Speaker 1: You're listening to a Mother Mea podcast.
Speaker 2: Mama Mea acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters.
Speaker 2: This podcast was recorded on It's a Saturday Morning in Waukeshire,
Speaker 2: Wisconsin in May twenty fourteen. And friends Bella, Morgan, and
Speaker 2: Anissa are playing at a local park after spending the
Speaker 2: night at Morgan's for a birthday sleepover. It was a
Speaker 2: lovely afternoon. The girls went skating, they played the sims,
Speaker 2: giggled endlessly, and eat cheese pips, just regular twelve year
Speaker 2: old girl stuff. But Anissa and Morgan had a secret plan,
Speaker 2: a plan to kill Bella to appease a fictional character
Speaker 2: called slender Man, who they'd read about online and planned
Speaker 2: to run away with. It was supposed to happen at
Speaker 2: two am, then five thirty am, then nine thirty am,
Speaker 2: but the girls keep chickening out. Bella keeps telling them
Speaker 2: no when they try and get her to lie down
Speaker 2: or pretend to be asleep, or to sit in the corner.
Speaker 2: It's harder than they anticipated. Finally, during a game of
Speaker 2: hide and seek at the park, Morgan takes charge. She
Speaker 2: straddles her best friend in the dirt and tells her
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. I have to do this because it's the
Speaker 2: only way to save my life. Someone from Creepy Pasta
Speaker 2: is stalking me. She stabs Bella nineteen times and flees
Speaker 2: with Anissa by her side, bleeding. A gravely injured Bella
Speaker 2: drags herself into a clearing where she's spotted by a
Speaker 2: passing cyclist. You will find a twelve year old female
Speaker 2: who appears.
Speaker 1: To be stabbed. Stab Are you with this twelve year
Speaker 1: old female? Yeah? She says she's having trouble breathing. She
Speaker 1: said she was stabbed multiple times, sab multiple times.
Speaker 2: As news of the stabbing lands in the inboxes of
Speaker 2: newsrooms globally, it becomes clear very quickly, this is a
Speaker 2: story that the whole world is about to have an
Speaker 2: opinion on. I'm Jemma Bath and this is true Crime
Speaker 2: Conversations Amoma mea podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes
Speaker 2: by speaking to the people who know the most about them.
Speaker 2: Slenderman is a creepy, faceless character with long arms and
Speaker 2: legs and black tentacles that protrude from his back. He
Speaker 2: wears a black suit, and his victims are pulled into
Speaker 2: a hypnotized state utterly helpless against him. By twenty fourteen,
Speaker 2: he was viral, gaining notoriety, in particular on a site
Speaker 2: called creepypasta dot com, a place for amateur horror stories
Speaker 2: and young adult content. That's where twelve year olds Morgan
Speaker 2: Geyser and Anissa Wire found him and became obsessed with him.
Speaker 2: Morgan had been seeing and hearing things, and they were
Speaker 2: afraid he had control of her mind and was coming
Speaker 2: to kill her family. They had to take action. They
Speaker 2: had to kill someone first, then then run away to
Speaker 2: Slender Mansion with him and become his proxies. It was
Speaker 2: the stuff of magic and fantasy for two very young girls,
Speaker 2: but it was intermixed with severe mental illness on Morgan's
Speaker 2: part and an undiagnosed disability and mental health condition on
Speaker 2: a Nissa's side. But it's those details, the mental health
Speaker 2: of these tween girls that got left behind in twenty
Speaker 2: fourteen and the years that followed, as the girls were
Speaker 2: tried as adults and prosecuted with the world's eyes and
Speaker 2: judgment upon them. When journalist Kathleen Hale decided to write
Speaker 2: about this case, she wanted to tell the whole story,
Speaker 2: the story that got lost in the media, the story
Speaker 2: that not only honored the victim and shared her terror
Speaker 2: and recovery, but tried to understand what actually happened, why
Speaker 2: it happened. Result was her book slender Man, A Tragic
Speaker 2: Story of Online obsession and mental illness, and Kathleen joins us. Now, Kathleen, firstly,
Speaker 2: can you take us inside the obsession that was slender
Speaker 2: Man in twenty fourteen ish? It was pretty huge online,
Speaker 2: wasn't it.
Speaker 1: It had been about five years in twenty fourteen since
Speaker 1: Slenderman first emerged online in two thousand and nine as
Speaker 1: part of like a photoshop contest in the paranormal sort
Speaker 1: of message boards of a horror forum. And he was
Speaker 1: born basically in these doctored photos that people that someone
Speaker 1: made of their children playing and having a good time,
Speaker 1: but they didn't notice that from afar was a very tall,
Speaker 1: sort of thin spectral figure watching them, stocking them, and
Speaker 1: it sort of just captured the attention of horror fans
Speaker 1: online who are beginning to congress gate in different forums.
Speaker 1: And by the time this case rolled around in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: he had become a semi popular character on creepypasta dot com,
Speaker 1: which was a fan fiction horror site where people could
Speaker 1: read each other's amateur horror stories and sort of borrow
Speaker 1: characters from each other and write original horror fiction. And
Speaker 1: he was one of many characters featured on the site.
Speaker 1: And actually, ironically, he wasn't super super popular in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: not as we know him to be now. It wasn't
Speaker 1: until a crime, a heinous, globally and famous crime, was
Speaker 1: committed in his name that he really became the popular
Speaker 1: sort of horror icon that people know him as today.
Speaker 2: And the idea of him as this kind of horror
Speaker 2: character was that too, did he stalk paople, manipulate people,
Speaker 2: kill people? What was his deal?
Speaker 1: So his sort of powers are more about rolling other
Speaker 1: people and having them do his bidding. He in some
Speaker 1: stories he is violent, but for the most part his
Speaker 1: narratives really revolve around him using mind control to inspire
Speaker 1: other people to commit violence in his name, and so
Speaker 1: there's a lot of scary stories about him, you know,
Speaker 1: getting in the heads of people and making them kill
Speaker 1: their whole families, and then when they're all done, he
Speaker 1: comes and he takes them away. But that's basically his
Speaker 1: number one power is mind control and getting other people
Speaker 1: to kill for him. He doesn't have to do it
Speaker 1: himself because he can. He can worm his way into
Speaker 1: the minds of vulnerable people, and that's how he enacts violence.
Speaker 2: And Creepy Pasta it's kind of just like a forum, right,
Speaker 2: a website.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a it's a website and it's in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1: It was very low fi like. It basically looked like
Speaker 1: a middle schooler's horror blog, like black background, red words,
Speaker 1: really sort of simple interface, and in fact, a lot
Speaker 1: of the stories on it were written by children, you
Speaker 1: could just tell. So it was popular among a certain
Speaker 1: age group. It wasn't sophisticated like you know, Reddit or
Speaker 1: a place like that. It was. It was a bit dorky,
Speaker 1: very pg. Thirteen. The submission guidelines were pretty you know, strict.
Speaker 1: Nothing could have any kind of like sexual overtones. Everything
Speaker 1: had to be sort of accessible for middle schoolers. It
Speaker 1: really felt like a site that was catered toward children.
Speaker 2: Well, I guess that makes sense with a name like
Speaker 2: Creepy Pasta as well.
Speaker 1: Yes, you know it's creepy Pasta. Yeah, yeah, no, it's
Speaker 1: it's a great it's a great site name. It's a
Speaker 1: word play on copy and paste, creepy pasta copy and paste,
Speaker 1: So it's it's evocat of what the site is for,
Speaker 1: which is to basically copy and paste each other's stories
Speaker 1: into a new, fresh word document, take away a lot,
Speaker 1: add some more of your own, upload it, and the
Speaker 1: cycle continues.
Speaker 2: Can you tell us about where this crime is set?
