The Waukesha PD dispatched canines into the woods where Bella had been stabbed. They cordoned off the dead end with yellow tape and snapped photos of bloody leaves. Helicopters circled overhead. Big Bend Road became an active crime scene. As one Waukesha resident put it, “There was squad cars zooming everywhere.”
Morgan and Anissa heard the sirens from their hiding spot in a nearby ditch. They started walking hunched over so that passing cars couldn’t see them. They thought they might be shot.
Part of Anissa wanted to run home, but she didn’t have a house key with her—and she worried that if Morgan tried to walk to Slender Mansion by herself, she would be sexually assaulted, or kidnapped, or wander into traffic and get hit by a car. So Anissa sallied forth, singing songs to help calm herself down.
Years later, a psychiatrist would ask Anissa to pause at this point in her story to clarify something that he found confusing: Had Anissa gone along with the plan out of fear—because she felt frightened of Slenderman (and by extension Morgan, his proxy)—or had she done it because she wanted Morgan to herself, out of “jealousy, or something”?
“No, I wouldn’t do something like this out of emotion,” Anissa said. “I would do something else, like drugs.”
“Payback of some kind?”
“No,” Anissa said.
“I don’t quite understand,” the psychiatrist continued, “because I thought at the time in the woods you were doing it to be part of the Slenderman characters, not because Slenderman was going to kill you if you didn’t do it.”
Anissa said that it had been the result of lots of different things: She feared Slenderman. She felt excited to spend the rest of her life with Morgan in his mansion. She worried for Morgan’s safety if she didn’t go. And on top of all that, she felt scared of Morgan, thinking, “Morgan would kill me if I didn’t do it, because she would be part of Slenderman.”
The girls stopped at a nearby stream to wash off Bella’s blood—Anissa succeeded, but Morgan’s fingers remained caked in it. Just then, Anissa thought she saw Slenderman in her peripheral vision. Morgan heard a twig crack, even though, as Anissa pointed out, “no one was moving.” They ducked into the nearest woods, hoping to find Slender Mansion there and save themselves the trip to the Nicolet National Forest.
“We were by a forest and couldn’t help ourselves,” Morgan later said.
She and Anissa pushed through the trees, expecting to see a fourteen-foot-tall demon. Instead they discovered a campsite, where they stole some bug spray. Wisconsin summers could be notoriously humid, and if everything went according to plan, they would be spending eternity in a forest, where mosquitoes thrived. To summon Slenderman to where they stood, Morgan carved the Slenderman symbol into one of the tree trunks with the same knife she had used to stab Bella. She pressed her forehead against the bark. Anissa did the same. Then Morgan recited “some weird poem,” according to Anissa.
At first, nothing happened. But when Morgan repeated the poem, Anissa saw more black things in her peripheral vision, which might have been strands of her hair, she later conceded. But it was also possible that she had seen Slenderman’s tendrils. When Anissa took her head off the tree, she saw it again—and she noticed Morgan’s gaze traveling in exactly the same direction, as if they were tracking the same thing.
“And OMG we saw him,” Anissa said.
She and Morgan reasoned that Slenderman had slipped away because he wanted them to meet him in the Nicolet National Forest as planned. They had received his message, and would continue their 300-mile exodus. But first, Anissa was thirsty.
The girls hid behind some bushes. A Walmart Supercenter loomed in the distance. They knew it had a public restroom. But Walmart also had security cameras. Large flat-screen televisions played in the electronics section, broadcasting local news. Were Morgan’s and Anissa’s faces already on television? What if someone recognized them in the store and called the police?
But as Morgan reasoned, nobody batted an eye when men shopped at Walmart “basically naked.” She and Anissa had been to the local Walmart quite a bit. When the weather was warm, it seemed like there was always at least one guy pushing his shopping cart around without a shirt on, even though a sign in the window said NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE.
Morgan shrugged. “It’s Walmart,” she said.
Inside, they ducked past customers into the women’s restroom. Anissa refilled the water bottles. Morgan peeled off her black lace gloves to scrub her hands in the sink.
On their way out of the store, they passed twenty open registers. But Morgan was right—nobody looked at them twice. “We just started singing songs to each other,” Morgan later recalled. “We were surprisingly calm, actually. It was like we hadn’t just killed someone.”
From Walmart, Morgan and Anissa found their way to the Fox River, which ran through downtown Waukesha. The water flowed north, and if they kept walking north, they would get to Slender Mansion. They passed a pub called the Wonderland Tap. They hid behind a column and drank water. They reasoned that if they drank from only one water bottle at a time, the water would last longer. Morgan flipped through her photo albums and cried for what felt to Anissa like thirty minutes. Anissa decided Morgan “needed to keep her sugar levels up,” otherwise she’d just get “crazier.”
