As they drove to the Waukesha police station, Matt and Angie debated whether to let Morgan go to the upcoming Star Trek convention as planned. They had brought along her inhaler, concerned the long walk to Pewaukee may have aggravated Morgan’s lifelong asthma.
Matt checked his blind spots, swallowing the anticipatory dread that always came before meeting eyes with the devil in his rearview mirror. Years later, he would explain to a documentary filmmaker how it was possible to fear a hallucination, though he knew that’s all it was: just a hallucination. It smiled and moved; you could see it and smell it—and when it reached for you, you felt its touch.
“I know the devil’s not in the back seat,” he said in the documentary, tears running down his face. “But the devil is in the back seat.”
Matt and Angie parked outside the precinct. Though police had raided their condo, they still assumed that there had been some kind of mistake. Had they been served with a warrant, the warrant would have explicitly laid out what the officers had been granted permission to search in the investigation of Morgan’s alleged crime. Instead, the Geysers had willingly handed over their computer and other belongings, assuming that they had nothing to hide. Worst-case scenario, they thought Morgan had wandered farther than the park without their permission. Like Bill Weier, they had been told only that one of the three girls had been injured, while the other two had gone missing. They had no other information.
In the basement of the Waukesha police precinct, Officer Dan Klein deposited Bella’s yellow capri pants and rainbow heart shirt—now known as Property Inventory #14-027629—into inventory dryer #2, later explaining in his police report that “some of these items were still soaked in blood and wet.”
Upstairs, Detectives Thomas Casey and Michelle Trussoni braced themselves for the arrival of Morgan’s and Anissa’s parents. They had decided not to let Morgan or Anissa make a phone call or to tell their parents what was happening. As Casey later explained, “We find that people are more truthful when they don’t have their parents present.” In Wisconsin it was legal for police to interrogate children without first offering them a phone call. It was also legal to interrogate them without a parent or advocate present, unless the child specifically asked for an attorney.
Matt held the door for Angie as they went inside. In the precinct lobby stood a large bronze statue of a child and police officer holding hands, called The Waukesha Protector. In the corner, a memorial to the police horse Fibber sat in a glass shrine, praising the late animal for being “well known by the children of Waukesha.” Free pamphlets printed in 1992 cautioned parents to protect their children by locking guns in a safe and providing supervision at the swimming pool. (“KIDS ARE NOT WATERPROOF!”)
“It is illegal to sniff or be high from sniffing,” read one pamphlet on inhalant abuse. “It is also illegal to sell products to a minor for sniffing purposes … Find out how much your child knows, but be careful not to give any ‘new ideas.’”
As Matt and Angie waited for someone to tell them what was going on, Detective Casey entered the lobby through a series of metal detectors. The machines beeped in response to the gun on his hip. He wore taupe khaki slacks and a crisp white-and-gray-striped golf polo. He reassured Matt and Angie that everything was fine—he just needed to ask Morgan a few questions.
Angie pushed her uneasiness aside. Like most people in the suburbs, she and Matt trusted law enforcement. Police officers attended show-and-tells at local elementary schools. They knelt on soft rugs and read little children stories—and as midwesterners, the Geysers were conditioned to be polite at all costs. Good things would happen if they waited their turn and maintained a level of decorum. Morgan was okay, that was the most important thing, and as far as Angie knew, all her daughter had done wrong was walk by herself down a busy road. They could deal with it at home.
In interrogation room #144, Anissa fiddled with her friendship bracelet. Officers milled around her, taking pictures and DNA samples. The officers murmured to each other in somber tones, verifying they were following the correct procedure for the collection of fingernail and saliva samples. Since Waukesha didn’t have many serious crimes, the officers were inexperienced in DNA collection, and treated each piece of evidence as a learning opportunity.
The officers’ professional demeanor was tinged with curiosity and with the natural adult impulse to make a child comfortable. One began to talk to Anissa, commenting about school. Perhaps to his surprise, Anissa responded quickly to the small talk. In a bright voice, she told them that it was her first year of middle school. She discussed her fingernail polish. When asked whether she was looking forward to summer break, which started in two weeks, Anissa said, “Yeah!”—not yet understanding that her plot to murder Bella would change her summers forever.
“Any big plans?” the officer asked her. “Like going up north or anything?”
“So far all I know is that I’m going to be staying at my mom’s house most of the time.”
“Those are some dirty nails,” the cop replied, scraping blood from underneath Anissa’s fingernails. “I will give you that much!”
Sounding self-conscious, Anissa said, “Yeah.”
“It is what it is, right? I always find that when my fingernails get dirty, you know, I just run them through my hair.” He handed a colleague the baggie containing Anissa’s cheek swab and instructed him to label it “‘Cheek’ … or whatever.” He passed him the baggie containing DNA from Anissa’s right hand and instructed him to label it “Left hand.” When Anissa pointed out the error, the officer was grateful. “Thinking one thing, saying the other! Thanks for catching that,” he said.
It was decided that Trussoni would interrogate Anissa and Casey would take Morgan. Both were seasoned cops with thirty years of law enforcement between them. But despite Casey’s assertion that young people were more honest when interviewed without their parents, neither he nor Trussoni had any experience interrogating children. Still, Trussoni had nieces and nephews, and Casey had a daughter around Morgan’s age—and perhaps they thought that counted for something.
