Payton Isabella Leutner, nicknamed “Bella” since kindergarten, loved the color purple. She had brown hair, blue eyes, and a high forehead that lent her otherwise young features a serious, Elizabethan quality. Bella’s teachers would later describe her as a “goodie-goodie,” prone to telling on classmates for being “naughty.”
Morgan liked the way Bella drew kitties. In 2011, they started sitting together on the stairs at recess. They were both nine years old.
Other kids had considered Morgan “weirdish” since first grade. But Bella cared more about being nice than being popular. When Morgan raced around the blacktop at recess, playing tag with her imaginary friends, Bella took off running, too. She decided she would be there for all of Morgan’s adventures, even if she didn’t always understand the game they were playing.
It was a decision she would come to regret.
From the very beginning, Morgan and Bella’s friendship surprised those who knew them best. In many ways the two were opposites: while Morgan read books about serial killers for fun, Bella referred to scary stories as “mean”; while Morgan wore a black heart pendant and sneakers patterned with human skulls, Bella wore rainbows and butterfly wings. Both loved Harry Potter, baby dolls, Barbie dolls, American Girl dolls, guinea pigs, cats, and the color purple, but they practiced their devotion with varying degrees of intensity. When it came to cats, for instance, Bella volunteered at the local animal shelter. She liked to hold two kittens at a time, one over each shoulder. But Morgan wanted to be a cat. She pictured herself with fangs and cat ears, wandering around the earth, all confused and forlorn, like a lost kitten. Bella had a habit of caring for strays.
When Morgan told Bella about the voices, Bella pretended to hear them, too.
For the next three years, Bella became Morgan’s caretaker. When Morgan reached for the fire alarm at school, Bella swatted her hand away. When Morgan found a mysterious pill on the floor of the girls’ bathroom and threatened to eat it, Bella threw it in the trash. She invited Morgan to her “hippie-themed” birthday party. She watched Star Trek with Morgan, even though, according to her teachers, liking Star Trek constituted “social suicide.”
When Morgan practiced the Vulcan salute in public, Bella smiled. When Morgan dressed as Spock for Halloween, they trick-or-treated together. On a school field trip to Skateland, the local roller rink, Morgan thought it would be funny to skate holding hands with her Star Trek figurine, so Bella held one of the figurine’s hands and Morgan held the other. They circled the rink in front of everyone. When other kids whispered, they laughed.
Over time, Morgan became more and more of an outsider, while Bella blossomed socially. No longer so introverted, she was an advocate for herself and others, and she went out of her way to be nice to people other than Morgan. Bella’s classmates grew to like her. According to her teachers, she “connected with others” and was considered “nice,” “sweet,” and “warm” and “normal,” compared with Morgan, who seemed increasingly “withdrawn,” her teachers said, and “very quiet.” Adults who supervised the girls’ lunch period noticed that whenever Morgan and Bella sat down with other students, everyone around them stood up and left without a word. In class, when Morgan talked, other students rolled their eyes at her, and nobody wanted to partner up with her for group assignments. When teachers weren’t looking, Morgan’s classmates bumped into her on purpose in the hallway. They made jokes about whether Morgan’s weirdness might be contagious.
In 2012, the popular fifth grade girls offered to let Bella join their group if she stopped being friends with Morgan.
“No, I choose Morgan,” Bella said.
She wrote up a contract in her journal, promising to be best friends with Morgan forever. By way of signature, she and Morgan peed on the journal. They wanted to add footprints, too, so they filled a bowl with ink and set it down on Bella’s living room floor. But when they stepped into the bowl, it tipped over onto Bella’s mom’s favorite rug.
Morgan and Bella tried to clean up the mess using shaving cream and nail polish remover, and left the rug hanging in the laundry room. When Bella’s mom, Stacie, asked about it, they lied.
Stacie started to feel like Morgan was a bad influence on Bella. She encouraged Bella to make new friends. But Bella refused, knowing that without her, Morgan had no one.
“We were friends,” Morgan later said, “and that’s the way it was going to stay until what happened.”