In January, a polar vortex swept through the Midwest, bringing with it the coldest temperatures in decades. Drivers loaded sandbags into their trunks to keep the wheels from skidding. Snowplows combed the highways, using liquid cheese brine to melt the icy roads. The Wisconsin State Journal promised readers, “If we can make it to Thursday without going cold crazy, we should be okay.”
After the sun set at 4:30 P.M., Morgan stared into her computer screen. Hoping that for now the plan itself would be enough to satisfy Slenderman’s bloodlust, she checked out books from the library on crime and punishment and crime scenes. Morgan was consumed by paranoia about Slenderman. She ventured into the part of the basement where her mom kept gardening tools, and retrieved a black rubber mallet with a twelve-inch handle, which Angie used to pound stakes into the ground for flowerbeds.
Morgan put the mallet in her backpack for protection and carried it to school. When she was putting away her things, the mallet fell out. Another student saw this and tattled on Morgan to teachers, saying she had seen a “sledgehammer.”
In the principal’s office, Morgan told Assistant Principal Woosencraft, a toothy man with pale red hair, that she had brought the mallet to school in case she needed to defend herself. Instead of asking follow-up questions about what Morgan might need defending from, Mr. Woosencraft said, “You were not being threatened by anyone and have no specific need for protection.” He told Morgan the school had a zero tolerance policy for weapons and suspended her for one day.
It was the most severe punishment Morgan had ever experienced. She crumpled to the ground crying and begged Mr. Woosencraft not to call her parents.
Later, as Morgan waited for her dad to collect her from school, a secretary noticed Morgan talking to herself. The secretary informed Assistant Principal Woosencraft, and Woosencraft informed Matt.
On the ride home, Morgan tried to explain that she hadn’t actually been talking to herself but to the voices in her head; she told Matt about the colors, too, and the demon kid, and the man she’d seen in the mirror. According to Morgan, Matt did not believe her, saying, “Okay, whatever,” and accused her of “making stuff up to get out of trouble.”
“I don’t know what kid pretends to hear voices to get out of trouble, though,” she mused years later. “They could have gotten me help. But instead they said I was trying to get attention.”
That night, when Angie returned from work at the OR, she heard Morgan talking to herself in her bedroom.
“Who are you talking to?” Angie asked.
“Voldemort.”
Angie brushed it off. Like Matt, she believed that Morgan was acting out on purpose to distract them from the suspension.
“And I don’t know,” Angie recalled years later, “we thought it was some weird ploy to try to get out of trouble. I don’t know if that makes sense at all—you know, kids do and say strange things when they get in trouble, and that’s what we thought it was. And it stopped, you know. She did it that day and then she never did it again. So we just thought it was some weird thing she was saying. Like, ‘Maybe if I pretend to be crazy, I won’t get in trouble for what I’ve just done.’”
She paused, before adding in a soft, sad voice, “But clearly it was more than that—I mean in retrospect, obviously it was.”
While Wisconsinites braved the deep freeze, Morgan passed her one-day suspension at home talking to Sev, Maggie, and the others. She performed internet searches for the following:
• “How to cover up a murder/YouTube”
• “What makes your conscience feel guilty about killing someone or homicides. Answers.com”
• “Can you get arrested for killing someone in self defense”
Sometimes, when she was alone, Morgan sensed someone watching her, but when she called out, “Who the fuck is in here?” nobody responded. At one point, she saw President Barack Obama galloping by on a unicorn, fully naked. (“What the fuzz?” Morgan thought.) She sent Anissa desperate, rambling emails, saying, “By the way right now I would like nothing more than to be put in a strait jacket [sic]. Help me. I keep seeing things,” and “I don’t know who, but someone is growing closer and closer to me. In a sort of creepy away. I hear footsteps in the hall. Gotta go …”
After one day at home, Morgan returned to Horning Middle School as planned. Before going to class, she met with guidance counselor Angie Jackson. As a sixth grader, Morgan was still new to the school and had never been to the guidance counselor’s office before.
“How are you doing?” Mrs. Jackson asked.
Morgan replied that she was happy to be back and “not worried about the other kids.”
“Do you know why you were suspended?”
“I brought the rubber mallet to school for protection. It was dumb.”
“Why did you need a mallet for protection?”
