Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls

This book is the result of seven years of research. My sources include police reports, doctors’ reports, police interrogations, court transcripts, previous coverage of the case, and other public records, as well as my interviews with psychologists, private investigators, juvenile justice experts, historians, professors, parents of children with mental illnesses, Morgan Geyser, her friends and family, her defense team, and her pen pals.

I also relied on police interviews with the victim, Payton Isabella Leutner, who is referred to in this book as “Bella,” which was her nickname when the crime occurred.

While I was unable to interview Bella or Anissa Weier, I depicted them according to public records, including social media postings, court documents, and television interviews with Bella and her family, as well as public statements made by Bella’s and Anissa’s friends, family, and teachers.

I grew up about thirty minutes from Waukesha (pronounced WOK-uh-shaw), where this crime took place. Throughout the book, there are times when I describe Wisconsin’s culture, traditions, seasonal patterns, politics, and establishments, drawing from my own experiences. Skateland, for instance, where Morgan and Anissa spent their last night of freedom, was a popular birthday venue during my childhood, too, and has not changed much since, though it now has stuffed emojis instead of whoopee cushions at the prize counter. When it comes to describing cultural norms, I supplement my experience and opinions with those of sociologists and historians.

In 2018, I moved back to Wisconsin for three months to conduct research and interview people in Waukesha, a county well known for being one of the three most conservative voting blocks in Wisconsin—a place where many residents equate media and press with classist snobbery and fake news.

In general, Wisconsinites are wary of outsiders. Like most people, they are especially wary of journalists. Growing up there earned me some credibility, in the sense that certain people involved in the Slenderman stabbing case became willing to speak to me after learning I was from the area. But many others, including the Leutners, the Weiers, Anissa’s defense team, Judge Michael Bohren, Morgan’s and Anissa’s teachers, the administrators of Washington County Jail and Winnebago Mental Health Institute, and the entire Waukesha police force, declined to answer my questions. In places where these people and establishments enter the narrative, my descriptions of them are drawn from records listed above and from my personal observations of them during hearings I attended. My descriptions of Bohren as a young boy are taken from his yearbooks and college newspapers. When I describe the history of Winnebago Institute, I source from the hospital museum. Anything having to do with the Geysers’ personal experiences and their family history are taken directly from my interviews with them.

Morgan and I have spoken on the phone countless times, but during the several months that I lived in Milwaukee, I regularly met with her in person at Winnebago. During visiting hours, we spent the majority of time discussing her writing, and whatever new story or novel she was working on. But Morgan also talked to me about her childhood, her family, her illness, boys, art, and her positive memories of Bella. Any descriptions of the crime that are attributed to Morgan in this book have been taken from police reports and court records. She and I did not talk about the crime, though she knew I was writing a book about it. Descriptions of her experience with schizophrenia, from childhood onward, are based primarily on my eighteen hours of in-person conversations with her, though I also sourced from my twelve hours of interviews with her mother, as well as from court records that include testimony from psychologists and psychiatrists who evaluated Morgan.

I first wrote about this case for Vice in 2014 and then for Hazlitt in 2017. Slenderman draws on my previous reporting, combined with my subsequent research on the case and its ancillary subjects, but in places where my prior reporting and interviews are mentioned, I use the third person, to avoid injecting myself in the book. Actual names have been used, with a handful of exceptions; pseudonyms are marked with asterisks and are reserved for people who agreed to speak with me under the condition of anonymity or for minors whose identities I want to protect. In dialogue, I use em dashes for clarity and to mark very short elisions and ellipses to mark any longer breaks.

Wisconsin makes obtaining legal documents extremely difficult, a practice considered hostile to the free press. At the Waukesha County Courthouse, transcripts and related documents cost up to five dollars per page, and the onus is on the journalist to find them: strangely, court transcripts are not always kept in the courthouse records office, as one might expect, but rather in court reporters’ private homes. In my research I often needed to chase down a retired court reporter in the hopes that she could find the notes I requested somewhere in her basement. I was also surprised to discover that, as the first person to request the vast majority of these records, I bore the burden of paying additional money for the reporter to actually begin the transcription process; the court reporter had retained her steno machine notes, of course, but, in the absence of any prior payment being made for those materials, had forestalled transcribing the hearings assigned to her. Though it surprised me to learn that I was the first to request these transcriptions, it made sense once I discovered their price tag.

Perhaps as a result of the steep cost of obtaining documents, previous reporting on this case has often been erroneous, and much of what is contained in these pages has not been published until now. Many people who think they know about the Slenderman stabbing, for instance, believe that Bella is dead—a misapprehension that persists so strongly to this day that even the judge on Morgan and Anissa’s case has mistakenly referred to their crime as “intentional homicide” rather than attempted murder. Early reporting on the stabbing also excluded any mention of Morgan’s schizophrenia, except for in rare cases where journalists derided it as an attempt by her lawyers to manipulate the law. So far the media has told a story of two unrepentant, violent criminals possessed by an internet demon. This is what really happened.