Detective Trussoni made her way to Anissa’s interrogation room. Her blond hair was held back in a butterfly clip. She had woken that day thinking, “Gorgeous day out—the earlier I get in, the earlier I get out and put in my eight.” But as soon as she had arrived at the station, Trussoni had been dispatched to the hospital to check on an assault victim. When she arrived, she found a twelve-year-old girl covered in stab wounds, unable to speak. As Bella was rushed into triage, Trussoni had tried to get what information she could. Though Bella was in too much pain to talk, she had nodded and shaken her head at Trussoni’s questions. She indicated that she had been attacked by her best friend and that another girl had been present—a girl police already knew was Anissa. When it became clear Bella was in no state to give her any more information, Detective Trussoni and Officer Klein were sent on an equally tough assignment: telling Bella’s mother what had happened. It was the sort of visit Trussoni would later describe as “never fun.”
What Trussoni knew, upon arriving back at the station to interview Morgan and Anissa, was that one or both of them had stabbed Bella. The only way she was able to make sense of Bella’s injuries, Trussoni later said, was to think, “Maybe this was all about a boy. This was a fight about a boy.”
“Um, this is about Morgan,” Anissa warned, after Trussoni entered the interrogation room. “She can be a little droopy and, like, get off task; it’s hard to figure out what she’s saying in the middle of the sentence a lot.”
“Huh,” Trussoni said. “Okay.”
“She hears voices.”
When Trussoni didn’t immediately respond, Anissa added, “I just wanted to tell you—”
“So I’m aware of that?” Trussoni interrupted. “So I’m not put off by that?”
Anissa nodded.
“Okay. Well, thank you for telling me that. I’ll be right back, honey.”
She left the room to confer with Casey.
Over the course of that day, he and Trussoni would question the girls for a combined total of eight hours. But no one would mention the voices again.
A fight over a boy was something that Detective Trussoni could wrap her head around. But voices were not. So she let the matter drop. Thinking back on that moment years later, Trussoni said, “I’ve never gone into an interview so blind as I have in this one.”
In interrogation room #137, Morgan stood with her hands cuffed behind her back and her legs crossed at the ankles. An overhead vent blasted cold air into the small concrete room. Officers milled around her, photographing her bloody clothes.
When Detective Casey entered, he unlocked Morgan’s handcuffs. “Gonna take these off,” he said. “Make you a bit more comfortable.” Perhaps he had been expecting the gesture to build some goodwill with Morgan. Maybe she, like Anissa, would be eager to chat about her classes and summer plans.
As soon as the cuffs were released, Morgan shoved at the air around her, as if pushing away something no one else could see. Her face remained emotionless, even slightly slack jawed. Casey took a step back, watching with curiosity and trepidation as Morgan flapped her hands around like birds, staring at nothing with her head tilted slightly to one side.
Had a psychologist been observing the interrogation, he or she might have pointed out that “flat affect” of Morgan’s face—a possible sign she was experiencing mental distress—and referred to Morgan’s hand flapping as a “stereotypy,” a repetitive but purposeless movement compulsion, another common symptom of untreated schizophrenia.
But no psychologist was present for the interrogation, and Detective Casey could only interpret Morgan’s behavior through the lens of his police training. As Detective Trussoni was put at ease by Anissa’s normalcy, Detective Casey took Morgan’s apparent unruliness as the sign of a bad attitude.
Casey asked Morgan to hold her hands at her sides—“if you want,” he added, the note of warning in his voice veiled by midwestern politesse. Morgan took him literally, interpreting his words as a suggestion. Her fingers drilled the air, as if playing invisible piano keys, until finally Casey demanded, “Hold them at your side.”
This was going to be a difficult interview.
Morgan obediently lowered her arms to her sides. Another officer swabbed her cheeks. “About as much fun as going to the dentist,” he quipped, but Morgan didn’t respond. In the hallway, other officers could be heard asking each other questions. Solving the kinds of crimes that occurred in Waukesha did not usually necessitate gathering chromosomal evidence. One recent case, considered serious by locals, involved a man attempting to break into an ATM using a forklift. Between the CCTV footage and the forklift, it was pretty much an open-and-shut case.
After leaving to change out of her bloody clothes, Morgan returned to the interrogation room wearing navy-blue jail scrubs. When she sat in the chair, her feet did not touch the ground. Her eyes darted around the room, as if watching a trapped bird. Maggie, the oldest voice in her head, screamed, “Plead the Fifth! Don’t tell them anything!”
Detective Casey spun a plastic chair to face hers. Upon first glance, he appeared casual and unhurried, his legs crossed left over right, his elbow resting on the interrogation table. But his inability to meet Morgan’s eye belied some discomfort. No doubt he was weighing the proper interview techniques to use on a twelve-year-old attempted murderer. In the next room, Detective Trussoni had opted for “maternal” and was making excellent progress with the approval-starved Anissa. But Morgan didn’t seem so eager to please Casey.
“Well, I’m a detective here at the Waukesha Police Department,” he started. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Morgan said.
“And something happened today. So I gotta talk to you about that for a little bit.”
“Okay.”
“What’d you do for your birthday?”
“Mommy and I had sushi, and cupcakes, with Daddy.”
