The highway from Winnebago to Washington County Jail was lined by dueling billboards. Christian pro-life campaigns sandwiched an ad for the Lion’s Den, an adult chain that sold pornography and plus-sized lingerie. Billboards for other adult stores were interrupted by billboards purchased by religious organizations, emblazoned with messages like WHAT WOULD JESUS THINK ABOUT PORNOGRAPHY? Images of Jesus Christ with his arms wide, ready to embrace sinners, declared, PORN KILLS LOVE, which were followed by ads for more pornography stores.
Morgan’s transport van turned off the highway into West Bend. In the Washington County Jail’s attached garage, officers unlocked her shackles and led her back into juvenile detention. In the rec room, inmates were hanging Christmas decorations. Guards assured Morgan that she and Anissa, who had remained at Washington County Jail during Morgan’s competency screening, would continue to be separated, taking their meals at different times and learning in different classrooms. Although the two girls never saw each other, Anissa would soon find ways to make her presence known to Morgan.
When Anissa had first entered the general population at Washington County Jail, the other children had mercilessly bullied her. But in the intervening months, she had managed to climb the social hierarchy, gradually earning other inmates’ respect by being nice to them, looking serious and unfazed when they taunted her, and parroting their use of swear words.
As the other girls in general population grew to like Anissa, they naturally grew to dislike Morgan, holding her responsible for Anissa’s incarceration. When Morgan returned, it bothered them that Anissa could not always join their games in the rec room or sit with them at school because Morgan was there. In solidarity with Anissa, they started giving Morgan the silent treatment. When they did speak to Morgan, they called her “psycho bitch.”
It was around this time that Morgan stopped thinking of Anissa as her friend and began referring to her, instead, as “my codefendant.”
Without any friends of her own, Morgan spent time playing with her hallucinations and making art. Lacking access to scissors, she created an entire dollhouse by drawing pieces of furniture on paper and tearing them out with her fingers. She made a tiny family for her dollhouse and cell phones for each member. Putting to use her recent education on courtroom proceedings, she even made a remote control and a television with a court drama, starring a judge and an attorney, playing out on the screen. It was the closest she could come to playing her favorite computer game: The Sims.
As Christmas approached, Morgan’s grandparents Bob and Dianna continued their annual tradition of buying Morgan a commemorative Holiday Barbie doll with long, flowing blond hair. She wore a red strapless dress tied at the waist with a gold ribbon.
Dianna put the unopened Barbie box in Angie’s old bedroom overlooking the honey locust tree. Every week, Bob raked the lawn and Dianna dusted the Barbie box. Over time, the boxes would accumulate, and Dianna stacked them in a pyramid facing the door—so that Morgan would see their smiling faces as soon as she walked in.
Tony and his wife, Laurel, were expecting a baby that winter. On December 19, Waukesha police arrested him for speeding en route to the hospital, while his wife sat beside him in labor. Local cops had not seen much excitement since the stabbing and made a big deal of Tony’s arrest. In the hospital parking lot, several squad cars converged on his SUV, and one of the officers pointed a gun at him. As Laurel hobbled inside, Tony shook his handcuffs at the cops and called them assholes. He threatened to sue the whole department, until eventually someone released him. No criminal charges were filed. Later that morning, Laurel gave birth to the couple’s second son.
When news of Tony’s brief arrest reached Morgan in jail, she laughed. Later, she heard a boy named Eric* complaining about his lawyer in the rec room and tried to one-up him, bragging, “Well, my lawyer got arrested.”
Eric was impressed. “You win.”
At first, Morgan thought Eric was a new hallucination. He looked so much like Sev. And why else would he be talking to her?
Children at the jail barely acknowledged Morgan’s existence. Anissa had mostly prevailed in coaxing them to give her the silent treatment, and they treated her as invisible.
“You’re talking to me,” Morgan said. Overcome with loneliness and gratitude, she burst into tears. “You’re talking to me.”
As Morgan sobbed, Eric turned back to his friends, muttering, “Whoa,” and “Crazy … these girls with all their feelings.”
Outside, temperatures hovered between 7 and 24 degrees Fahrenheit. Typical for December, meteorologists forecast around fourteen inches of snow. Judge Bohren had just received his annual tickets for A Christmas Carol.
As the Geysers and the Weiers prepared for their first Christmas without their daughters, the girls’ legal proceedings seemed to drag on forever. Tony filed motion after motion, holding up time in court with pleas that nobody expected to work. In one failed motion, he demanded Morgan’s charge get thrown out entirely, as adult prosecution infringed on her constitutional rights. But this was Waukesha, not the Supreme Court, and the law was what it was.
Delaying trial seemed to some like a calculated money grab. But Tony knew that the longer a criminal trial was delayed, the more likely prosecutors were to strike an attractive deal with Morgan. “Justice delayed is justice served” was a common saying among American defense attorneys.
But that didn’t make it any easier to wait.
The day before New Year’s Eve, a guard at Washington County Jail found Anissa weeping in the bathroom after breakfast and wrote up the following report:
I spoke with Anissa, who was crying and breathing real hard in the bathroom cell. Anissa kept stating that she feels like she is going to throw up and her stomach hurts.
She also mentioned that when she blows her nose there is blood, to which I told her isn’t all that unusual as it is dry in here.
I asked her if she felt that it was more anxiety related rather than actual illness related.
