Slenderman
Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls
-
- 105,00 kr
-
- 105,00 kr
Publisher Description
The first full account of the Slenderman stabbing, a true crime narrative of mental illness, the American judicial system, the trials of adolescence, and the power of the internet
On May 31, 2014, in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, Wisconsin, two twelve-year-old girls attempted to stab their classmate to death. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier’s violence was extreme, but what seemed even more frightening was that they committed their crime under the influence of a figure born by the internet: the so-called “Slenderman.” Yet the even more urgent aspect of the story, that the children involved suffered from undiagnosed mental illnesses, often went overlooked in coverage of the case.
Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls tells that full story for the first time in deeply researched detail, using court transcripts, police reports, individual reporting, and exclusive interviews. Morgan and Anissa were bound together by their shared love of geeky television shows and animals, and their discovery of the user-uploaded scary stories on the Creepypasta website could have been nothing more than a brief phase. But Morgan was suffering from early-onset childhood schizophrenia. She believed that she had seen Slenderman long before discovering him online, and the only way to stop him from killing her family was to bring him a sacrifice: Morgan’s best friend Payton “Bella” Leutner, whom Morgan and Anissa planned to stab to death on the night of Morgan’s twelfth birthday party. Bella survived the attack, but was deeply traumatized, while Morgan and Anissa were immediately sent to jail, and the severity of their crime meant that they would be prosecuted as adults. There, as Morgan continued to suffer from worsening mental illness after being denied antipsychotics, her life became more and more surreal.
Slenderman is both a page-turning true crime story and a search for justice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this searing account, Hale (Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker: Six Essays) goes beyond the headlines to reveal how and why two 12-year-old girls, who wanted to please a fictional internet bogeyman known as the Slenderman, nearly killed another 12-year-old girl in Waukesha, Wis., in 2014. Morgan Geyser was an odd child, but her parents and schoolteachers overlooked her burgeoning schizophrenia, Hale writes. After Morgan discovered the Slenderman horror stories online, she and classmate Anissa Weier became obsessed with joining him and plotted to kill classmate Bella Leutner. Five months later, Morgan stabbed Bella 19 times while Anissa urged her on. Bella survived, and the two girls were quickly caught and confessed. Hale argues that the adults in the children's lives could have prevented this tragedy had they paid attention to the warning signs and the girls' internet searches. Both Morgan and Anissa were tried as adults, found mentally deficient and sentenced to a psychiatric hospital. Anissa was released in 2021, but Morgan remains there, Hale notes, suicidal and still delusional about demons. As the first researcher into the case to draw extensively from transcripts of vital records, Hale has produced what stands as the most accurate account to date of this horrifying episode. This is a must for true crime fans.