Casey scratched his ear and shifted in his chair. “My daughter just had her eleventh birthday, and we had sushi, too.” He sounded uneasy about the coincidence. “You’re a year older than her, though.” Taking a deep breath, he added, “That’s funny that you both like sushi.”
He glanced fleetingly at the expressionless child sitting in front of him. Despite shyly hugging her knees to her chest, she stared straight into his eyes. In a monotone voice, she told him that she had gone as a vampire for fifth grade Halloween and as Spock for sixth grade Halloween.
“A vampire?” Casey still could not meet her gaze. He kept his eyes on his notes. “That doesn’t sound Star Trek related.”
“Nope.”
“How’d you pick a vampire?”
“Because all the other costumes looked a bit showy.”
“What do you mean by showy?”
“I don’t like wearing short sleeves or poufy stuff. They were too revealing.”
“That makes sense.”
When asked about her school performance, Morgan said, “I think I do pretty good.”
“When’s your last day of school let out?”
“I don’t know. I’m not excited because I like school.”
Now confident that his subject was at least talking, Detective Casey took the opportunity to begin quizzing her on common facts, doing a sort of impromptu mental check. She knew that the president was Barack Obama. She knew her home address. She knew what day of the week it was.
Satisfied that his subject was mentally sound, Detective Casey was ready to begin the interrogation in earnest. But first Morgan needed to be Mirandized.
“Have you had your rights read to you before?”
“Earlier today. When I was in a car, with a police officer—I don’t know, like twenty minutes ago?”
She listened as Detective Casey read her the Miranda rights from a piece of paper. At the bottom of the page was a line for her signature.
Seven years earlier, the American Bar Association had assembled a task force that found “young people are less competent to understand their legal rights, and therefore deserve greater scrutiny and protection before waiving their rights to counsel or making incriminating statements.” But the American Bar Association held little authority in Wisconsin, the only state in the nation where attorneys could practice law without first passing the bar exam.
When Casey finished reading Morgan her rights, he handed her a pen. Morgan hesitated before signing the document, explaining to Casey that she wasn’t very good at cursive script. When they learned it in school, she had paid attention at first, but when she had not immediately mastered the handwriting, she had stopped practicing at all. From her bedroom, police would later uncover stacks of drawings, most of them Slenderman illustrations and sayings about him she had seen online: “HE STILL SEES YOU,” “NEVER ALONE,” “SAFER DEAD,” “AT THE END OF THE PATH, HE WAITS.” But one picture stood out from the rest: a half-finished Slenderman portrait, crossed out in a fit of frustration, a giant, angry X through its center. Next to it, Morgan had written, “GRR! I CAN’T DRAW!” She was a perfectionist with an all-or-nothing mentality.
After Morgan took the pen from Casey, he asked, “Is that usually how you hold a pen?—No way. Are you a sloppy writer?”
“No,” Morgan snapped.
Suddenly she forgot what she was doing. She stared at the Miranda rights document. “Do I write my name?”
“Yeah, ‘Morgan.’”
When Morgan stopped there, Casey prompted, “‘Geyser.’”
“I’m gonna sign it too,” he continued. “So no one can say it was something different later.”
When they were finished, Casey asked, “So what’s going on with you? Why do you think you’re here today?”
“Because Anissa and I ran off after hurting Bella.”
“Tell me what happened with Bella.”
“Um.” Morgan was reluctant. “What do you mean?”
“Tell me what happened when you first woke up this morning.”
Morgan did. She started with waking up, then talked the detective through the mundane details of her morning at home. Detective Casey took detailed notes, pausing every now and then to verify specifics, like the spelling of Quotev, the quiz website, and the origins of the clothes they’d used for dress-up.
Morgan described how the girls got to the park and how Anissa had suggested they go for a walk.
“Then she jumped on Bella,” Morgan said. “And she held her to the floor.”
Detective Casey was caught off guard. “Anissa did this?” He was clearly referring to the stabbing, but Morgan didn’t clarify that she was talking about Anissa holding Bella down during hide-and-seek.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Where did this happen?”
Morgan explained that they had gone into some trees to look at plants. “And then we stabbed her.”
Clearly Detective Casey had expected a bit more lead-up to the story’s climax, but Morgan was reluctant to give the details of how exactly Bella’s stabbing had come about.
“So did you talk about doing this beforehand?”
“Anissa told me we had to.”
“Why?”
“Because she said he’d kill our families.”
“Who’s ‘he’?”
Morgan paused, worried that if she tattled on Slenderman he would murder her.
“A man,” she said. “I didn’t know him. But Anissa knew him.”
Detective Casey tried a different tack. He asked where the knife had come from (Morgan’s kitchen) and how long they had been planning the stabbing (since December).
“She was my best friend since fourth grade,” Morgan said, unexpectedly bringing the conversation around to Bella. Detective Casey continued to ask about who had chosen Bella as a victim and who else might be involved in their plan. It seemed to him that Morgan was gearing up for a full confession. But her explanation was frustrating in its simplicity.
“Anissa made it seem necessary,” she said. “And I figured if it was necessary, then I would.”
Meanwhile, just down the hall, Trussoni admired Anissa’s friendship bracelet. “Oh, they’re neat. My nieces and nephews gave me the rubber band one.” She inquired about Anissa’s appetite. “Are you doing okay? Is it warm enough in here? It gets a little chilly.”
