The Morgan Geyser Case: What We Owe To Youth And Mental Health

Slenderman, in Wisconsin.

If you are unfamilar with who Morgan Geyser is, the easiest thing would be for me to say “Slenderman,” and then you might be familiar. If you’re still not, Geyser (top right in the above photo) and her friend Anissa Weier (bottom right) stabbed their friend Peyton “Bella” Leutner in May 2014 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The narrative on the stabbing was that the two friends got obsessed with an online character called “Slenderman” on the creepypasta Wiki, and they needed to become “proxies” of Slenderman, and the way to do that was to kill their friend Bella. It should be noted here that Bella did not die and is actually a college junior right now. She was stabbed 19 times, however — mostly by Morgan — and she apparently has 26 different wounds on her body now. A lot of people refer to this case as the “Slenderman Murders,” although no one was murdered. Bella, again, survived — although it was pretty close.

There is a similar case in West Virginia where someone was murdered. Her name was Skylar Neese, and she was murdered apparently because her two friends were in a lesbian relationship and didn’t want anyone to find out:

The Slenderman story is different. Years later, most of the interrogation video has been released on Geyser and Weier:

If you watch it, you can clearly tell a difference between Geyser and Weier, and that’s even reflected in the modern moment. Weier is out of a mental facility, and has been since September 2021. So, she was in the system about seven years. Geyser is still in the system, although she is appealing for a release this sumer after declining her appeal last summer.

I just finished a book about this case, by Kathleen Hale.

If you are interested in the below topics, I’d definitely consider reading this book:

• Crime

• True crime

• Online behavior

• Mental health

• How we tend to put people in boxes

• The pros and cons of the criminal justice system

• Our misunderstanding of youth

• How young girls can get captivated by things, be it online horror or Instagram

The book hits all those concepts, so if those intrigue you, go buy it or get it at the library.

Geyser was early-onset schizophrenic, which is a condition we barely understand in adults, much less children. If you watch the interrogation above, the detective in her room is named Casey (last name), and while he starts off pretty good, he gets frustrated repeatedly with her. But, at the time, she was literally seeing dragons and unicorns talk to her. She had several imaginary friends, including one named Sev and one named Maggie.

One of the primary issues of this case, or at least for the community of Waukesha, was that Morgan’s dad was also schizophrenic, and because of her mom’s job — something in the medical world whereby she regularly had to drive 100 miles to do nursing-related jobs — her dad mostly raised her. The Leutner family and others would go nuts about that later on.