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

As news of what had transpired in Waukesha, Wisconsin, started to hit the headlines in May 2014, it immediately exploded worldwide.

Two 12-year-old girls had lured a friend into the forest after a sleepover, and one of them had stabbed her 19 times during a game of hide-and-seek.

They were inspired by the fictional character Slender Man, who they'd read about on a website aimed at teens and young adults called 'Creepypasta.com', which housed amateur horror stories.

The perpetrators — Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier — were immediately demonised. Evil girls with evil hearts, who'd turned on their innocent friend Payton Isabella Leutner, or 'Bella' as they called her, in a vicious murder plot.

Watch: Who is Slender Man? Post continues below.

They were tried as adults despite their youth, and the world watched as they entered court-rooms in chains and mumbled their words and averted their eyes. Many jeered and criticised the system when they were eventually sentenced in 2017, to time in a psychiatric hospital instead of a prison.

As a Wisconsin local herself who grew up just 30 minutes away from the girls in this case, journalist Kathleen Hale watched on over the lengthy court proceedings, waiting for someone with a platform, someone in the media, to question the system. Interrogate the motive. Talk about the real story at the heart of 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," Hale, who eventually penned Slenderman: A Tragic Story of Online Obsession and Mental Illness, told Mamamia's True Crime Conversations.

Listen to Hale on TCC. Post continues below.

"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. But unfortunately, in the US, we're in this place where two things cannot be true."

As Hale explains, mental health wasn't something that was widely accepted in 2014, or even 2017 — especially in Wisconsin. In fact, during Weier's trial in 2017, Assistant District Attorney Kevin Osborne told the jury, "kids believe in Santa Claus. Is that a delusion? Yes it is."

He continued, "There are all kinds of mental diseases or defects — I daresay most people have them — I'm afraid of heights; is that a mental disease? Yes. Would it justify me doing things like the defendant did in this case? Absolutely not."

It was that very attitude to mental health that underpins why the main perpetrator in this case — Geyser, who did the actual stabbing — was left undiagnosed for so long.

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

In reality, she struggled with early-onset childhood schizophrenia, which Geyser explained to Hale during their lengthy chats together. It first manifested for her as a toddler.

"Some of her first memories are being bitten by ghosts…she would see colours floating like chalk or dust in front of her face. She would see rainbow colours dripping down the walls of her bedroom, and gradually her world became populated by imaginary friends," Hale told True Crime Conversations.

Despite her own father being diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorder, Geyser's parents made the decision not to tell her about his illness until she was 16 so as not to scare her, completely missing the fact she herself was struggling with the same thing.

"Morgan had no one to talk to about the things that she was seeing and hearing, the hallucinations that she was having," explained Hale.

A loner at school, her peers and teachers knew she was different and 'weird.' She'd repeatedly write 'die' in her notebooks, draw in her own blood and bark at children in the playground.

Her best friend Leutner — the complete opposite to her in so many ways — stood by her friend, and shielded her from criticism. But Leutner loved rainbows and butterflies and started getting scared by Geyser's stories.

"I don't want to play this game anymore. You're scaring me," she told her.

So when Weier moved to their school — a girl who loved magic, dark forces and horror stories, the two girls descended together down the wormhole that was 'Slenderman' and his adventures on Creepypasta.com.

The faceless character with eerily long arms and tentacles on his back, was known to lure people with mind control and force them to do his dark bidding. First emerging online in 2009, by 2014 it had gone viral. But to Weier and Geyser, he was more than a character — he was real.

Weier and Geyser after their arrest. Image: Police images.

They decided he was one of the voices and faces that was appearing to Geyser, and that he was going to come and kill her and her family unless they sacrificed another human being in his name, like in the scary stories they'd read.

It was in this dangerous and warped environment — with Geyser, who was severely mentally unwell, and Weier, who had an undiagnosed learning disability that left her struggling to tell the difference between reality and fantasy — that the two 12-year-olds began to plot murder.

How a sleepover birthday party turned deadly.

It's impossible to tell this story without also talking about what was mentally going on with both Weier and Geyer, and yet for so many years that's how this case was reported.

There is no escaping or excusing the brutality of the crime. What happened to 12-year-old Leutner was simply devastating, and her bravery in crawling her way out of that forest and into the path of a passing cyclist who called for help, is remarkable.

But in reading Hale's recount of the 24 hours that transpired before the attempted murder, what jumps out the most is the absurdity and naivety of the way these two 'killers' behaved.

"When you read the police reports and the interviews and the way that they were thinking, the things that they were doing — they were so unbelievably, shockingly young. The way that their minds worked with the absurdity of a child's mind in that narrative leading up to the stabbing….it's absurd," Hale told True Crime Conversations.

The night before, the girls had gone skating, played Sims on the computer, opened Geyser's birthday gifts and ate cheesy puffs. The morning of the stabbing, they'd played dress ups and eaten donuts.

Bella was different to her friends, in that she wasn't into the dark horror stories they were. Image: Facebook.

Geyser and Weier had planned to kill Leutner while she slept, but they'd been too tired, then they chickened out. Their plan changed the next day to taking her to the park. They thought they might try in the public bathroom first, but again, couldn't do it.

