The disturbing legacy of the 'Slender Man' stabbing case has resurfaced after Morgan Geyser, now 23, briefly fled from a Wisconsin group home, casting a harsh new light on the system that has overseen her life for over a decade.
A Desperate Flight and a Failed System
Geyser, who was just 12 years old in 2014 when she pleaded guilty to stabbing a classmate 19 times to appease the fictional horror character Slender Man, was picked up by police 24 hours after her disappearance. She was found 100 miles away at a truck stop outside Chicago, having cut off her monitoring ankle bracelet. She was in the company of 43-year-old Chad 'Charley' Mecca, a transgender woman.
This incident occurred just months after Geyser was conditionally released from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute to the group home. Mecca later stated to Wisconsin news outlet WKOW, "she ran because of me," explaining they feared their visits would be stopped and were potentially trying to reach Nashville, Tennessee.
Author and case expert Kathleen Hale, who wrote Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, argues this flight is not evidence of dangerousness but of desperation. "For someone institutionalised since childhood, freedom isn’t just a reward – it’s frightening," Hale says. "It’s not hard to see why someone raised inside locked institutions might not trust that release would really happen."
A Childhood Lost to Institutions
The core of the current crisis, according to Hale and other observers, lies in Geyser's treatment by the state from the moment of her crime. Both Geyser and her co-defendant, Anissa Weier, were prosecuted as adults under Wisconsin law. A jury found them not guilty by reason of mental defect or disease.
While Weier was sentenced in 2017 to 25 years in a mental institution and granted supervised release in 2021, Geyser received a 40-year sentence. The jury accepted she was suffering from undiagnosed childhood-onset schizophrenia at the time of the attack, and she has since been diagnosed with autism and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
"She entered the system as a child and never had the chance to grow up inside it," Hale states bluntly. "This is a 23-year-old woman whose emotional and educational development effectively froze at age 12. She spent her adolescence in forensic wards with violent adults, not in school classrooms. She wasn’t rehabilitated – she was institutionalised."
Red Flags and a 'Hit Job'
Geyser's path to conditional release this year was contentious. When a judge ordered her release from Winnebago, prosecutors attempted to block the move. They cited her reading material, including a novel about murder, and her communication with a man who collects memorabilia from murderers.
Waukesha County Prosecutor Abbey Nickolie called these "red flags," while Geyser's attorney, Tony Cotton, labelled the prosecution's efforts a "hit job." Geyser was ultimately transferred to the group home where she reportedly met Mecca at church two months prior to their flight.
Mecca told WKOW that Geyser felt mistreated at the home and had expressed suicidal thoughts, saying, "before you showed up, I was ready to drink bleach."
The original 2014 crime saw Geyser and Weier lure their friend, Payton Leutner, to a park in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times before both girls left her for dead, hoping to travel to a distant forest to meet Slender Man. Leutner miraculously survived after crawling to a path where a cyclist found her.
Hale concludes that the state's approach has been fundamentally flawed. "The state didn’t just punish Morgan – it failed to raise her," she argues. "Wisconsin took a child and created an adult with no tools for adulthood. We can hold two truths: the crime was terrible, and the response failed." Geyser now faces the prospect of being returned to a secure psychiatric institution, a move that critics say would merely perpetuate the cycle of institutionalisation that has defined her life since the age of 12.