Anissa piped up, “Can I ask a quick question?”
Trussoni likely thought Anissa might ask whether Bella was going to be okay, a question Trussoni didn’t yet know the answer to. At that moment, Bella was undergoing her second emergency surgery. Trussoni braced herself. “Sure,” she said.
Anissa stared at her lap, a note of anticipatory pride in her voice as she asked, “I just wanted to know how far I walked, because I’m usually not very athletic and I just want to know.”
Trussoni seemed taken aback by the question.
Anissa listed some of the landmarks she and Morgan had passed during their escape to Slender Mansion. “You know that Kmart that closed down in Waukesha?”
“Off of Sunset?” Trussoni said. “I do, mm-hmm.”
Anissa said she and Morgan had walked from there all the way to Steinhafels.
“Okay,” Trussoni said.
“Do you know how far that would be?”
Trussoni pointed out that there were multiple Steinhafels in the area. “Is it the Steinhafels, like, by the car dealership? By, like, Fleet Farm? That Steinhafels? I’m not positive which Steinhafels.”
To help narrow down “which Steinhafels,” Anissa described signs she’d seen nearby, including one with arrows on it. She showed Trussoni which way the arrows were pointing using her fingers.
In a gentle voice, Trussoni explained that it was time for them to stop talking about Steinhafels. Morgan had been read her rights, and now it was Anissa’s turn.
“Because it’s been quite a day,” Trussoni said, “I kind of know bits and pieces, but I don’t know the full-on truth … and before I find out the truth, before I find out what the real story is of what happened today, I need to read you your rights—your Miranda rights. Have you ever heard of that before?”
Anissa had not.
“Have you ever seen a show where sometimes on TV they read people their rights, on cop shows and stuff like that?”
“Like, when somebody gets arrested, and they say, ‘So-and-so, you’re under arrest for da-da-da’—?”
“Right—so I’m going to read those rights to you, okay?”
“Okay.”
After reading Anissa her rights, Detective Trussoni wrote Anissa’s home address and her occupation (“student”) on the Miranda statement form. Under “Employer,” she jotted Horning Middle School. Anissa added her signature. When they were finished, Trussoni turned to Anissa, sounding professional but uneasy, and asked, “Can you tell me what happened?” She seemed to be ready to hear an account of a fight between the three girls or maybe a description of Anissa’s terror as Morgan pulled out a knife. She certainly did not expect what Anissa would say next.
“So there’s this website,” Anissa began. “The Creepypasta Wiki.”
To her credit, Detective Trussoni’s confusion was barely evident in her voice as she wrote down Anissa’s words.
Anissa went on to explain about Slenderman and his servants, “proxies,” as she called them. As Trussoni dutifully took notes, Anissa continued: “And Morgan said, ‘Hey, Anissa. We should be proxies.’”
Once Anissa started talking, she continued eagerly, pausing now and then to clarify the details for Detective Trussoni. She explained how proxies were forced to serve their killers. She advised Trussoni about what to search for if she wanted to find out more about Creepypasta.
Detective Trussoni’s pen flew across her page, trying to capture every new detail. Satisfied that she understood the purpose of Creepypasta, she steered the conversation away from the internet.
“All right,” she said. “Morgan told you, ‘Hey, we should be proxies.’ And you said what?”
“I said, ‘Okay, how should we do that?’ and she said, ‘We have to kill Bella.’ We had to prove ourselves worthy to Slender.”
“And what did you think of this?” Detective Trussoni asked. In hindsight, her question might be interpreted as an intentional opportunity for Anissa to express reluctance or remorse. But if Trussoni were trying to throw Anissa a bone, Anissa didn’t catch it.
“I was surprised but also kind of excited, ’cause I wanted proof he existed,” Anissa explained. Now that the topic was back on Slenderman, she was in her element. She eagerly described the evidence of Slenderman’s existence that she’d found online and her hopes of finding proof that would convince the skeptics.
“So, did you think you actually had to kill someone to do it?”
“Yeah.”
“Like for real?”
“Mm-hmm.” The conversation lulled, and Anissa jumped back into her rambling account of Creepypasta’s best stories. It was only after several more minutes of this that Detective Trussoni managed to turn the conversation back to Bella.
This time, Anissa was ready to talk. She launched into an account of the day’s events, including Morgan handing her the knife (because she was “too squeamish”) and the girls playing hide-and-seek with Bella (“to distract her”). She told Detective Trussoni how she had told Morgan, “Now” (“‘Cause I was starting to get a little freaked out”), and how Bella had screamed in agony.
As she recounted the details of Bella’s desperate cries, Anissa lost her train of thought. “Sorry,” she told Trussoni, apologizing for her pause. “We told her we were gonna get help, but we really weren’t. We were gonna run and let her pass away.”
A few doors down, Detective Casey struggled to make sense of his subject’s responses.
“Why did you want to kill Payton?” he asked, circling around again to the core issue.
“Huh?” Morgan sounded genuinely stumped. The necessity of Bella’s death seemed obvious to her, and she didn’t know why it was such a sticking point for Detective Casey.
“Why did you want to kill Payton?” he repeated. Perhaps she hadn’t heard.
“It’s not that we wanted to.”
“Before, you said it was necessary?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Why was it necessary?”
“Because.”
