As an undergrad, Michael Bohren attended Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin, a city known for being the birthplace of the Republican Party. In the late 1960s, while many of his classmates were becoming hippies, Bohren was writing pro–Vietnam War editorials extolling the virtues of anticommunism. He believed what the government told him and considered political engagement part of his patriotic duty. As head of the Ripon College Young Republicans Club, Bohren recruited new members so aggressively and successfully that one student exclaimed, “Somehow even dyed-in-the-wool liberals find themselves clutching a bought and paid for membership card. They are a little hazy about how it happened, but mostly they are glad they belong, they think.” In 1969, during his senior year, Bohren traveled to Washington, D.C., to celebrate the inauguration of Richard Nixon.
Decades later, before issuing his verdict on Morgan and Anissa’s reverse waivers, sixty-eight-year-old Judge Bohren sipped from a Ronald Reagan mug. The courtroom was crowded that day. The Weiers, the Geysers, the Leutners, the Leutners’ friends, and multiple new crews had gathered to hear Bohren’s ruling.
Setting down his mug, Bohren glanced summarily at Morgan and Anissa from his dias; certainly the girls looked very young, but there was also the fact of their crime, so heinous and haunting. As Bohren had written for the Ripon newspaper College Days, “Perhaps we should see the enemy for what it is, not what we wish it was.”
“They were young when the offense occurred,” he said now, “but they get older every day, frankly.”
Bohren acknowledged that adult prison was not the best situation, but that held true for anyone; neither Morgan nor Anissa deserved any special treatment.
“This court wasn’t particularly impressed with what Taycheedah said they had available,” Bohren said. “[But] that is the nature of the state correctional system in addressing inmates, it’s overcrowded, cost[s] a lot of money and there’s a lack of resources to address anyone in that system.” He called Morgan and Anissa’s crime, “frankly, vicious” and ruled “on that basis” that the case remain in adult jurisdiction.
Following the hearing, Nick Bohr of local ABC News affiliate WISN reported live: “There were tears and some surprise here in court as a judge denied a motion by lawyers for both girls to have their cases handled in juvenile court. The victim’s father here said they wouldn’t be commenting, though the family did appear to be upbeat following this decision.”
Journalists caught Matt sobbing outside the Waukesha courthouse. In the days to come, Morgan’s defense team would politely ask him to stop showing up at hearings; his interminable sobbing was distracting the judge.
When questioned by reporters that day, Matt said only that he wished Judge Bohren had “thought harder.”
Waukesha was one of the most conservative counties in what was becoming an increasingly conservative state—one that by around twenty thousand votes would swing the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s favor. Local residents supported Judge Bohren’s tough-oncrime decision to keep Morgan and Anissa’s case in adult court.
At home, Angie opened a beer. Recently, Tony had told her that he needed an extra $100,000. Bob had dipped deeper into his police pension, reassuring Angie that she shouldn’t feel guilty—Tony had promised that the flat rate would cover all remaining legal things. This would be the end of it.
But as Angie paged through the newest bills, she was shocked to learn that juvenile jails charged parents child support. Apparently, taxpayer money did not cover “pre-detainment” and kicked in only once the young defendant finished trial, which in Morgan’s case could take years.
Angie had already maxed out several credit cards to cover Morgan’s collect phone calls, which over time would total more than $10,000. On top of that, she would end up owing $150,000 to the Washington County Jail. Between Tony’s initial retainer, the remaining legal fees, and what the Geysers owed the state of Wisconsin, they were looking at around $300,000 in charges related to the case.
Angie finished her beer and opened another.
Later, she returned from walking the dog to find a Japanese film crew setting up outside her front door. She turned around and kept walking until the Japanese people left. She wanted to move out of Waukesha but felt she needed to wait until she knew where Morgan would end up, so that she could move someplace nearby. Back home, she called up the state and arranged a payment plan for the jail bills. She took out a personal loan from the bank. She tiptoed past Matt’s new bedroom—Morgan’s bedroom. They slept separately now.
Meanwhile, Morgan remained in psychosis. She was losing the ability to read. She could not do basic math.