Speaker 2: It was a town or city in Wisconsin that you're
Speaker 2: actually very familiar with, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, I grew up nearby. The crime took place in Waukeshaw, Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: which is one of the three most conservative counties in
Speaker 1: all of Wisconsin, which is sort of saying something people
Speaker 1: who are not from Wisconsin or not from the United
Speaker 1: States to really understand it. I guess it reminds me
Speaker 1: a lot of the Shirley Jackson story. The Lottery. People
Speaker 1: are really, really, really friendly, but there are these very
Speaker 1: strong Gothic undertones, lots of secrets, lots of vengeful attitudes
Speaker 1: when lines are crossed. But you know, just in terms
Speaker 1: of what it looks like so people can picture it,
Speaker 1: extremely suburban, extremely pristine, clean white, and the sort of
Speaker 1: extreme far right political culture of this locale cannot be overstated.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of trump Ism there and when this
Speaker 1: case was first unfolding, it was two years before he
Speaker 1: won the twenty sixteen election, and all of the forces
Speaker 1: that were poised to put him into the White House
Speaker 1: were very much alive and electric and brewing in a
Speaker 1: state at that time. It's the sort of place where
Speaker 1: people are very, very wary of outsiders. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of sort of quiet racism, and there's a sort of
Speaker 1: misplaced idea that the reason that Waksha is so safe
Speaker 1: is because of these tough on crime laws as they're
Speaker 1: called in the United States, which you know, which is
Speaker 1: you know, not true, But it's the sort of self
Speaker 1: reinforcing ideology that things are safe because things are the
Speaker 1: way they are, and so that's sort of what the
Speaker 1: environment is like. But it's beautiful. It's a beautiful, beautiful place.
Speaker 1: It's a place where you can have a really good
Speaker 1: life at little cost to yourself, so long as you
Speaker 1: fit in to what everyone thinks, you know, you should be.
Speaker 2: It sounds like the kind of place where a crime
Speaker 2: like this would be particularly shocking.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I think that the prior to this, in
Speaker 1: all of Waukesha, there's a lot of people there. There
Speaker 1: had been less than one murder per year, and this
Speaker 1: was not a murder case. It was it would be
Speaker 1: widely mistaken as a murder case. But just to give
Speaker 1: you an idea of how safe and crime free the
Speaker 1: area was. Like any suburban place in the US, it
Speaker 1: had its issues with drugs, you know, there were things
Speaker 1: like that going on, but in terms of violent crime, no,
Speaker 1: there is nothing. This was the kind of place were
Speaker 1: something like this would never No one would have expected
Speaker 1: this to happen.
Speaker 2: It took you seven years or so to write your
Speaker 2: book on this. How did you find writing it? Approaching
Speaker 2: the people in the story, trying to gain their trust,
Speaker 2: and it helped being as somewhat local.
Speaker 1: It helped me having been local. Once they would speak
Speaker 1: to me, I mean a group so close to where
Speaker 1: this took place, like that the girls involved in the
Speaker 1: story and I we had a lot of the same
Speaker 1: sort of childhood touched ones the same place where these
Speaker 1: three girls spent Morgan and Anissa's last night of freedom.
Speaker 1: That was the roller rink where I first held hands
Speaker 1: with the crush. Like, we had these sort of common
Speaker 1: cultural monuments. And so once somebody would speak to me,
Speaker 1: and once maybe they heard the way I spoke and
Speaker 1: they could understand that I understood them on this sort
Speaker 1: of deeper level. I do think that that helped us.
Speaker 1: I was looking at it from the point of view
Speaker 1: of not just this was a horrible crime. I was
Speaker 1: also looking at it from the point of view of
Speaker 1: this is a horrible crime that we committed on the
Speaker 1: so called criminals involved in the case. The judicial process
Speaker 1: that unfolded was a circus, and the laws that came
Speaker 1: crashing down on these young girls they need to be
Speaker 1: revoked and amended. And I just couldn't believe what was happening,
Speaker 1: and nobody really wanted to look at it from that
Speaker 1: point of view. To them, my having any compassion for
Speaker 1: the other two children who were involved in the crime
Speaker 1: the assailants was the same as saying that the victim's
Speaker 1: experience didn't matter, which is not how I felt at all.
Speaker 1: But unfortunately, in the US were in this place where
Speaker 1: the two things cannot be true, right a lot compassion.
Speaker 1: You can't have compassion for a victim and have compassion
Speaker 1: for her attackers. Those two ideas seemed mutually exclusive to
Speaker 1: most of the people that I talked to, so it
Speaker 1: was very hard getting people to talk to me, but
Speaker 1: Morgan's family opened up to me and I got to
Speaker 1: speak to Morgan, and from there, just because of all
Speaker 1: of the extensive documentation on the case, Thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: of pages of interviews, etc. And all of the previous reporting,
Speaker 1: I was able to vary laboriously and as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: slowly build a factual timeline of what had happened, which
Speaker 1: was shocking because the truth of the story was so
Speaker 1: at odds with the myth that had grown around it.
Speaker 1: An urban legend had grown around the case, just as
Speaker 1: the case had grown around an urban legend, and so
Speaker 1: the true story was almost I mean, it was so
Speaker 1: much more shocking than what had been reported in the
Speaker 1: media prior to that.
Speaker 2: Well, you mentioned Morgan, and she's the reason that this
Speaker 2: case is back in the headlines again. She was released
Speaker 2: only a few weeks ago the judge made the decision.
Speaker 2: So January twenty twenty five, how did you first come
Speaker 2: to talk to her? And what was she like?
Speaker 1: I came to talk with her because her mom and
Speaker 1: I had been talking and I got permission from her
Speaker 1: mom to speak to her. And Morgan was curious about
Speaker 1: talking to me because she is a writer and an artist,
Speaker 1: and we talked a lot about her life, but we
Speaker 1: also talked a lot about her writing. We would have
Speaker 1: little sort of like creative writing workshops in the hospital
Speaker 1: cafeteria when I went to go visit her, and she
Speaker 1: was fifteen when I first met her, and she was
Speaker 1: a child. She was so childlike, so seft spoken, so
Speaker 1: self loathing, so sweet, and so vulnerable. And at that
Speaker 1: point she had been taken away from her family for
Speaker 1: three years and had not hugged her parents outside of
Speaker 1: a legal or medical setting for that entire time. She'd
Speaker 1: actually been prohibited. She hadn't been allowed to hug them
Speaker 1: for four months after her arrest when she was twelve
Speaker 1: years old, so it was and they had never seen
Speaker 1: where she slept. I mean, all these obvious things about
Speaker 1: being incarcerated, but she was on an adult ward at
Speaker 1: the age of I mean, she was so young, So
Speaker 1: I think that that was sort of for me. The
Speaker 1: most sort of salient quality that I got from her
Speaker 1: is just how young she was, and I was shocked
Speaker 1: by it every time we got together, especially given the
Speaker 1: context of our meetings. In terms of her personality, she's
Speaker 1: very smart, can be very funny, very creative, very troubled
Speaker 1: and wasn't getting any help at all despite the environment
Speaker 1: that she was in. Like you would think, especially in
Speaker 1: the US, there's a misconception that these kinds of forensic hospitals,
Speaker 1: which used to be called hospitals for the criminally insane,
Speaker 1: are more nurturing environments than prisons. I would say they're
Speaker 1: definitely less dangerous, less physically dangerous than a prison less
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean that they're safe. But they're not nurturing.
Speaker 1: She was receiving almost no therapy, She was receiving no
Speaker 1: juvenile resources when we met. She was not receiving any education.
Speaker 1: She had not been in any kind of a classroom
Speaker 1: setting or received any kind of academic support since sixth
Speaker 1: grade when she was arrested. And the entire ward, because
Speaker 1: of the institutionalization in the US in the seventies and eighties,
Speaker 1: the entire ward was manned not by doctors or nurses,
Speaker 1: but by these psychiatric care technicians who are entry level.
Speaker 1: They have no specialized education, they're paid minimum wage, and
Speaker 1: they're overworked and burnt out, and some of them have
Speaker 1: criminal records themselves. And the way that they control people
Speaker 1: on the board is by using spit hoods, just like
Speaker 1: last sewing a patient's head with a hood so that
Speaker 1: they and restraint boards. So everything about this situation was
Speaker 1: so surreal and unfair, Like, I mean, that's not justice,
Speaker 1: you know, that's revenge. That's there's supposed to be two
Speaker 1: separate things. I can understand why the victim's family in
Speaker 1: this situation would want Morgan to suffer, but I don't
Speaker 1: know that the entire judicial system should be built around
Speaker 1: that that same impulse.
Speaker 2: Well, especially because the idea of sending someone to a
Speaker 2: hospital rather than a prison, you would think is to
Speaker 2: treat them right. But from what I'm hearing, it sounds
Speaker 2: very old fashioned as well, like like something out of
Speaker 2: a horror movie.
Speaker 1: It was something out of a horror movie. The campus
Speaker 1: was completely open, so I was able to walk around it,
Speaker 1: and it was a very old hospital that was built
Speaker 1: in the eighteen nineth when they first started admitting patients.
