We’re Finally Telling The True Story About The Slender Man Stabbing

What started as a typical sleepover in Wisconsin in 2014 turned into one of the most chilling true crime stories in America.

Twelve-year-olds Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier lured their friend, Payton "Bella" Leutner, into the woods with a plan to kill her as a sacrifice to Slender Man, the creepy internet figure.

Both girls were charged as adults in a case that stunned the world.

Now, with Morgan’s 2025 release from psychiatric care, the case is back in the spotlight, except this time we’re having conversations the media steered clear of at the beginning.

Why did this happen? How did this happen? And what was going on mentally and psychologically for those two little girls?

You can read Kathleen's book Slenderman: A Tragic Story of Online Obsession and Mental Illness here.

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Guests: Kathleen Hale

Host: Gemma Bath

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
You're listening to a Mother Mea podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Mama Mea acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters.
This podcast was recorded on It's a Saturday Morning in Waukeshire,
Wisconsin in May twenty fourteen. And friends Bella, Morgan, and
Anissa are playing at a local park after spending the
night at Morgan's for a birthday sleepover. It was a

(00:35):
lovely afternoon. The girls went skating, they played the sims,
giggled endlessly, and eat cheese pips, just regular twelve year
old girl stuff. But Anissa and Morgan had a secret plan,
a plan to kill Bella to appease a fictional character
called slender Man, who they'd read about online and planned

(00:56):
to run away with. It was supposed to happen at
two am, then five thirty am, then nine thirty am,
but the girls keep chickening out. Bella keeps telling them
no when they try and get her to lie down
or pretend to be asleep, or to sit in the corner.
It's harder than they anticipated. Finally, during a game of

(01:18):
hide and seek at the park, Morgan takes charge. She
straddles her best friend in the dirt and tells her
I'm sorry. I have to do this because it's the
only way to save my life. Someone from Creepy Pasta
is stalking me. She stabs Bella nineteen times and flees
with Anissa by her side, bleeding. A gravely injured Bella

(01:43):
drags herself into a clearing where she's spotted by a
passing cyclist. You will find a twelve year old female
who appears.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
To be stabbed. Stab Are you with this twelve year
old female? Yeah? She says she's having trouble breathing. She
said she was stabbed multiple times, sab multiple times.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
As news of the stabbing lands in the inboxes of
newsrooms globally, it becomes clear very quickly, this is a
story that the whole world is about to have an
opinion on. I'm Jemma Bath and this is true Crime

(02:23):
Conversations Amoma mea podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes
by speaking to the people who know the most about them.
Slenderman is a creepy, faceless character with long arms and
legs and black tentacles that protrude from his back. He
wears a black suit, and his victims are pulled into

(02:43):
a hypnotized state utterly helpless against him. By twenty fourteen,
he was viral, gaining notoriety, in particular on a site
called creepypasta dot com, a place for amateur horror stories
and young adult content. That's where twelve year olds Morgan
Geyser and Anissa Wire found him and became obsessed with him.

(03:06):
Morgan had been seeing and hearing things, and they were
afraid he had control of her mind and was coming
to kill her family. They had to take action. They
had to kill someone first, then then run away to
Slender Mansion with him and become his proxies. It was
the stuff of magic and fantasy for two very young girls,

(03:27):
but it was intermixed with severe mental illness on Morgan's
part and an undiagnosed disability and mental health condition on
a Nissa's side. But it's those details, the mental health
of these tween girls that got left behind in twenty
fourteen and the years that followed, as the girls were
tried as adults and prosecuted with the world's eyes and

(03:49):
judgment upon them. When journalist Kathleen Hale decided to write
about this case, she wanted to tell the whole story,
the story that got lost in the media, the story
that not only honored the victim and shared her terror
and recovery, but tried to understand what actually happened, why
it happened. Result was her book slender Man, A Tragic

(04:13):
Story of Online obsession and mental illness, and Kathleen joins us. Now, Kathleen, firstly,
can you take us inside the obsession that was slender
Man in twenty fourteen ish? It was pretty huge online,
wasn't it.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
It had been about five years in twenty fourteen since
Slenderman first emerged online in two thousand and nine as
part of like a photoshop contest in the paranormal sort
of message boards of a horror forum. And he was
born basically in these doctored photos that people that someone
made of their children playing and having a good time,

(04:54):
but they didn't notice that from afar was a very tall,
sort of thin spectral figure watching them, stocking them, and
it sort of just captured the attention of horror fans
online who are beginning to congress gate in different forums.
And by the time this case rolled around in twenty fourteen,

(05:17):
he had become a semi popular character on creepypasta dot com,
which was a fan fiction horror site where people could
read each other's amateur horror stories and sort of borrow
characters from each other and write original horror fiction. And
he was one of many characters featured on the site.

(05:37):
And actually, ironically, he wasn't super super popular in twenty fourteen,
not as we know him to be now. It wasn't
until a crime, a heinous, globally and famous crime, was
committed in his name that he really became the popular
sort of horror icon that people know him as today.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
And the idea of him as this kind of horror
character was that too, did he stalk paople, manipulate people,
kill people? What was his deal?

Speaker 1 (06:07):
So his sort of powers are more about rolling other
people and having them do his bidding. He in some
stories he is violent, but for the most part his
narratives really revolve around him using mind control to inspire
other people to commit violence in his name, and so

(06:28):
there's a lot of scary stories about him, you know,
getting in the heads of people and making them kill
their whole families, and then when they're all done, he
comes and he takes them away. But that's basically his
number one power is mind control and getting other people
to kill for him. He doesn't have to do it

(06:49):
himself because he can. He can worm his way into
the minds of vulnerable people, and that's how he enacts violence.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
And Creepy Pasta it's kind of just like a forum, right,
a website.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah, it's a it's a website and it's in twenty fourteen.
It was very low fi like. It basically looked like
a middle schooler's horror blog, like black background, red words,
really sort of simple interface, and in fact, a lot
of the stories on it were written by children, you
could just tell. So it was popular among a certain

(07:25):
age group. It wasn't sophisticated like you know, Reddit or
a place like that. It was. It was a bit dorky,
very pg. Thirteen. The submission guidelines were pretty you know, strict.
Nothing could have any kind of like sexual overtones. Everything
had to be sort of accessible for middle schoolers. It

(07:48):
really felt like a site that was catered toward children.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Well, I guess that makes sense with a name like
Creepy Pasta as well.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yes, you know it's creepy Pasta. Yeah, yeah, no, it's
it's a great it's a great site name. It's a
word play on copy and paste, creepy pasta copy and paste,
So it's it's evocat of what the site is for,
which is to basically copy and paste each other's stories
into a new, fresh word document, take away a lot,

(08:18):
add some more of your own, upload it, and the
cycle continues.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
Can you tell us about where this crime is set?
It was a town or city in Wisconsin that you're
actually very familiar with, right.

