Curled up next to Thor, Loki, and Tulip, Morgan barely slept that night. “I don’t like sleeping at sleepovers at all,” she later said. “And all of my friends like sleep, and need sleep, for some reason.” According to the National Alliance for Mental Illness, insomnia not only exacerbates existing mental health issues, but it can also “be a sign of an impending condition,” like mania or full-blown psychosis.
At 5:30 A.M., Morgan woke Anissa, and when Anissa realized that Morgan had let her sleep past the 2:00 A.M. alarm, she became angry. She gestured impatiently at Bella’s sleeping form: “Why don’t we do it now?” But just as quickly, she had another idea: she and Morgan should go downstairs and take quizzes on Quotev.com.
In the basement, Morgan and Anissa crowded in front of the computer. Quotev was one of their favorite sites after Creepypasta. It had quizzes like “Are You Really Best Friends?” and “Does My Best Friend Like Me?” and “Is Your Best Friend a Good Friend?”
Upstairs, Bella woke to find herself alone. When she discovered Morgan and Anissa pressed together like best friends in front of the computer, she became unhappy. She wasn’t having any fun and considered going home.
Anissa told Bella she had a special question for her, which she pretended to read from Quotev.
“What would you do if someone were to come up to you and stab you?”
“I’d probably scream,” Bella said.
At breakfast, Morgan’s mom, Angie, set out strawberries and homemade doughnuts. After eating, Morgan, Anissa, and Bella pressed Bella’s Silly Putty into the sides of its plastic container to make fart noises. They played dress-up. Bella wore a pink princess costume. Anissa wore a mishmash of clothing and called herself a “prosti-troll” (half prostitute, half troll; Morgan later told the police that it “was sort of inappropriate”). Morgan dressed as the character Data from Star Trek, a sentient android who likes cats.
When Bella disappeared into the bathroom to change back into her normal clothes, Anissa turned to Morgan and, using the code word for Bella’s murder, said, “We should do ‘it’ today, at the park.”
“Okay,” Morgan said.
When it was Anissa’s turn to change out of her costume, Morgan waited for her to go inside the bathroom before telling Bella they should play a prank on Anissa. Bella found a granola bar and mixed it with the Silly Putty. When Anissa emerged from the bathroom wearing a blue shirt and elastic-waist corduroy pants, Bella and Morgan showed her the mutated Silly Putty. Anissa laughed at the prank. She threw the Silly Putty at the ceiling. It stuck there. “Wait, wait, wait! It’s sticky now!” Anissa said. But then it fell.
When it was Morgan’s turn to change, she wanted privacy, but Anissa followed her into the bathroom, so Morgan undressed in the shower. She cast aside the Data costume and put on jeans and an Owl City concert T-shirt, as well as long, fingerless black lace gloves, which her aunt had given to her as a present. When Morgan pulled back the curtain, she saw that Anissa was wearing lipstick she had found.
At 9:30 A.M., Morgan took a knife with a six-inch blade from a drawer in the kitchen. Anissa would later describe it as the sort of knife used for cutting carrots. Morgan asked her parents if she and Anissa and Bella could go to the park.
Matt and Angie conferenced. They had let Morgan walk to the park only one or two times before. But they felt her birthday marked a special occasion. Besides, everyone knows that girls are safer in a group.
Before leaving, Morgan shrugged on a winter coat and the getaway bag. She hugged and kissed her mom goodbye.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too,” Angie said.
She would not touch her daughter again for five months.
A paved path led from Sunset Homes to an elm tree shading the sidewalk on East Garfield Avenue, and just across the road sat David’s Park, five idyllic acres of flat green land, interrupted in places by trees, playground equipment, and a sandy baseball diamond. It was 75 degrees outside, but like Morgan, Anissa was dressed for the cold; anticipating what she called “gross” or “marshy” terrain in the Nicolet National Forest, she’d worn the closest thing she owned to hiking shoes: insulated snow boots. As they walked to David’s Park, she and Morgan would have felt hot and sweaty.
When Bella asked Morgan why she had brought along a big bag, Morgan said that it was full of snacks “in case we get hungry.” It wasn’t a total lie. To survive in the wild forever, she and Anissa had packed seven M&M’s-flavored Kudos bars and a box of peanut butter cereal bars. When Bella wasn’t looking, Morgan opened her coat and flashed the knife at Anissa.
“Dear God, it’s really happening,” Anissa thought.
Out of everything they had planned, Anissa felt most nervous about seeing a corpse. The last time she had seen a dead body was at her uncle’s funeral. She didn’t like it.
