The Slenderman Stabbings

The Slenderman Stabbing

(Evil Friends)

Friends. People we trust, people we let our guard down around and try to just enjoy being ourselves with. People we have so much in common with that we often feel like kindred spirits, or even sometimes like long lost siblings or relatives. It’s a powerful connection to be sure, even intimate in its own way. For most people when we are with our friends, our trusted inner circle if you will, we feel completely safe, knowing that should the worst happen that they have your back, and you theirs. At least that’s how it should be and even is for most of us. That’s not always the case though. Sometimes within our closest and most trusted friends there lurks something… dark. Something festering just beneath the surface that we don’t see until it’s far too late.

Such as tragically in the case of Payton Isabella Leutner back in the summer of 2014. For Payton the events of one May day would change absolutely everything. Having gone to her best friend Morgan Geyser’s birthday-slumber party, the 12 year old was enjoying quality time with her long time friend and another… mutual friend, Anissa Weier things would take an incredibly sinister turn the day after the sleepover when under the guise of playing Hide and Seek Morgan and Anissa lured Payton first to a nearby park and from there into the woods. Payton could not have had any idea just what was about to transpire, or that her best friend was about to commit a betrayal so foul that it would make anyone hearing the story begin to doubt possible motives of their own friends.

You see, Morgan and Anissa had been planning something terrible, and this the day after Morgan’s 12th birthday was the day they were going to enact it. After convincing Payton to lie down and covering her with leaves and sticks, Anissa handed Morgan a knife and told her “Do it now. Go ballistic, go crazy. Make sure she’s down.” (Words Payton still remembers hearing) and then her friend Morgan said “Don’t be afraid. I’m only a little kitty cat.” Then she pounced on Payton and began stabbing her repeatedly. As Payton lay there on the ground bleeding out she managed to say “I trusted you…”. Anissa and Morgan then told Payton that if she just laid there then she would lose blood slower, so she should just lay right there while they went to fetch some help for her; at which point the two conspirators fled, leaving Payton to die, alone in the forest.

Eventually Payton was able to pull herself to her feet with the aid of some nearby trees, she then began to painfully make her way back towards the park that they had come from. Which is incredibly brave and tells you just how much strength was in that 12 year old girl that had just been betrayed in the most profound way possible by at least one person whom she genuinely trusted and cared for.

I phrase it that way because while Payton did consider Morgan as her best friend she really didn’t feel like Anissa was ever really her friend, saying that Anissa was always “cruel” to her. She also said that she felt very much like Anissa was jealous of her relationship with Morgan, maybe because they had already been friends for years by the time Anissa met them and joined their group.

As Payton trudged her way through the woods, desperately trying to find someone to help her, a cyclist found her and called EMTs. All told Payton had been stabbed 19 times, one of the wounds missed a major artery of her heart by a millimeter. Another went through her diaphragm and punctured her liver and stomach. It took six hours of operations to save her with the surgeon saying “if the knife had gone the width of a human hair further she would not have lived”. During a 2019 interview Payton has said that she suffers lingering trauma (understandably so) from the attack and she sleeps with a pair of broken scissors in fear of ever being attacked again.

Chapter 2 - It Gets Darker

This is where we really start getting into the truly terrifying part of this case. The attack, while horrific, is less terrifying than the actual motive behind it. I think it goes without saying that all of us here have a love of horror and the creepy, both real and fictional. But when you take young people (be they male or female let’s just be clear) that feel outcast and marginalized, coupled with a hidden and untreated mental illness is a recipe for disaster. Morgan Geyser is unfortunately an embodiment of what can happen and what a person can become when these elements combine.

Young Morgan was always an outsider, from her earliest days in school. Payton initially became friends with her because she felt bad seeing that Morgan had no other friends at all. That’s how their bond was formed, and the two became best friends. But Morgan was a girl with secrets. And once Anissa came along, another troubled young girl with social and mental health issues, the pair fell into what can only be called a shared delusion. Morgan suffered from early onset schizophrenia and had fallen into a delusion that fictional characters were in fact her friends. In her state she was convinced she knew these characters and had a personal relationship with them.

One of these characters included the creepypasta character known as Slenderman, or Slender as the girls referred to him. Anissa was just as caught up in this fantasy as Morgan was, and the pair kind of fueled each other’s delusional state and continually escalated each other’s unstable mental state. The entire fantasy they built became an Ouroboros with each girl’s instability feeding the other. It was bound to become a calamity for someone, and unfortunately that person ended up being Payton.

Along the way they became convinced that Slenderman had told them that the only way to keep themselves and their families safe was to kill someone for him, to prove they were worthy. Their plan thus became to kill Payton and prove that Slenderman was real. 5 hours after the attack on Payton the pair were apprehended by police on I-94. The pair claimed they were on their way to meet Slenderman in his home called Slender Mansion, in a National Forest over 200 miles from where they were captured.

During the very first interviews. which were conducted with no counsel or guardian present, Morgan seemed to have absolutely no empathy while Anissa did seem to show some guilt for what had been done. However they were both resolutely convinced that the killing had to take place in order to appease Slenderman. During psychiatric evaluations Morgan admitted to having hallucinations beginning in early childhood, and was later diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia. Her mother even corroborated much of what Morgan told them saying that Morgan often would be conversing with unseen people, behaved like a cat, claimed to see unicorns among other things. She believed she had relationships with Voldemoort and Severus Snape and even claims to have conversed with one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Morgan was admitted to a mental health facility initially to determine if she was competent to stand trial. During that time she was medicated and eventually returned to the county jail to await her trial. However her mental health continued to deteriorate and during her trial she was committed to the facility that had previously treated her.

Morgan was charged with attempted first degree murder and Anissa attempted second degree homicide, a Class A and Class B felony respectively. In 2017 Anissa pleaded guilty but was later found not guilty by reason of insanity or mental defect by the jury. Morgan followed suit pleading guilty and also then being found not guilty by the jury after they learned of her schizophrenia diagnosis.

That is not to say that they did not receive punishment. Anissa was sentenced to 25 years to life, 3 of which were to be served in confinement and involuntary treatment at a state forensic psychiatric institute followed by communal supervision until she is 37 years old. In an update she was released in 2021 under 24/7 monitoring via ankle bracelet and has to ask permission to leave Waukesha County.

Morgan has also been seeking an early release citing tremendous improvements in her mental health. As of this writing there do seem to be things in place for her to be released into a communal home where she is supposed to be until 2056, likely under similar conditions of a monitoring by an ankle bracelet however I cannot say that for certain. There are other things around Morgan and some of her recent moves to try and secure an early release, but I feel those are her business and don’t really have much bearing on what happened in 2014. The information is out there though for those who are curious or want to look into this case for themselves.

As for Payton herself she still bears the scars of that day, both physical and non-physical. She says she tries not to think about the physical scars too much, and when asked what she would say to Morgan if she ever saw her again, Payton's answer was “I’d thank her.” The reason being that in the wake of that terrible attack Payton herself has been inspired to go into a career in medicine.

All told this entire case is just… very, very terrifying. To think someone that’s your best friend one day, is luring you into the woods the next day, attacking you and then leaving you for dead the next. What a truly horrifying world we live in sometimes. But also sometimes in the deepest darkness burns the brightest little lights.