The Slender Man Stabber Walked Away — And Nobody Noticed for 12 Hours

The woman who stabbed her classmate nineteen times to please a fictional internet monster has cut off her ankle monitor and fled — triggering a multi-state manhunt that ended at an Illinois truck stop.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
The woman who stabbed her classmate nineteen times to please
a fictional internet monster, has cut off her ankle monitor
and fled, triggering a multi state manhunts that ended at
an Illinois truck stop. I'm Darren Marler, and this is
weird dark news. Morgan Geiser is a name that still
makes people in Wisconsin uncomfortable. She's the girl who, at

(00:33):
twelve years old, stabbed her best friend nineteen times because
she believed a fictional internet monster named slender Man would
hurt her family if she didn't. That was back in
twenty fourteen. She spent years in a psychiatric hospital, and
earlier this year, after a long legal battle, she finally
won conditional release to a group pomp with round the

(00:55):
clock supervision and a GPS ankle monitor tracking her every move.
The system was supposed to keep her and everyone else safe.
This weekend, that system failed. Saturday night, November twenty second,
twenty twenty five, seemed routine at the Madison, Wisconsin group
home where Morgan had been living since her release. Nothing

(01:17):
appeared out of the ordinary. Then around nine thirty pm,
the Wisconsin Department of Corrections received an alert that Geyser's
GPS monitoring bracelet was malfunctioning. An alert like that should
trigger an immediate response. This is a woman who tried
to commit murder as a child, Her whereabouts should matter.
But it took two full hours until eleven thirty pm

(01:40):
before the Department contacted the group home to check on her.
And when they finally did make that call, staff at
the facility informed them only five minutes later that Geyser
was not there and that she had removed her GPS
ankle bracelet. She had not just wandered off, She cut
the thing off and left. The timeline from this point
point is frustrating. The Department of Corrections issued an apprehension

(02:03):
request around midnight, but somehow that request was never relayed
to Madison Police. The people who should have been actively
searching for her didn't even know she was gone. It
wasn't until seven forty six am on Sunday that someone
from the group home finally called nine to Poet one
to report Geyser as a missing person. That means Madison

(02:24):
police were not aware she had disappeared until nearly twelve
hours after she had actually left. Twelve hours is a
long time. It's enough time to get very very far away,
and that's exactly what Morgan Geyser did. By the time
anyone started looking for her in Earnest, Morgan was already
across state lines. She and her companion had taken a

(02:46):
bus from Wisconsin to the Chicago area, then walked to
Posts in Illinois, a small community about twenty miles south
of Chicago. The distance from Madison to Posen is roughly
one hundred and seventy miles. She had put an intense
higher state between herself and the group home she'd fled.
The companion traveling with her would turn out to be significant.

(03:07):
Sunday night, around ten thirty pm, officers with the Posts
and Police Department were dispatched to a Thornton's truck stop
at fourteen eight forty Western Avenue. The call wasn't about
a fugitive or a missing person. Someone had reported man
and a woman loitering behind the building, just two people
hanging around where they shouldn't be. When officers arrived, they
found two individuals sleeping on the sidewalk, a man and

(03:30):
a woman, both looking like they'd been traveling and were exhausted.
The officers did what officers do. They asked for identification,
the woman wouldn't give her name. She initially provided officers
with a false identity, hoping maybe they'd move on, maybe
they wouldn't dig deeper. But the officers kept asking. They
weren't going to let two people sleep behind a truck

(03:52):
stop without at least knowing who they were. And then
Morgan Geiser did something that stopped everyone cold. After continue
you'd attempt to identify her, she finally stated that she
didn't want to tell the officers who she was because
she had done something really bad, and suggested that officers
could just google her name. According to the statement later

(04:12):
released by the Posn Police Department, just google me, That's
what she said. Because Morgan Geiser knows exactly how notorious
she is. She knows that her name brings up headlines
about attempted murder, about slender Man, about a twelve year
old girl left bleeding in the woods. She didn't have
to explain what she had done. A simple internet search

(04:33):
would tell the whole story. Once she provided her real name,
officers confirmed she was Morgan Geiser, wanted in Wisconsin for escape.
The manhunt that had been under way for less than
a day was over. She was taken into custody at
approximately ten thirty four pm. Morgan was not alone when
she fled, and the identity of her traveling companion calls

(04:54):
into question how closely she was actually being monitored at
the group home. A police report identified them man with
Geyser as forty three year old Chad Mecca. He's twenty
years older than her, and, according to what Morgan told
officers after her arrest, their relationship had been going on
for some time, even though it apparently wasn't supposed to be.

