The population of juveniles at Washington County Jail ranged from twenty-five to thirty boys and girls in the summer to somewhere in the sixties come winter, when temperatures dropped to zero and the sky turned black and people all over Wisconsin started to feel a little destabilized.
On the night of May 31, 2014, Corrections Officer Shelley Grunke met Morgan and Anissa’s van in the jail’s garage. Two small girls were unloaded from the back seat. They were the youngest kids Grunke had ever seen on the premises. She searched them for weapons, metal objects, and jewelry. Anissa had already removed her friendship bracelet.
Grunke unfastened the girls’ wrist and leg shackles. She led them inside.
One of the other officers booked Anissa, while Grunke handled Morgan, entering her name, birthdate, and other identifying information into the computer system. As part of a heath screen, Grunke asked Morgan if she wanted to end her own life.
Morgan answered without making eye contact: “No, not mine.” She used to have plans to kill “a girl,” she explained, “my best friend.”
“Well, she was my best friend,” Morgan remembered. “She hates me now.”
She glanced over at Anissa. “But it had to be done.”
Before Grunke could stop her, Morgan walked to where Anissa was standing and tried to hug her. Anissa stiffened. During their intake, she and Morgan had each been provided a list of thirty-nine rules, which prohibited hugging, whistling, taking extra blankets, using colored pencils for makeup, removing caulk from window frames, shaking hands, running, whispering, chanting, speaking in a language other than English, and braiding each other’s hair, among other violations.
Grunke reminded Morgan that hugging was against the rules and led her away from Anissa. Back at Grunke’s computer, Grunke asked Morgan what she had meant by “it had to be done.”
“The man ordered it,” Morgan said. “The man told Anissa to do it, too.” She met Grunke’s gaze and whispered, “The man only comes to me in darkness.”
To Grunke it sounded like Morgan was describing a ghost. She asked Morgan if “the man” looked “dark” like a “shadow.”
“Yes,” Morgan said. She held up three fingers to indicate she had first seen the shadow man when she was three years old. She told Grunke the stabbing was supposed to keep him from coming back.
Grunke wanted to ask more questions, but it was almost midnight. It had been a long day for both girls, and Grunke thought Morgan should get some sleep. She handed Morgan a green jail uniform, toiletries, bed linens, and underwear.
Morgan and Anissa were herded from the administrative offices to their cells.
“Good night,” Morgan said, and tried again to hug Anissa. But Anissa stiffened and said nothing. She was better than Morgan was at holding a grudge. She would not speak to Morgan directly for six years.
After witnessing Morgan’s strange behavior during her intake questionnaire, Grunke decided that Morgan might be more vulnerable to bullying and abuse than other inmates and chose to put Morgan by herself in an “iso-pod,” a series of empty, interlocked cells situated far away from the other children.
“Will Morgan ever have to be placed in my cell?” Anissa nervously questioned the guards. “Will I have to see her? … Are we going to be in the same room together?”
“No,” the guards reassured her. “We are going to keep you separate from everything.”
In general population (Gen Pop), female inmates slept together in locked cells, positioned in a circular arrangement around a “control area,” where officers watched them through mirrored glass. The day room had two steel tables with steel stools bolted to the floor, one shower, and a TV, where Anissa’s new roommates would soon watch international news coverage of the “Slenderman stabbing” and scream at Anissa that she was a bitch and a monster, until she believed them and wanted to die. But for now, Anissa shuffled past a metal toilet and carried her blanket to an empty cot, as the other girls watched her in the dark.
At home, Morgan had preferred to sleep on the carpet underneath her loft bed, and it felt safer to do the same in jail. She pulled the thin blue waterproof mattress off its metal springs and dragged it beneath the bed frame, waiting for her hallucinations to keep her company. The jail’s thick walls and metal bars reassured her. For the first time in months, she felt like she might actually fall asleep. It was a huge relief not to scheme or worry anymore. She could finally breathe.
When the guards left the room and locked the door behind them, she felt free.
Morgan was unable to remember where, exactly, Sev, Maggie, “Voldie” (her nickname for Voldemort), or any of the others had been during the stabbing, though the intensity of her violence that day would suggest they might have abandoned her in that crucial moment. People with hallucinations often report voices, usually the devil’s, that made them do something bad. But Morgan’s hallucinations were benevolent friends, and until the stabbing, they had always acted more like guardian angels than destructive forces.
Morgan would later recall how Maggie had resurfaced during the police interview, urging Morgan to plead the Fifth and legally protect herself (Morgan hadn’t listened), and how Sev had stayed with her in jail, sleeping next to her on the floor under her metal bunk bed, draping his soft leather jacket over her for warmth. He let Morgan lay her head on his chest so she could hear his familiar heartbeat.
But when guards at Washington County Jail checked on Morgan through the security window of her cell, all they saw was a little girl lying underneath her bed, alone.