Speaker 1 (08:31):
Yes, I grew up nearby. The crime took place in Waukeshaw, Wisconsin,
which is one of the three most conservative counties in
all of Wisconsin, which is sort of saying something people
who are not from Wisconsin or not from the United
States to really understand it. I guess it reminds me

(08:51):
a lot of the Shirley Jackson story. The Lottery. People
are really, really, really friendly, but there are these very
strong Gothic undertones, lots of secrets, lots of vengeful attitudes
when lines are crossed. But you know, just in terms
of what it looks like so people can picture it,
extremely suburban, extremely pristine, clean white, and the sort of

(09:20):
extreme far right political culture of this locale cannot be overstated.
There's a lot of trump Ism there and when this
case was first unfolding, it was two years before he
won the twenty sixteen election, and all of the forces
that were poised to put him into the White House
were very much alive and electric and brewing in a

(09:43):
state at that time. It's the sort of place where
people are very, very wary of outsiders. There's a lot
of sort of quiet racism, and there's a sort of
misplaced idea that the reason that Waksha is so safe
is because of these tough on crime laws as they're
called in the United States, which you know, which is

(10:07):
you know, not true, But it's the sort of self
reinforcing ideology that things are safe because things are the
way they are, and so that's sort of what the
environment is like. But it's beautiful. It's a beautiful, beautiful place.
It's a place where you can have a really good
life at little cost to yourself, so long as you

(10:28):
fit in to what everyone thinks, you know, you should be.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
It sounds like the kind of place where a crime
like this would be particularly shocking.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
Oh yeah, I think that the prior to this, in
all of Waukesha, there's a lot of people there. There
had been less than one murder per year, and this
was not a murder case. It was it would be
widely mistaken as a murder case. But just to give
you an idea of how safe and crime free the
area was. Like any suburban place in the US, it

(11:02):
had its issues with drugs, you know, there were things
like that going on, but in terms of violent crime, no,
there is nothing. This was the kind of place were
something like this would never No one would have expected
this to happen.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
It took you seven years or so to write your
book on this. How did you find writing it? Approaching
the people in the story, trying to gain their trust,
and it helped being as somewhat local.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
It helped me having been local. Once they would speak
to me, I mean a group so close to where
this took place, like that the girls involved in the
story and I we had a lot of the same
sort of childhood touched ones the same place where these
three girls spent Morgan and Anissa's last night of freedom.
That was the roller rink where I first held hands

(11:52):
with the crush. Like, we had these sort of common
cultural monuments. And so once somebody would speak to me,
and once maybe they heard the way I spoke and
they could understand that I understood them on this sort
of deeper level. I do think that that helped us.
I was looking at it from the point of view
of not just this was a horrible crime. I was

(12:14):
also looking at it from the point of view of
this is a horrible crime that we committed on the
so called criminals involved in the case. The judicial process
that unfolded was a circus, and the laws that came
crashing down on these young girls they need to be
revoked and amended. And I just couldn't believe what was happening,

(12:36):
and nobody really wanted to look at it from that
point of view. To them, my having any compassion for
the other two children who were involved in the crime
the assailants was the same as saying that the victim's
experience didn't matter, which is not how I felt at all.
But unfortunately, in the US were in this place where

(12:57):
the two things cannot be true, right a lot compassion.
You can't have compassion for a victim and have compassion
for her attackers. Those two ideas seemed mutually exclusive to
most of the people that I talked to, so it
was very hard getting people to talk to me, but
Morgan's family opened up to me and I got to

(13:20):
speak to Morgan, and from there, just because of all
of the extensive documentation on the case, Thousands and thousands
of pages of interviews, etc. And all of the previous reporting,
I was able to vary laboriously and as you mentioned,
slowly build a factual timeline of what had happened, which
was shocking because the truth of the story was so

(13:43):
at odds with the myth that had grown around it.
An urban legend had grown around the case, just as
the case had grown around an urban legend, and so
the true story was almost I mean, it was so
much more shocking than what had been reported in the
media prior to that.

Speaker 2 (14:03):
Well, you mentioned Morgan, and she's the reason that this
case is back in the headlines again. She was released
only a few weeks ago the judge made the decision.
So January twenty twenty five, how did you first come
to talk to her? And what was she like?

Speaker 1 (14:21):
I came to talk with her because her mom and
I had been talking and I got permission from her
mom to speak to her. And Morgan was curious about
talking to me because she is a writer and an artist,
and we talked a lot about her life, but we
also talked a lot about her writing. We would have

(14:42):
little sort of like creative writing workshops in the hospital
cafeteria when I went to go visit her, and she
was fifteen when I first met her, and she was
a child. She was so childlike, so seft spoken, so
self loathing, so sweet, and so vulnerable. And at that

(15:03):
point she had been taken away from her family for
three years and had not hugged her parents outside of
a legal or medical setting for that entire time. She'd
actually been prohibited. She hadn't been allowed to hug them
for four months after her arrest when she was twelve
years old, so it was and they had never seen

(15:24):
where she slept. I mean, all these obvious things about
being incarcerated, but she was on an adult ward at
the age of I mean, she was so young, So
I think that that was sort of for me. The
most sort of salient quality that I got from her
is just how young she was, and I was shocked
by it every time we got together, especially given the

(15:47):
context of our meetings. In terms of her personality, she's
very smart, can be very funny, very creative, very troubled
and wasn't getting any help at all despite the environment
that she was in. Like you would think, especially in
the US, there's a misconception that these kinds of forensic hospitals,

(16:09):
which used to be called hospitals for the criminally insane,
are more nurturing environments than prisons. I would say they're
definitely less dangerous, less physically dangerous than a prison less
but that doesn't mean that they're safe. But they're not nurturing.
She was receiving almost no therapy, She was receiving no

(16:29):
juvenile resources when we met. She was not receiving any education.
She had not been in any kind of a classroom
setting or received any kind of academic support since sixth
grade when she was arrested. And the entire ward, because
of the institutionalization in the US in the seventies and eighties,
the entire ward was manned not by doctors or nurses,

(16:52):
but by these psychiatric care technicians who are entry level.
They have no specialized education, they're paid minimum wage, and
they're overworked and burnt out, and some of them have
criminal records themselves. And the way that they control people
on the board is by using spit hoods, just like

(17:13):
last sewing a patient's head with a hood so that
they and restraint boards. So everything about this situation was
so surreal and unfair, Like, I mean, that's not justice,
you know, that's revenge. That's there's supposed to be two
separate things. I can understand why the victim's family in

(17:36):
this situation would want Morgan to suffer, but I don't
know that the entire judicial system should be built around
that that same impulse.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
Well, especially because the idea of sending someone to a
hospital rather than a prison, you would think is to
treat them right. But from what I'm hearing, it sounds
very old fashioned as well, like like something out of
a horror movie.