Speaker 1: It was all women at the time, in the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 1: They were bringing them in for anger and promiscuity and
Speaker 1: all of this stuff. But the treatments at the time
Speaker 1: when it first started were very quaint and gentle. It
Speaker 1: was like brandy and dancing and gardening, and then the
Speaker 1: institution over the years, it just it was deformed into
Speaker 1: this awful, awful place. So there's a dire, dire need
Speaker 1: for psychiatric hospitals in our country, but because there's no
Speaker 1: funding for them, a place like whin a Bago, where
Speaker 1: Morgan spent so many years of her childhood, is basically
Speaker 1: being turned into a prison and only taking patients found
Speaker 1: not guilty by reason of insanity, and there's no room
Speaker 1: for sort of anything else, and there's no resources to
Speaker 1: even employ full time doctors and nurses in the way
Speaker 1: that they desperately need to.
Speaker 2: Did Morgan was she subjected to the spit hoods and
Speaker 2: the being strapped to boards and all of those things
Speaker 2: that you mentioned.
Speaker 1: No, she really, i think learned very quickly how to
Speaker 1: keep her head down and spent a lot of her
Speaker 1: time feeling really frightened, and she was quite docile because
Speaker 1: of the heavy duty drugs that they had her on.
Speaker 1: They had her on really heavy duty antipsychotics for a
Speaker 1: long time. But she was attacked by another patient at
Speaker 1: the hospital. Everyone knew what she had done, and so
Speaker 1: that made her sort of a target. She was not
Speaker 1: abused by the staff to that extent to the extent
Speaker 1: that some patients at Winnebago have been, but she was
Speaker 1: not nurtured by them either, not helped in any way.
Speaker 2: You're listening to true crime conversations me, Jemma Bass. I'm
Speaker 2: speaking with author Kathleen Hale about the slender Man stabbing
Speaker 2: case in the US. Up next, Kathleen explains the early
Speaker 2: signs that Morgan Geyser was mentally ill and what the
Speaker 2: lack of diagnosis led to. I know you didn't speak
Speaker 2: to her a lot about the crime itself, but you
Speaker 2: did really delve into her childhood and how her mental
Speaker 2: health and illness kind of manifested and it started really young,
Speaker 2: kind of when she was a toddler. She has memories.
Speaker 2: Can you take us inside her brain and the descriptions
Speaker 2: that she gave you?
Speaker 1: Sure? Yeah. So Morgan was telling me that some of
Speaker 1: her first memories are being you know, bitten by ghosts,
Speaker 1: ghosts pulling her hair, ghosts hugging her. She would see
Speaker 1: colors sort of floating like like chalk or dust, rainbow
Speaker 1: colors floating in front of her face. She would see
Speaker 1: rainbow colors sort of dripping down the walls of her
Speaker 1: bedroom like paint, and then very gradually her world became
Speaker 1: populated by these imaginary friends. One of them was named sev.
Speaker 1: She could see him. He took care of her. He
Speaker 1: was like a handsome boy in his twenties always, you know.
Speaker 1: He stayed that age for her, and as she got older,
Speaker 1: he was the same age. And then there was a
Speaker 1: voice in her head named Maggie who sort of kept
Speaker 1: her company and was kind for a long time until
Speaker 1: she became quite cruel as she got older and the
Speaker 1: crime got closer and closer, her mental unraveling. The way
Speaker 1: that that looked to her was that more and more
Speaker 1: imaginary friends started to populate her life, and she stopped
Speaker 1: being able to control them when they talked to her,
Speaker 1: when they didn't talk to her, and they began to
Speaker 1: scare her, you know, And that that was sort of
Speaker 1: the shift that occurred. Prior to the stabbing.
Speaker 2: Her father was a diagnosed schizophrenic, but her parents, I mean,
Speaker 2: prior to the crime, they didn't really kind of look
Speaker 2: into her mental health, did they.
Speaker 1: No, they didn't. They had plans to tell her about
Speaker 1: her father, Matt's mental illness, struggle with mental illness, but
Speaker 1: they didn't want to scare her. They thought she was
Speaker 1: too young to know about it, and they had plans
Speaker 1: to tell her when she turned sixteen. Uh, sort of
Speaker 1: like magical age, you know in the US, where you
Speaker 1: get to drive and you get to go to prom.
Speaker 1: And I guess that they thought that at that age
Speaker 1: she would be ready. In reality, Morgan knew that something
Speaker 1: was wrong with her dad and she would ask who
Speaker 1: She would ask him, point plank, what is wrong with you?
Speaker 1: Because he was unmedicated and he was her full time
Speaker 1: caregiver from the time she was a baby until this
Speaker 1: crime occurred, so she spent a lot of time with him,
Speaker 1: and she saw him behave in really strange ways, and
Speaker 1: he would say, I'll tell you when you're sixteen. I'll
Speaker 1: tell you when you're sixteen. Morgan's mom, Angie, was very
Speaker 1: devoted to her family and she was the primary earner
Speaker 1: and her job was really intense. She assisted on brain
Speaker 1: and spine surgeries and she was on call and would
Speaker 1: be driving within one hundred miles of her house at
Speaker 1: a moment's notice, and she sometimes worked seven days a
Speaker 1: week just to kind of keep the family afloat. On
Speaker 1: a single salary as a surgery technician, so she was
Speaker 1: often leaving before dawn before Morgan woke up in the morning,
Speaker 1: coming home after bedtime, not always, but a lot, and
Speaker 1: so she was really relying on Matt to be an
Speaker 1: accurate reporter of what was happening at home, and unfortunately
Speaker 1: that just wasn't happening. I do I always feel very
Speaker 1: protective of Angie in this story because I know that
Speaker 1: it's common for people to say, like, but where were
Speaker 1: the parents, especially where was the mother? And you know,
Speaker 1: as like a mom, I feel really protective of her
Speaker 1: because she was doing everything she could to keep her
Speaker 1: family safe and secure, and I think, like any working mom,
Speaker 1: would have loved to have spent more time with her children.
Speaker 1: But unfortunately that just wasn't the situation at the time,
Speaker 1: and so a lot of warning signs were missed, and
Speaker 1: a lot of it had to do with the lack
Speaker 1: of communication that was happening between the adults in Morgan's life,
Speaker 1: especially her teachers. It was actually at school that you
Speaker 1: see the most documented evidence that something was going very
Speaker 1: very badly for Morgan, that she was really suffering and
Speaker 1: that she was struggling and that she was confused. But
Speaker 1: the school didn't I mean they just didn't. They didn't
Speaker 1: rope her parents into a conversation about it, they didn't
Speaker 1: address it. They ignored it. They told police Slater that
Speaker 1: they thought if they just they thought that Morgan was
Speaker 1: just trying to get attention, which culturally in that area
Speaker 1: is considered a very bad character flaw. Right, What could
Speaker 1: be worse in a Scandinavian culture than wanting to be
Speaker 1: an individual, not wanting to conform, not wanting to be
Speaker 1: part of the collective. And so they tried to correct it,
Speaker 1: and they said this themselves by withholding the attention that
Speaker 1: they thought that she craved. So they just ignored her.
Speaker 1: And that to me was much more upsetting than anything,
Speaker 1: you know, on Angie's part, because Angie wasn't seeing Morgan
Speaker 1: painting with her own blood, which is what Morgan's math
Speaker 1: teacher saw her doing, or like barking on the playground,
Speaker 1: or you know, any of the other things writing die
Speaker 1: over and over again in her notebook. And so her
Speaker 1: mother had a really incomplete picture of what was happening
Speaker 1: with Morgan. And by the time I met them, Angie
Speaker 1: felt so bad. I mean, I can't. Morgan felt terrible
Speaker 1: for what she had done, and Angie felt an immense
Speaker 1: amount of anguish and guilt too. She had missed this,
Speaker 1: She had missed this, and as a result, she had
Speaker 1: lost lost her daughter.
Speaker 2: Those kind of antics that you described Morgan doing, writing
Speaker 2: in her blood, things like that. You know, she didn't
Speaker 2: have a lot of friends. She was considered weird by
Speaker 2: kids at school because of stuff like that. But she
Speaker 2: did have a really close friendship with a girl called Peyton,
Speaker 2: who you referred to as Bella because that was her
Speaker 2: nickname at the time. Can you tell us about their friendship,
Speaker 2: because they really were from your descriptions kind of chalk
Speaker 2: and cheese. They were completely different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were very, very different. Morgan was very dark,
Speaker 1: Bella was very light. Bella was bubbly and sweet and
Speaker 1: normal and not very imaginative and very literal, and Morgan
Speaker 1: was extremely imaginative. And you know, she wore dark clothes
Speaker 1: and patterned with like human skulls, and she wore a
Speaker 1: black heart pendant around her neck, and Bella wore like
Speaker 1: rainbows and butterfly wings, and it just sort of captures
Speaker 1: the dynamic of their friendship and basically the way that
Speaker 1: they came together was in fourth grade. Bella was for
Speaker 1: some reason, even less popular than Morgan was who knows.
