A woman accused of stabbing her classmate to please the bizarre horror character Slender Man more than a decade ago asked a judge again on Friday to release her from a psychiatric hospital.
Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier were 12 in 2014 when they lured Payton Leutner 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, who is now 22 years old, 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.
She withdrew her first petition two months after filing it in 2022. Bohren denied her second request this past April, saying she remains a risk to the public.
Geyser’s attorney, Anthony Cotton, didn’t immediately respond to email and telephone messages Friday morning.
Geyser pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree intentional homicide and was sent to the psychiatric institute because of mental illness. Weier pleaded guilty to attempted second-degree intentional homicide and was also sent to the psychiatric center. She was granted a release in 2021 to live with her father and was ordered to wear a GPS monitor.
The Slender Man is a modern-day myth, created online. His form is deep-rooted in tradition and folklore: a spirit of the woods, he’s largely characterised as a claimer of young souls.
It was created in 2009. Under his username “Victor Surge”, Eric Knudsen created the Slender Man in 2009 as part of a photoshop challenge on the Something Awful forum, in which users were asked to manipulate real photos to give them a paranormal edge. Knudsen submitted two examples, both black-and-white shots of children with a haunting, spectral figure in its background.
One caption read: “‘We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time…’ — 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead.”
The other read: “‘One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as ‘The Slender Man’. Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.’ — 1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.”
