Payton was stabbed 19 times by her best friend to please 'Slender Man'. Years later, she thanked her.

Morgan Geyser and Payton 'Bella' Leutner became friends aged nine, because they liked drawing 'kitty cats' together.

They were complete opposites.

Leutner was bubbly, sweet, kind and very literal. She was a typical girly girl, into rainbows and butterflies.

Geyser wore dark clothes patterned with human skulls, black heart pendants and was extremely imaginative.

The girls became fast friends, but as they grew older, Geyser's differences and behaviour at school started to become weirder.

"Fast forward two years and Bella is now becoming more liked by her peers because she's so kind and sweet, and Morgan is becoming more and more unpopular. People are really bullying her," author of Slenderman: A Tragic Story of Online Obsession and Mental Illness, Kathleen Hale told Mamamia's True Crime Conversations.

Listen to the full interview below. Post continues.

She'd started barking at other children in the playground, writing in her own blood in her notebook and scribbling the word 'die' over and over again.

Instead of alerting her parents, her teachers viewed the behaviour as "attention-seeking" and "quirky," which Hale described as an unsurprising reaction from the community of Waukesha, Wisconsin — a conservative area of America where not wanting to conform is "considered a bad character flaw".

What her teachers and parents missed, is that Geyser was becoming increasingly mentally unwell with undiagnosed schizophrenia.

Despite it all, Leutner stood by her side, and even pretended to see the imaginary friends Geyser told her about, until she started to become scared by the stories. Leutner told Geyser she didn't want to play those games anymore.

So, Geyser sought comfort in her new friend Anissa Weier, who was into paranormal stories from the site Creepypasta.com; a forum where teens and young adults shared horror stories.

Payton "Bella" Leutner, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier. Image: Facebook.

"Morgan at that point was really afraid that she might be going crazy (because she was seeing more and more imaginary people). [But Weier] goes, 'No, I think you're a medium. I think that you straddle two worlds.' So, she made Morgan feel special," said Hale.

Geyser confided in Weier that "the scariest thing she ever saw was a shadowy figure standing behind her that was really tall and thin," per Hale.

"And Anissa is like, 'I've seen him too. His name is Slender Man,'" she said.

By 2014, the fictional character of Slender Man was viral. He was tall, thin and faceless — was often written about on Creepypasta.com — and hypnotised victims into doing his dark bidding.

Watch: Who is Slender Man? 

The girls got it into their heads that Slender Man was sending Geyser 'demons' to warn her he would come back and kill her and her family, and that the only way to stop him was to offer a human sacrifice.

"When you sort of zoom out, it was two 12-year-old girls, one of whom, Anissa, had a very severe learning disability that was undiagnosed at the time, where she could not tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Then you have another girl who's severely mentally ill, and together they're trying to diagnose her, and so this is what they came up with," Hale told True Crime Conversations. 

They picked Leutner as their victim, because they believed the sacrifice had to be someone Geyser loved.

The Slender Man sacrifice.

When Geyser invited Weier and Leutner, all aged 12, to her home for a birthday sleepover in May 2014, the plan was to use the event to sacrifice Leutner.

After chickening out several times during the course of the evening, the girls went to a playground the morning after.

"You have to do it," Weier told Geyser. "Go ballistic."

Geyser straddled her best friend Leutner in the dirt, and stabbed her 19 times.

"I'm sorry….I have to do this because it's the only way to save my life. Someone from Creepypasta is stalking me," she told her.

After telling her they were going to get help, Geyser and Weier ran away and started their journey to 'Slender Mansion' where they intended to become proxies to the fictional character.

Anissa Weier (left) and Morgan Geyser (right). Image: Waukesha Police Department .

Leutner later told police she lay there for what felt like 10 minutes after being stabbed, until something inside her told her to stand up and "walk to some grass".

She said she stumbled and crawled through the woods into the sunlight then lay down again, "because it hurt too bad, and it was really hard to breathe".

After being spotted by a passing cyclist, Leutner was rushed to hospital. Her injuries required multiple life-saving surgeries and left her with scars on her arms, legs, hip, torso and chest.

Weier and Geyser were arrested soon after and were interviewed for eight hours without a parent or attorney present.