(05:14):
Geyser told officers she felt that she was treated unfairly
at the group home and was upset that Chad was
not allowed to visit her. The facility had rules about
who could come and go, and Mecca wasn't on the
approved list, but that didn't stop him. She told police
that Mecca had snuck him through her window on multiple
occasions to see her at the group home multiple occasions.

(05:37):
This is a facility that was supposed to be providing
twenty four hour supervision of a woman who attempted murder
as a child, and a forty three year old man
was climbing through her window to visit her without anyone noticing.
When asked about her ankle monitor. Geyser stated she had
cut it off with scissors, and that she and Chad
had discussed potentially making their way to Nashville, Tennessee Nashville,

(06:00):
not north toward the Wisconsin Wilderness, like she had tried
to do in twenty fourteen, when she believed slender Man's
mansion was waiting for her in the Negolette National Forest.
This time the destination was real, a city, a place
that actually exists on a map. Whether that represents progress
in her mental state or just a different kind of
escape attempt is hard to say. They stopped walking after

(06:21):
Geyser injured her foot, which is how they ended up
sleeping behind that truck stop in the first place. If
she had not hurt herself, they might have kept going.
They might have made it a lot farther before anyone
found them. Meccha was charged with criminal trespassing and obstructing
identification and has since been released. His role in all
of this, how he met Morgan, how long they've been
in contact, how he managed to sneak into a supervised

(06:44):
facility multiple times. That all still remains unclear. While Morgan
was on a bus heading toward Chicago, the people who
cared about her were starting to panic. Geyser's mother, Angie Geyser,
released a statement while her daughter was still missing, saying,
if you see Morgan, please call the police. Morgan, if
you can see this, we love you and just want
to know you are safe. It's the kind of plea

(07:07):
you would expect from any parent whose child has disappeared,
but the context here is complicated. Angie Geiser has stood
by her daughter through more than a decade of legal proceedings,
psychiatric evaluations, and public scrutiny. She has watched Morgan transform
from a disturbed child into a young woman who seemed
to be making progress, and now she was watching that

(07:29):
progress unravel in real time. Morgan's attorney, Tony Cotton, also
went public with a plea before she was captured, posting
a video statement to social media urging her to turn
herself in. Cotton had spent years fighting for Morgan's release.
He'd argued before judges that she was no longer dangerous,
that treatment had worked, that she deserved a chance at

(07:50):
something resembling a normal life. We worked too hard to
secure her freedom for her to continue on this path,
he said. There's a particular kind of frustration. In that statement,
Cotton wasn't just worried about his client. He was watching
years of legal work evaporate. Every argument he had made
about Morgan being ready for supervised release, every psychiatric evaluation

(08:13):
he had cited, every assurance he had given the court,
all of it was being undermined by a pair of
scissors and a bus ticket to Illinois. On the other
side of this story is another family, one that has
spent eleven years trying to move forward while knowing the
girl who nearly killed their daughter was still out there.
Peyton and her family are safe and are working closely

(08:34):
with local law enforcement to ensure their continued safety. The
statement from the Lightner family said after Morgan's capture, continuing
by saying the family would like to thank all the
law enforcement entities involved in the efforts to apprehend Morgan.
Peyton Lightner was twelve years old when Morgan stabbed her
nineteen times in a Waukeshell park in May twenty fourteen.
She thought they were friends. She'd spent the night at

(08:56):
Morgan's house for a sleepover, eaten donuts for breakfast, gotten dressed,
and headed out into what she believed was going to
be a game of hide and seek in the woods.
She had no idea her two closest friends had been
planning her death for months. One wound came so close
to a major artery that if the knife had gone
the width of a human hair deeper, Peyton would have

(09:17):
bled out in those woods instead. Somehow she found the
strength to crawl with nineteen stab wounds. With her attackers
walking away, believing she was already dead, Peyton pulled herself
through the underbrush until she reached a bike path. A
cyclist found her there, covered in blood, barely conscious. She survived.
She's now in her early twenties, described by those who

(09:39):
know her as excelling in school. But the trauma of
that morning, the betrayal by two girls she trusted completely,
doesn't just go away because years have passed. Earlier this year,
when Morgan's release was being planned, Peyton's mother broke her
long silence to object to the proposed placement. The original
plan would have put Morgan in a group hom in Manitowac, Wisconsin,