Speaker 1: I mean, kids have all sorts of ways of deciding
Speaker 1: what the social hierarchies are. And no one would sit
Speaker 1: with her at lunch. And Morgan one day across the
Speaker 1: cafeteria to sit with Bella because she liked the way
Speaker 1: that Bella drew kitty cats, and that was the thing
Speaker 1: that sort of brought them together. And they both loved
Speaker 1: dolls and cats and the color purple, and you know, Bella,
Speaker 1: for Morgan's sake, pretended to like start. She also pretended
Speaker 1: to see and hear Morgan's imaginary friends, and that sort
Speaker 1: of binded them together. And you know, fast forward two
Speaker 1: years to sixth grade, things are really shifting fast. Bella
Speaker 1: is now becoming more liked by her peers because she's
Speaker 1: so kind and so sweet, and Morgan is becoming more
Speaker 1: and more unpopular. People are really bullying her. They'll, you know,
Speaker 1: pretend to they'll bump into our purpose just to pretend
Speaker 1: to need to wash their hands and scream that they've
Speaker 1: touched her. And Bella is approached by the popular crowd
Speaker 1: and they say, you know, you can join us if
Speaker 1: you stop being friends with Morgan. And Bella refused because
Speaker 1: Morgan had come to her aid during a time when
Speaker 1: she had nobody, and that had inspired such a deep
Speaker 1: loyalty in her that she was willing to stick it
Speaker 1: out with Morgan. And obviously that's the decision that she
Speaker 1: really came to regret.
Speaker 2: Even Bella's parents were quite wary of Morgan.
Speaker 1: Yes, I mean Morgan set their basement on fire. That'll
Speaker 1: do it. But you know they didn't tell her parents.
Speaker 1: H I mean, I can't imagine if somebody set fire
Speaker 1: to my house, if one of like, it's reflective of,
Speaker 1: like I said, a very very specific Wisconsin Midwestern Gothic
Speaker 1: culture where there's a lot of silence around anything that
Speaker 1: would require a social interaction a confrontation that might not
Speaker 1: be just like friendly talking about the weather keeping things
Speaker 1: at the surface, like, that's a difficult conversation to have.
Speaker 1: And so she just didn't have it. And so, but
Speaker 1: they really didn't. Bella's mom, Stacy, really didn't like Morgan,
Speaker 1: and Morgan later told me that she felt like, and
Speaker 1: she said this almost in an admiring way, that Stacy
Speaker 1: was the only person in her life who knew that
Speaker 1: there was something wrong with her. She noticed, Yeah, she noticed.
Speaker 1: She noticed something that nobody else noticed about Morgan, and
Speaker 1: she did what she could to try to extricate the
Speaker 1: two girls. But she did it in sort of a
Speaker 1: roundabout way where she would try to like encourage Bella to,
Speaker 1: you know, hang out with more popular kids, or you know,
Speaker 1: make up an excuse for why Bella couldn't go to
Speaker 1: Morgan's things that were sort of easily ignored or circumvented.
Speaker 1: I don't think that there was ever a conversation like
Speaker 1: I just don't this doesn't feel good. And in fact,
Speaker 1: she and Bella's dad, Joe, were sort of at odds
Speaker 1: about it. Joe was pretty warm toward Morgan. I saw
Speaker 1: it in the courtroom too, the way that Bella's parents
Speaker 1: were divided by their approach to the aftermass of the crime.
Speaker 1: Bella's mom was at every hearing really wanted the most
Speaker 1: extreme punishment for Morgan, which anyone can understand why Bella's
Speaker 1: mom would want that, And Joe was a bit more expansive.
Speaker 1: He held the door for Morgan's mom in court, little
Speaker 1: gestures that I think they frayed the relationship over time,
Speaker 1: and they ended up divorcing after this this crime unfolded.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying it's just because of that, obviously, It's
Speaker 1: just that, you know, you could see the differences in
Speaker 1: their reactions to this tragedy, and that's something that pulls
Speaker 1: couples apart when they don't react to something like that
Speaker 1: in lockstep with each other.
Speaker 2: When did Anissa come into their lives and how did
Speaker 2: she kind of change the dynamic between the girls.
Speaker 1: Anissa she joined Morgan and Bella's middle school at the
Speaker 1: beginning of sixth grade. Anisa switched school districts, so they
Speaker 1: were all going to a new middle school. Middle school
Speaker 1: starts in sixth grade in the US, but Bella and
Speaker 1: Morgan had gone to elementary school together and Anissa was
Speaker 1: the new kid. And Anissa also happened to be Morgan's
Speaker 1: neighbor in the same apartment complex, and she began as
Speaker 1: Morgan's bully. She would bullied Morgan just like the other kids,
Speaker 1: believe Morgan, but sort of gradually she realized that Morgan
Speaker 1: was interested in the same things that she was interested in,
Speaker 1: which made them both very different. I mean, they both
Speaker 1: liked horror stories, they liked dark things. It's not something
Speaker 1: that girls in Waukeshaw, Wisconsin are really like celebrated for
Speaker 1: being into I mean, this was when people were doing
Speaker 1: like the ice bucket challenge, you know, like Bella wanted
Speaker 1: to do the ice pocket challenge. She wanted to do
Speaker 1: like social media pranks to raise awareness for like causes,
Speaker 1: and Morgan wanted to like like read conspiracy theories online.
Speaker 1: It was a very different thing, and so Anissa noticed
Speaker 1: that about her and something kind of clicked between them.
Speaker 1: At the time, Anissa's parents were getting divorced. Stuff at
Speaker 1: home was really bad. She had a lot of reasons
Speaker 1: to want to leave home, and she was lonely. She
Speaker 1: was super lonely. She doesn't She was a bully, which
Speaker 1: meant that in some ways she had power over other children,
Speaker 1: but she didn't have any friends. She operated kind of
Speaker 1: as a rule enforcer, which is where her bullying came from.
Speaker 1: Like she would when kids didn't follow the rules in class,
Speaker 1: she would punch them or call them names while the
Speaker 1: teacher wasn't looking. She was very good at executing that
Speaker 1: kind of like justice in her mind when adults weren't looking. Later,
Speaker 1: all of her teachers would be like she was amazing,
Speaker 1: and all of the kids would be like, she was
Speaker 1: a nightmare and she had this fantasy of wanting to
Speaker 1: save the world, but basically she just wanted friends and
Speaker 1: she was obsessed with Morgan. But Bella stood between them.
Speaker 1: Morgan already had a best friend, and that was always
Speaker 1: sort of a thorn in a Nissa's side.
Speaker 2: Slender Man kind of became this common ground between a
Speaker 2: Nissa and Morgan, like an obsse They started to read
Speaker 2: about Slenderman and obsess about human his character. But how
Speaker 2: did an obsession with this creepy fictional character kind of
Speaker 2: morph into there's no other way to describe it but
Speaker 2: a murder plot and a murder plot to kill Bella.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was gradual and it was also it would
Speaker 1: also never have happened. If Morgan and Anissa had not
Speaker 1: found each other, none of this would have happened. Basically,
Speaker 1: Morgan had no one to talk to about the things
Speaker 1: that she was seeing and hearing, the hallucinations that she
Speaker 1: was having. She tried to talk to Belle about it.
Speaker 1: Bella was like, I lied about seeing and hearing your
Speaker 1: imaginary friends. I don't want to play this game anymore.
Speaker 1: I'm scared you're scaring me. It's not nice, it's mean,
Speaker 1: and so Morgan felt like if she were to confide
Speaker 1: in Bella that she was going to lose Bella, and
Speaker 1: she didn't want to lose Bella. And eventually it came
Speaker 1: up with Anissa that Morgan saw and heard these things,
Speaker 1: and Anissa was intrigued because she believed in magic and
Speaker 1: dark forces, and you know, she had this creeping sense
Speaker 1: of dread and that's why she loved horror stories because
Speaker 1: they validated this feeling that she had all the time.