As Hale explained to True Crime Conversations, "I know a lot of people have seen clips taken out of context [and are like], 'How are these girls so callous? How are these girls so cold?' If you watch the whole thing, you're like, 'Oh, these girls are getting railroaded… tricked… these girls are children. They don't even know the difference between reality and magic.'"

She added, "You can see how mentally ill Morgan is. You can see all of the signs that she's just completely unravelling and that she's sick and that she needs help. With Anissa, I think you see a learning disability on full display."

The girls were tried as adults, and as the world learnt about what they'd done, any discussion of mental health, age or impairment was largely ignored by the media, as the girls were branded as "evil".

"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.

"I just couldn't believe what was happening 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 was the same as saying that the victim's experience didn't matter, which is not how I felt at all," said Hale, who released her book on the crime in 2023.

READ: In 2014, the 'Slender Man stabbing' shocked the world. Now, we're finally telling the real story.

After a lengthy court proceeding over many years, the girls were both found not guilty of the crime by reason of mental disease or defect.

Weier was released from Winnebago Mental Health facility in 2021 aged 19, and Geyser was released in January 2025 aged 22.

Both girls have expressed deep regret for their actions.

Bella's recovery.

The Leutner family's victim impact statement to the courts in 2017, showed the impact the stabbing had Payton. Part of her still lived in those woods with her cheek pressed into the dirt and Geyser sitting on her back.

"For months she slept in my bed; partially because she needed help getting in and out of bed, but mostly because she was afraid to sleep in her room. She wouldn't go into the basement because the last time Morgan was at our house the basement rec room was where they played and slept. When she did finally move back into her bedroom, she refused to unlock the windows or open the curtains.

"She slept with scissors under her pillow. She couldn't sleep unless I was in the room next to her and could respond to three knocks on her wall with three knocks on mine signifying 'I love you, you're safe, and I'm here,'" wrote her mother, Stacie Leutner, in a letter to the judge.

Payton "Bella" Leutner was 12 when she was stabbed by her best friend. Image: Facebook.

She explained that while outwardly Leutner seemed to recover remarkably fast, making new friends, going on sleepovers and cross-country trips with school — she was different. More "reserved and cautious".

She wanted Geyser punished to the fullest extent of the law and wrote, "I know she will not feel safe if either Morgan or Anissa are released back into the community unsupervised."

In 2019, Leutner — who goes by Payton now, not Bella — told ABC in her first public interview, "I feel like it's time for people to see my side rather than everyone else's".

"I saw the change from fifth to sixth grade when she met Anissa," she said of Geyser. "That's when I was really wanting to get out of that friendship".

She decided to remain in it, because she didn't want Geyser to be alone.

After the stabbing, she wasn't surprised to hear about Slender Man's influence, "because [Geyser] believed so hard in this thing," but she was shocked to see, "they had this big, huge plan that they had been working on for months."

Reflecting on her former best friend's mother, Leutner told the ABC, "I'm sure a lot of people are trashing on her and hating her. And saying that it was her fault, she raised [Geyser] wrong. It wasn't [Angie's] fault… Morgan's schizophrenic. There is nothing that she could have done to stop that or control that. It was not her fault."

As for what she would've told Geyser five years after the crime, Leutner even surprised herself with her answer, she admitted.

"I would probably, initially thank her," she told the ABC. "I would say, 'Just because of what she did, I have the life I have now. I really, really like it and I have a plan. I didn't have a plan when I was 12, and now I do because of everything that I went through.'"

"I wouldn't think that someone who went through what I did would ever say that," Leutner said. "But that's truly how I feel. Without the whole situation, I wouldn't be who I am."

Impressed by Leutner's maturity and understanding of the complexities of Geyser and Weier's crime, despite being the victim of it, Hale told True Crime Conversations she's "proud" of how people talk about the case now that there is more awareness about mental illness and mental health in general.

"There's a real understanding now of neurodiversity, and so we can talk about the case unlike we did back then. We're able to have a much more nuanced discussion about it."

"I would invite people into the grey area of this story because I think once you understand more about it, you realise that something like this could happen to anybody. I think when a lot of people hear about this story they think 'what if my child was stabbed?' I am more haunted by the question of 'what if my child stabbed somebody? What if I missed something?'" she added.

Feature image: ABC 20/20.