“If she had a physical illness, you know if she was diabetic, if she had a seizure disorder, if she had a broken arm, she would have been given medical treatment immediately,” Angie told the press. “Schizophrenia, it needs to be looked at more like a physical illness, because it is a physical illness. Her brain is physically and neurochemically different. So it just blows my mind.”
“For whatever reason, we feel sympathetic when we see the child with the shaved head, because the ten-year-old has leukemia,” Tony later said. “There isn’t a person you meet whose heart doesn’t go out to the child, who wouldn’t, if the family needed five bucks, wouldn’t pull it out of their wallet to give it to the person. If that child is acting out violently because the child suffers from schizophrenia, there’s almost no compassion. I don’t know why that is.”
Plagued by alternating fits of loneliness and confusion, Morgan increasingly relied on her hallucinations for company. Both Peter and Eric had aged out of the system, and while she still spoke to Eric periodically on the phone, Morgan longed for a female friend.
But other girls at Washington County Jail continued to prefer Anissa over Morgan, calling her “psycho bitch” and giving her the silent treatment on Anissa’s behalf. So when another girl at Washington County Jail offered to be Morgan’s roommate, Morgan and her family were relieved. Morgan’s parents wanted her to have non-hallucinatory company. But shortly after moving in, Morgan’s new roommate started masturbating in front of Morgan and sexually propositioning her. The roommate warned that if Morgan told anyone, she would go to the press and spin the story her way—the press clearly hated Morgan; they would believe anything anybody told them.
By the time Morgan told her parents about the sexual harassment, the roommate, whose crime is unknown, had been released.
When FOX6 News reported that Tony’s and Maura McMahon’s appeals on the reverse waiver decisions had been denied, 119 comments unfurled underneath the article, including a GIF of a dog clapping. When a lone commenter tried to stand up for the girls, saying, “Trying these kids as adults is barbaric and outrageous,” other commenters pounced on him:
“No, barbaric and outrageous is what they did to that child. People like you are the problem.”
“Glad you care more for them than the victim.”
“They need to rot in prison. They know what they were doing.”
On October 8, 2015, after not paying her car bills for several months, Kristi Weier’s Jeep was repossessed, complicating her ability to regularly visit Anissa. Bill Weier was not an emotional man, but sometimes he missed Anissa so much it made him cry.
Every day, Anissa felt guiltier about the ways that her crime had affected her family. At the same time, she relished how much more attention they paid her, now that she was in jail, which made her guiltier still.
On the night before Thanksgiving, she struggled to sleep because people were yelling at each other through the vents. Anissa could feel her chest getting tight. “Don’t do it,” she kept thinking, “don’t do it.” She did not want to lose her temper, knowing that any outburst might make her look bad in court. So instead she started scratching at her wrists, hoping the pain would ground her so that she would “not blow up.”
She thought about suicide, reasoning that if she didn’t exist, then Bella would never have gotten hurt. But she didn’t tell anyone, not wanting to get smocked.
Angie did not want to speak ill of Judge Bohren, as he was still in charge of Morgan’s future. But when asked if she felt like he was biased against them, she answered shyly, “He’s denied just about every motion we’ve put in front of him, so it certainly feels that way.”
Without support from Bohren on the matter of medication, Morgan’s family learned that the only remaining way to force Morgan into treatment would be through civil court. Tony explained that he could not recommend a civil lawyer because it was a conflict of interest. But he encouraged the Geysers to find one and pursue a Chapter 51 order—a legal process by which someone with a severe mental illness, a degenerative brain disorder, or developmental disabilities can be court ordered to an approved treatment facility and administered medication under the Americans with Disabilities Act. If the plan worked, it would create even more of a paper trail for Morgan’s mental illness and help Tony win an NGRI at her trial.
As the girls prepared for their second Christmas in jail, the Geysers paid a new attorney thousands of dollars and successfully petitioned a judge other than Bohren for a Chapter 51 order.