Speaker 1 (18:00):
It was something out of a horror movie. The campus
was completely open, so I was able to walk around it,
and it was a very old hospital that was built
in the eighteen nineth when they first started admitting patients.
It was all women at the time, in the eighteen nineties.
They were bringing them in for anger and promiscuity and
all of this stuff. But the treatments at the time

(18:21):
when it first started were very quaint and gentle. It
was like brandy and dancing and gardening, and then the
institution over the years, it just it was deformed into
this awful, awful place. So there's a dire, dire need
for psychiatric hospitals in our country, but because there's no
funding for them, a place like whin a Bago, where

(18:45):
Morgan spent so many years of her childhood, is basically
being turned into a prison and only taking patients found
not guilty by reason of insanity, and there's no room
for sort of anything else, and there's no resources to

(19:05):
even employ full time doctors and nurses in the way
that they desperately need to.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
Did Morgan was she subjected to the spit hoods and
the being strapped to boards and all of those things
that you mentioned.

Speaker 1 (19:20):
No, she really, i think learned very quickly how to
keep her head down and spent a lot of her
time feeling really frightened, and she was quite docile because
of the heavy duty drugs that they had her on.
They had her on really heavy duty antipsychotics for a

(19:41):
long time. But she was attacked by another patient at
the hospital. Everyone knew what she had done, and so
that made her sort of a target. She was not
abused by the staff to that extent to the extent
that some patients at Winnebago have been, but she was

(20:01):
not nurtured by them either, not helped in any way.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
You're listening to true crime conversations me, Jemma Bass. I'm
speaking with author Kathleen Hale about the slender Man stabbing
case in the US. Up next, Kathleen explains the early
signs that Morgan Geyser was mentally ill and what the
lack of diagnosis led to. I know you didn't speak

(20:30):
to her a lot about the crime itself, but you
did really delve into her childhood and how her mental
health and illness kind of manifested and it started really young,
kind of when she was a toddler. She has memories.
Can you take us inside her brain and the descriptions
that she gave you?

Speaker 1 (20:51):
Sure? Yeah. So Morgan was telling me that some of
her first memories are being you know, bitten by ghosts,
ghosts pulling her hair, ghosts hugging her. She would see
colors sort of floating like like chalk or dust, rainbow

(21:11):
colors floating in front of her face. She would see
rainbow colors sort of dripping down the walls of her
bedroom like paint, and then very gradually her world became
populated by these imaginary friends. One of them was named sev.
She could see him. He took care of her. He
was like a handsome boy in his twenties always, you know.

(21:36):
He stayed that age for her, and as she got older,
he was the same age. And then there was a
voice in her head named Maggie who sort of kept
her company and was kind for a long time until
she became quite cruel as she got older and the
crime got closer and closer, her mental unraveling. The way

(21:56):
that that looked to her was that more and more
imaginary friends started to populate her life, and she stopped
being able to control them when they talked to her,
when they didn't talk to her, and they began to
scare her, you know, And that that was sort of
the shift that occurred. Prior to the stabbing.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
Her father was a diagnosed schizophrenic, but her parents, I mean,
prior to the crime, they didn't really kind of look
into her mental health, did they.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
No, they didn't. They had plans to tell her about
her father, Matt's mental illness, struggle with mental illness, but
they didn't want to scare her. They thought she was
too young to know about it, and they had plans
to tell her when she turned sixteen. Uh, sort of
like magical age, you know in the US, where you

(22:50):
get to drive and you get to go to prom.
And I guess that they thought that at that age
she would be ready. In reality, Morgan knew that something
was wrong with her dad and she would ask who
She would ask him, point plank, what is wrong with you?
Because he was unmedicated and he was her full time
caregiver from the time she was a baby until this
crime occurred, so she spent a lot of time with him,

(23:13):
and she saw him behave in really strange ways, and
he would say, I'll tell you when you're sixteen. I'll
tell you when you're sixteen. Morgan's mom, Angie, was very
devoted to her family and she was the primary earner
and her job was really intense. She assisted on brain
and spine surgeries and she was on call and would

(23:36):
be driving within one hundred miles of her house at
a moment's notice, and she sometimes worked seven days a
week just to kind of keep the family afloat. On
a single salary as a surgery technician, so she was
often leaving before dawn before Morgan woke up in the morning,
coming home after bedtime, not always, but a lot, and
so she was really relying on Matt to be an

(23:59):
accurate reporter of what was happening at home, and unfortunately
that just wasn't happening. I do I always feel very
protective of Angie in this story because I know that
it's common for people to say, like, but where were
the parents, especially where was the mother? And you know,
as like a mom, I feel really protective of her
because she was doing everything she could to keep her

(24:21):
family safe and secure, and I think, like any working mom,
would have loved to have spent more time with her children.
But unfortunately that just wasn't the situation at the time,
and so a lot of warning signs were missed, and
a lot of it had to do with the lack
of communication that was happening between the adults in Morgan's life,
especially her teachers. It was actually at school that you

(24:45):
see the most documented evidence that something was going very
very badly for Morgan, that she was really suffering and
that she was struggling and that she was confused. But
the school didn't I mean they just didn't. They didn't
rope her parents into a conversation about it, they didn't
address it. They ignored it. They told police Slater that

(25:09):
they thought if they just they thought that Morgan was
just trying to get attention, which culturally in that area
is considered a very bad character flaw. Right, What could
be worse in a Scandinavian culture than wanting to be
an individual, not wanting to conform, not wanting to be
part of the collective. And so they tried to correct it,

(25:30):
and they said this themselves by withholding the attention that
they thought that she craved. So they just ignored her.
And that to me was much more upsetting than anything,
you know, on Angie's part, because Angie wasn't seeing Morgan
painting with her own blood, which is what Morgan's math

(25:52):
teacher saw her doing, or like barking on the playground,
or you know, any of the other things writing die
over and over again in her notebook. And so her
mother had a really incomplete picture of what was happening
with Morgan. And by the time I met them, Angie
felt so bad. I mean, I can't. Morgan felt terrible

(26:16):
for what she had done, and Angie felt an immense
amount of anguish and guilt too. She had missed this,
She had missed this, and as a result, she had
lost lost her daughter.