Morgan paused. She had already tried telling her parents and couldn’t risk upsetting Slenderman by tattling on him.
“I only said that because I didn’t know what else to say.”
Mrs. Jackson later told the police that Morgan “seemed like everyone else.”
Before letting her return to class, Mr. Woosencraft checked on Morgan. He noticed that Morgan seemed unusually nervous.
“Everything is okay,” she assured him. “I will not hurt anyone. There will be no more problems.”
He dismissed her with no further questions.
Shortly thereafter, another student tattled on Morgan for writing the word “die” over and over again in her notebook, and Morgan was sent back to Mrs. Jackson.
“Do you know why you’re here?” Mrs. Jackson asked again.
“Yes.”
Morgan told Jackson the word “die” was from a comic.
Mrs. Jackson phoned Matt, who said he knew about the notebook and had warned Morgan not to bring it to school. Before dismissing Morgan, Mrs. Jackson told her not to write the word “die” at school.
After the stabbing, Mrs. Jackson would tell police that throughout their meeting Morgan had seemed “very upset and very agitated,” but “that if she felt that something was wrong that she would have made a referral to the parents for outside resources.” In Morgan’s case, she “did not feel it was necessary” because she “saw no red flags.”
Like many public school teachers, the staff at Horning was overburdened and underpaid. Their students struggled to scrape by in standardized testing, which helped determine the school’s funding, with only about 20 percent of the student body scoring proficient or better in math and reading. Though Horning boasted a respectable student-to-teacher ratio of eleven-to-one, instructors often had their hands full, not just with behavioral issues related to the onset of puberty, but also with helping the school’s large population of low-income students navigate the systemic inequalities of the public school system. The school’s two guidance counselors, who between them served 680 students, were not much better off.
When it came down to it, Morgan’s teachers had neither the time nor the training to effectively distinguish the early signs of a severe mental illness from the myriad other ways that the student body was struggling.
In their later conversations with the police, Morgan’s sixth grade teachers echoed Mrs. Jackson’s nonchalance. Yet all of them also described witnessing objectively bizarre, troubling behavior from Morgan in the months leading up to her crime. On the playground, she was seen barking at other children, and tossing bugs at them. In class, she flew into nonsensical tirades, laughing uproariously for no reason and at inappropriate times. At lunch, she and Bella ran giggling to their favorite teacher, Jill Weidenbaum, a teacher of fourteen years, to say that Voldemort was chasing them. Mrs. Weidenbaum encouraged Morgan to fit in, warning her that if she kept barking and talking to herself, other kids would not sit with her.
But while teachers noticed nothing amiss with Morgan because she was “never defiant” and “did not rebel,” children smelled something “off” about her and tattled on her constantly. In math class, a classmate saw Morgan pick a scab off her knee and paint in her notebook with the blood. She kept picking and painting, picking and painting, using her knee as an artist’s palette. The classmate told on Morgan to their math teacher, Diane Giese, who told Morgan to stop and clean up. When Morgan did so, it reassured Mrs. Giese that she did not need to talk to Morgan about “personal things.” As with Mrs. Weidenbaum’s, her one concern revolved around Morgan’s social status.
“I was worried that, you know, if she were playing with her blood, that kids would talk about it, and it wouldn’t help her to, you know, fit in.”
Mrs. Giese felt that Morgan was trying to be “weird on purpose” and “had an attitude like ‘screw all of you’ to get attention.”
Later, in their interviews with police, all of Morgan’s sixth grade teachers would use the words “attention seeking” and “quirky” to describe Morgan; Mrs. Weidenbaum focused on guiding Morgan away from what she called “negative attention,” because “she thought that Morgan was purposely doing weird things to get attention.” Even the student who reported Morgan for the “sledgehammer” would be written off by Mrs. Jackson as “a character with a lot of issues of her own … very attention seeking.”
“The children all came and said to the teachers ‘this is happening, something’s wrong’—and the adults all said, ‘quirky, wants attention,’” Anissa’s attorney later said at trial. “There were warnings, there were signs—and as adults, we whistle past the graveyard because we don’t want to see that a child is sick. We want it to be a phase, we want to look away, we don’t want to see it, because it frightens us—a parent doesn’t want to see it, a teacher doesn’t want to tell. It’s hard, and it’s hidden. But we need to be more open about mental illness in our society. We wouldn’t be here if we were.”