Steinhafels, a family-owned-and-operated furniture store known for being Wisconsin’s number one mattress retailer, was giving away complimentary cookies, candy, and lemonade. Inside, Anissa grabbed four cookies and two things of fruit snacks—“because I thought, ‘Hey, if we want to keep our sugar levels up, we might as well eat something kind of healthy.’” After snacking, and refilling their water bottles in Steinhafels’ public restroom, Morgan realized she had forgotten her black lace gloves back on the counter in the Walmart bathroom. She started crying again, and couldn’t bring herself to eat a second cookie.
“I wish I had my gloves,” Morgan kept saying.
Anissa was getting annoyed. She told Morgan to put the second cookie in their bag if she wasn’t going to eat it.
They continued walking north until Anissa spotted the wrong side of the WELCOME TO WAUKESHA sign, which meant they were almost to Pewaukee, the neighboring town. A busy interstate blocked their path out of the city.
Until then, they had let Slenderman guide them. But the magic seemed to wear off when they stepped away from the river. Anissa wanted to stop and ask for directions. But Morgan said they could not risk it: “Because what isn’t strange about a blond girl with creepy eyes with a blood-covered jacket?” People at Walmart might have been oblivious, but they couldn’t count on that forever.
Unsure of how to circumnavigate the highway, they walked more than three miles in the wrong direction. Five hours had passed since the stabbing. “I’m hot,” Anissa said.
They stopped at a cemetery, where they crawled under some bushes for shade. Anissa had eaten all the cookies and fruit snacks, so Morgan gave her one of the peanut butter bars from their bag. But Anissa struggled to swallow it and eventually spit it out.
“It’s disgusting,” she said.
Morgan gave Anissa one of the Kudos bars to try. But Anissa could manage only two bites of that (“nibbles,” she would clarify in her confession) before spitting it out, too. She would later wonder if the bad taste in her mouth had anything to do with “Bella laying in the forest area where we left her, dying.” What they’d done to Bella had begun “sinking in.”
“Can we go home yet?” she asked.
Morgan stared at Anissa in disbelief. “No.” She reminded Anissa they had just killed someone. If they went back home, they would die. “The consequences for murder are being murdered yourself.”
“Oh yeah,” Anissa said. “I forgot. Thanks, Morgan.”
They walked along the highway, looking for some kind of bridge or tunnel to Pewaukee. Finally, behind a Rocky Rococo pizza and pasta restaurant, they spotted an on-ramp. Unsure of how else to get across, they walked onto the busy freeway. Cars whizzed by at sixty miles an hour. One of the drivers phoned the police to report two little girls, one blond and one brunette, wandering too close to the highway. The woman’s description matched the physical descriptions of Morgan and Anissa that were being broadcast across social media.
As the adrenaline of the stabbing was replaced by thirst, sweat, and a growing sense of fear, the reality of their situation caught up to Anissa all at once, and she suffered what she later called a “nervous breakdown, and blamed Morgan for everything.”
Morgan began to pray: “Slender, if you’re listening, please help us.”
But as Anissa later told the police, no help from Slenderman arrived. No sign appeared.
“He didn’t do anything,” Anissa said. “Nothing happened.”
Anissa climbed down into a ditch that ran alongside the highway. She lay on some rocks near a stream. They had walked nearly ten miles.
Morgan followed after Anissa, worried that she might get eaten. They had seen hawks that day—“like ten hawks,” Anissa later insisted—and Morgan, confusing hawks with vultures, worried that maybe Anissa was surrendering herself to the birds. But Anissa reassured her that she was just hot again, and the rocks were cool. This wasn’t a suicide. “Stop crying.”
Morgan cried anyway. She told Anissa that water attracted mosquitoes. She urged Anissa to keep walking, before she got malaria.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Anissa said. “I wanna call my mom, I wanna go home.”
“If you do that you’ll spend your life in prison—either that or be executed.”
As if on cue, they heard sirens. Tires crunched on gravel. Car doors slammed.
“Hands!” a police officer yelled. “Hands where I can see them!”
“And then they got us,” Anissa later said.
As the police drew their guns, Morgan put up her hands in surrender. She and Anissa stumbled up the ditch toward the cops.
“They listened very well,” recalled one of the lieutenants who apprehended them that day. “They just seemed like normal girls.”
After being handcuffed, Morgan turned to one of the officers and said, “I was forced to kill my best friend.”
As the handcuffs clicked around her wrists, Anissa told another officer, “I’m Anissa, and I live on Big Bend Road.”
Surveying the dark, crusty stains on Anissa’s shirt, the officer asked her, “Are you injured? Do you need emergency services?”
“No,” she said. “I’m scared.”