Speaker 2 (26:30):
Those kind of antics that you described Morgan doing, writing
in her blood, things like that. You know, she didn't
have a lot of friends. She was considered weird by
kids at school because of stuff like that. But she
did have a really close friendship with a girl called Peyton,
who you referred to as Bella because that was her
nickname at the time. Can you tell us about their friendship,

(26:53):
because they really were from your descriptions kind of chalk
and cheese. They were completely different.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
Yeah, they were very, very different. Morgan was very dark,
Bella was very light. Bella was bubbly and sweet and
normal and not very imaginative and very literal, and Morgan
was extremely imaginative. And you know, she wore dark clothes
and patterned with like human skulls, and she wore a

(27:22):
black heart pendant around her neck, and Bella wore like
rainbows and butterfly wings, and it just sort of captures
the dynamic of their friendship and basically the way that
they came together was in fourth grade. Bella was for
some reason, even less popular than Morgan was who knows.
I mean, kids have all sorts of ways of deciding

(27:43):
what the social hierarchies are. And no one would sit
with her at lunch. And Morgan one day across the
cafeteria to sit with Bella because she liked the way
that Bella drew kitty cats, and that was the thing
that sort of brought them together. And they both loved
dolls and cats and the color purple, and you know, Bella,

(28:08):
for Morgan's sake, pretended to like start. She also pretended
to see and hear Morgan's imaginary friends, and that sort
of binded them together. And you know, fast forward two
years to sixth grade, things are really shifting fast. Bella
is now becoming more liked by her peers because she's
so kind and so sweet, and Morgan is becoming more

(28:32):
and more unpopular. People are really bullying her. They'll, you know,
pretend to they'll bump into our purpose just to pretend
to need to wash their hands and scream that they've
touched her. And Bella is approached by the popular crowd
and they say, you know, you can join us if
you stop being friends with Morgan. And Bella refused because

(28:55):
Morgan had come to her aid during a time when
she had nobody, and that had inspired such a deep
loyalty in her that she was willing to stick it
out with Morgan. And obviously that's the decision that she
really came to regret.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
Even Bella's parents were quite wary of Morgan.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
Yes, I mean Morgan set their basement on fire. That'll
do it. But you know they didn't tell her parents.
H I mean, I can't imagine if somebody set fire
to my house, if one of like, it's reflective of,
like I said, a very very specific Wisconsin Midwestern Gothic

(29:36):
culture where there's a lot of silence around anything that
would require a social interaction a confrontation that might not
be just like friendly talking about the weather keeping things
at the surface, like, that's a difficult conversation to have.
And so she just didn't have it. And so, but
they really didn't. Bella's mom, Stacy, really didn't like Morgan,

(30:00):
and Morgan later told me that she felt like, and
she said this almost in an admiring way, that Stacy
was the only person in her life who knew that
there was something wrong with her. She noticed, Yeah, she noticed.
She noticed something that nobody else noticed about Morgan, and
she did what she could to try to extricate the
two girls. But she did it in sort of a

(30:21):
roundabout way where she would try to like encourage Bella to,
you know, hang out with more popular kids, or you know,
make up an excuse for why Bella couldn't go to
Morgan's things that were sort of easily ignored or circumvented.
I don't think that there was ever a conversation like
I just don't this doesn't feel good. And in fact,

(30:43):
she and Bella's dad, Joe, were sort of at odds
about it. Joe was pretty warm toward Morgan. I saw
it in the courtroom too, the way that Bella's parents
were divided by their approach to the aftermass of the crime.
Bella's mom was at every hearing really wanted the most

(31:04):
extreme punishment for Morgan, which anyone can understand why Bella's
mom would want that, And Joe was a bit more expansive.
He held the door for Morgan's mom in court, little
gestures that I think they frayed the relationship over time,
and they ended up divorcing after this this crime unfolded.

(31:27):
I'm not saying it's just because of that, obviously, It's
just that, you know, you could see the differences in
their reactions to this tragedy, and that's something that pulls
couples apart when they don't react to something like that
in lockstep with each other.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
When did Anissa come into their lives and how did
she kind of change the dynamic between the girls.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
Anissa she joined Morgan and Bella's middle school at the
beginning of sixth grade. Anisa switched school districts, so they
were all going to a new middle school. Middle school
starts in sixth grade in the US, but Bella and
Morgan had gone to elementary school together and Anissa was
the new kid. And Anissa also happened to be Morgan's

(32:13):
neighbor in the same apartment complex, and she began as
Morgan's bully. She would bullied Morgan just like the other kids,
believe Morgan, but sort of gradually she realized that Morgan
was interested in the same things that she was interested in,
which made them both very different. I mean, they both
liked horror stories, they liked dark things. It's not something

(32:34):
that girls in Waukeshaw, Wisconsin are really like celebrated for
being into I mean, this was when people were doing
like the ice bucket challenge, you know, like Bella wanted
to do the ice pocket challenge. She wanted to do
like social media pranks to raise awareness for like causes,
and Morgan wanted to like like read conspiracy theories online.

(32:59):
It was a very different thing, and so Anissa noticed
that about her and something kind of clicked between them.
At the time, Anissa's parents were getting divorced. Stuff at
home was really bad. She had a lot of reasons
to want to leave home, and she was lonely. She
was super lonely. She doesn't She was a bully, which

(33:19):
meant that in some ways she had power over other children,
but she didn't have any friends. She operated kind of
as a rule enforcer, which is where her bullying came from.
Like she would when kids didn't follow the rules in class,
she would punch them or call them names while the
teacher wasn't looking. She was very good at executing that

(33:40):
kind of like justice in her mind when adults weren't looking. Later,
all of her teachers would be like she was amazing,
and all of the kids would be like, she was
a nightmare and she had this fantasy of wanting to
save the world, but basically she just wanted friends and
she was obsessed with Morgan. But Bella stood between them.
Morgan already had a best friend, and that was always

(34:02):
sort of a thorn in a Nissa's side.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Slender Man kind of became this common ground between a
Nissa and Morgan, like an obsse They started to read
about Slenderman and obsess about human his character. But how
did an obsession with this creepy fictional character kind of
morph into there's no other way to describe it but

(34:27):
a murder plot and a murder plot to kill Bella.

Speaker 1 (34:30):
Yeah, it was gradual and it was also it would
also never have happened. If Morgan and Anissa had not
found each other, none of this would have happened. Basically,
Morgan had no one to talk to about the things
that she was seeing and hearing, the hallucinations that she
was having. She tried to talk to Belle about it.