Detective Casey waited for the rest of the sentence, but there wasn’t any more. He tried again. “When you say it was necessary, what do you mean by that?”
“That’s what Anissa was telling me.”
Casey grew frustrated. Over and over, he and Morgan fell into the same pattern: he pressed for details, and Morgan deflected. Her answers were clipped and so matter-of-fact that they seemed almost evasive.
Later, Morgan would tell the press that she hated “when” questions because they threw a spotlight on the unreliability of her memory. She was a smart girl and a perfectionist, and she hated questions that pointed out the gaps in her recall. In years to come, her family would learn that Morgan barely remembered the time leading up to the stabbing. Sickness had cooked her brain like a fever. But Detective Casey couldn’t know that Morgan’s short answers were a product of her disjointed perception of the world. To him, her behavior was at best intentionally uncooperative and at worst the sign of a true sociopath.
“Did you have the knife first, or did Anissa?” Detective Casey asked.
“I don’t remember. It happened really, really fast.”
“But you stabbed her a couple times?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How many times do you think it was?”
“I don’t know.” Sassily, she added, “I didn’t know I was supposed to count.”
“Like one or two—”
“I don’t know!”
“Five? Ten? Fifty—a hundred?”
Morgan smirked. “I think she’d be dead if it was a hundred.”
Casey grimaced in irritation. “A few times? A bunch of times?”
To his surprise, Morgan laughed. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m thinking about a video.”
“Five times? Ten?”
“I really didn’t count.”
“Was there a lot of blood?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“A lot?”
“A lot,” Morgan repeated back to him. “A very, very considerable amount.”
Anissa described to Trussoni the route she and Morgan had taken out of the park. She told Trussoni about the bug spray they had taken, the gloves Morgan left in Walmart, and the fruit snacks they had found in Steinhafels. Trussoni took notes on it all, preparing to compile a written statement that would eventually become the criminal complaint.
Anissa gave a lot of details about her and Morgan’s journey toward Slender Mansion. It was far more detail than was necessary, but Detective Trussoni didn’t stop her. At one point, Anissa paused in her recollection of events and explained that she and Morgan were “so close we’re like sisters.”
“Can I ask a question?” Anissa asked. “Where is Bella’s body now?”
Trussoni leaned back in her chair. She had just received word from the hospital that Bella had survived the second surgery. Surgeons had stitched up Bella’s liver, pancreas, stomach, and heart. According to her doctors, the chest wound was “one millimeter away from certain death.” She was unconscious in the ICU. But she was expected to survive.
“Bella’s at the hospital,” Trussoni said.
Anissa smiled, her feelings on the matter inscrutable. “Okay.” Referring to Bella’s body, she added, “I thought it was still out there, in the crime scene.”
“She is alive.”
“Okay.”
“How does that make you feel?”
Anissa admitted, “It makes me feel kinda happy and kinda worried. Like, I’m just scared. All around.”
“What are you worried about?”
“That she hates my guts.”
“She was very, very close to dying,” Trussoni reminded Anissa.
“Okay,” Anissa said.
“The doctors were able to save her.”
“Okay.”
“How does that make you feel?” Trussoni emphasized.
This time Anissa answered correctly: “Good.”
“Makes you feel good that she’s alive?”
“Will I be able to go back to school?”
“You know … I don’t know if you’re gonna be able to go back to school on Monday. But at some point in time you’ll be able to go back to school.”
“How many stab wounds did they find?”
“Nineteen.”
“Morgan counted seventeen.”
“Was she counting out loud when she was doing it?”
“No, she was counting in her head,” Anissa said. “I asked her where she stabbed Bella, and she said that she got her in the chest six times and in the lung twice and then everywhere else. I know there was one on her leg and I saw her leg bleeding like crazy.”
Morgan was becoming annoyed with Detective Casey. He had been asking her questions for hours.
“What were you trying to do with her when you stabbed her?”
“I might as well just say it,” Morgan answered breezily. “We were trying to kill her.”
She watched Casey write down her words.
“This is going to get me arrested, isn’t it?”
Instead of explaining to Morgan that she had already been arrested, Casey said, “One minute.”
“I won’t take back any of it,” Morgan said.
“You won’t take it back because it’s all the truth?”
“It’s all the truth.”
Morgan told him that she understood the importance of truth. She had learned all about it when she was suspended for bringing a sledgehammer to school. Detective Casey seized on this new information.
“So you were gonna use that hammer to hurt somebody, or …?”
“Oh no,” Morgan corrected him. “It was an accident.”
“An accident.”
Morgan’s matter-of-fact answers were making less and less sense. Realizing the sledgehammer wasn’t the break in the case he was hoping for, Casey circled the conversation back to the matter at hand.
“So Anissa told you that somebody told her that it was necessary to kill—”
“I was confused a little bit,” Morgan said.
She wasn’t the only one.
“What do you mean you were confused?”
“I didn’t really understand what we were doing … I don’t know if she’s alive, though, she was crying.”
“She’s alive.”
“Good,” Morgan answered. She sounded relieved. But to her frustration, Casey told her to start from the beginning, fact-checking Morgan’s timeline of events, trying to catch her in a lie. He pressed her for more and more detail, asking the same questions over and over. The closer they got to the actual stabbing, the more urgent his questions became.