(10:03):
just eight miles from where Peyton lived. Eight miles in
a car that's about ten minutes on foot. It's only
a few hours for a mother who had nearly lost
her daughter to Morgan's delusions that proximity was unbearable. The
court listened and a new placement was arranged farther away,
but farther away doesn't mean safe. This weekend proved that

(10:27):
Morgan's ankle monitor didn't stop her, The twenty four hour
supervision didn't stop her. The carefully constructed system designed to
keep track of her whereabouts failed, and for about twenty
four hours, the Leitner family had to wonder whether the
situation they'd been dreading for eleven years was about to
get worse. To understand why Morgan Geiser was living in

(10:48):
a Madison group home in the first place, you have
to understand a legal battle that's been going on since
she was first sentenced. Morgan pleaded guilty to attempt it
first degree intentional homicide in twenty sive seventeen, but she
claimed she wasn't responsible because she was mentally ill. The
court agreed. In twenty eighteen, Waukeshaw County Circuit Judge Michael

(11:09):
Bowen sentenced her to forty years in a psychiatric facility,
the maximum allowable sentence. She was sent to the Winnebago
Mental Health Institute, where she would spend the next seven
years of her life. The system, though, permitted her to
a petition for conditional release every six months. In twenty
twenty two, she made her first attempt, but withdrew it
two months later. Then, in early twenty twenty four, a

(11:32):
Wisconsin judge scheduled in april hearing to evaluate whether years
of treatment had made her fit to re enter society.
The hearing didn't go smoothly. State health officials raised troubling
concerns about Morgan's behavior inside the facility. She'd been reading
a novel about murder and black market organ sales, not
exactly the kind of material that inspires confidence in someone's rehabilitation.

(11:55):
Even more concerning, she had been corresponding with a man
who collected murder me morabilia. She'd sent him a sketch
of a decapitated body and a postcard expressing desire for intimacy.
These revelations seemed like exactly the kind of red flags
that should keep someone locked up. Here was evidence that
even after years of treatment, Morgan might still be drawn

(12:18):
to violence, still fascinated by death. But her attorney, Anthony Cotton,
pushed back. The book, he pointed out, was one the
facility had approved and provided. Morgan hadn't smuggled it in
or sought it out against the rules. The staff knew
about her correspondence with the collector, it wasn't hidden or secret,
and when Morgan discovered the man was selling items she

(12:40):
had sent him, she cut off contact herself. These were
not signs of a dangerous person, Cotton argued, but of
a young woman navigating complex emotions and relationships while under
constant supervision. Judge Bolren ultimately sided with the defense. The state,
he ruled had not met its burden approving Morgan posed
a clear danger to hers for others. On July thirty first,

(13:02):
twenty twenty five, Morgan appeared virtually in Waukeshaw County Court
for what her attorney hoped would be her final hearing.
Judge Scott Wagner announced his decision. She would be released
to a group palm with GPS monitoring and twenty four
hour supervision. She would have to follow strict rules about
where she could go and who she could see. Every
movement would be tracked. A facility in sun Prairie, Wisconsin,

(13:26):
initially agreed to take her, but then declined due to
negative publicity that they were receiving about the potential move.
Nobody wanted to be the community that housed the Slender
Man stabber. She ended up in a group hoom in
Madison instead, the same city where just months later she
would cut off her ankle monitor and disappear. Looking back

(13:46):
at what happened this weekend, the failures are glaring. The
GPS monitor was supposed to be Morgan's electronic leash, a
constant signal telling authorities exactly where she was at all times,
but when the depart of Corrections received and alert that
the bracelet was malfunctioning on Saturday night, it took two
hours before anyone even checked on her, two hours during

(14:09):
which Morgan was cutting the device off and preparing to flee.
The group home was supposed to be providing twenty four
hour supervision, but a forty three year old man had
apparently been sneaking through Morgan's window on multiple occasions without
anyone noticing. The oversight that was supposed to make her
release safe clearly wasn't as tight as the court had
been led to believe, and the communication between agencies. The

(14:33):
Department of corrections, the group home, the Madison police. It
all broke down completely. An apprehension request was issued at midnight,
but never made it to the police department that should
have been searching for her for twelve hours. Morgan Geyser
was a fugitive nobody was looking for. The District Attorney's
office had warned this might happen. Not only should she

(14:55):
have been in custody from twenty fourteen forward, but also
Attorney Abby Nikolai argued via a for her not to
be released to conditional release, and I believe it was
January of this year. Waukeshaw County District Attorney Leslie Bosse
told reporters after Morgan's capture, the prosecutors never believed Morgan
was ready. They fought against her release at every hearing,