Speaker 1: And so Morgan at that point was really afraid that
Speaker 1: she might be going crazy. You can see that in
Speaker 1: her Google searches. She was searching for like what kind
Speaker 1: of insane am I? If Anissa had said like, I
Speaker 1: think maybe you are, like, you know, crazy, things might
Speaker 1: have gone differently. But instead she goes, no, I think
Speaker 1: you're a medium. I think that you straddle to worlds
Speaker 1: and you're in touch with this side of life that
Speaker 1: like no one else understands. So she made Morgan feel,
Speaker 1: you know, special in this way that was really reassuring
Speaker 1: to Morgan, but also scary, right, because then it means
Speaker 1: that all of these things that she's seeing and hearing
Speaker 1: are real and so she keeps opening up to Anissa,
Speaker 1: and she shares that at one point in her childhood,
Speaker 1: the scariest thing she ever saw was she was looking
Speaker 1: in the mirror and she saw this shadowy figure standing
Speaker 1: behind her, really tall and thin, and anisays, like, I've
Speaker 1: seen him too. His name is Slenderman. And that's when
Speaker 1: she introduced Morgan to creepypasta dot com. And basically, between
Speaker 1: all of these different variables, what they came up with
Speaker 1: was that Slenderman had appeared to Morgan when she was
Speaker 1: a young child as a warning, and now he was
Speaker 1: sending like demons at her to sort of like to
Speaker 1: warn her that he would come back and kill her
Speaker 1: and her family in Anissa and a Nissa's family, and
Speaker 1: maybe the whole human race like in the creepypasta stories
Speaker 1: that they read, if they didn't sacrifice another human being
Speaker 1: in his name, like in the scary stories that they read.
Speaker 1: So they just put all these pieces together and it
Speaker 1: was basically, when you sort of zoom out, it was
Speaker 1: two twelve year old girls. One of her, Anissa, had
Speaker 1: a very severe learning disability that was undiagnosed at the time,
Speaker 1: where she could not tell the difference between reality and fantasy,
Speaker 1: and then you have another girl who's severely mentally ill,
Speaker 1: and together at the age of twelve, they're trying to
Speaker 1: diagnose her. They're trying to figure out without any help,
Speaker 1: what is wrong. And so this is what they came
Speaker 1: up with. Now, in terms of choosing Bella as the victim,
Speaker 1: that is the one piece of this puzzle that will
Speaker 1: probably always be a mystery. It's the only place where
Speaker 1: Morgan and Anissa's testimonies diverge. Each one blamed the other
Speaker 1: for picking Bella. So, like what Morgan said to me
Speaker 1: is that Anissa said that it had to be someone
Speaker 1: that Morgan loved, and isn't that convenient? Also that Anissa
Speaker 1: happens to hate Bella, and Morgan really only loved one
Speaker 1: person other than her family, and that's Bella. So it
Speaker 1: was pretty obvious who Anissa was talking about. And Anie
Speaker 1: would tell police that it was Morgan's idea. That Morgan
Speaker 1: was like, we got to kill Bella first lender man,
Speaker 1: and so it's unclear whose idea it was exactly, But
Speaker 1: I think the one thing that is consistent even in
Speaker 1: that piece of the story is that Morgan and Anissa
Speaker 1: chose Bella because Morgan loved Bella. So it wasn't because
Speaker 1: Morgan hated Bella. It was because it was the opposite.
Speaker 1: It was that Bella was the most important person in
Speaker 1: the world to her, and that was the only thing
Speaker 1: she thought that would make the sacrifice count.
Speaker 2: After the break, Kathleen tells us what Morgan and Anissa
Speaker 2: were planning to do to Bella and what exactly went
Speaker 2: down on the night of the Slender Man's sacrifice. When
Speaker 2: you read the details of what these two twelve year
Speaker 2: olds did to Bella, you know, flat on a news report,
Speaker 2: it's kind of like they lured her into the forest
Speaker 2: playing hide and seek, they stabbed her. When you read
Speaker 2: it in your book, it's so obvious when you break
Speaker 2: it all down that these are doing help Like they're
Speaker 2: twelve year old girls, and the way they're thinking into
Speaker 2: how this plot kind of unravels really kind of shows that.
Speaker 2: And I want to kind of help the audience understand
Speaker 2: that by kind of explaining that this started with skating
Speaker 2: at a sleepover, playing sims, eating cheese puffs, sping in
Speaker 2: a pillow for like regular twelve year old girl stuff,
Speaker 2: and then this plan that they kind of had in
Speaker 2: the back of the back of the sleepover, which was like,
Speaker 2: we've got a killer, but how do we do it?
Speaker 2: And they kind of keep chickening out, don't they. Over
Speaker 2: the course of the night.
Speaker 1: They've chicken out several times, and Morgan comes up with
Speaker 1: these kind of magical thinking type ways of avoiding the stabbing,
Speaker 1: like without actually stopping it, Like she thinks she can
Speaker 1: stop it if she does, she can stopish she does that.
Speaker 1: When you said that the real timeline of events leading
Speaker 1: up to the stabbing, the most glaring thing about it
Speaker 1: is that these were twelve year old girls. Like I
Speaker 1: laughed a little bit, not because it's not because it's funny,
Speaker 1: but because it's so true. Like it's like when you
Speaker 1: read the police reports and the interviews and the way
Speaker 1: that they were thinking the things that they were doing it,
Speaker 1: they were so unbelievably shockingly young, and the way that
Speaker 1: their minds worked were it was, you know, their minds
Speaker 1: worked with the absurdity of a child's minds, like and
Speaker 1: and so there are moments in that narrative leading up
Speaker 1: to the stabbing where you kind of it's it's it's
Speaker 1: absurd to the point of feeling like it it's yes,
Speaker 1: So anyway, so what happened was it was a Friday
Speaker 1: Saturday sleepover. On Friday night, they went to Skateland, which
Speaker 1: is a roller rink, and they you know, they skated,
Speaker 1: They had they had a fun time. They held hands,
Speaker 1: they ate creamsicles. They went home. They gave Morgan her
Speaker 1: birthday presents, which included the stuffed banana and the Star
Speaker 1: Trek mug, among other things. They played the sims. Anissa
Speaker 1: and Bella shared a bed. They slept head to foot.
Speaker 1: Bella slept with a dolly. She brought nine cat magazines
Speaker 1: with her to the sleepover.
Speaker 2: It's so innocent. It sounds also innocent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it sounds so innocent. And the plan kept getting subverted.
Speaker 1: The plan had been to kill Bella that night right away.
Speaker 1: The initial plan that they came up with was that
Speaker 1: after Bella fell asleep, Anissa was going to stab her
Speaker 1: and then to death, and that they were going to
Speaker 1: leave her body in a sleeping bag and slip out
Speaker 1: in the middle of the night so that if anyone
Speaker 1: came in it would look like she was sleeping. But
Speaker 1: by the time Bella fell asleep, Anissa was so tired
Speaker 1: from roller skating so much that she was too tired
Speaker 1: to kill anybody. So Morgan said, well, let's just rest.
Speaker 1: I'll set an alarm on my phone for two thirty am.
Speaker 1: But she didn't set the alarm because she didn't want
Speaker 1: the stabbing to happen, but because she was a child,
Speaker 1: she thought that that was like a way to avoid
Speaker 1: the tragedy. She didn't anyway, she didn't want to make
Speaker 1: Anissa mad. Is sort of the thing that was like
Speaker 1: leading her. So then Anissa woke up in the morning
Speaker 1: and she was furious at Morgan for not setting the alarm.
Speaker 1: And then Morgan got permission from her parents to go
Speaker 1: play outside at the nearby park. They'd only let her
Speaker 1: do it like once before, but you know, they reasoned
Speaker 1: that girls are safer in a group usually, so they
Speaker 1: let them go. And then the plan had become to
Speaker 1: kill Ella in the playground restroom because Anissa thought it
Speaker 1: would work because it had a drain for the blood
Speaker 1: to go down. So they brought her in there, telling
Speaker 1: her that they wanted to show her some vandalism them
Speaker 1: in the toilets. She quickly realized that this was not true,
Speaker 1: and then but she didn't leave because, I mean, who
Speaker 1: would think that who would think. She thought that they
Speaker 1: were being mean, that they were like that they were
Speaker 1: gossiping about her, that they were whispering about her. She
Speaker 1: wasn't having fun. She wanted to go home. She felt
Speaker 1: like they were excluding her, but she didn't call her
Speaker 1: mom because she wanted to be a good friend to Morgan.
