In the spring of 2014, as Morgan’s twelfth birthday party approached, Anissa told on herself to her dad for reading Creepypasta, but he didn’t seem to care.
As far as Bill was concerned, Anissa had been accessing the site from her school-issued iPad, which had parental controls for filtering inappropriate content.
When no one tried to stop Anissa from reading the site, she confronted Morgan with a logic problem in the origin story of Jeff the Killer. Secretly, she was starting to wonder if what they were planning was insane.
“I did believe in him,” she later told psychiatrists, “but as it started getting closer to May, I started thinking it was crazy.”
Anissa presented her case to Morgan:
Part of Jeff the Killer’s mythology on Creepypasta was that he had used a knife to slice open the corners of his mouth, giving himself a permanently ghoulish grin. But Creepypasta also said Jeff the Killer was human, which, if it were true, meant that he needed food to survive.
“How can someone eat if the muscles are not there?” she asked Morgan.
“Get rid of all logic,” Morgan responded. “Logic doesn’t pertain to us anymore.” Morgan, who had been suspending disbelief for years, was letting Anissa in on a trade secret.
Satisfied, Anissa went back to planning the murder. Sometimes she considered telling Morgan, “No, we can’t do this.” But in the end, she always decided they were “too far in and can’t quit now.”
As Morgan and Anissa prepared to run away and live in the woods forever, they emailed each other about how hard it was to write goodbye notes to their family. At Morgan’s suggestion, Anissa tried Vulcan mind control to numb her feelings. “I almost cried … I said, ‘I love you guys and I would never hurt you’ and ‘I could never be the perfect daughter for a family like you,’” she emailed Morgan. “Then I told myself not to feel emotions and it worked!”
Leading up to the stabbing, Morgan used Vulcan mind control a lot. It allowed her to compartmentalize the murder part of the birthday from the party part, which she was genuinely looking forward to. She even emailed Bella about fun things they could do that night.
Anissa had additional non-Slenderman reasons for wanting to run away on the weekend of May 30. Specifically, Bubba and Sarah’s mom had just died. Bill had recently sat down with Anissa and her little brother to say Bubba and Sarah would be moving in with them on May 31. Bill encouraged Anissa to make her older half siblings feel welcome, warning that they were going to be sad “for quite a while” and that Anissa needed to be “good”—that it was up to her, he said, to be “supportive” and “take the older kids’ minds off of what was happening.” He would later admit to “trying to spread between the four kids, but keeping a close focus on the two who just lost their mom.”
Anissa planned to escape to Slender Mansion the day that Sarah and Bubba were moving in. While her older siblings rode with Bill from Milwaukee to Waukesha in a U-Haul van filled with their belongings, Anissa would be hiking with Morgan to the Nicolet National Forest, leaving behind a lonely gray condo filled to the brim with other people’s things.
In Mr. Cera’s classroom, Morgan crossed out the word “SCIENCE” on the torn red cover of her science notebook and wrote “PLAN” in large letters underneath. She listed defenses to use against Slenderman—presumably reasoning that he might try to kill her and Anissa before they could explain why they were there: “run like hell,” “compliment his clothes,” “slowly back away.” She doodled balloons in the margins of the page, anticipating her birthday. The red notebook also contained a packing list, which would later be introduced as evidence in court.
PEPPER SPRAY
MAP OF FOREST
CAMERA
SPRAY BOTTLE
CHEESECAKE
THE WILL TO LIVE
WEAPONS (KITCHEN KNIFE …)
Three weeks before the party, Morgan messaged Anissa from her Harry Potter email address, “hermioneg516,” which contained a numerical reference to Morgan’s birthday, May 16. In the email, Morgan instructed Anissa to delete “everything” Morgan had ever sent her. She then sent a follow-up email telling Anissa to also delete her deleted mail, so that it couldn’t be found in her trash, saying, “I’ll explain more at school.”
One week later, on May 16, Morgan turned twelve years old. To celebrate the special occasion, her parents presented her with tickets to an upcoming Star Trek convention. As a treat, they ordered in sushi for dinner. Morgan ate a vegetable sushi roll, explaining that she abhorred violence and would not eat dead animals.
Around that same time, Morgan got her first period. Shortly after, she could no longer recognize familiar faces, which twisted into unfamiliar shapes. When the family went out together and ran into their acquaintances, Matt and Angie clocked Morgan’s confusion but thought she was simply being a snotty preteen—that she was refusing to engage with their friends. They chided her for being rude.
Angie called her mother, Dianna, for advice, saying that Morgan kept “hiding in her bedroom all the time, she’s angry and moody all the time.”
“You know, Angie, I raised two teenage girls,” Dianna said. Angie and her sister had acted just the same at Morgan’s age. “This is how teenage girls behave—she just got her period. She’s going through puberty—that’s how they behave.”
Dianna would later kick herself for steering Angie wrong, saying, “I’m just as guilty as anybody.”
In hindsight the warning signs would strike Morgan’s family as obvious. But at the time, they lacked a composite picture of what was happening to Morgan. They glimpsed her dissolution in fragments: moodiness, a rubber mallet, colors that might be a migraine, voices that seemed like an excuse. Perhaps if Morgan had known about Matt’s illness, or if her parents had known about the fire in Stacie’s basement, or if Matt had been in treatment, or if Mrs. Jackson had recommended that Morgan seek treatment—maybe then they might have put the pieces together. But there was no open and honest communication among any of the authority figures in Morgan’s life, and instead, her parents were left with an incomplete picture—a picture they mistook for a typical portrait of adolescence, that normal emotional roller coaster of shocking, even horrifying, highs and lows.
“She was a teenage girl,” Dianna said. “That’s what we thought was happening.”