(15:15):
and now less than a year after she won her freedom,
she's sitting in an Illinois jail cell. Having proven their
concerns were justified. Geyser appeared in court earlier today, Monday,
November twenty fourth, and was ordered to be detained at
Cook County Jail. Her extradition hearing is scheduled for tomorrow
in Cook County, Illinois, Post and Police Chief William Alexander

(15:36):
said Geyser's not facing any local charges in Illinois because
additional charges would only prolong the process of sending her
back to Wisconsin. The priority right now is getting her
back to the state where she committed her original crime
and where her conditional release was granted. Once she's back
in Wisconsin, the real legal battle begins. District Attorney Boss

(15:57):
said her office fully supports a petition to rev oak
Geyser's conditional release. That petition would have to be filed
by the state Department of Health Services, which has custody
of Morgan. Moose outlined what would happen next, saying, we
will go before a judge to make a decision whether
or not she will be returned to conditional release or
whether she will be returned to institutionalized care, which is

(16:18):
where she came from. If her release is revoked, Geyser
would be returned to full time institutionalized care, back behind
the walls of Winnebago Mental Health Institute, where she spent
nearly seven years before winning the freedom she just threw away.
It's hard to imagine any judge looking at what just
happened this weekend and deciding that conditional release should continue.

(16:40):
Morgan cut off her ankle monitor with scissors. She fled
across state lines with a man who had been sneaking
into her room. She had aided capture for nearly twenty
four hours. She didn't turn herself in. She had to
be found sleeping behind a truck stop, only giving up
her identity when she realized the officers weren't going to
let her go without it. Everything her attorney worked for,

(17:01):
every argument about rehabilitation and readiness for reintegration, it all
collapsed in a single weekend. While Morgan dominates headlines this weekend,
another young woman has been quietly living the life Morgan
was supposed to have. Anissa Weir was the other twelve
year old in those woods in twenty fourteen. She did
not hold the knife Morgan did, but she urged her on.

(17:25):
She helped plan the attack. She helped lure Payton to
the park. When Morgan hesitated, Anissa told her to go
ahead with it. A Nissa fleeted guilty to attempted second
degree intentional homicide. She was also sent to Winnebago Mental
Health Institute, but her sentence was shorter, twenty five years
and In twenty twenty one, after serving just four years,

(17:45):
she was granted conditional release to her father's home. Since then,
Nissa has done everything Morgan was supposed to do. She
wears a GPS monitor, She follows the rules of her supervision.
She stays out of trouble. By all accounts, she is
successfully re integrated into society. She has not reoffended, hasn't
made headlines, hasn't become the danger many feared she would be.

(18:08):
Her quiet success was supposed to be the roadmap for Morgan,
proof that someone involved in such a horrific crime might
eventually lead a normal life with proper treatment and supervision.
The two girls committed the same crime together, received similar sentences,
underwent similar treatment. If a Nissa could make it work,

(18:28):
why couldn't Morgan. This weekend answered that question, At least
for now. Anissa Weir is still living quietly under supervision,
following the rules, rebuilding her life. Morgan Geiser is in
a Cook County jail cell, waiting to be sent back
to Wisconsin to face the consequences of running. The difference
might come down to something as simple as judgment. The

(18:49):
ability to understand that cutting off your ankle monitor and
fleeing across state lines will only make things worse, or
it might point to something deeper, some fundamental difference in
how the few women have processed what they did and
what they need to do to move forward. Whatever the reason,
Morgan's escape has made it that much harder for anyone
else in her situation to argue for conditional release. Every

(19:13):
future petition will be met with the memory of this weekend,
the scissors, the bus ride, the truck stop in Posen.
In all the coverage of Morgan's escape and capture, slender
Man himself almost becomes an afterthought, but he is still
present in the background of this story, the fictional boogeyman
who set everything in motion. Eric Knudsen created slender Man

(19:34):
in two thousand and nine as a piece of digital
art for an online contest. The figure was simple, but
deeply unsettling, an abnormally tall, thin man in a black
suit with no facial features, sometimes depicted with tentacle like
appendages extending from his back. Nudsen photo edited him into
the backgrounds of ordinary pictures, children playing in parks, friends

(19:56):
gathered at parties, always at the edge of perception, always
watching The character spread through Internet forums. As people added
their own stories, their own details, their own terrifying embellishments,
he became a collaborative creation, growing more elaborate with each retelling.
Some said that he kidnapped children. Others claimed he could teleport,

