has a gift. Thereâs no doubt about it. Most authors canât recount the events of such a case without making it drag on in some parts. Usually this is where the court scenes come in, yet somehow, Hale defies this. Not a single moment in Slenderman is dull, in fact, it reads like a novel. It plays out like a story rather than facts regurgitated onto the page, instead of keeping timelines with an overuse of dates and times, Hale organically inserts us into the years by causally mentioning current events. Its simple, clean, and allows us to think âoh, yeah, I remember that.â We get to know each girl, and though Hale clearly favors Morgan, which makes sense considering Geyser was the only of the three she actually spoke and bonded with, she splits the focus between all three girls. By the end of the first quarter of the book, we know them. We know, and like them, we want to comfort Anissa in her loneliness, help Morgan in her delusions, and praise Bella for her compassion.
This is why I compare Slenderman, positively, to In Cold Blood. Capote wrote In Cold Blood like a novel. We got to know the family before they were murdered, and later, we got to know the killers, after they were caught. One killer in particular became quite friendly with Capote and that friendship shows in the book, you can read In Cold Blood and see the love that Capote had for Perry Smith. He knew what he did, he understood, and he chose to care for the person underneath anyway.
Slenderman follows a similar technique. In showing the girls before the crime, we get to know them, and can view the assault as a three-way tragedy instead of a plain barbaric act that hurt only one life.
Despite Hale´s desire to paint a full picture of events, delicately framing each girl, and adult as someone without fault. Her drive for writing Slenderman, is not only to tell what really happened that day on Saturday morning, May 31, 2014, but to put a spotlight on how America looks at, treats, and punishes the mentally ill. This book is a Lana Winters special on the dated views of the Wisconsin criminal system, exposing the bigoted views of mental illness and juvenile criminals in one of the most conservative states in America. To be blunt, I f**king loved it.
Itâs hard for me to look at this case from a neutral stance. It wasnât until the HBO documentary, Beware the Slenderman, was released did I really start to look at it. The documentary focuses more on Slenderman the character than anything else, feeding into the idea that kids mixed with the world wide web is a destructive combination. Though there was one detail revealed in the documentary that told me all I needed to know, that changed my outlook on the case, and its leading âvillainâ in a new light.
Morgan Geyser suffered from a rare child onset schizophrenia, and as a result, her condition went unnoticed until it was too late. The world treated her symptoms the same way they treat with all symptoms of mental illnessâitâs not real, just an act to get attention, its someone acting crazy just for crazy sake, its someone who will be labeled an outcast.
The way Hale described Morgan and her illness says all you need to know.
âAt the time of her crime, Morgan has just turned twelveâand though she wasnât officially diagnosed with schizophrenia until a few months after her arrest, sheâd been experiencing hallucinations since age three, and by the time she arrived at the Washington Country Juvenile Jail, her hidden symptoms had escalated into full-blown psychosis. It was obvious to everyone who interacted with her at the jail that she was suffering. Yet nobody helped her. Despite multiple bids by her attorneys, Morgan did not receive medication for nineteen months. For that entire time, she was in a state of florid psychosis, which cooks the brain like a fever. Untreated psychosis leads to cognitive decline. Morgan lost the ability to read and do basic math. That is child abuse.â
I grew up with a father who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and there were days where, like Morgan Geyser, he had no idea what was happening around him. Days where he was convinced that someone was outside the house, trying to kill us. He even boarded up my windows thinking this killer would shoot me in the head if I sat up in the bed in the middle of the night.
To someone healthy, this sounds completely crazy, and thatâs the tricky thing about mental illness. You canât see it, canât see the unbalance of the brain, the delusions, the sounds they hear, the people they see, and in this world, if we canât see or rationalize it, then we donât believe it.
Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls by Kathleen Hale is no short of a true crime masterpiece. You can see the amount of work and dedication that Hale put into each page, this was a project that moved her, compelled her, and touched it. Insanely moving, as well as informative, by the end youâll feel a mix of emotions, most importantly, a sense of loss for even though most of us donât know Morgan Geyser personally, Hale has allowed us to know her. Weâve witnessed the loss of not only her childhood but also that of Anissa Weier, and Payton Leutner.
