SLENDERMAN: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girlsby Kathleen Hale
If there’s a true crime voice, it’s that of a prime-time Midwestern news anchor, utterly depraved and mild-mannered—the kind that make the worst horrors seem corporate, not cause for contemplation but for stern punishment. That’s not exactly Kathleen Hale’s voice, but it’s close. Her book, “Slenderman,” is set in Waukesha, Wisc., a law-and-order community half an hour from where Hale herself grew up and where, in May 2014, three sixth-graders—Payton “Bella” Leutner, Morgan Geyser, and Anissa Weier – went into a wooded park to play hide and seek. As Anissa watched and encouraged her, Morgan stabbed Bella 19 times with a kitchen knife. Bella, left for dead, managed to trip and crawl to a nearby road for help; Morgan and Anissa were soon taken into police custody. Given the brutal nature of the crime, they were charged as adults.
What happened? What drove two 12-year-olds to kill one of their friends? Morgan turned out to be obsessed with a website called Creepypasta.com, a wiki of scary stories and urban myths; those who grabbed her were about a dark figure named Slenderman. Hale writes: “When? [Morgan] Slenderman encountered, she was fascinated. She had seen his face before. Not on the internet, but at her home. He was its image, the tall, faceless man who had teased her since childhood.” As the site and the stories were crowdsourced, information about Slenderman spread all over the internet – kids took new pictures, posted new stories. There was even a video game.
Hale spent seven years studying thousands of pages of court documents, police reports, and other public records. She interviewed Morgan and her family, as well as her defense team and her pen pals, but she didn’t speak to Bella or Anissa. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Morgan, whose father has schizophrenia, is showing signs of the illness himself. To her, Slenderman is both a threat and a hero, one who understands her terrifying visions and fears: “Every hallucination that ever frightened her, entranced her, or comforted her was projected onto Slenderman.”
