Beyond the horrific incident at its center, the book expands into a searing criticism of how society treats (and mistreats) the mentally ill. Her message is resonant: We must do better for those in need. “Hale breathlessly recounts this unspeakable tragedy but holds her focus on the courtroom and society’s failures in treating the mentally ill. However, undiagnosed schizophrenia, midwestern stoicism, and intense friendship dynamics are much more to blame for the attack, as Kathleen Hale illustrates here.”- CrimeReads Hysterical parenting sites spread a moral panic about CreepyPasta, the website where stories of Slenderman originated and then became memes.
When two middle schoolers stabbed another middle schooler in the woods in 2012, they claimed to do it on behalf of a mysterious figure known as Slenderman. “Kathleen Hale’s Hazlitt piece on the Slenderman story still stands out from the general sensationalist coverage of the case for its level of empathy for all involved. steady narrative vision brings clarity to a thoroughly upsetting situation.”- Shelf Awareness Moreover, Hale is originally from Wisconsin, providing her well-developed true-crime narrative with an insider’s take on social and cultural norms that fostered the communication breakdown among authority figures who might have tuned into the suspicious circumstances before a crime could be committed. “The Slenderman case can seem impenetrably bizarre, but Hale nimbly documents the numerous contributing factors to the online legends, the crime and its judicial outcome. This is a must for true crime fans.”- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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. Slenderman is both a page-turning true crime story and a search for justice. There, as Morgan continued to suffer from worsening mental illness after being denied antipsychotics, her life became more and more surreal. Bella survived the attack, but was deeply traumatized, while Morgan and Anissa were immediately remanded into jail, and the severity of their crime meant that they would be prosecuted as adults. She believed that she had been seeing Slenderman for many years, 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. But Morgan was suffering from early-onset childhood schizophrenia. 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.
#THE SLENDER MAN FULL#
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 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. On May 31, 2014, in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, Wisconsin, two twelve-year-old girls attempted to stab their classmate to death.
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