After Morgan’s bail hearing, Angie Geyser sat on the kitchen floor and wailed like a wounded animal. When Matt came in, she expected him to join her. How many times over the course of their marriage had she rested a hand on his arm while he cried? But instead, Matt cautioned Angie to be quiet, saying, “The neighbors might hear!”
Angie stared at him in disbelief. “I don’t care if the neighbors hear.”
But Matt turned away from her and climbed the stairs to Morgan’s empty bedroom. Inside, he felt Morgan’s warm energy emanating from the pale blue walls, and projected feelings of love to her in jail. He heard a meow and turned to see Puma, their cat, padding across the carpet. Puma looked sick, Matt decided, so he brushed and cuddled her. Later that night, he slept with her on the floor of the bedroom, hoping Morgan’s healing aura would cure their suffering, while Angie slept alone downstairs. Until then, they had weathered everything together. But separated by anguish, they began to grow apart.
The next morning, Angie answered the doorbell to find Detective Casey waiting on her stoop. He was there to retrieve Bella’s overnight bag, the brown corduroy backpack with a pink butterfly appliquéd on the front.
Angie handed over the bag, which contained, among other items, the children’s mystery book If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late.
“Can I come in for a quick chat?” Casey asked.
The last time he had been to Angie’s condo, she had been compliant, even smiling in her naïveté. But now she stared back at him with steely eyes.
“I do not want to talk to you,” she said. “If you want to come inside, you need a warrant.”
She shut the door in his face.
Later, Angie sat at the computer feeling depleted as she scrolled through articles about the crime. The press was not supposed to publish the names or faces of juveniles, but Morgan’s and Anissa’s adult charges meant that they were not technically children. The media was under no obligation to protect their identities. The captions under their photos included their full names.
Angie stared longingly at the photos of Morgan taken at the bail hearing, eyes wide behind her thick glasses. She remembered wanting to lunge over the courtroom railing that separated visitors from defendants and brush her daughter’s tangled hair.
Several hours after Casey collected the backpack, the Daily Mail published online the first of several damning exposés that cast the Geyser family as wicked and complicit in Morgan’s crime. Until then, the closest Angie had come to being in the public eye was as a teenager, when she played Consuelo in West Side Story at the community theater in Manitowoc, a secluded northern town covered in lakes and green trees. It hadn’t occurred to her or Matt to delete their social media pages or set them to private.
“Revealed,” read the Daily Mail headline: “Father of Girl, 12, Who Stabbed ‘School Friend 19 Times to Prove Slender Man Myth Was Real’ Proudly Shared Her Sketch of Horror Creature on His ‘DEADBOY’ Instagram.”
The article showcased photos pulled from Matt’s Instagram account. “Telling,” read one of several captions displayed beneath Matt’s photos: “He posted this photo two months ago with the caption ‘Only Mogo draws Slenderman on a napkin in crayon when we’re out for dinner’ showing that he was aware of his daughter’s fascination with the virtual villain well before the attack.” Under a picture of brass knuckles Matt had found in a store that had tiny skulls carved into the nubs (“I think I’d like these,” he had written under the original post), another Daily Mail caption asked, “Violent?” Matt had also posted photos of a spooky Calvin and Hobbes comic, which showed the two characters cast in shadow, and a Bloody Mary cocktail, served in a skull goblet—images that the news outlet analyzed as follows: “Seemingly innocuous: The Calvin and Hobbes photo shared by Morgan’s father (left) and the skull-adorned Bloody Mary (right) show that the family embraced darker themes in pop culture.”
In 1980, a Canadian psychiatrist named Lawrence Pazder and his patient (and eventual wife) Michelle Smith cowrote Michelle Remembers, an account of Smith’s alleged experience with “satanic ritual abuse” (SRA). Despite multiple investigations into Smith’s claims, nothing in the book could ever be corroborated, and her accusations were later discredited as fake.
Nevertheless, much like Dilulio’s debunked but enduringly popular superpredator claims, Michelle Remembers became an instant bestseller. It inspired an international manhunt for demonic cults that did not actually exist, setting the stage for a shameful period in American history now referred to as “Satanic Panic.” By the 1990s, a decade or so after the book’s publication, religious fundamentalists, police investigators, child advocates, and therapists, as well as clients in psychotherapy, had falsely accused more than twelve thousand people of SRA. Accused parties lost their jobs and reputations. Some Goth teenagers went to prison for decades. As Americans came to realize that their fear of satanism had actually been a case of crowd madness, Satanic Panic turned into a national embarrassment and became a cautionary tale to anyone wanting to work in psychology or law enforcement.
But in 2014 Waukesha, the devil was as real as ever. One week after the stabbing, Detective Casey called Marcus Quinones, a former NYPD officer turned demonologist. During the 1990s, Satanic Panic had turned Quinones into somewhat of a minor celebrity. In 1995, the New York Daily News described him as a “Satan-hunting cop” who spent his free time performing exorcisms. According to the article, when Quinones “stepp[ed] into the forbidden circle” of a haunted house, “he felt deranged energy from the soles of his feet to the hair on his head. ‘God, take this feeling away,’ he cried out. ‘An itchiness grabs your whole body,’ he said later. ‘If it got any weirder, I would have left the room.’”
At the time of Casey’s call, Quinones had also self-published a hundred-page “manual,” Satan: An Intelligence Report, about the “spiritual warfare” between Satan and God Almighty. (“But there is good news: Jesus Christ came to earth to destroy the works of Satan!”)
Casey’s notes on his conversation with Quinones described the former NYPD officer as “an expert on demonology and cult killings—he did provide me with information about human sacrifice, and the belief system that many persons that are involved in satanic worship follow.”