Morgan had enough. Casey’s nickname on the force was “the Closer.” But Morgan was the best debater in Mrs. Weidenbaum’s whole class.
“Are you trying to do this over and over to see if I tell the story differently?” she demanded.
“I’m just trying to make sure I get it right, so I don’t make any mistakes,” Casey said. “So what was the plan in the bathroom?”
“I’m not so sure—Anissa came up with several plans, it was hard to keep track.”
“So then after the bathroom, where did you go?”
Morgan’s patience was running out. “I already told you.”
“And what’d you do there?”
“Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab,” Morgan deadpanned. “Stabby, stab, stab, stab, stab.”
When asked why she wanted to be a Slenderman proxy, Anissa said, “Supposedly you live in Slender Mansion and take orders directly from him.”
“So that’d be neat to you,” Trussoni said. “You’d enjoy that? Is that cool?”
“At the time, it was really cool. I wanted to prove the skeptics wrong.”
“In order to do this, you physically had to kill somebody?”
“Yes. Even seemingly nice creepypastas, like ones that keep me calm, are about killing.”
“And you know what happens when you kill somebody? Like, physically, what happens to the person?”
“I never fully understood what it meant to kill somebody—until now.”
“Do you think you could physically do that now?”
“No,” Anissa said emphatically, determined to get the answer right.
“And why is that?”
Anissa started crying a little. “I’m too nice of a person,” she said through her tears. “Too nice—and too squeamish.”
Trussoni steered the conversation back to the confession, quizzing Anissa on the details of whose idea it had been to become proxies and who had decided on the guest list for Morgan’s birthday party. The completed account of Anissa’s confession was six pages of Detective Trussoni’s scrawled, all-uppercase handwriting. It explained that “proxy’s [sic] are like puppets to the head guy called Slenderman,” and “Zalgo also has proxy’s. He’s a demon with 7 mouths.”
In Anissa’s account, the responsibility for the original idea, and for the stabbing itself, fell squarely onto Morgan’s shoulders. But when Trussoni asked her if she thought Morgan was completely to blame for the stabbing, Anissa told her that Morgan was not entirely at fault.
“I don’t think any of this would’ve happened if I hadn’t told her about creepypastas.”
“Does it worry you?” Trussoni asked, referring to Bella’s survival. She reminded Anissa that, according to her logic, if Bella lived, it meant Anissa wouldn’t see Slenderman—or worse, he could murder her. “Or do you think he does not exist?”
“He does not exist.” Anissa sounded like a child who knows she is giving the right answer. “He is a work of fiction.”
“It didn’t feel like anything,” Morgan said, pantomiming stabbing. “It was like air.”
Morgan pulled her arms into her shirt. She drew her head in, too, like a turtle hiding in its shell.
“And then Bella was like, ‘I can’t see, I can’t see,’ and I said, ‘I’m sorry. This had to happen,’ and she was like, ‘Why?’”
She peered at Casey through the armhole of her shirt. But he wasn’t looking at her.
“It was necessary,” she said. “I can’t explain why.” As Casey wrote this down, she added, “Please don’t cut off my head.”
“No one’s gonna cut off your head,” he said. Keeping his eyes on his notes, he asked, “And then what?”
“And then it was sort of—we ran.”
“Where did you run to?”
“Forward. The rule is to move forward until you get out of Waukesha. I just remember we went forward and forward and forward—we went everywhere, and actually we were singing the whole time.” She watched Casey write. “Will I regret giving you this information later?”
“This information is gonna be used to try and get you some help,” he said. “So you don’t have to hear those screams and don’t have to worry about hurting anybody anymore.”
“Okay.”
“So did you guys get a ride from anybody, or you guys just kept walking?”
“No, we got there by ourselves. We tried to find Slenderman.”
“Tried to find who?” Unlike Anissa, Morgan had taken well over an hour to mention his name.
“Slender,” she said, as if it were obvious.
“Who’s Slenderman?”
“He’s this tall, faceless man who preys on children. ‘Cause we were by the forest and we couldn’t help ourselves.”
“Why were you trying to find him?”
“What?” Morgan asked, and Detective Casey repeated himself.
“Because Anissa said he could help us. I sorta thought he might kill us if we did find him, though, because he has a tendency to do that.” Morgan started explaining Creepypasta, but Detective Casey wasn’t interested. It seemed like another tangent leading nowhere, much like the sledgehammer.
“Did you clean the knife at all?” he asked.
“I sort of wiped it on my jacket,” Morgan told him. “It was weird. I felt no remorse. I thought I would. ‘Cause I still have this idea in my head that it was necessary.”
“You didn’t feel any remorse?”
“Mm-hmm,” she said. “I actually felt nothing.” She added, “Mommy always says that whatever you do catches up to you eventually, and it did.”
The detectives would later explain that they had trusted Anissa but not Morgan, because when Anissa spoke, Trussoni recalled feeling like, “All right, I am talking to a twelve-year-old.” Whereas when Casey sat down with Morgan, he thought, “I have a daughter that’s almost the same age as her, like she could be my daughter. But then she started saying things that were really very eerie, hearing them come out of a twelve-year-old’s mouth.” Trussoni was gentle with Anissa, even guiding Anissa toward expressing guilt and remorse. But Casey grew increasingly irritated with Morgan. Her flat affect struck him as heartlessness, her self-professed confusion an attempt to shrug off blame. While Anissa acted like a little girl, sniffling and talking in a pitched voice, Morgan spoke in low monotone. In later interviews, Casey and other officers would describe her as a psychopath.