Speaker 1: Anissa tried to knock Bella unconscious in the bathroom, which
Speaker 1: sounds quite violent. It sounds like anybody would have left
Speaker 1: that situation if they had been Bella. But Anissa was
Speaker 1: by her own admission, she used these words, I'm not
Speaker 1: very athletic. She's also twelve. She also thought that to
Speaker 1: kill somebody just like kind of booped them on the
Speaker 1: head like in a video game, and so she just
Speaker 1: like sort of pushed Bella's head like that, and Bella
Speaker 1: was like, wow, like you're you know, like but but
Speaker 1: she obviously was not knocked unconscious, and so then Anissa
Speaker 1: didn't know what to do. So they thought, let's go
Speaker 1: into the woods. So they asked Bella if she wanted
Speaker 1: to go bird watching. She said no. She was sulking
Speaker 1: at this point, so they said hide and seek. She
Speaker 1: agreed to play hide and seek. They actually played one
Speaker 1: game the normal way they you know, Morgan counted and
Speaker 1: they hid and she kind of found them, and then
Speaker 1: they played again. And that time when Morgan found Anissa
Speaker 1: and Bella in a clearing, she couldn't go through with
Speaker 1: it at first, and Anissa got into a fight about
Speaker 1: who was going to do it. They're fighting off at
Speaker 1: the side of this clearing, passing the knife that they've
Speaker 1: taken from Morgan's kitchen. They're passing it back and forth,
Speaker 1: and Morgan's finally, you know, said something that annoyed Anissa
Speaker 1: so much because she's not sticking to the plan that
Speaker 1: Anissa turns to leave and just walk away, and if
Speaker 1: she had, this would not have happened. But instead she
Speaker 1: turned around and she said kitty now. And kitty was
Speaker 1: her like pet name for more and it sort of
Speaker 1: ignited something in Morgan. She said to Morgan, goberzerk go crazy.
Speaker 1: Morgan tackled Bella. She said, don't worry, I'm just a
Speaker 1: little kitty cat, and then she stabbed Bella nineteen times.
Speaker 2: It's a miracle she lived nineteen times. How did she live?
Speaker 1: Well, there's a few things. One is that it was
Speaker 1: a medical miracle. One of the stab wounds missed her
Speaker 1: heart by a millimeter or something crazy like that. So
Speaker 1: that's part of it. There was one stab wound that
Speaker 1: should have killed her. She was stabbed in the torso,
Speaker 1: in the arms. It was awful. The other thing is
Speaker 1: that Morgan was still in this mindset of I don't
Speaker 1: want this to happen. I don't want this to happen.
Speaker 1: And if you look at the side, at the the
Speaker 1: scope of the each individual wound, and by that I
Speaker 1: mean in the police report they measure it centimeters millimeters
Speaker 1: the whole she was using a six inch blade and
Speaker 1: barely breaking the surface in a lot of these in
Speaker 1: a lot of these strikes, very very very small wounds.
Speaker 1: And that's not to minimize the violence of this crime
Speaker 1: is awful, and Bella suffered enormously. She had to have
Speaker 1: multiple life saving surgeries that left her with so much
Speaker 1: scarring from her throat to her abdomen. I mean, and
Speaker 1: it's a huge, huge trauma. But what I'm saying is
Speaker 1: Morgan was not she was not pressing very hard. She
Speaker 1: was she was flailing and going through the motions of
Speaker 1: this stabbing. And of course, when you stab somebody that
Speaker 1: many times you're going to create devastating consequences. But if
Speaker 1: you imagine somebody who doesn't really want to be doing it,
Speaker 1: who's kind of holding their arm back a bit, who's
Speaker 1: flailing a bit more than actually striking, those were Those
Speaker 1: were the kinds of wounds that a lot of, not
Speaker 1: all nineteen wounds were kill wounds.
Speaker 2: A few things happened after the stubbing. One Morgan at
Speaker 2: one point tried to administer some first aid with a
Speaker 2: leaf and yeah, but then they kind of said to Bella,
Speaker 2: we'll go and get help. But they weren't going to
Speaker 2: go get help. They were basically going to run away
Speaker 2: to be with Slenderman, because that was the plan. How
Speaker 2: How was Bella found? How was she saved?
Speaker 1: It's really miraculous, and it's a testament to her bravery
Speaker 1: and fortitude and intelligence because she, you know, she had
Speaker 1: believed them all day about everything, and she, in her desperation,
Speaker 1: might have believed them when they said they were going
Speaker 1: to get help. I think another person might have, you know,
Speaker 1: in that sort of vulnerable moment, and she didn't, and
Speaker 1: so she started to drag herself through the woods. She
Speaker 1: couldn't see, she couldn't breathe, and she managed to drag
Speaker 1: herself all the way out of the woods, probably like
Speaker 1: one hundred yards to a trail off the street. And
Speaker 1: at that very moment, a bicyclist named Greg Steinberg, who
Speaker 1: had just finished running a five K in downtown Waukeshaw
Speaker 1: and he was bicycling home. He crossed the path and
Speaker 1: he saw her, and he saved her. He made the
Speaker 1: nine one one call that saved her life.
Speaker 2: What about Morgan and Anissa? How were they because obviously
Speaker 2: word of a stabbing got out very quickly. Police are like,
Speaker 2: we've got to find these other girls that you know.
Speaker 2: How would they tracked down? And in what state were
Speaker 2: they in?
Speaker 1: So Morgan and Anissa after stabbing Bella, they took off.
Speaker 1: Their plan was to go to what they thought was
Speaker 1: slender Man's mansion, slender Mansion, and they thought that it
Speaker 1: was in the Nicolae National Forest, which was three hundred
Speaker 1: miles away, and they were going to walk there without
Speaker 1: a map or a phone or any provisions other than
Speaker 1: some Maxi pads because Morgan had just gotten her period,
Speaker 1: and a couple granola bars and some water bottles and
Speaker 1: they were twelve, and that was their plan, and you know,
Speaker 1: they because they didn't have a compass or anything, they
Speaker 1: walked a lot. They spent a lot of time walking
Speaker 1: in the wrong direction. They followed the Fox River north
Speaker 1: they knew that that went north, and then after that
Speaker 1: they were meandering sort of walk trying to get around
Speaker 1: the highway, and that slowed them down. They did manage
Speaker 1: to walk about ten miles. But then what happened was
Speaker 1: they decided to cross a busy highway by walking onto
Speaker 1: the highway rather than under the highway. And they got
Speaker 1: into the highway and a driver, you know, saw these
Speaker 1: little girls four feet tall walking along the side of
Speaker 1: a big the road and called the police. And the
Speaker 1: police were looking for two girls matching that description, one blonde,
Speaker 1: one brunette, just under four feet and they came and
Speaker 1: got them very quickly. And by that point Morgan and
Speaker 1: Anissa were relieved because they were it had stopped being
Speaker 1: fun and they had started to realize that slender Man
Speaker 1: wasn't coming for them.
Speaker 2: And Bella had been able to give those descriptions through
Speaker 2: all of her injuries.
Speaker 1: She was able to tell them it was my best friend.
Speaker 1: Then she was whisked away into surgery, so she gave
Speaker 1: the police the names of those girls. They were able
Speaker 1: to then go to Morgan's house where her parents were,
Speaker 1: and they also went to Anissa's house and got descriptions
Speaker 1: of them and what they'd been wearing that way from
Speaker 1: their parents.
Speaker 2: I want to skip to those initial conversations that the
Speaker 2: girls had with police, because one their parents went with
Speaker 2: them was that local.
Speaker 1: It is in Wiscon and a lot of strange things
Speaker 1: are legal in Wisconsin, and one is that you can
Speaker 1: interview a child about a crime without a parent or
Speaker 1: attorney present, unless the child specifically asks for a lawyer, which,
Speaker 1: as you can imagine, most kids are not thinking that way.
Speaker 1: They've been taught to trust the police. Why would a
Speaker 1: police officer want to trick me? Why would a police
Speaker 1: officer want to hurt me? Especially in suburban communities, in
Speaker 1: white suburban communities, people feel that way. So the police
Speaker 1: interviewed them, I'm interrupted for eight hours, and they lied
Speaker 1: to their parents too about what they were talking to
Speaker 1: them about. And it's all legal.
Speaker 2: How would you describe those conversations. The stuff that jumped
Speaker 2: out to me, particularly from a Nissa, was I don't
Speaker 2: think she really grasped what had happened. She was asking
Speaker 2: things like what am I going to get my clothes back?
Speaker 2: And oh, I haven't taken my antihistamy today. It was
Speaker 2: almost like she didn't realize what had happened. Yeah, how
Speaker 2: would you kind of look at those conversations?