Wondering if Matt was a satanist who had somehow drawn Morgan and Anissa into his belief system, Casey served a warrant to Instagram, requesting all of Matt’s deleted photos. In response, Casey received pictures of tomato plants and cats.
While Casey pursued the satanic angle, news coverage of Morgan and Anissa’s case quickly centered on the dangers of unmonitored internet use.
Following his press conference on the girls’ bail hearing, Police Chief Russell Jack held another press conference, calling the stabbing “a wake-up call for parents” and describing the internet as being “full of dark and wicked things.”
Jack’s words carried connotations of witchcraft, as if the internet itself had possessed Morgan and Anissa. (Creepypasta web administrators quickly issued a statement, saying, “We are a literature site, not a crazy satanic cult.”) Parents fretted that Slenderman might lure their children away, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. A New York Times op-ed titled “Struggling to Understand ‘Slenderman’” described him as a dangerous figure, one that “continues to disturb America. Beyond the obviously upsetting nature of the crime, many are asking what—if anything—it says about contemporary society that a figment of the Internet’s imagination might have driven two children to violence.”
This discourse also sounded familiar. In 1924, journalists blamed Leopold and Loeb’s murder of Bobby Franks on the teenagers’ obsession with detective novels. In 1977, fifteen-year-old Ronny Zamora’s murder of his elderly neighbor was called “a killing spree spurned by an obsession with violent television and a show featuring a bald police detective named Kojak.” After the Columbine shooting in 1999, many reporters blamed the massacre on video games and Marilyn Manson. Several years after Morgan and Anissa’s crime, media all over the world would file stories about Momo, a nonexistent being who allegedly controlled children’s minds and made them kill themselves.
As news of the Slenderman stabbing focused increasingly, and sometimes exclusively, on the Slenderman mythology, Bella’s survival got lost in the shuffle. The crime was referred to as the “Slenderman killings” or “Slenderman murders,” leading many readers to assume that Bella had been killed, a misconception that continues to this day.
Angie remembered how judgmental she had been when news first broke about the Columbine shooting in Colorado, thinking, “How did their parents not know that something was wrong?”
“Well, you know,” she thought now, “it turns out sometimes you just don’t know.”
“Sometimes there aren’t obvious signs,” she told the press. “I was still tucking her in at night when she was home—we were just past reading bedtime stories—I really felt like at the time she was open with me … but I guess I just didn’t know … I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did.”
On Facebook, people Angie knew shared their opinions about the Daily Mail article, which had gone viral. Strangers linked to it on their social media feeds. Others flocked to the comments section. “Possibly there are parents to blame here as well. How about the kids go to a juvenile facility for a few years to properly learn right and wrong, while the parents go on trail [sic] for involuntary manslaughter and child neglect.”
“The parents didn’t check to see what the girls were looking at on the internet. You MUST parent your children whilst they use the internet. They are so susceptible to these websites.”
“Parenting, Parenting, Parenting … The parents of the two girls failed.”
The hate mail rolled into Angie’s inbox immediately and continually. Some of it was generic (“that little bitch”), and some of it was frightening, threatening that if Morgan were ever released back into the community, “someone’s seriously gonna kill her.” Wisconsin residents had become so desensitized to adult prosecution that the prospect of Morgan spending sixty-five years in prison struck many as lenient. They campaigned online for Morgan and Anissa to receive the death penalty, unaware that it had been outlawed in Wisconsin for over one hundred years.
In their fury over the misconception that a child had been killed, the public conveniently forgot that Morgan and Anissa were children, too. Strangers posted online that a “young woman” had killed a little girl. The press wrote that an “assailant” had attacked a twelve-year-old.
In coverage of the crime, Bella was described as “a 12-year-old girl” and throughout his three hundred interviews on behalf of Bella’s family, the Leutners’ spokesperson, attorney Stephen Lyons, was careful to emphasize Bella’s youth. As their legal representative, he referred to Bella as “the twelve-year-old victim” or “the little girl”—as if Bella were the only little girl involved—while referring to Morgan and Anissa by name or as “attempted murderers” or “the assailants.”
When asked why he characterized only one of the three girls as a child, Lyons said, “Painfully it’s accurate—they are assailants, they are attempted murderers—I have no problem calling what it is what it is—by the grace of God she was not killed from their well-planned-out, vicious, horrific attack in the woods, where they held down, again, a twelve-year-old girl, after stabbing her nineteen times throughout her torso, and left her for dead … Any way you call it, it is still attempted murderers trying to kill a twelve-year-old girl … whether they’re 12 or 112.”
Meanwhile, Sheboygan County district attorney Joe DeCecco talked to the press about the importance of prosecuting children as adults. He spoke of “Adult Crime, Adult Time,” and urged the public to ignore the fact that Morgan and Anissa looked like children; they had lost the right to their childhoods as soon as they attempted to take away someone else’s life. “You don’t look at their Justin Bieber haircuts,” he warned. “You don’t look at their acne. They are not quite older yet. We look at what they did and I think that’s how most prosecutors look at it. What did you do? Not what you look like. What did you do?”
As far as Angie could tell, the only people on Morgan’s side were a few nameless teenage girls, unknown to Morgan, Bella, or Anissa, who spoke to the press anonymously. Being closer to childhood, they remembered it more vividly as a time when anything could happen. “Middle school sucks,” one of them said. “It’s a terrible time, and it would drive anybody crazy.”
“You don’t really know what you’re doing when you’re twelve,” another recalled.
Meanwhile, at Waukesha Memorial Hospital, Stacie Leutner kept an eye on Bella as she slept, torturing herself for not trying harder to end her friendship with Morgan. Through the window, she could see a crowd of reporters gathered in the hospital parking lot.
Stacie held Bella’s hand and watched the growing mob.