“Have you ever killed anything else?” Casey asked. “Any animals or anything?”
“Not intentionally.”
Morgan told him that once she had overfed her fish, causing it to become “all constipated and stuff, and then he got depressed—he always sat at the bottom of the tank like this”—she stretched out her arms and tilted her head back and made herself convulse, imitating a fat, dying fish—“and then he died.”
“That’s too bad.”
“We were happy when he was dead, because he always looked miserable.”
Casey needed a break. He slapped his knee. He tucked his notes under his arm. He rose to his feet. “Sit tight for a little bit, okay?—I’ll be back in a minute.”
He would be gone for half an hour. As the door shut behind him, Morgan sang, “Byeee.” Her eyes drifted to the camera mounted above. She laid her head on the table. She sang “Tidal Wave,” by Owl City, a song about feeling scared because you don’t know what’s going to happen next. She lifted her arms and spun in a circle. She climbed onto the chair and smiled at nothing. She sat down. She hugged her knees to her chest. She poked a hole in the paper socks they’d given her—the kind her mom wore over her shoes during surgeries. She stuck her big toe through the hole, peeled off a piece of skin and ate it. She laid her head on her knees for twenty minutes.
Downstairs, according to Matt and Angie, Casey intercepted them again in the lobby to say that Morgan was “sick” and needed help, and he was going to make sure she got it. They did not realize that he thought she was a psychopath.
Throughout the interview, Detective Casey would leave multiple times—sometimes to take phone calls, sometimes to confer with Trussoni in the hallway. Each time he would return with a new tactic to try on Morgan or a new angle he wanted to investigate.
“Who’s this creepy guy you were talking about?” he asked at one point.
“Which one?”
“Is it Slim, or Slender, or something?”
“Slenderman,” Morgan reminded him.
“Have you ever met him?”
“Not exactly.”
Detective Casey was in no mood to play games. “Tell me about him.”
“He watches you.”
“How does he watch you?”
“He can read minds, and he has teleportation skills.”
“Tele-what?”
Morgan sounded it out for him: “Te-le-port.”
“Do you see him in your dreams?”
“Oh, I see him in my dreams. But if he’s stalking you—you start to be affected by something that’s called ‘Slender Sickness,’ because of the sigma radiation that he emits.”
Detective Casey was caught off guard and had to ask Morgan to repeat the whole explanation.
“So you never met Slender? He’s more in your dreams or on the computer?”
“He doesn’t like technology, because it doesn’t work around him. Why do you need to know about Slenderman?”
“Because I think Slenderman might have something to do with what’s going on with you today.”
“Oh.” Morgan took a puff from her inhaler. “Are you going to put me in prison, and I’m going to rot and die?”
“Well, I don’t think that you’re going to prison,” Casey began.
But Wisconsin was a law-and-order state known for being tough on crime, and Morgan had just stabbed someone.
“I don’t think you’re going to rot and die there,” he amended.
Casey’s phone rang again, and he took the call in a relaxed pose. He stretched his legs under the table, while Morgan held hers to her chest. He jotted down notes.
After hanging up the call, Casey asked Morgan, “Who lives with you on Big Bend Road?”
“Mommy … Daddy …” Morgan began listing the names of her pets, too, because they also lived on Big Bend Road. But Casey made it clear he didn’t need those.
He asked if she always had a sleepover for her birthday.
Morgan sighed. “I had a sleepover last year. It was more fun last year, though. Obviously.”
As her interview neared its end, she apologized to Casey: “I’m sorry for putting you through all this trouble, sir.”
“I think you need some help—somebody to talk to and try to work out some of these things you got going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those thoughts probably aren’t real, and to think about stabbing one of your very good friends, those aren’t the best thoughts to be having. Right?”
“Probably not.”
“Stabbing your friend, do you think that’s right or wrong?”
Morgan smirked again. “If it were right, I wouldn’t be here.”
Casey did not like her tone. “You can’t go around stabbing people.”
Morgan laid her cheek against her knee. “But lots of people have seen Slenderman.”
Down the hall, Detective Trussoni was also trying to figure out how exactly Slenderman had become so real to the girls.
“Were you hoping that Bella was gonna die so you could see Slender?”
“Part of me kind of wanted this to fail. I hear about manslaughter and all that on TV, and it doesn’t bother me much, but when I see it, it traumatizes me. But the other part of me wanted her to die,” Anissa admitted. “The bad part of me wanted her to die. But the good part of me wanted her to live.”
Detective Trussoni asked about Walmart, and Steinhafels, and the knife.
“Are my clothes being cut apart?” Anissa blurted out.
Trussoni patiently explained that Anissa’s clothes had blood on them, which was a biohazard.
“Am I ever gonna get my clothes back?”
“With the blood on it and stuff? Yeah, I don’t know …” Trussoni trailed off.
Anissa pretended not to care. “I don’t even remember where I got that blue shirt.”