The Chapter 51 represented the Geysers’ first win since Morgan’s arrest, and in mid-December, after nineteen months of unmedicated psychosis, Morgan was finally sent back to Winnebago and administered antipsychotics. Doctors started her on a low dose of Abilify, which was gradually increased. After one month of medication, according to their notes, Morgan was still “cocky.” She spent most of each day in her room, did not attend group therapy, and barely spoke. According to one doctor, “She hated people.” But by early February, two months after starting on Abilify, Morgan began to show what her doctors characterized as “dramatic signs of improvement.” She spent less time alone. She achieved “100 percent group participation.” She won the title “Patient of the Month.” She started to cry.
Until then, psychosis had masked her feelings. What Morgan called “Vulcan mind control” was actually a subsidiary symptom of schizophrenia, characterized as flat affect. Almost two years after she committed her crime, antipsychotics reached therapeutic levels in her bloodstream; the air around her cleared and realization hit her like a truck: in a moment of hallucinatory confusion and fear, she had stabbed her best friend nineteen times. As a result of starting Abilify, she felt remorse; unfortunately for Morgan, she felt everything.
In some ways, it was like waking up from a nightmare, only to find herself inside another nightmare. The galloping drumbeat of unicorn hooves was replaced by the buzz of fluorescent lights, the crackle of the hospital intercom, and the interminable screaming of patients in psychosis, which signaled the dawn of each day, like a crow’s call. One by one, Morgan’s only friends in the world started dying. The antipsychotics killed Sev and next Voldie—and on and on, until only Maggie remained. Morgan missed Bella terribly. She wrote in her notebook: “I want to die. I want to kill myself—I want to go to sleep and never wake up.” Multiple pages of the journal were covered in the same repeated sentence:
“I can’t wake up from this nightmare. I can’t wake up from this nightmare. I can’t wake up from this nightmare. I can’t wake up from this nightmare …” And then, at the very bottom: “I’m not asleep.”
Morgan’s memory of the stabbing was foggy, and what she could recall frightened her.
Meanwhile, Maggie seemed impossible to kill. But her company brought Morgan little comfort. As a result of the antipsychotics, Maggie was becoming cruel; it was as if she saw the poison rushing toward her through Morgan’s veins and hated Morgan for it. She invented a game where Morgan was not allowed to eat unless Maggie gave her permission. Often, Morgan went hungry.
When Maggie finally disappeared, it should have brought Morgan relief, but instead, she felt bereaved.
For many schizophrenia patients, hallucinations are a negative and frightening experience. But for Morgan, they had been good friends, making her laugh and keeping her company. When Abilify caused Sev and the others to disappear, their absence registered as an enormous loss. It felt like a mass death.
Morgan unpacked her grief through poetry:
“Sev”
By Morgan
I was told he was dead.
But what am I to believe,
When around me I feel his life
And his great reluctance to leave?
I was told he was imaginary.
But how could it be so,
When many a night his heartbeat
Sang me to sleep
And I heard his voice so calm and low?
Feeling truly alone for the first time in her life, Morgan listened to the silence in her head and felt even more desperate for a friend. The adult patients in Petersik frightened her. They were unpredictable and loud—and over time, Morgan gravitated toward the quietest among them: a woman who, it turned out, was deaf.
Morgan and her new friend sat together, communicating mostly in writing. Excited about the prospect of their friendship, Morgan had borrowed a book from the hospital library on sign language. With someone to sit with each day, she felt less adrift. But one day while they were “talking,” the deaf woman passed Morgan a note: “Can I touch your boob?”
Morgan wrote back, “No,” and left the table.
As she walked down the corridor alone, Morgan’s mind turned to what had happened on her birthday. She sat down on the cold floor and rocked back and forth, hugging herself, until a staff member offered to inject her with Xanax.
Later, Morgan walked groggily around the ward, trying to find Sev.
In the outside world, news of the stabbing continued to circulate. As before, the brunt of media attention focused on Slenderman. Morgan and Anissa’s young age, and Morgan’s schizophrenia, took a back seat to descriptions of Creepypasta. Morgan’s and Anissa’s parents agreed to talk to HBO documentary filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky. The Geysers hoped their participation would draw focus to Morgan’s mental illness. Instead, the documentary primarily stressed the dangers of the online world. One of the academics interviewed called Slenderman “a virus of the mind.” Morgan’s schizophrenia was not mentioned until more than an hour into the ninety-minute film.