Speaker 1: I think is is wild, But if you watch it,
Speaker 1: I mean what I thought was just in Morgan's case,
Speaker 1: I thought, this cop really has it out for her.
Speaker 1: He really hates her. And also you can see how
Speaker 1: mentally ill Morgan is. You can see all of the
Speaker 1: science that she's just completely unraveling and that she's sick
Speaker 1: and that she needs she needs help. And with a Nissa,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think you see a learning disability on
Speaker 1: full display. Like that's something that kind of comes out
Speaker 1: throughout this case. Is if you want to see a
Speaker 1: monster in these girls, you can see a monster. But
Speaker 1: if you go into it with the context of their
Speaker 1: situations of a Nissa's incredibly difficult disability in terms of
Speaker 1: her processing information and in terms of Morgan being in
Speaker 1: a state of psychosis, you can see that she's in
Speaker 1: a state of psychosis. That's the short answer, is that
Speaker 1: she is in a state of psychosis. For the entire interview,
Speaker 1: and the the police officer questioning her is treating her
Speaker 1: like a serial killer. And that's the dynamic in her
Speaker 1: interrogation room and with a nieceas she has no idea,
Speaker 1: she has no idea how much trouble she is, and
Speaker 1: she wants to go back to school on Monday. She
Speaker 1: wants to make sure that she'll be able to do that.
Speaker 1: And they just they talk and talk and talk and
Speaker 1: talk and talk for hours, and by the time they
Speaker 1: go out of there, the police have secured a lengthy
Speaker 1: confession with the explicit purpose of trying to put the
Speaker 1: girls into an adult prison for over one hundred years.
Speaker 1: The police officer's goal that day was to incarcerate the
Speaker 1: girls for as long as possible and the most extreme
Speaker 1: environment possible at an adult women's prison. It was not
Speaker 1: to understand the crime or why it happened, and it
Speaker 1: was not to yeah, it was not to have a
Speaker 1: deeper understanding of the case to punish the case, and
Speaker 1: so they went about it using the methods that would
Speaker 1: best serve that goal.
Speaker 2: Morgan's mental health kind of was assessed five or so
Speaker 2: days into prison, so all does it happened? She'd been
Speaker 2: placed into a prison. How did her mental health kind
Speaker 2: of continue to unravel once she was incarcerated, because it
Speaker 2: was in that first prison visit that her parents finally
Speaker 2: kind of clicked and were like, oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: People are like, well, how did she manage? How did
Speaker 1: no one manage to see it? Well, part of it
Speaker 1: is that she hid it, and you know, she hid
Speaker 1: it as well as an extremely intelligent, high IQ twelve
Speaker 1: year old girl with emerging psychosis can hide it. And
Speaker 1: at the end, she was having a lot of trouble
Speaker 1: hiding it leading up to the crime, but her friends
Speaker 1: were helping her hide it. Anissa was helping her hide it,
Speaker 1: like Bella was helping her hide it. Other kids were like,
Speaker 1: what's going on? But they were managing to sort of
Speaker 1: protect her from any sort of adult scrutiny. After the
Speaker 1: crime occurred, she could no longer hide it because she
Speaker 1: had also gone through a traumatic event. When you try
Speaker 1: to kill somebody, it sticks in your brain in a
Speaker 1: real way. It causes PTSD the same way that you
Speaker 1: know with someone else trying to kill you will stick
Speaker 1: in your brain. It's extremely violent and it broke her
Speaker 1: and it made her snap, and from then on she
Speaker 1: could not hide the symptoms that had been plaguing her
Speaker 1: prior to that, so she was talking to herself in
Speaker 1: the open, in front of everybody. As soon as she
Speaker 1: was checked into the jail, she was flagged for a
Speaker 1: psych evaluation and when her parents, by the time her
Speaker 1: parents managed to get in to see her, which didn't
Speaker 1: happen for many, many many days, they weren't allowed in.
Speaker 1: She had not washed, she was muttering to herself. She
Speaker 1: didn't even seem to know that they were there, so
Speaker 1: she had a full psychotic break post crime.
Speaker 2: Was Anissa also assist for her mental health at that time.
Speaker 1: So that's the really messed up part about the post
Speaker 1: crime phase of this story is that because they were
Speaker 1: charged as adults, because that is the law in Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: they did not receive any therapeutic services, which is very
Speaker 1: messed up. We do provide them to children automatically in
Speaker 1: the United States, but not to adults, and so because
Speaker 1: they were adults, they were denied you know, counseling, They
Speaker 1: were denied you know, sort of diagnostic services for a
Speaker 1: very very long time. And it was only because Morgan's
Speaker 1: attorney was having doctors assess her for the trial phase
Speaker 1: that she was able because and it was only because
Speaker 1: her attorney petitioned really, really, really hard to get her
Speaker 1: assessed that she was taking care of a niece of
Speaker 1: was never really taking care of therapeutically, at least not
Speaker 1: during the pre incarceration phase, which is just so sad
Speaker 1: she I mean, she really could have used some help
Speaker 1: during that time.
Speaker 2: Because it's not too And this is what a lot
Speaker 2: of people think that talking about mental health is excusing
Speaker 2: the crime, which it's not. But it's hard to separate
Speaker 2: the two when it comes to this particular story, particularly
Speaker 2: when we kind of skip forward a bit and we
Speaker 2: do talk about the assessments that these two girls end
Speaker 2: up getting. Morgan is eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, and I mean,
Speaker 2: you've used a sentence in your book that stick to me.
Speaker 2: Sickness cooked her brain like a fever to the point
Speaker 2: where she didn't even really remember the crime, right, Can
Speaker 2: you talk to that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, she was really insulated from the event itself. She
Speaker 1: seemed to the people around her to be remorseless because
Speaker 1: she was just lost in a world of her of
Speaker 1: her own making. From her perspective, Slenderman is coming for her.
Speaker 1: She is right now in a jail, but she's also
Speaker 1: there's unicorns in the jail, and there's like Barack Obama
Speaker 1: is riding through naked on a purple dinosaur. Like that's
Speaker 1: what she That's what she was seeing during that time.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't until they put her on medication. She
Speaker 1: told me once that it took four years for her
Speaker 1: to accept that Slenderman wasn't coming and to realize what
Speaker 1: she had done.
Speaker 2: Right, which people would say is her not showing remorse.
Speaker 1: Right, I'll tell you that she feels an extreme amount
Speaker 1: of remorse. I mean it's she hates herself to this
Speaker 1: day on such a deep level. This is something that
Speaker 1: she lives with and relives every day. And she misses Bella.
Speaker 1: That's why she chose her when they were children, or
Speaker 1: that's why you know, that's why this was the crime
Speaker 1: is because Morgan loved Bella, not because she hated her.
Speaker 1: She misses her so much. From one person's point of view,
Speaker 1: it might look like evil, and then if you look
Speaker 1: at it in a different way, it's like this person
Speaker 1: is extremely sick and a danger to themselves and others.
Speaker 1: But it was definitely mistaken as remorselessness, and it wasn't that.
Speaker 1: It was just that her reality contact was so limited
Speaker 1: that she wasn't even really grounded in the realization that
Speaker 1: she had stabbed her best friend.
Speaker 2: And then with a Nissa, you've talked about the kind
Speaker 2: of learning disability, but she is also eventually diagnosed with
Speaker 2: and I'm like, butcher this, but fully you do, which
Speaker 2: is kind of like a shared psychotic disorder.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Oh. One thing I do want to say
Speaker 1: about the emotional, the remorse and the mental illness thing
Speaker 1: is that something that Morgan's mom said to me that
Speaker 1: I thought was really profound and simple and true is
Speaker 1: that when you're when you have psychosis, you don't have emotions.
Speaker 1: You don't have them at all. So that's another way
Speaker 1: of looking at it. Yes, So after the crime, A
Speaker 1: Nissa was diagnosed with FALIA and she got very, very
Speaker 1: lucky in this Wisconsin legal system. In the US legal system,
Speaker 1: it is so hard to get an NNGRI verdict not
Speaker 1: guilty by reason of Sandy. People think it's very widespread
Speaker 1: in common. It is statistically almost impossible to get that
Speaker 1: verdict from jury's So she was very lucky to have
Speaker 1: gotten it at all. But the defense was very creative.
