"Slenderman" asks tough questions about crime and mental illness
On the morning of May 31, 2014, in the small city of Waukesha, Wisconsin, three 12-year-old girls were getting ready to say goodbye at the end of a birthday slumber party. After breakfast and some dawdling on the internet, birthday girl Morgan Geyser suggested a walk through the idyllic David’s Park, where she and her best friend, Anissa Weier, whispered and trailed behind Morgan’s former best friend, Payton “Bella” Leutner. This didn’t seem too strange; Bella had become the odd one out since Anissa and Morgan had met on the bus earlier in the school year, so she was more annoyed than scared when the two started acting weird.
But it was an unusual morning, the culmination of a monthslong delusion that Morgan and Anissa had lost themselves to: that the Slender Man—a fictional horror character they’d come to believe was real—needed them to murder their friend. It seemed easier in their imaginations, but in the woods, faced with the reality of living, breathing Bella, the attack was prolonged with false starts. First Anissa hit Bella and pushed her to the ground; she quickly apologized. She and Morgan passed the knife back and forth while Bella was distracted, each trying to convince the other to do it. When Morgan finally pinned Bella down and stabbed her nineteen times, Anissa watched from a short distance. Bella was still alive when Morgan and Anissa left her, but they assumed she’d die soon, confident they’d be well on their way to their new lives (living with Slender Man at his mansion, they believed) by the time their crime was discovered. But Bella survived, and as she underwent life-saving surgeries and Anissa and Morgan were taken into custody, news of the brutal crime spread throughout the state and nation. It was a sensation.
Journalist and novelist Kathleen Hale began reporting on the case almost immediately, starting with a Vice feature on the reactions of other teenage Wisconsin girls in July of 2014. In her book, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls—out in paperback June 20—Hale aims to cut through the noise of the media blitz, which “so far… has told a story of two unrepentant, violent criminals possessed by an internet demon,” and clarify the facts of tragic event that has morphed into legend. In the final line of her author’s note, Hale writes, “This is what really happened.” It’s a big claim, and she delivers.
The endeavor is not without hurdles, though—most significantly the fact that Anissa, Bella, and their families refused interviews. Hale fills in inevitable gaps with court documents, police records, and public interviews, evidenced by the extensive citations that close the book. But it would be it would be disingenuous to ignore the fact that the result is a recounting that is, by necessity, imbalanced in Morgan’s favor. Still, it’s a more than worthwhile project. Morgan’s story is valuable—not as a means for her redemption, but for what it reveals about our failures in understanding and mitigating mental illness, and the dire consequences of those failures.
Hale opens on Morgan as a toddler, describing her earliest hallucinations—ghosts that hugged and bit her, “colors [that] melted down the walls of her bedroom,” external voices that would become friends. She jumps back in time to address Morgan’s family history, significant both for her father’s schizophrenia and for the secrecy surrounding it. This clear focus on schizophrenia sets the stage for the crime but also for the scope of Hale’s investigation. She’s at her best here, revealing young Morgan’s pain, confusion, and fear in heartbreaking, frank detail. There’s Morgan at three years old, running into her parents’ room because hers was haunted, only to be turned away; Morgan at eleven years old, opening Google and asking, “What kind of insane am I?” She’s flailing, trying to understand who she is and what’s happening in her brain. (Despite the signs she both exhibits and reports to her parents, Morgan doesn’t see a psychiatrist or receive a diagnosis until after she’s arrested.)
As Morgan gets older, we see her friendships and interests evolving in step with the increasing severity of her symptoms. When her new friend Anissa introduces Morgan to the online horror fiction forum CreepyPasta.net, Morgan has already spent years trying to make sense of the dark figure she often sees in the corner of her vision. When Anissa insists that a recurring character called Slender Man (also written as Slenderman, or just “Slender”) is real and that she’s seen him too, Morgan is eager to believe her. Soon the pair write themselves into one of Slender’s stories, believing they’ve been ordered to sacrifice a loved one on his behalf. The internet, the horror stories—these are familiar boogeymen, and they are factors in this crime, but they aren’t the cause. As Hale presents it, there is no understanding Morgan’s attempted murder of Bella without understanding the complicated circumstances of Morgan’s schizophrenia—its rare early onset, its unfettered proliferation, and the failure of so many adults in her life to recognize the warning signs and intervene.
In the chapters preceding the crime, Hale highlights years of egregious and maddening lapses in judgment. Morgan’s parents dismiss her fears and visions even though they knew her father’s schizophrenia increased her chances of being diagnosed with the same. When a classmate saw Morgan using blood from her scraped knee to doodle on the wall, her teacher did nothing beyond telling Morgan to clean up and “encourag[ing] her to fit in.” Depending on their opinions of Morgan, her teachers either disregarded her behavior as acting “weird on purpose … to get attention,” or acted on “one concern … Morgan’s social status.” The circumstances leading to the attack present a perfect storm of mental illness, the limitations of the underdeveloped prepubescent brain, and the reluctance of adults to confront what makes them uncomfortable.
When Morgan and Anissa were actively planning a murder, Anissa told a younger student she was going to kill one of her friends so that she could “become a proxy of Slenderman.” The confused child told her twin, who then reported the conversation to a different teacher, “without consequence.” During the trial, some of these teachers gave rueful testimony, saying people just don’t want to believe a child could be so sick. Maybe this is true. But why, then, was it still so hard for Morgan to get help when her schizophrenia could no longer be denied? It’s this question that propels the bulk of Slenderman as Hale takes us through years awaiting and then sitting on trial, tracking the differences between Morgan’s and Anissa’s cases and treatments, Morgan’s abuse and lack of access to necessary medical care, and the politicization of insanity pleas. It’s a damning account of a system that has long criminalized mental illness while also refusing rehabilitative care to those who need it.
Hale doesn’t blame the murder on Morgan’s schizophrenia wholesale, but she acknowledges its mistreatment as a factor. Knowing that antipsychotics eventually removed Morgan’s hallucinations, a question arises: Would she have been as susceptible to the Slenderman delusion if she were medicated earlier? Morgan and Anissa both reported reluctance and guilt even before the attack—Morgan chose not to wake Anissa in the middle of the night when they’d originally planned to attack Bella, wanting to put it off; after stabbing Bella, Morgan tried to administer first aid before leaving her to die—so one wonders if she’d have gone through with it if she didn't truly believe she had to.
Hale’s focus on mental illness is risky, requiring nuance and a delicate hand. Mental illness—schizophrenia especially—is often used as a diversion in conversations about gun control and mass murder, a vague but powerful threat that draws on deep-seated misconceptions and which allows observers to look outward and avoid complicity. If we can’t confidently say schizophrenia makes people violent — and recent research warns against seeing the correlation between schizoaffective disorders and violent crime as causation — what role did it play in this specific attack, and what do we gain by highlighting it? Hale walks this line deftly, almost certainly benefitting from her own experiences of (and reflections on) mental illness. She takes care to avoid exploitative or gratuitous descriptions of a crime that has otherwise been treated a spectacle, instead making it impossible to ignore the humanity of all parties in what is ultimately a confluence of tragedies. She stops short of investigating the link between violence and schizoaffective disorders or surveying radical and shifting theories of solutions, all of which would emphasize the broader consequences of these issues. At its core, though, Slenderman is a cautionary tale—a bold and necessary call for a better understanding of mental illness, and, with that understanding, the development of better tools for crisis management and treatment.