Anissa had decided to kill Bella in the park’s public restroom. (As she would explain to the police, “There was a drain for the blood to go down.”) After stabbing her, Anissa planned to prop Bella’s body so that it was sitting on the toilet. She and Morgan would lock the bathroom stall door from the inside and crawl out from under the stall. Anissa thought nobody would notice Bella was dead for a long time, because it would look like she was peeing, and the toilet would catch most of the blood. This would give them a head start to Slender Mansion.
But first, according to police reports, Morgan, Anissa, and Bella spent some time climbing the playground equipment “like normal kids.”
After a while, Morgan and Anissa decided it was time. Anissa told Morgan to go sing. Morgan disappeared into the public restroom and paced the stalls, singing Owl City songs. “Singing and what else?” police later asked.
“Singing,” Morgan said.
When she felt finished with singing, Morgan called for Anissa and Bella to join her in the bathroom. She claimed she had something to show them—“some vandalism” inside one of the toilet bowls.
Bella did not believe Morgan about the vandalism. But part of her wanted to see if it was true. So she followed Anissa into the girls’ bathroom.
Morgan let them into one of the bathroom stalls and locked the door behind them. “It wasn’t really true about the vandalism,” she said.
Morgan began lecturing Bella about Slenderman and “proxies.” She instructed Bella to sit on the floor in the corner of the stall. But just because it was Morgan’s birthday didn’t mean Bella had to do exactly what she said. So she sat on the floor, but not in the corner. Morgan pulled Bella’s arms behind her back. When Anissa did not immediately stab her, Morgan dropped Bella’s arms.
“I need to talk to you in the next stall,” Morgan said to Anissa. “Alone.”
Bella felt left out again as Morgan and Anissa disappeared into another stall without her. She thought she heard Morgan whispering to Anissa, “I thought we agreed you would do this.”
Inside the other stall, Morgan pushed the knife into Anissa’s hand. (“I knew where the ribs were and were not in the human body,” Anissa later explained.) But Anissa handed the knife back to Morgan. So Morgan put the knife in her getaway bag and slung it over her shoulder.
When they returned to Bella’s stall, Anissa held Bella’s arms behind her back. Morgan stared at Bella. She fondled her bag. Anissa instructed Bella, “Shut your eyes.” Reciting Jeff the Killer’s catchphrase, Anissa added, “Go to sleep.”
“No,” Bella said. She did not understand this game. “I’m not tired. I can’t do that.”
Morgan paced back and forth. She started singing a new song that Bella called “depressing.” Anissa started singing, too. No one would remember what the song was.
Morgan called Anissa over to where she was standing across the bathroom, leaving Bella sitting alone and confused with her back to the wall.
“I can’t do this,” Morgan said. “You have to do it, I’m too scared.”
Anissa hugged her.
(“She stabbed apples,” Anissa later told the police, “but she never actually cut a flesh wound into somebody.”)
When Anissa would not agree to stab Bella, Morgan asked, “Can you try to knock her out?”
“I can try,” Anissa said.
As the girls walked back toward Bella, she noticed funny looks on their faces, like maybe they’d just planned a prank or talked about something without her.
Anissa approached Bella, balling her hand into a fist. But when she hit her intended victim in the forehead, her “punch” was really more of a slow push. Bella remained conscious, albeit angry.
“Excuse you!” she snapped.
“Sorry. I got bored and I needed something to do,” Anissa said, “plus my hands got really finicky.”
As far as Bella was concerned, it was a tired excuse. She wanted to call her mother. She told Morgan she was going to leave the bathroom, and Morgan made no move to stop her. “Just go out on the playground and just play,” Morgan said dismissively.
Bella did.
In the bathroom, Anissa and Morgan huddled together, planning their next move in hushed tones. Morgan decided the concrete bathroom had too much of an echo to muffle Bella’s screams and suggested they take a walk. Anissa agreed, and the two reemerged from the bathroom to find Bella obediently playing by herself. Over the years, her patience for Morgan’s antics had likely raised Bella’s threshold for bizarre behavior. The same quality that made her a good friend now made her the perfect victim. When Morgan and Anissa told her that they wanted to go for a walk on Big Bend Road, Bella led the way without a fuss.
Morgan and Anissa lagged behind, conferencing in hushed voices about what to do next. According to police reports, “they were doing this all secretly so [Bella] would never know.” In the distance, a sign with a big red X marked the dead end on Big Bend Road. Behind it was a wooded area. Anissa pointed out the forest, still whispering so that Bella couldn’t hear: “We can take her in there and do the deed.” She reminded Morgan that they needed to be discreet and “should do it there, quietly.” Then, in a louder voice so that Bella could hear, Anissa said, “We should play hide-and-seek.”