(20:18):
control minds or drive people insane just by being near them.
Fake documentary footage made him seem almost real. For most people,
it was entertainment, a modern campfire story shared through screens.
Her twelve year old Morgan Geiser, whose mind was already
struggling to distinguish between what was real and what wasn't,

(20:38):
slender Man became something else entirely. She heard voices, She
saw things that weren't there. She believed slender Man visited her,
threatened her, demanded she prove her loyalty or watch her
family suffer. The psychiatric treatment that followed was supposed to
dispel those delusions forever. Seven year years of medication, therapy

(21:02):
and institutional care, the voices went quiet, the hallucinations stopped.
Slender Man no longer visited. A media professor told CNN
that while slender Man's popularity has declined since the early
to mid twenty tens, he can anecdotally say that he
still performs the role of Boogeyman on playgrounds. Kids still

(21:23):
know who he is. The story still gets passed around,
but for most people, he remains what he always was,
a scary story, nothing more. Morgan Geiser's relationship with slender
Man is different. She built her identity around him, committed
attempted murder because of him, spent years in a psychiatric
hospital being treated for the delusion he represented. Even if

(21:47):
she no longer believes in him, even if the medication
has silenced the voices that once told her he was real,
slender Man will always be a part of her story.
Every headline about her mentions him, article recaps the twenty
fourteen stabbing. She cannot escape him any more than she
can escape what she did in those woods. As Morgan

(22:08):
Geiser sits in an Illinois jail cell awaiting extradition back
to Wisconsin, the question that haunted her case from the
beginning remains unanswered. Can someone who once believed so completely
in monsters ever be trusted to live among the rest
of us? The psychiatric experts said yes. They testified that

(22:28):
Morgan has made remarkable progress, that her symptoms were under control,
that she understood what she had done and why I
was wrong. They believed seven years of treatment to transformed
her from a dangerous, delusional child into a stable young
woman capable of living under supervision in the community. The
prosecutors said no. They argued that Morgan should never have

(22:50):
been released, that the risk was too great, that the
crime she committed was too severe to ever justify conditional freedom.
They pointed to the murder memorabilia correspondence, the decapitated body sketch,
the book about organ sales. They said the warning signs
were still there this weekend. Morgan answered the question herself,

(23:12):
not with words, but with actions. She cut off her
ankle monitor. She fled across state lines. She traveled one
hundred and seventy miles before police found her sleeping behind
a truck stop. She didn't turn herself in, even when
her own attorney begged her to. Maybe she was just
a young woman who felt trapped and made an impulsive decision.

(23:32):
Maybe the restrictions of supervised living felt unbearable after years
of institutionalization. Maybe Chad Mecha convinced her that running was
the answer. Maybe she just wanted to feel free, even
for only a day or Maybe the prosecutors were right
all along. Maybe the progress everyone thought they saw wasn't

(23:53):
as solid as it had appeared. Maybe the delusions are
quieter now, but not gone. Maybe more and Geyser will
always be someone who needs to be watched, monitored, controlled,
because the alternative is too dangerous to risk. The GPS
bracelet she cut off with scissors was supposed to be

(24:13):
the answer to all of these questions. It was supposed
to prove that conditional release could work, that supervision technology
could keep the community safe while giving Morgan a chance
at something like a normal life. Instead, it's just another
piece of evidence proof that even constant monitoring can't prevent
someone from running if they really want to. The court

(24:34):
will decide what happens next. Morgan will either be returned
to conditional release with even stricter supervision, or she'll go
back to Winnebago Mental Health Institute for the foreseeable future.
Given what happened to this weekend, the second option seems
far more likely. Peyton Lightner will keep living her life,
carrying the scars visible and invisible, from that morning in

(24:57):
twenty fourteen. Her family will keep watching, keep worrying, keep hoping,
that the system will protect them from the girl who
once tried to kill their daughter, and Morgan Geiser will
remain what she's been since she was twelve years old.
A permanent example of what happens when Internet mythology meets
mental illness, when fiction bleeds into reality, when a child

(25:20):
picks up a knife and decides that a faceless monster
in a black suit is more real than the friend
standing in front of her. If you'd like to read
this story for yourself or share the article with a friend,
you can read it on the Weird Darkness website. I've
placed a link to it in the episode description, and
you can find more stories of the paranormal, true crime, strange,
and more, including numerous stories that never make it to

(25:43):
the podcast, in my Weird Darknews blog at Weird Darkness
dot com slash news