(34:51):
Bella was like, I lied about seeing and hearing your
imaginary friends. I don't want to play this game anymore.
I'm scared you're scaring me. It's not nice, it's mean,
and so Morgan felt like if she were to confide
in Bella that she was going to lose Bella, and
she didn't want to lose Bella. And eventually it came
up with Anissa that Morgan saw and heard these things,

(35:12):
and Anissa was intrigued because she believed in magic and
dark forces, and you know, she had this creeping sense
of dread and that's why she loved horror stories because
they validated this feeling that she had all the time.
And so Morgan at that point was really afraid that
she might be going crazy. You can see that in
her Google searches. She was searching for like what kind
of insane am I? If Anissa had said like, I

(35:36):
think maybe you are, like, you know, crazy, things might
have gone differently. But instead she goes, no, I think
you're a medium. I think that you straddle to worlds
and you're in touch with this side of life that
like no one else understands. So she made Morgan feel,
you know, special in this way that was really reassuring

(35:57):
to Morgan, but also scary, right, because then it means
that all of these things that she's seeing and hearing
are real and so she keeps opening up to Anissa,
and she shares that at one point in her childhood,
the scariest thing she ever saw was she was looking
in the mirror and she saw this shadowy figure standing
behind her, really tall and thin, and anisays, like, I've

(36:20):
seen him too. His name is Slenderman. And that's when
she introduced Morgan to creepypasta dot com. And basically, between
all of these different variables, what they came up with
was that Slenderman had appeared to Morgan when she was
a young child as a warning, and now he was
sending like demons at her to sort of like to

(36:43):
warn her that he would come back and kill her
and her family in Anissa and a Nissa's family, and
maybe the whole human race like in the creepypasta stories
that they read, if they didn't sacrifice another human being
in his name, like in the scary stories that they read.
So they just put all these pieces together and it

(37:05):
was basically, when you sort of zoom out, it was
two twelve year old girls. One of her, Anissa, had
a very severe learning disability that was undiagnosed at the time,
where she could not tell the difference between reality and fantasy,
and then you have another girl who's severely mentally ill,
and together at the age of twelve, they're trying to
diagnose her. They're trying to figure out without any help,

(37:28):
what is wrong. And so this is what they came
up with. Now, in terms of choosing Bella as the victim,
that is the one piece of this puzzle that will
probably always be a mystery. It's the only place where
Morgan and Anissa's testimonies diverge. Each one blamed the other
for picking Bella. So, like what Morgan said to me

(37:53):
is that Anissa said that it had to be someone
that Morgan loved, and isn't that convenient? Also that Anissa
happens to hate Bella, and Morgan really only loved one
person other than her family, and that's Bella. So it
was pretty obvious who Anissa was talking about. And Anie
would tell police that it was Morgan's idea. That Morgan

(38:13):
was like, we got to kill Bella first lender man,
and so it's unclear whose idea it was exactly, But
I think the one thing that is consistent even in
that piece of the story is that Morgan and Anissa
chose Bella because Morgan loved Bella. So it wasn't because
Morgan hated Bella. It was because it was the opposite.

(38:36):
It was that Bella was the most important person in
the world to her, and that was the only thing
she thought that would make the sacrifice count.

Speaker 2 (38:48):
After the break, Kathleen tells us what Morgan and Anissa
were planning to do to Bella and what exactly went
down on the night of the Slender Man's sacrifice. When
you read the details of what these two twelve year
olds did to Bella, you know, flat on a news report,

(39:08):
it's kind of like they lured her into the forest
playing hide and seek, they stabbed her. When you read
it in your book, it's so obvious when you break
it all down that these are doing help Like they're
twelve year old girls, and the way they're thinking into
how this plot kind of unravels really kind of shows that.

(39:30):
And I want to kind of help the audience understand
that by kind of explaining that this started with skating
at a sleepover, playing sims, eating cheese puffs, sping in
a pillow for like regular twelve year old girl stuff,
and then this plan that they kind of had in
the back of the back of the sleepover, which was like,

(39:53):
we've got a killer, but how do we do it?
And they kind of keep chickening out, don't they. Over
the course of the night.

Speaker 1 (39:59):
They've chicken out several times, and Morgan comes up with
these kind of magical thinking type ways of avoiding the stabbing,
like without actually stopping it, Like she thinks she can
stop it if she does, she can stopish she does that.
When you said that the real timeline of events leading
up to the stabbing, the most glaring thing about it
is that these were twelve year old girls. Like I
laughed a little bit, not because it's not because it's funny,

(40:22):
but because it's so true. Like it's like when you
read the police reports and the interviews and the way
that they were thinking the things that they were doing it,
they were so unbelievably shockingly young, and the way that
their minds worked were it was, you know, their minds

(40:42):
worked with the absurdity of a child's minds, like and
and so there are moments in that narrative leading up
to the stabbing where you kind of it's it's it's
absurd to the point of feeling like it it's yes,
So anyway, so what happened was it was a Friday
Saturday sleepover. On Friday night, they went to Skateland, which

(41:04):
is a roller rink, and they you know, they skated,
They had they had a fun time. They held hands,
they ate creamsicles. They went home. They gave Morgan her
birthday presents, which included the stuffed banana and the Star
Trek mug, among other things. They played the sims. Anissa

(41:25):
and Bella shared a bed. They slept head to foot.
Bella slept with a dolly. She brought nine cat magazines
with her to the sleepover.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
It's so innocent. It sounds also innocent.

Speaker 1 (41:36):
Yeah, it sounds so innocent. And the plan kept getting subverted.
The plan had been to kill Bella that night right away.
The initial plan that they came up with was that
after Bella fell asleep, Anissa was going to stab her
and then to death, and that they were going to
leave her body in a sleeping bag and slip out
in the middle of the night so that if anyone

(41:58):
came in it would look like she was sleeping. But
by the time Bella fell asleep, Anissa was so tired
from roller skating so much that she was too tired
to kill anybody. So Morgan said, well, let's just rest.
I'll set an alarm on my phone for two thirty am.
But she didn't set the alarm because she didn't want

(42:19):
the stabbing to happen, but because she was a child,
she thought that that was like a way to avoid
the tragedy. She didn't anyway, she didn't want to make
Anissa mad. Is sort of the thing that was like
leading her. So then Anissa woke up in the morning
and she was furious at Morgan for not setting the alarm.
And then Morgan got permission from her parents to go

(42:41):
play outside at the nearby park. They'd only let her
do it like once before, but you know, they reasoned
that girls are safer in a group usually, so they
let them go. And then the plan had become to
kill Ella in the playground restroom because Anissa thought it

(43:02):
would work because it had a drain for the blood
to go down. So they brought her in there, telling
her that they wanted to show her some vandalism them
in the toilets. She quickly realized that this was not true,
and then but she didn't leave because, I mean, who
would think that who would think. She thought that they

(43:23):
were being mean, that they were like that they were
gossiping about her, that they were whispering about her. She
wasn't having fun. She wanted to go home. She felt
like they were excluding her, but she didn't call her
mom because she wanted to be a good friend to Morgan.
Anissa tried to knock Bella unconscious in the bathroom, which
sounds quite violent. It sounds like anybody would have left