“Hide-and-seek, that was a cover-up,” Anissa later said. The new and final plan, at that point, was to lure Bella into the woods, set her loose, and then hunt her down—“like lionesses,” Anissa, the wild animal lover, said. “Like lionesses chasing down a zebra.”
When Bella didn’t respond to Anissa’s hide-and-seek suggestion, Morgan caught up to Bella and asked if she wanted to go bird-watching in the woods. “We can document some birds.”
Bella was not in a good mood. “Whatever,” she said.
“Everybody loves hide-and-seek,” Morgan promised.
“No, I don’t want to play.”
“We can do what you want to do next.”
Bella believed in fairness. The compromise suited her. “Okay.”
Later, in a press release, Stacie would say of Bella, “She felt a need to protect Morgan and believed deeply that every person deserved at least one friend.”
The woods along Big Bend Road were overgrown and contained no trails. To follow Morgan and Anissa inside, Bella would have had to lift her legs over prickly thickets and brambles, pushing aside branches that thwacked together in her wake. Under the shade of overhanging boughs, Bella turned to her best friend, ready to play hide-and-seek.
“People that trust you,” Morgan later said, “are very gullible.”
Usually, Morgan preferred hiding to seeking. After seeing “It” in the mirror when she was a small child, Morgan used to hide under her covers. But on the morning of May 31, 2014, Morgan was it, counting down the seconds left on Bella’s life, and calling out, “Ready or not!”
According to police records, Morgan, Anissa, and Bella played one game of hide-and-seek “the normal way.” When Morgan left to count again, Anissa led Bella through the trees into a small clearing, which she later described to police as having “one really big rock, and four medium rocks, covered in moss.”
Hoping to make it easier for Morgan to stab Bella, Anissa instructed Bella to lie on her back in the dirt “stomach up.” (“So that I could sit on her chest,” she later clarified, “so that I could pin her down and get it done and over with, and then we could leave.”)
“I’m not lying in dirt,” Bella protested. “It’s all squishy and there are twigs and sharp rocks everywhere.” Bella could be very understanding about many things, but she drew the line at getting dirty. Her yellow capri pants looked better when they were clean. She started to pick flowers instead.
Frustrated by Bella’s disobedience (first in the bathroom, where she wouldn’t put herself to sleep, and now here), Anissa shoved Bella to the ground and sat on her.
“Ow! I can’t breathe!” Bella yelled. When Anissa wouldn’t move, Bella screamed, “Ow ow ow ow ow!” until Anissa got up.
Anissa hated screaming. She would later tell the police, “It’s the one thing I can’t handle.”
When Anissa spotted Morgan watching them from across the clearing, she complained to her that Bella wasn’t lying down. Anyone who studied Slenderman knew that toying with his patience was a dangerous game. It would have been easy to picture him sitting in his mansion, drumming his long, bone-white fingers on a counter, waiting for news of Bella’s demise.
Morgan’s gaze shifted to Bella, who’d gone back to picking flowers. For months, Morgan had been drawing pictures of herself with whiskers and cat ears, holding a knife that dripped blood—she’d even created her own “killer catchphrase,” just like Jeff the Killer (who whispered to his victims, “Go to sleep”):
Don’t worry, I’m just a little kitty cat.
But now she wasn’t so sure she could go through with it.
Anissa noticed that Morgan looked freaked-out. Anissa felt freaked-out, too. She crossed the clearing and hugged Morgan.
Morgan covertly handed Anissa the knife.
“I can’t do it,” Morgan whispered. “You know where all the soft spots are.”
Anissa did know where the soft spots were. She had watched Doomsday Preppers on YouTube. According to the videos, something as simple as a lollipop stick, or “sucker,” could do serious damage as long as you aimed for the stomach or the neck. (“A sucker being an actual lollipop, not, like, code words or anything,” Anissa later clarified.)
But Anissa wanted Morgan to stab Bella. “You have to do it,” she whispered back. “Go ballistic.”
“When?”
Anissa seemed exasperated. “Whenever you want!”
“I’m doing it when you want me to.”
“Go ballistic,” Anissa insisted.
“Okay, I’ll go ballistic. When you say you want me to.”
“I don’t care when you do it!”
“Whatever.”
Anissa did not like Morgan’s sullen tone. “Screw it,” she thought. “I’m scared, I want to go home and act like this never happened.” She walked away from Morgan. For a moment it seemed like nothing would happen.
But then she turned back around and said, “Kitty, now.”