Concerned that Morgan might have a serious mental illness, Tony quickly hired experts to examine her in jail. His most pressing concern was Morgan’s “competency,” a legal term, meaning that she understood the charges against her and could be counted upon to assist in her own defense at trial. It soon became clear that neither was true.
On June 5, 2014, five days after her arrest, Dr. Kenneth Robbins sat down with Morgan in one of the jail’s private visitation rooms. Already, her crime was an international news sensation, making the Slenderman stabbing Dr. Robbins’s most famous case since interviewing Jeffrey Dahmer, a cannibalistic serial killer known as “the Milwaukee Monster” who had hunted the city’s tiny gay district during the ’80s and ’90s.
Dr. Robbins had met Dahmer following his arrest. To many, Dahmer’s insanity seemed like a foregone conclusion, but Robbins, tasked with determining whether Dahmer was not guilty by reason of insanity, firmly disagreed. He later recalled that what had frightened him most about Dahmer was how “ordinary” he seemed.
When asked which famous criminal had scared him more, Morgan Geyser or Jeffrey Dahmer, Dr. Robbins found the question ludicrous. The differences between Morgan and Dahmer struck him as obvious and extreme. Morgan was not a murderer, and what had frightened Robbins most about Dahmer was precisely what made him so different from Morgan: “He was sane.”
When Robbins first sat down to speak to Morgan, she squatted on her chair and bounced, turning all the way around in her seat to watch unicorns graze the cold floor of the interview room. She talked about Harry Potter, unicorns, and Ninja Turtles. She told Robbins that Slenderman was real. But when he asked if Ninja Turtles were real, Morgan said, “Well, no, don’t be ridiculous, I’m not an idiot. But Raphael is real.”
It didn’t take a battery of tests for Robbins to deduce she was hallucinating. His hunch was that she landed somewhere on the schizo-typal spectrum. But a specific diagnosis would need to wait until she could be evaluated in a hospital setting. For now, he focused on the matter of competency.
“I didn’t think she was competent for two primary reasons,” he determined. “Number one, that she believed her primary mission in court was to protect she and her family from Slenderman. That was her focus. She really wasn’t focused on how she could try to become innocent. The second belief she had was that she had these Vulcan mind control powers, and that she could be wherever she wants. So who cares if I’m in jail or I’m in prison? Who cares? I can just close my eyes and be wherever I want. So for those two reasons, I thought she wasn’t competent.”
Other doctors arrived at similar conclusions. When they tried to engage Morgan during visits, she became transfixed by her hands, which she contorted into different shapes. She spoke excitedly about having had a sleepovers with Voldemort, and when doctors assumed that by “Voldemort” Morgan meant the Harry Potter villain who shared that name, Morgan corrected them: her Voldemort was a real person, and she interacted with him daily “unless he’s away on a business trip.”
When asked about her crime and how she felt about the prospect of spending up to sixty-five years in an adult prison, Morgan seemed nonchalant.
“At least it’s secure,” she said. “I would have food, I would have shelter, there would be other people. If someone tried to get me, I could run, fast, I could defend myself.”
At other times, she talked about how a sixth grade classmate of hers had been “a Pegasus” and how, at Horning Middle School, “students molested unicorns.” She told doctors that her friend Voldemort had taught her Vulcan mind control and that she knew Slenderman, with whom she had formed “a strong bond.” Though sometimes confused, she was clear about one thing: “He is real.”