Speaker 1: They had to get creative because she didn't have a
Speaker 1: mental illness. She had a learning disability, which I don't
Speaker 1: know why they didn't lean into that more honestly, but
Speaker 1: they might have just it might have been too precarious
Speaker 1: an outcome, but they just The Falia did thing where
Speaker 1: it came from is that she hadn't been diagnosed with
Speaker 1: a mental illness, but they needed to. They were trying
Speaker 1: to put her into a safer environment than prison, and
Speaker 1: a hospital would have been a safer environment because she
Speaker 1: was going to be in an adult setting regardless. And
Speaker 1: so Falia does a nineteenth century French diagnosis, which means
Speaker 1: the madness of tune. It basically is when one person's
Speaker 1: mental illness spreads to the other because of the closeness
Speaker 1: of their real relationship. And it usually only happens in
Speaker 1: like married couples, and it does happen where two people
Speaker 1: get wrapped in a delusion even though only one of
Speaker 1: them has a mental illness diagnosis. And so they used
Speaker 1: that argument with Anissa. But I thought the more persuasive thing, honestly,
Speaker 1: was that she was so severely learning disabled. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's kind of all you have to know in that situation.
Speaker 1: But it was a very very like creative argument to
Speaker 1: use and the jury, the jury agreed and they got
Speaker 1: very lucky with that.
Speaker 2: So what was the decision? What did the jury decide?
Speaker 1: The jury decided to give her an nngri verdict, which
Speaker 1: meant that she would be serving out a sentence yet
Speaker 1: to be determined by the judge in a hospital instead
Speaker 1: of a prison, and he gave her twenty years, which
Speaker 1: was less than she would have been serving in prison. Luckily,
Speaker 1: she got up sooner. Sooner than that she didn't. She
Speaker 1: had to spend the rest of her childhood in an
Speaker 1: adult psychiatric board, but she got up.
Speaker 2: Morgan's proceedings happened after a niece's. How different would they
Speaker 2: because she didn't end up going to trial. She took
Speaker 2: a play agreement.
Speaker 1: Right, There were a couple of things happening. Bella's family
Speaker 1: wanted to avoid a trial because if there were a trial,
Speaker 1: then Bella would have to testify and they were really
Speaker 1: concerned about that and what it would do to her psychologically.
Speaker 1: Morgan's team wanted to avoid it because if she had
Speaker 1: been found guilty, you know, she's going to go to
Speaker 1: prison for at least sixty five years and she was
Speaker 1: sick and she had been denied medication for nineteen months.
Speaker 1: She was still, you know, really really struggling, and they
Speaker 1: wanted her to get therapeutic treatment, and they thought that
Speaker 1: that would be more likely to happen in a hospital.
Speaker 1: There was also a concern that a niece's verdict would
Speaker 1: had shocked the local community. People were very at odds
Speaker 1: about it. I mean, on its face, it doesn't sound
Speaker 1: great that a girl who conspired to stab another local
Speaker 1: girl got out of prison time because of I mean,
Speaker 1: the entire thing was just very controversial locally, especially because
Speaker 1: so many of the local population did not believe that
Speaker 1: mental illness was real, and so the fact that she
Speaker 1: had gotten off and she didn't even have a mental
Speaker 1: illness diagnosed was really angering to people. And Morgan's team
Speaker 1: was concerned that if her case went to child even
Speaker 1: though she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, even though there
Speaker 1: was all of this documentation around her mental illness, they
Speaker 1: were concerned that people would be so angry that the
Speaker 1: jury would issue a reactionary verdict and at least want
Speaker 1: to send one of them to prison, you know, So
Speaker 1: they didn't feel like it was a short bet, even
Speaker 1: though it probably should have been. So they took a
Speaker 1: plea agreement and the judge agreed to give her an
Speaker 1: energy and he sentenced her to the forensic hospital for
Speaker 1: forty years.
Speaker 2: How did Bella and her parents react to those sentences
Speaker 2: or verdicts?
Speaker 1: I mean Bella's family. What they said, their sort of
Speaker 1: press quotes about it and things basically conveyed that it
Speaker 1: was unfair that she didn't have to meet the harshest
Speaker 1: consequences for her behavior. So I don't think that they
Speaker 1: were were thrilled about it at the time. I think
Speaker 1: that they wanted the harshest punishment for her. I think
Speaker 1: that Bella probably is just from what I know of her,
Speaker 1: would have been the kind of person who actually would
Speaker 1: have been happy that Morgan was going to be at
Speaker 1: a hospital getting sort of the help that she needed,
Speaker 1: but that her representatives and her spokes sorry, her spokes
Speaker 1: people said that it wasn't fair.
Speaker 2: Well, these girls didn't end up serving twenty and forty years,
Speaker 2: and Lisa got out in twenty twenty one, and as
Speaker 2: we've mentioned, Morgan was released this year January twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: so three years and you know a few more than that, respectively.
Speaker 2: Do we know how they're doing. Have you spoken to Morgan.
Speaker 1: I've heard from her family very I mean, I think
Speaker 1: that it's surreal the idea that she might be able
Speaker 1: to that she will that might that she will be
Speaker 1: able to hug her mother outside of a legal medical
Speaker 1: setting for the first time since she was twelve years old.
Speaker 1: And I think like is struggling to wrap her mind around,
Speaker 1: in a good way, around the idea that she might
Speaker 1: be able to go do normal things like go to
Speaker 1: a library, you know, be allowed in and out of
Speaker 1: the building where she lives, you know, Like, I think
Speaker 1: it's I think it's surreal, and I think her family
Speaker 1: is completely overjoyed to have her back. They really didn't
Speaker 1: think that they were gonna that they were going to
Speaker 1: have this moment. They weren't, you know, they weren't sure
Speaker 1: about that.
Speaker 2: So when the media started reporting on Morgan's release in
Speaker 2: January twenty twenty five, so many years after those aditial headlines,
Speaker 2: do you think that the media has learned anything? Do
Speaker 2: you think society has learned anything? Are we treating this
Speaker 2: case differently now?
Speaker 1: I think we are, I think, and I think it
Speaker 1: makes me feel really proud again to be from Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: a place that has such a progressive history, such a
Speaker 1: community oriented history. And I also think that it signals
Speaker 1: a few changes in the culture at large. I think
Speaker 1: that there is much more awareness about mental illness and
Speaker 1: mental health in general, and neurological diversity. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a real understanding now of neurodiversity, and so we can
Speaker 1: talk about the case unlike we did back then. We
Speaker 1: can talk about the case taking for granted that these
Speaker 1: things are true, that different human brains are different depending
Speaker 1: on the circumstances of our upbringings and also our biology.
Speaker 1: So the same sort of reviled girl who was really
Speaker 1: burned by society in twenty fourteen, she can, you know, exit,
Speaker 1: she can be released in the same people who are
Speaker 1: so angry about her don't even know that she's out there.
Speaker 1: They don't even know she out there anymore. So I
Speaker 1: think I don't know that the way the internet was
Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen, if it were still that way, I
Speaker 1: don't know if we'd be getting this same decision, because
Speaker 1: the judge would on the case would still feel very scrutinized.
Speaker 2: Lastly, what do you want people to take away from
Speaker 2: hearing kind of this version of events, your version of
Speaker 2: events from the book of kind of delving into more
Speaker 2: than just the headline.
Speaker 1: I would invite people to be interested in the gray
Speaker 1: areas of like good and evil. And you know, we
Speaker 1: can be very black and white as as human beings
Speaker 1: in terms of understanding the world. And if you put
Speaker 1: it into these two categories, you feel a bit safer
Speaker 1: because of course, none of us would ever be exposed
Speaker 1: to evil because we're good, you know. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: would just invite people into the gray area of this
Speaker 1: story because I think once, once you understand more about it,
Speaker 1: you realize that something like this could happen to anybody.
Speaker 1: When a lot of people hear about this story, they think,
Speaker 1: what if my child was stabbed? And now, having looked
Speaker 1: at it a bit more closely, I am more haunted
Speaker 1: by the question of like, what if my child stabs somebody?
Speaker 1: What if I miss something like what will you know?
Speaker 1: And and something like this happened. I think anybody, anybody,
Speaker 1: under the wrong set of circumstances, can become an attempted killer.
Speaker 1: And I think understanding that part of human reality and
Speaker 1: a human psyche I don't know to me it feels important.
Speaker 2: Thanks to Kathleen for helping us to tell this story.
Speaker 2: True Crime Conversations is a Muma MEA podcast hosted and
Speaker 2: produced by me Jemma Bath and Tarlie Blackman, with audio
Speaker 2: design by Jacob Brown. Thanks so much for listening. I'll
Speaker 2: be back next week with another True Crime Conversation