When Morgan arrived at Winnebago for her competency screening, she was placed in Petersik Hall, the hospital’s maximum-security, short-term holding unit. As the youngest patient by at least a decade, she felt uncomfortable around the adult patients, many of whom wore diapers and paced the hallways screaming. Winnebago no longer provided its residents with hot baths and relaxing massages, there was no lolling on the lawn; instead, PCTs strapped unruly individuals to boards and lassoed their faces with “spit hoods.” Every day at 8:30 A.M. and 4:30 P.M., patients were allowed to spend thirty minutes in small, outdoor pens surrounded on all sides by razor wire.
A few leisure activities remained, most of them in the form of markers and crayons. Artists cogent enough to follow instructions were allowed to make inventory for the hospital’s Log Cabin Gift Shop, but even this was more of an assembly-line job. Log Cabin supervisors prohibited patients from designing their own products, making them choose from a strict list of preselected items with cheerful phrases painted on top, such as a wooden chair with SIT AND CACKLE A WHILE painted on its seat.
With little else to do, patients at Winnebago watched television shows like The Voice. Sometimes they switched on the news and Morgan’s face appeared, and patients pointed at her, laughing: “Hey, that’s you.”
Feeling scared and out of place, Morgan clung to her hallucinations for friendship. When asked how she might feel if she were to receive drugs that made Voldemort and the others disappear, Morgan began to cry—something that would later be used against her in court—but she was never offered medication.
“I like seeing things, I like hearing Maggie,” she said. “Seeing my friends, none of these things are dangerous. These friends can’t disappear. They are important to me.”
In Petersik Hall, patients could check out small radios and bring them into their rooms. Morgan’s bed scared her, so she sat on the floor for hours, listening to the radio and making up music videos in her head. In one of her favorite songs, a singer crooned about a toxic friendship, offering to save a seat for his former friend in hell, just like Anissa and Morgan used to save seats for each other on the bus.
Winnebago staff noted that while Morgan was, at times, “able to communicate coherently,” overall “she had lost reality contact.” Physicians noted she often looked “elated” and “thrilled” when discussing the stabbing. She was “giddy, laughing, silly.” On other occasions she acted like a cat or became manic, talking “rapidly,” growing “quite agitated and anxious.” During family visits, she lay under the table “tying and retying her mother’s shoes.”
“When we would visit her, we never knew what to expect, how she would behave, if she would be there mentally or not,” Angie later said. “She was frequently hallucinating, talking to people who weren’t there, you know, laughing at people who weren’t there. It’s so hard to explain, but the biggest thing is her eyes. It’s like she wasn’t present.”
When her grandparents visited, Morgan would “lambast” her grandpa Bob, as he put it. “What’s up with your ears?” she might ask.
“I don’t know, Morgan,” Bob said. “They’re just on the sides of my head.”
“Your nose looks like you have a peanut stuck in your nostril.”
“You want to make fun of Grandpa, you go right ahead—you can make fun of Grandpa all you want.” He let her tease him about old man ears and his old man nose because he saw the sickness weighing on her and wanted to carry some of it. “Grandpa’s got big shoulders,” he told her.
Every week he and Dianna brought Morgan thirty-dollar phone cards, and when she was feeling bad about herself—feeling fat, like girls sometimes did, or self-conscious about her teeth—Bob assured Morgan that she was beautiful and that “Grandma and Grandpa will buy you braces as soon as you get out of here.”
Now that Morgan was no longer being held at Washington County Jail, her parents were finally allowed to hug her. But when they reached for her on their first visit, Morgan kept her arms stiffly at her sides, just like Anissa had when Morgan tried to hug her on the night of the stabbing. Matt and Angie stepped away from Morgan, giving her space. They’d always been an affectionate family. But now Morgan recoiled from them, shaking her head. After almost three months in jail, she informed them, “I no longer like to be touched.”
On October 22, 2014, doctors at Winnebago diagnosed Morgan with the disease that many people in her life had already detected: early-onset childhood schizophrenia. Neuroscientists have found that the disease is progressive and, if left untreated, that psychosis can have irreversible effects on the patient’s mental state. Medication would need to be administered as soon as possible, or Morgan’s IQ could begin to drop.
Psychiatrists on Morgan’s treatment team would later testify that medication was the “cornerstone” of schizophrenia treatment. But while Morgan was in their care, they refused to give it to her. Instead, they focused on explaining the law to Morgan. The goal was to prepare her for trial. Admissions criteria said that patients at Winnebago needed to have been found NGRI or to have been sent there for a competency exam. Since Morgan had not been found NGRI, the focus would be on restoring her to legal competency, not on making her well.
When asked how withholding medication might affect someone in psychosis, child psychiatrist Dr. Stephanie Brandt responded, “Oh my God! … We do not ever withhold medication from somebody in an acute psychotic state. It is not done … To withhold medication is unacceptable, and it would potentiate any problems she was already having.”