"Anissa tried to knock Bella unconscious, which sounds quite violent….but she sort of just pushed Bella's head. She thought to kill someone you just kind of 'boop' them on the head like in a video game," said Hale.

Eventually, during a game of hide-and-seek, Geyser followed through with their plan. She straddled Leutner and started stabbing her. The reason she survived was because Geyser's stab wounds weren't that deep, and they happened to miss vital organs by millimetres.

The girls fled the scene, promising to get help. But in their minds they were embarking on the next phase of their plan — after completing their mission as proxies to Slender Man, they were going to join him at 'Slender mansion'. They had no idea about the magnitude of what they'd just done, and were very quickly picked up by police and whisked away into hours-long interviews without any parents present.

"I know a lot of people have seen clips [from their interviews] taken out of context, and it's like, 'how are these girls so callous? How are these girls so cold? How do they not care what they've done?' [But] if you watch the whole thing, you're like 'Oh, these girls are beng railroaded…tricked. Where is the advocate? They have no idea what's happening. They don't even know the difference between reality and magic,'" said Hale.

The other thing that Hale says is quite obvious from the police interview, is how mentally unwell Geyser is.

"You can see all the signs that she's just completely unravelling and that she needs help. You can see that she's in a state of psychosis, and the police officer is treating her like a serial killer."

The 'real' story.

When this story broke in 2014, it was at a time when the conversation about the internet and screens and the damage it could cause to our children was only just starting to emerge.

But as Hale explained, the focus was solely on the influence of Slender Man and the websites that fuelled it, completely ignoring and eradicating mental health from the narrative at all.

"This case became basically the equivalent of two witches bewitched by the evil internet into violence….the mental health side of things was treated very much like a legal defence — like something that conveniently offered itself to a shorter sentence," Hale told True Crime Conversations.

It also completely seemed to forget that these girls were 12. They were still being tucked into bed at night by their parents.

"I was really shocked that no one even stopped to question the fact that 12-year-olds were being tried in adult court. I think people in this country have gotten really desensitised to seeing children tried as adults," said Hale.

It took three years of delayed court proceedings for the girls to be sentenced, during which time Geyser spent time in a psychiatric ward where she was finally officially diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Alongside her learning disability, Weier was also diagnosed with folie à deux, also known as "shared psychotic disorder," which is a rare condition where a person develops a mental illness due to a close relationship with someone who has a mental illness.

In 2017, they were both found not guilty by reason of insanity — Weier after a trial, and Geyser after a plea agreement.

Geyser photographed in court in 2017. Image: AAP/Michael Sears.

Anissa Weier in court in 2017. Image: AAP.

Weier was told she would spend a maximum of 25 years in Winnebago Mental Health Institute, while Geyser was given a potential maximum of 40 years. Both were told they'd be subject to ongoing evaluations and would be able to petition for release every six months.

Weier was released in 2021, and Geyser was released just recently in January 2025.

As far as the crime itself, Geyser doesn't remember a lot from the stabbing. As Hale explained in her book, "sickness cooked her brain like a fever".

"She was really insulated from the event itself. [She seemed] to the people around her to be remorseless, but she was so lost in a world of her own making. From her perspective, Slender Man is coming for her," she added, in conversation with True Crime Conversations.

"It wasn't until they put her on medication….she told me it took her four years to accept that Slender Man wasn't coming and to realise what she had done. I'll tell you that she feels an extreme amount of remorse…she hates herself to this day."

Weier expressed remorse for Leutner from her initial interrogation, asking about her well-being and expressing that she was "happy" she was alive. In jail, she sobbed trying to understand "how her brain had let her do this," and in court she said she would do "whatever she had to do to make sure she did not experience any sort of delusion of whatever again."

In 2019, Leutner was asked by 20/20, what she'd like to say to Geyser.

"I would probably…thank her," she said. "Because of what she did, I have the life I have now, which I really, really like — I'm surprised to hear myself say that — I wouldn't think that someone who went through what I did would ever say that. But it's truly how I feel."

When asked about Geyser's mum, she expressed remorse for her and said, "I'm sure a lot of people are saying that it was her fault, that she raised her wrong. And it wasn't her fault. Morgan's schizophrenic."

"Without the whole situation, I wouldn't be who I am." In new exclusive interview with @DavidMuir, stabbing survivor Payton Leutner says she would “thank” her attacker. #ABC2020 #TheWicked https://t.co/OfBXK4EL9Q pic.twitter.com/QDZYMhWqtG

— 20/20 (@ABC2020) October 26, 2019

Coverage of the Slender Man story and Geyser's release being ordered in 2025, is world's apart from the headlines of 2014, which is something that Hale says makes her "feel really proud".

"It signals a few changes in the culture at large. I think that there is much 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," she told True Crime Conversations.

With that in mind, Hale thinks parents can learn a lot more from this story through a 2025 lens.

"I would invite people into the grey area of this story because I think once you understand more about it, you realise 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 more closely, I am more haunted by the question of 'what if my child stabbed somebody? What if I missed something?'"

The full True Crime Conversation with Kathleen Hale about the 'Slender Man stabbing' will be released on January 30. Subscribe here, so you don't miss it.

Feature image: Police photo.