On February 13, 2015—which was, coincidentally, Bella’s thirteenth birthday—Judge Bohren held a hearing to schedule future hearings. Morgan and Anissa’s case was drawing out longer than expected. Tony and the Geysers had anticipated it taking a year at most. Now, three months from the one-year mark, they were nowhere near a trial. As Morgan’s grandpa Bob later said, “We didn’t expect to see all this drama and other things.”
Part of the delay had to do with Tony, who kept filing far-fetched motions to have Morgan’s charge reduced or thrown out. Focused on getting Morgan rehospitalized, he was doing everything in his power to avoid a trial. If a jury found Morgan guilty, she could spend the rest of her life in an adult prison without any mental health resources.
But one by one, Judge Bohren denied Tony’s motions. So Tony played his last card, and scheduled a reverse waiver hearing—Morgan’s only remaining hope for avoiding a criminal trial.
In Wisconsin, attempted homicide cases are automatically waived into adult court, but they can be reverse-waived into juvenile court—a tricky process that, per Wisconsin law, requires defense attorneys to convince a judge by “a preponderance of evidence” that juvenile prosecution would “not depreciate the seriousness of the crime” in the eyes of the community, that keeping the case in adult court was not the best way to deter others from committing a similar crime, and that the defendant could receive adequate treatment only within the juvenile system.
If Tony could convince Judge Bohren of these three things, Morgan would receive mental health resources and be released to her family for private treatment upon her seventeenth birthday, just like Peter and Eric.
Later that spring, new transfers to Anissa’s cellblock crowded in front of the rec room television to watch an ABC 20/20 special on Bella. Afterward, they called Anissa “a fucking bitch,” which upset Anissa, because until then she’d been making social progress. Some of the newer girls also accused Anissa of stabbing someone, which upset Anissa even more, because she hadn’t.
Around 7:00 P.M. that same night, an officer unlocked Anissa and the other girls from their cellblock to attend a movie screening in the rec room. But Anissa was crying and didn’t want to leave her cell. She sat weeping with her head against the wall, nearly hyperventilating. When asked what was wrong, she said, “Slenderman.”
“They were talking about the 20/20 show, and said I did the stabbing too.”
“You need to calm down,” the officer said. “Look at me—take some deep breaths.”
“I am trying and I really need to get some stuff off my chest—I’m a monster, I tried to kill someone, I am a fuckin’ bitch monster.”
“You don’t need to explain to me anything about your case.”
It seemed as if he didn’t want her to talk at all.
“I need to talk about it,” Anissa insisted. When the officer offered to call mental health services, she begged, “NO! Just don’t leave.”
“Are you thinking of hurting yourself?”
“NO.”
“People have their own opinions,” the guard said, referring to the girls who had called Anissa a bitch. But he stayed, and Anissa started to calm down.
Within forty-five minutes, she was smiling again. “Thank you for talking to me.”
“Do you want to go watch the movie?”
“Can I just have the radio?”
The guard let her have the radio and left to talk to the girls who had been bullying Anissa, reminding them that it was against the rules to discuss other inmates’ cases. One of the girls laughed in his face, saying, “I can talk about it if I want.”
Later, Anissa complained to guards of a headache. She felt nauseated, and the light hurt her eyes. The nurse gave her Gatorade, Tylenol, and a cold washcloth.
On May 15, 2015, the eve of Morgan’s thirteenth birthday, Angie brought cupcakes to the jail. That same day, Donna Bennett, a social worker from the Department of Health Services, sat down to talk to Morgan in preparation for the reverse waiver. Bennett arrived around lunchtime and waited for Morgan in one of the visitation rooms. Morgan entered carrying a meal tray with soup and bread. After setting down her food, Morgan sat in the chair across from Bennett, then stood up and tried a different seat. She kept sitting in different chairs, squirming in each of them before finally settling in the one farthest away from Bennett. Morgan rolled the bread on her tray into tight little balls. She dropped them into her soup. She stirred them around and played with them. In her notes from that day, Bennett described Morgan as “skittish.”
As an icebreaker, Bennett complimented Morgan’s purple glasses. They talked about the color purple, which was still Morgan’s favorite. Morgan told Bennett that her dad used to bite her toes, and that since her arrest, she had made a list of everything that was wrong with him. Angry with Matt for hiding his schizophrenia from her, Morgan had started tearing out his face from the family photos she kept in her cell. She told Bennett that she didn’t want to talk to him anymore because he had “disrespected” her friend, which Bennett took to mean an imaginary friend, as Morgan had no real ones.
Bennett noted that Morgan didn’t seem particularly uncomfortable about the case pending against her. When she asked Morgan if she missed her family or her cats, Morgan replied that she didn’t miss anybody. “I don’t miss things … Negative emotions are illogical and the human race is illogical. Missing things speeds up entropy—you know, ‘evil.’”
Morgan said that if anything, she missed sunlight. She would prefer to live at home than in jail, if only so that she could look out windows again. She wanted to “play with her whole set of action figures.”
Before leaving, Bennett wished Morgan a happy birthday.
Morgan responded that birthdays were no big deal, just another day closer to death.