Dr. Deborah Collins, who evaluated Morgan several times during her pre-incarceration, agreed. Like everyone else in Morgan’s case, she struggled to explain why doctors withheld medication from Morgan: “Winnebago staff would be best put to that to answer that question.”
Later, Dr. Kenneth Casimir would testify that he had denied Morgan medication because he had wanted to make sure she “wasn’t drowsy” in court or experiencing medication “side effects that would get in the way of a competency evaluation.” To Morgan’s family, prioritizing Morgan’s legal education over her health felt tantamount to withholding a medically induced coma from someone with a brain injury because they might miss work. But they held no sway over Morgan’s treatment. She belonged to the state of Wisconsin.
Over the course of that summer, Bella made a startling recovery, recuperating in time to attend her first day of seventh grade. The notoriety of the Slenderman stabbing had put pressure on Wisconsin politicians to honor it in some way, and shortly before Bella returned to Horning Middle School, Governor Scott Walker issued a proclamation that August 13 would be Purple Hearts for Healing Day, a onetime state holiday.
Back at Washington County Jail, Anissa talked to her grandparents about trick-or-treating that year, and ideas she had for costumes, convinced that she would make it home in time for Halloween. But as reality set in, Anissa realized there would be no trick-or-treating. When her parents visited, according to court records, “Anissa sobbed trying to figure out ‘how her brain had let her do this.’” She expressed “regret” for her actions and asked about Bella’s “wellbeing every visit.” She started swearing around the other children in jail, hoping that by doing so, she would “come off as an equal,” and avoid their wrath. The plan worked. She began to make new friends. In November, when Anissa turned thirteen, she received several citations for hair braiding, and a verbal warning for accepting a birthday card from another inmate.
Part of her still believed in Slenderman—the adults in Anissa’s life wanted her to say otherwise, to claim he wasn’t real; Anissa had said as much to Detective Trussoni during the interrogation, calling Slenderman “a work of fiction.” But in her core, Anissa trusted he was out there. She maintained a passion for paranormal stories and watched ghost-hunting shows with the other girls in jail. She started reading the Bible, and confided in doctors that she’d decided Slenderman was a demon, like in Christianity.
“Human beings that we are, we’re very good at constructing stories,” said Dr. David Van Nuys in the film The Most Dangerous Animal of All, a documentary about a man convinced that his father was the Zodiac Killer. “There are people out there who have belief systems that are absolute delusions, and they’re unshakable. They may build their whole life around this story to the point that it becomes an obsession, and they get so attached to them that there’s no way of arguing them out of them … Even though it’s an ugly story, it makes them important nonetheless. It’s feeding something in them.”
In Anissa’s case, her trust in Slenderman had become self-identifying, the most difficult kind of delusion to break. Disentangling herself from the internet demon meant admitting that what she had done to Bella was not only wrong but also stupid and insane.
At Winnebago, the unmedicated Morgan flew into tirades about unicorns. She asked doctors if she could see their toenails. She prowled the corridors shouting, “I hate Natalie Portman, especially the movie where Natalie Portman gets pregnant and lives inside a Walmart.” She wanted to know if Dr. Sangita Patel had hair on her toes. According to Morgan, Dr. Patel answered, “Yes,” and ran away.
Morgan’s doctors described her behavior as “cocky.”
They spent their sessions quizzing Morgan on the courtroom and its various players. What is a judge? What is a defense attorney? What is a defendant?
Adults would need to explain the law to Morgan for nearly half a year before she understood what was happening, and even then, her parents wondered if she ever truly knew what was going on. When Dr. Casimir and Dr. Patel declared Morgan “competent” to stand trial, Morgan’s family was stunned, but experts on American law seemed unsurprised. “Legal competence was a narrowly focused question. It focused on someone’s ability to understand factually and rationally legal proceedings and to assist in their defense. Many people, with even active symptoms of a mental illness, can still be competent,” explained Dr. Collins. Much like she had managed in middle school, while in psychosis, to memorize foreign language conjugations, Morgan managed, at Winnebago, to learn the difference between a defense lawyer and a prosecutor.
Dr. Casimir called the decision not to administer medication a “temporary” one, implying that it would wait until after Morgan could be restored to competency, as antipsychotics might interfere with the process. But after declaring her competent, Dr. Casimir and Dr. Patel dispatched Morgan back to jail without any psychiatric medication. They wrote her a prescription for albuterol, to treat her lifelong asthma, but no antipsychotics that might have addressed her more serious medical issues.
“In this psychiatrist’s opinion,” Dr. Casimir testified shortly thereafter, “Ms. Morgan Geyser has substantial mental capacity to understand the proceedings and to assist in her own defense.”