(43:44):
that situation if they had been Bella. But Anissa was
by her own admission, she used these words, I'm not
very athletic. She's also twelve. She also thought that to
kill somebody just like kind of booped them on the
head like in a video game, and so she just
like sort of pushed Bella's head like that, and Bella
was like, wow, like you're you know, like but but

(44:06):
she obviously was not knocked unconscious, and so then Anissa
didn't know what to do. So they thought, let's go
into the woods. So they asked Bella if she wanted
to go bird watching. She said no. She was sulking
at this point, so they said hide and seek. She
agreed to play hide and seek. They actually played one
game the normal way they you know, Morgan counted and

(44:28):
they hid and she kind of found them, and then
they played again. And that time when Morgan found Anissa
and Bella in a clearing, she couldn't go through with
it at first, and Anissa got into a fight about
who was going to do it. They're fighting off at
the side of this clearing, passing the knife that they've
taken from Morgan's kitchen. They're passing it back and forth,

(44:52):
and Morgan's finally, you know, said something that annoyed Anissa
so much because she's not sticking to the plan that
Anissa turns to leave and just walk away, and if
she had, this would not have happened. But instead she
turned around and she said kitty now. And kitty was
her like pet name for more and it sort of
ignited something in Morgan. She said to Morgan, goberzerk go crazy.

(45:17):
Morgan tackled Bella. She said, don't worry, I'm just a
little kitty cat, and then she stabbed Bella nineteen times.

Speaker 2 (45:28):
It's a miracle she lived nineteen times. How did she live?

Speaker 1 (45:34):
Well, there's a few things. One is that it was
a medical miracle. One of the stab wounds missed her
heart by a millimeter or something crazy like that. So
that's part of it. There was one stab wound that
should have killed her. She was stabbed in the torso,
in the arms. It was awful. The other thing is

(45:58):
that Morgan was still in this mindset of I don't
want this to happen. I don't want this to happen.
And if you look at the side, at the the
scope of the each individual wound, and by that I
mean in the police report they measure it centimeters millimeters

(46:18):
the whole she was using a six inch blade and
barely breaking the surface in a lot of these in
a lot of these strikes, very very very small wounds.
And that's not to minimize the violence of this crime
is awful, and Bella suffered enormously. She had to have

(46:39):
multiple life saving surgeries that left her with so much
scarring from her throat to her abdomen. I mean, and
it's a huge, huge trauma. But what I'm saying is
Morgan was not she was not pressing very hard. She
was she was flailing and going through the motions of
this stabbing. And of course, when you stab somebody that

(47:01):
many times you're going to create devastating consequences. But if
you imagine somebody who doesn't really want to be doing it,
who's kind of holding their arm back a bit, who's
flailing a bit more than actually striking, those were Those
were the kinds of wounds that a lot of, not
all nineteen wounds were kill wounds.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
A few things happened after the stubbing. One Morgan at
one point tried to administer some first aid with a
leaf and yeah, but then they kind of said to Bella,
we'll go and get help. But they weren't going to
go get help. They were basically going to run away
to be with Slenderman, because that was the plan. How

(47:45):
How was Bella found? How was she saved?

Speaker 1 (47:49):
It's really miraculous, and it's a testament to her bravery
and fortitude and intelligence because she, you know, she had
believed them all day about everything, and she, in her desperation,
might have believed them when they said they were going
to get help. I think another person might have, you know,

(48:12):
in that sort of vulnerable moment, and she didn't, and
so she started to drag herself through the woods. She
couldn't see, she couldn't breathe, and she managed to drag
herself all the way out of the woods, probably like
one hundred yards to a trail off the street. And
at that very moment, a bicyclist named Greg Steinberg, who

(48:34):
had just finished running a five K in downtown Waukeshaw
and he was bicycling home. He crossed the path and
he saw her, and he saved her. He made the
nine one one call that saved her life.

Speaker 2 (48:48):
What about Morgan and Anissa? How were they because obviously
word of a stabbing got out very quickly. Police are like,
we've got to find these other girls that you know.
How would they tracked down? And in what state were
they in?

Speaker 1 (49:03):
So Morgan and Anissa after stabbing Bella, they took off.
Their plan was to go to what they thought was
slender Man's mansion, slender Mansion, and they thought that it
was in the Nicolae National Forest, which was three hundred
miles away, and they were going to walk there without
a map or a phone or any provisions other than
some Maxi pads because Morgan had just gotten her period,

(49:24):
and a couple granola bars and some water bottles and
they were twelve, and that was their plan, and you know,
they because they didn't have a compass or anything, they
walked a lot. They spent a lot of time walking
in the wrong direction. They followed the Fox River north
they knew that that went north, and then after that
they were meandering sort of walk trying to get around

(49:46):
the highway, and that slowed them down. They did manage
to walk about ten miles. But then what happened was
they decided to cross a busy highway by walking onto
the highway rather than under the highway. And they got
into the highway and a driver, you know, saw these
little girls four feet tall walking along the side of

(50:10):
a big the road and called the police. And the
police were looking for two girls matching that description, one blonde,
one brunette, just under four feet and they came and
got them very quickly. And by that point Morgan and
Anissa were relieved because they were it had stopped being
fun and they had started to realize that slender Man

(50:30):
wasn't coming for them.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
And Bella had been able to give those descriptions through
all of her injuries.

Speaker 1 (50:38):
She was able to tell them it was my best friend.
Then she was whisked away into surgery, so she gave
the police the names of those girls. They were able
to then go to Morgan's house where her parents were,
and they also went to Anissa's house and got descriptions
of them and what they'd been wearing that way from

(50:58):
their parents.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
I want to skip to those initial conversations that the
girls had with police, because one their parents went with
them was that local.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
It is in Wiscon and a lot of strange things
are legal in Wisconsin, and one is that you can
interview a child about a crime without a parent or
attorney present, unless the child specifically asks for a lawyer, which,
as you can imagine, most kids are not thinking that way.
They've been taught to trust the police. Why would a
police officer want to trick me? Why would a police

(51:32):
officer want to hurt me? Especially in suburban communities, in
white suburban communities, people feel that way. So the police
interviewed them, I'm interrupted for eight hours, and they lied
to their parents too about what they were talking to
them about. And it's all legal.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
How would you describe those conversations. The stuff that jumped
out to me, particularly from a Nissa, was I don't
think she really grasped what had happened. She was asking
things like what am I going to get my clothes back?
And oh, I haven't taken my antihistamy today. It was
almost like she didn't realize what had happened. Yeah, how
would you kind of look at those conversations?

