A woman convicted of repeatedly stabbing her sixth-grade classmate in tribute to “Slender Man,” a mythical horror character, was found in Illinois after escaping from her group home in Wisconsin over the weekend, police said.
The Madison Police Department said it received notification at 10:34 p.m. Sunday that Morgan Geyser, 23, had been taken into custody. Geyser cut off her GPS monitoring bracelet and left the group home on Saturday night, the department wrote on Facebook.
The department said Geyser was last seen in the area of Kroncke Drive around 8 p.m. with “an adult acquaintance” and advised people to call 911 if they see her. Geyser’s attorney, Tony Cotton, also posted a video statement on Instagram Sunday calling on her to turn herself in.
In 2014, Geyser and her friend Anissa Weier lured their classmate Payton Leutner into the woods in a Milwaukee suburb, where Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times with Weier’s encouragement.
All three girls were all aged 12 at the time of the stabbing. Leutner survived the attack after crawling out of the woods and being found by a cyclist.
Geyser and Weier told detectives they were compelled to kill Leutner to become proxies, or servants, to “Slender Man,” an online creature typically depicted as a tall, shadowy figure with a featureless white face. The attackers said they feared for their and their families’ safety if they didn’t kill Leutner.
In 2017, Weier pleaded guilty to second-degree attempted intentional homicide in a deal with prosecutors. She claimed she was not responsible for her actions because she was mentally ill at the time of the stabbing, and was committed to 25 years in a mental hospital — the maximum punishment possible, the Associated Press reported at the time. Weier was released to live with her father in 2021, after spending almost four years at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute in Oshkosh.
Geyser pleaded guilty in 2017 to attempted first-degree intentional homicide, claiming she was not criminally responsible and should not go to prison. She was committed the following year to 40 years in a mental hospital — the maximum punishment sought by prosecutors, The Post reported.
In January of this year, Geyser was placed in a group home after being granted conditional release from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute, where she had spent almost seven years. Judge Michael Bohren, who also decided Geyser’s sentencing in 2018, found that “conditional release would not pose a significant risk of bodily harm to the defendant or other,” according to notes from the hearing.
According to Madison police’s timeline of Geyser’s disappearance and subsequent apprehension, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections received an alert Saturday at around 9:30 p.m. that Geyser’s GPS monitoring bracelet was malfunctioning.
The DOC issued an apprehension request for Geyser at around midnight after the group home reported that Geyser was not there and left her monitoring bracelet. But the request was never relayed to Madison police, the department said, noting that it only found out Geyser was missing after a missing-person 911 call from the group home.
The Wisconsin Department of Corrections did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Monday.
The post ‘Slender Man’ attacker captured after cutting off GPS bracelet to escape appeared first on Washington Post.