Anissa asked for a Kleenex. Her allergies were acting up. She asked Trussoni if it was dangerous that she had not taken an antihistamine that day. Trussoni reassured her that she would survive. She left the room and returned with a handful of toilet paper. Anissa received a gray blanket, which she hugged around her shoulders like a cape. She burrowed inside of it and talked to herself. She drew her feet up underneath her. She yawned. She blew her nose. She inspected the contents of her balled-up tissues. She burped.
When Trussoni returned, she finished writing Anissa’s confession and read it to her. “Is there anything you want added?”
“I also picked up two packages of fruit snacks at Steinhafels,” Anissa corrected. “Could you add that Slenderman and Zalgo have proxies?” She reminded Trussoni that Zalgo was the demon with seven mouths. “He also has a few comic strips.” Anissa told Trussoni about the comic strips and how they sometimes starred Garfield and Garfield’s owner, Jon, except in the Zalgo version Jon and Garfield had black eyes, and Garfield looked like “a crack clown.” Trussoni added this to the confession.
Anissa signed it, saying, “I have the same signature as my father.” She sounded proud.
“It is a blessing that she is alive,” Trussoni said of Bella. “It was scary for her. Where she was stabbed was near the heart. They did have to go in and make an incision and open up her chest and sew part of her heart to repair it.”
“Okay.”
“And then after that, they had to open up her stomach, because her pancreas was cut.”
“Wow,” Anissa said.
“A part of her liver was cut, and some of her stomach,” Trussoni repeated.
“Yeah, Morgan said she got her in the stomach.”
“There were very serious injuries, and she was very near to death. So what you guys were trying to accomplish today was very close to happening, okay? But the doctors were able to fix her, and—”
“What about the big gash?” Anissa pointed to her calf. She remembered Morgan bending down to clean it with a leaf.
“I’m sure they’re going to be able to sew that up. There are no major arteries in the leg. There are when you get closer to your pelvic bone. I know you were worried about execution and stuff like that—we don’t have the death penalty in Wisconsin. You’re twelve years old. I’m going to be honest with you: I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen.”
“Okay.”
“Something horrific happened today, and I know you realize that now.”
She paused, waiting.
“I regret it,” Anissa said.
“But we’ve got to accept some responsibility here, and by giving me that statement”—she nodded at the signed confession—“you’re accepting some responsibility. You were very honest with me, and you cooperated with me, and that means a lot—that means a lot to Payton.”
Anissa announced that she felt hungry and thirsty. Trussoni left the room and placed an order for two burgers and fries—one for Morgan, too.
Anissa cocked her head to the side and covertly picked her nose. She nuzzled her chin to her chest and snuffled. She had given the police a lot to work with. As the CCTV cameras finished recording, she said to herself, “Shit.”
Anissa’s interview ran three hours. But Morgan’s lasted five. Before ending his shift, Casey showed Morgan her confession. It ran three pages long.
I currently live at 1434 Big Bend #5 with my mommy and daddy.
My birthday was on the 16th but I had my sleep over party last night. Yesterday, Anissa Weier and Payton [Bella] Leutner came to my house and we played “SIMS.” Which is a video game. Around 6 o’clock my daddy took us to skateland.…
I wanted to kill Payton [Bella] because it was “necessary.” …
This is what Anissa kept telling me and I believed her.…
We planned it for today because it would be easier and we would all be together.
I sort of didn’t want it to be today because I wanted it to be a normal sleepover.
We walked to Walmart. We filled our water bottles and washed off the blood. We had a lot of blood on us. I had gloves that I left at Walmart by the sink. They were black lace gloves, with no fingers.
This was unintentional.
Morgan signed the confession three times, writing simply “Morgan” in print. She wrote her lowercase g entirely above the line, a childish handwriting error that her teachers had no doubt been trying to correct.
“Perfect,” Casey said. He sounded upbeat. It was almost time for him to go home. Presumably, he had a few things to ask his eleven-year-old daughter about what she did online.
As Casey left the interrogation room, Morgan pulled out a piece of her hair and stretched it between her fingers until it broke. She whispered to herself. She yawned. She took apart her inhaler and played with the pieces, slamming them together in front of her like toy cars. She took another puff. When an officer entered to take her into fingerprinting, she told him that she never, ever wanted to see Anissa again.
Despite Morgan’s wishes, the girls were quickly reunited in the back of a police transport van. Both were shackled to the seats. Morgan turned to Anissa. “Stop being serious, this is fun, this is just a game.”
“Stop talking to me,” Anissa said.
Anissa loved school as much as Morgan did. It was her reprieve from home—from an overwhelmed father and an unpredictable mother, both of whom she now missed terribly. But Detective Trussoni had made one thing very clear to Anissa: Anissa would not be going to school that Monday, maybe not even on Tuesday—and she blamed Morgan for that. Over the course of her interrogation, Anissa had convinced herself, and Trussoni, that Morgan was to blame for everything.
She and Morgan spent the drive in silence. Forty-five minutes later, their van merged off Interstate 45 into the dark and quiet streets of West Bend, Wisconsin, a manufacturing city known for its lumberyards. The van continued down West Bend’s main drag, passing a funeral home and barbecue restaurant. It turned into the brightly lit parking lot of the Washington County Jail, a concrete cubist structure that looked like something Anissa might have built on Minecraft. A secure garage opened its doors in front of them. As they pulled inside, Anissa might have glanced up at the stars through the van’s rear window.
She would not see the night sky again for nearly three years.