Anissa began to cry more stating things like she just needs to go home, she missed Christmas and will miss her mom’s birthday, seven months is way too long, etc.
She also said something along the lines of that she hates crying and needs to stop.
As Anissa struggled with her mental health issues, Morgan remained in a state of florid psychosis. Alone in her cell, she sat watching the shadows, holding out hope that Slenderman might still come for her.
During the day, guards asked Morgan why she kept slapping at the air, as if trying to fan away smoke. Morgan went back to parting the colorful curtains of mist. Sometimes through the fog she heard other kids talking about how weird and creepy she was.
Morgan wasn’t the only one suffering; her hallucinations were also becoming unhinged. At night, Morgan caught Sev cutting himself in the iso-pod bathroom and doing heroin. Morgan staged an intervention. Together they decided that Sev should go to rehab and get his head straight, while Morgan stayed in jail.
After Sev left, the lack of therapy, medication, hugging, and sunlight cooked Morgan’s brain like a fever. With no one to talk to, aside from the airy figures born of her unquiet mind, the little girl who’d once proudly thought of herself as an outsider began to feel lonely. Every other day, she received cleaning supplies and was permitted to sweep, mop, and clean out her cell. But when she was finished, she scattered her drawings and cat photos back across the cleaned floor like a carpet, explaining to the guards that it made the iso-pod feel less empty.
When Morgan noticed other girls amusing each other by wetting clean tampons in the sink and throwing them up at the bathroom ceiling to see if they would stick, she tried to impress them by throwing a wet tampon at one of the girls when she was showering. Instead of laughing, the naked girl ran screaming out of the shower. Being an outcast had never bothered Morgan before. But her Vulcan mind control had stopped working. The isolation hurt.
One day, Morgan was sitting by herself in the jail’s recreation room when she heard a voice say, “Hi.”
It was Eric, the boy who had said, “You win,” when Morgan bragged about Tony’s arrest. He wore his straight hair parted dramatically to one side, like an anime character, so that it covered his right eye and most of his face. His resemblance to Sev comforted Morgan.
Eric was sixteen years old and looked young for his age, his face soft, his bottom front teeth small and crooked. But to Morgan, who was twelve and stood less than five feet tall, he seemed like a man. His Adam’s apple poked through the smooth skin of his neck, pointing at her.
“Hi,” Morgan said back.
She had assumed he’d never speak to her again, and the interaction sparked her confidence and she began to truly socialize. Boys proved easier to get along with, perhaps because Anissa held less sway over them. Shortly after conversing with Eric, Morgan met a different boy, Peter*, who was sixteen and had amazing dark green eyes. Morgan and Peter started “dating.” He won twelve-year-old Morgan’s heart for being the first person other than her parents to ever call her pretty. When people were around, he flirted with other girls in front of her. But Morgan didn’t really care. Being boyfriend-girlfriend was way more exciting than playing with ants.
Shortly after they started “dating,” Peter aged out of the system and left Washington County Jail. Morgan didn’t make a big deal out of it. She wanted to play it cool. But she wasn’t sure how long to wait before contacting him.
“Should I write to him first, since it’s been a while, or will that make me seem desperate?” she asked one of the girls who deigned to speak to her.
The other girl seemed surprised that Morgan wanted to stay in touch with Peter at all. “Don’t you know what he did?”
Peter had told Morgan that he was in jail on drug charges, which seemed exotic and cool.
“Cocaine,” she said.
“He raped his six-year-old nephew.”
In Wisconsin, sex crimes were not automatically transferred into the adult system. Cases like Peter’s unfolded in juvenile court. Unlike Morgan, he would have received “special services,” such as psych evals, and been assigned a social worker. Upon his release from Washington County Jail, his record would have been wiped clean. In Wisconsin and several other states, long-term registration of juvenile sex offenders is thought to involve too much “stigmatization.” Repeat offenses by sex offenders are referred to by Wisconsin legislators as “relapses,” suggesting that in a state where the reality of mental illnesses was often disputed, officials nevertheless considered pedophilia a sickness.
Morgan believed the other girl when she told her what Peter had done. But none of it made her think less of him. Who was she to judge? Morgan was being prosecuted as an adult, whereas Peter had been adjudicated as a child. According to the law, her crime was worse than his. Plus, the abuse had supposedly been handed down over generations, starting with Peter’s dad raping him when Peter was a boy. Morgan felt sorry for him.
But when sixteen-year-old Eric wanted to be her boyfriend next, Morgan did not hesitate to break up with Peter. She committed herself to Eric without reservation. They never kissed or anything, because guards were always watching, but they were officially boyfriend and girlfriend.
Like Peter, Eric claimed to be in jail on cocaine charges.
“What did you really do?” Morgan asked.
Eric blushed, looking surprised. “Uh, I don’t really want to tell you. You’ll stop talking to me.”
It flattered Morgan that Eric even cared about her talking to him or not.
“Just tell me,” she pleaded.
Eric shook his long hair out of his face and stared at her, searching Morgan’s wide, innocent eyes for judgment. Finding none, he confessed, “Child pornography.” Evidently, cocaine charges were a trendy cover story among the jail’s small population of sex predators.
But Morgan just shrugged. “Okay,” she said. “Whatever.”
By then she lacked any reference point for what normal relationships should look like. Her friendship with Anissa had centered on plotting murder. Her best friendship with Bella had ended when Morgan had attempted to kill her. She had sleepovers with Voldemort. She was twelve years old.