Speaker 1 (52:08):
I think is is wild, But if you watch it,
I mean what I thought was just in Morgan's case,
I thought, this cop really has it out for her.
He really hates her. And also you can see how
mentally ill Morgan is. You can see all of the
science that she's just completely unraveling and that she's sick

(52:29):
and that she needs she needs help. And with a Nissa,
I mean, I think you see a learning disability on
full display. Like that's something that kind of comes out
throughout this case. Is if you want to see a
monster in these girls, you can see a monster. But
if you go into it with the context of their
situations of a Nissa's incredibly difficult disability in terms of

(52:56):
her processing information and in terms of Morgan being in
a state of psychosis, you can see that she's in
a state of psychosis. That's the short answer, is that
she is in a state of psychosis. For the entire interview,
and the the police officer questioning her is treating her
like a serial killer. And that's the dynamic in her

(53:21):
interrogation room and with a nieceas she has no idea,
she has no idea how much trouble she is, and
she wants to go back to school on Monday. She
wants to make sure that she'll be able to do that.
And they just they talk and talk and talk and
talk and talk for hours, and by the time they
go out of there, the police have secured a lengthy

(53:43):
confession with the explicit purpose of trying to put the
girls into an adult prison for over one hundred years.
The police officer's goal that day was to incarcerate the
girls for as long as possible and the most extreme
environment possible at an adult women's prison. It was not

(54:03):
to understand the crime or why it happened, and it
was not to yeah, it was not to have a
deeper understanding of the case to punish the case, and
so they went about it using the methods that would
best serve that goal.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
Morgan's mental health kind of was assessed five or so
days into prison, so all does it happened? She'd been
placed into a prison. How did her mental health kind
of continue to unravel once she was incarcerated, because it
was in that first prison visit that her parents finally

(54:36):
kind of clicked and were like, oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:39):
People are like, well, how did she manage? How did
no one manage to see it? Well, part of it
is that she hid it, and you know, she hid
it as well as an extremely intelligent, high IQ twelve
year old girl with emerging psychosis can hide it. And
at the end, she was having a lot of trouble
hiding it leading up to the crime, but her friends

(55:00):
were helping her hide it. Anissa was helping her hide it,
like Bella was helping her hide it. Other kids were like,
what's going on? But they were managing to sort of
protect her from any sort of adult scrutiny. After the
crime occurred, she could no longer hide it because she
had also gone through a traumatic event. When you try
to kill somebody, it sticks in your brain in a

(55:21):
real way. It causes PTSD the same way that you
know with someone else trying to kill you will stick
in your brain. It's extremely violent and it broke her
and it made her snap, and from then on she
could not hide the symptoms that had been plaguing her
prior to that, so she was talking to herself in

(55:41):
the open, in front of everybody. As soon as she
was checked into the jail, she was flagged for a
psych evaluation and when her parents, by the time her
parents managed to get in to see her, which didn't
happen for many, many many days, they weren't allowed in.
She had not washed, she was muttering to herself. She
didn't even seem to know that they were there, so

(56:03):
she had a full psychotic break post crime.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
Was Anissa also assist for her mental health at that time.

Speaker 1 (56:11):
So that's the really messed up part about the post
crime phase of this story is that because they were
charged as adults, because that is the law in Wisconsin,
they did not receive any therapeutic services, which is very
messed up. We do provide them to children automatically in

(56:32):
the United States, but not to adults, and so because
they were adults, they were denied you know, counseling, They
were denied you know, sort of diagnostic services for a
very very long time. And it was only because Morgan's
attorney was having doctors assess her for the trial phase

(56:53):
that she was able because and it was only because
her attorney petitioned really, really, really hard to get her
assessed that she was taking care of a niece of
was never really taking care of therapeutically, at least not
during the pre incarceration phase, which is just so sad
she I mean, she really could have used some help

(57:17):
during that time.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
Because it's not too And this is what a lot
of people think that talking about mental health is excusing
the crime, which it's not. But it's hard to separate
the two when it comes to this particular story, particularly
when we kind of skip forward a bit and we
do talk about the assessments that these two girls end
up getting. Morgan is eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, and I mean,

(57:40):
you've used a sentence in your book that stick to me.
Sickness cooked her brain like a fever to the point
where she didn't even really remember the crime, right, Can
you talk to that?

Speaker 1 (57:49):
Yeah, she was really insulated from the event itself. She
seemed to the people around her to be remorseless because
she was just lost in a world of her of
her own making. From her perspective, Slenderman is coming for her.
She is right now in a jail, but she's also
there's unicorns in the jail, and there's like Barack Obama

(58:12):
is riding through naked on a purple dinosaur. Like that's
what she That's what she was seeing during that time.
So it wasn't until they put her on medication. She
told me once that it took four years for her
to accept that Slenderman wasn't coming and to realize what
she had done.

Speaker 2 (58:31):
Right, which people would say is her not showing remorse.

Speaker 1 (58:35):
Right, I'll tell you that she feels an extreme amount
of remorse. I mean it's she hates herself to this
day on such a deep level. This is something that
she lives with and relives every day. And she misses Bella.
That's why she chose her when they were children, or
that's why you know, that's why this was the crime

(58:56):
is because Morgan loved Bella, not because she hated her.
She misses her so much. From one person's point of view,
it might look like evil, and then if you look
at it in a different way, it's like this person
is extremely sick and a danger to themselves and others.
But it was definitely mistaken as remorselessness, and it wasn't that.
It was just that her reality contact was so limited

(59:17):
that she wasn't even really grounded in the realization that
she had stabbed her best friend.

Speaker 2 (59:25):
And then with a Nissa, you've talked about the kind
of learning disability, but she is also eventually diagnosed with
and I'm like, butcher this, but fully you do, which
is kind of like a shared psychotic disorder.

Speaker 1 (59:37):
Yeah. Yeah. Oh. One thing I do want to say
about the emotional, the remorse and the mental illness thing
is that something that Morgan's mom said to me that
I thought was really profound and simple and true is
that when you're when you have psychosis, you don't have emotions.
You don't have them at all. So that's another way
of looking at it. Yes, So after the crime, A

(59:59):
Nissa was diagnosed with FALIA and she got very, very
lucky in this Wisconsin legal system. In the US legal system,
it is so hard to get an NNGRI verdict not
guilty by reason of Sandy. People think it's very widespread
in common. It is statistically almost impossible to get that

(01:00:23):
verdict from jury's So she was very lucky to have
gotten it at all. But the defense was very creative.
They had to get creative because she didn't have a
mental illness. She had a learning disability, which I don't
know why they didn't lean into that more honestly, but
they might have just it might have been too precarious
an outcome, but they just The Falia did thing where

(01:00:46):
it came from is that she hadn't been diagnosed with
a mental illness, but they needed to. They were trying
to put her into a safer environment than prison, and
a hospital would have been a safer environment because she
was going to be in an adult setting regardless. And
so Falia does a nineteenth century French diagnosis, which means
the madness of tune. It basically is when one person's
mental illness spreads to the other because of the closeness

(01:01:10):
of their real relationship. And it usually only happens in
like married couples, and it does happen where two people
get wrapped in a delusion even though only one of
them has a mental illness diagnosis. And so they used
that argument with Anissa. But I thought the more persuasive thing, honestly,
was that she was so severely learning disabled. I mean,

(01:01:31):
that's kind of all you have to know in that situation.
But it was a very very like creative argument to
use and the jury, the jury agreed and they got
very lucky with that.

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
So what was the decision? What did the jury decide?

Speaker 1 (01:01:49):
The jury decided to give her an nngri verdict, which
meant that she would be serving out a sentence yet
to be determined by the judge in a hospital instead
of a prison, and he gave her twenty years, which
was less than she would have been serving in prison. Luckily,

(01:02:12):
she got up sooner. Sooner than that she didn't. She
had to spend the rest of her childhood in an
adult psychiatric board, but she got up.

Speaker 2 (01:02:20):
Morgan's proceedings happened after a niece's. How different would they
because she didn't end up going to trial. She took
a play agreement.

Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
Right, There were a couple of things happening. Bella's family
wanted to avoid a trial because if there were a trial,
then Bella would have to testify and they were really
concerned about that and what it would do to her psychologically.
Morgan's team wanted to avoid it because if she had
been found guilty, you know, she's going to go to
prison for at least sixty five years and she was

(01:02:50):
sick and she had been denied medication for nineteen months.
She was still, you know, really really struggling, and they
wanted her to get therapeutic treatment, and they thought that
that would be more likely to happen in a hospital.
There was also a concern that a niece's verdict would
had shocked the local community. People were very at odds

(01:03:13):
about it. I mean, on its face, it doesn't sound
great that a girl who conspired to stab another local
girl got out of prison time because of I mean,
the entire thing was just very controversial locally, especially because
so many of the local population did not believe that

(01:03:34):
mental illness was real, and so the fact that she
had gotten off and she didn't even have a mental
illness diagnosed was really angering to people. And Morgan's team
was concerned that if her case went to child even
though she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, even though there
was all of this documentation around her mental illness, they
were concerned that people would be so angry that the

(01:03:55):
jury would issue a reactionary verdict and at least want
to send one of them to prison, you know, So
they didn't feel like it was a short bet, even
though it probably should have been. So they took a
plea agreement and the judge agreed to give her an
energy and he sentenced her to the forensic hospital for

(01:04:15):
forty years.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
How did Bella and her parents react to those sentences
or verdicts?

Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
I mean Bella's family. What they said, their sort of
press quotes about it and things basically conveyed that it
was unfair that she didn't have to meet the harshest

(01:04:43):
consequences for her behavior. So I don't think that they
were were thrilled about it at the time. I think
that they wanted the harshest punishment for her. I think
that Bella probably is just from what I know of her,
would have been the kind of person who actually would
have been happy that Morgan was going to be at
a hospital getting sort of the help that she needed,
but that her representatives and her spokes sorry, her spokes

(01:05:06):
people said that it wasn't fair.

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
Well, these girls didn't end up serving twenty and forty years,
and Lisa got out in twenty twenty one, and as
we've mentioned, Morgan was released this year January twenty twenty five,
so three years and you know a few more than that, respectively.
Do we know how they're doing. Have you spoken to Morgan.

Speaker 1 (01:05:28):
I've heard from her family very I mean, I think
that it's surreal the idea that she might be able
to that she will that might that she will be
able to hug her mother outside of a legal medical
setting for the first time since she was twelve years old.

(01:05:49):
And I think like is struggling to wrap her mind around,
in a good way, around the idea that she might
be able to go do normal things like go to
a library, you know, be allowed in and out of
the building where she lives, you know, Like, I think
it's I think it's surreal, and I think her family

(01:06:11):
is completely overjoyed to have her back. They really didn't
think that they were gonna that they were going to
have this moment. They weren't, you know, they weren't sure
about that.

Speaker 2 (01:06:19):
So when the media started reporting on Morgan's release in
January twenty twenty five, so many years after those aditial headlines,
do you think that the media has learned anything? Do
you think society has learned anything? Are we treating this
case differently now?

Speaker 1 (01:06:35):
I think we are, I think, and I think it
makes me feel really proud again to be from Wisconsin,
a place that has such a progressive history, such a
community oriented history. And I also think that it signals
a few changes in the culture at large. I think

(01:06:56):
that there is much more awareness about mental illness and
mental health in general, and neurological diversity. You know, there's
a real understanding now of neurodiversity, and so we can
talk about the case unlike we did back then. We
can talk about the case taking for granted that these
things are true, that different human brains are different depending

(01:07:17):
on the circumstances of our upbringings and also our biology.
So the same sort of reviled girl who was really
burned by society in twenty fourteen, she can, you know, exit,
she can be released in the same people who are
so angry about her don't even know that she's out there.

(01:07:40):
They don't even know she out there anymore. So I
think I don't know that the way the internet was
in twenty fourteen, if it were still that way, I
don't know if we'd be getting this same decision, because
the judge would on the case would still feel very scrutinized.

Speaker 2 (01:07:56):
Lastly, what do you want people to take away from
hearing kind of this version of events, your version of
events from the book of kind of delving into more
than just the headline.

Speaker 1 (01:08:08):
I would invite people to be interested in the gray
areas of like good and evil. And you know, we
can be very black and white as as human beings
in terms of understanding the world. And if you put
it into these two categories, you feel a bit safer
because of course, none of us would ever be exposed
to evil because we're good, you know. But yeah, I

(01:08:32):
would just invite people into the gray area of this
story because I think once, once you understand more about it,
you realize that something like this could happen to anybody.
When a lot of people hear about this story, they think,
what if my child was stabbed? And now, having looked
at it a bit more closely, I am more haunted
by the question of like, what if my child stabs somebody?

(01:08:54):
What if I miss something like what will you know?
And and something like this happened. I think anybody, anybody,
under the wrong set of circumstances, can become an attempted killer.
And I think understanding that part of human reality and
a human psyche I don't know to me it feels important.

Speaker 2 (01:09:21):
Thanks to Kathleen for helping us to tell this story.
True Crime Conversations is a Muma MEA podcast hosted and
produced by me Jemma Bath and Tarlie Blackman, with audio
design by Jacob Brown. Thanks so much for listening. I'll
be back next week with another True Crime Conversation