On March 23, 2016, three months after starting medication, Winnebago discharged Morgan with a prescription for antipsychotics and sent her back to jail.
Morgan’s family was devastated. Antipsychotics alone were not enough to treat Morgan’s schizophrenia. She needed therapy. She needed to be in a medical setting. They did not understand why Winnebago could not keep her, and administrators at the hospital seemed unable to give them a rational explanation.
Upon her return to the Washington County Jail, Morgan deteriorated rapidly. At Winnebago, doctors had prescribed her antipsychotics but not antidepressants, and the self-loathing that had set in upon recognizing what she’d done to Bella gnawed away at Morgan’s mind.
Given the circumstances, rushing through a trial might have been the fastest way to get Morgan better mental health treatment: if found NGRI, which seemed like an obvious conclusion, given Morgan’s diagnosis, Winnebago would immediately readmit Morgan, do a medication adjustment, add antidepressants to her roster of drugs, and engage her in therapy.
But despite their reputation as “get out of jail free” cards, NGRI verdicts were extremely hard to come by. Surveys showed that the average American believed that 40 to 60 percent of people who committed crimes pled NGRI, but in reality the number was closer to 1 percent. In 2016, 110,000 felony cases were tried in Wisconsin, and 400 involved NGRI pleas—but of those cases, only about 100 resulted in an NGRI verdict. That’s 0.09 percent of all cases. Statistics showed that 99 percent of those NGRI verdicts were the result of a plea deal. Jurors rarely sent defendants with mental illnesses to hospitals.
Again, Tony needed to come up with a way to get Morgan medical attention without launching into trial or requesting any resources from the state of Wisconsin. He found his foothold with a bail reduction hearing: if the Geysers could afford to post bail, Morgan might await trial at home, where she could receive mental health treatment from residential facilities and private doctors. McMahon and Smith jumped aboard Tony’s motion, and on April 24, 2016, he and Anissa’s lawyers appeared in court for a bail reduction hearing.
Maura McMahon and Joseph Smith wanted Anissa’s bail lowered from $500,000 to $500. When it was their turn to make a case for bail reduction, Anissa rose and read from a statement she’d written:
“As of right now, I’ve been away from my family for 22 months and 13 days. I don’t want to be the older sister my little brother barely knows because of legal limbo. I’ve missed two of his birthdays, Christmases and Thanksgivings. That, for me, is far too many. I know if my bail was reduced and my family able to pay it … it would give me an opportunity to make up lost time with my family … I would show up to every court date. I’d also voluntarily wear a GPS-like monitor. Thank you for your consideration. With utmost sincerity, Anissa Weier.”
The defense rested. Bohren denied their plea for bail reduction. McMahon gave Anissa a small hug.
Bohren turned his attention to the second defense table. It was Tony and Donna’s turn to make their argument.
Tony straightened his tie. Despite Anissa’s loss, it was possible that the right testimony might put Morgan’s case on a better course.
Tony reminded Bohren that the purpose of bail in criminal proceedings was to ensure defendants appear for trial and do not run away or attempt to intimidate victims and potential jurors—in Morgan’s case, Tony argued, those concerns were virtually irrelevant. Unlike other children in the juvenile jail, Morgan had never once been violent since her arrest.
“The risk to the community is essentially nonexistent,” Tony said. “She has no car, no transportation, no friends.”
Tony also reminded Bohren that Morgan had a “persuasive, severe and untreated mental health condition” and that the Washington County Jail lacked mental health treatment. Reducing bail would allow Morgan’s parents to enroll her at an outpatient mental health facility.
“What’s really essential here is making sure that the issues that caused this offense to take place—which is a fixation on Slenderman, emerging schizophrenia and very severe mental health conditions—get treated.”
Bohren stopped him. “Why hasn’t there been mental health treatment at the facility which is holding her now?”
Rather than unpacking the myriad ways in which the judicial system had failed his client, Tony focused on the future. He explained to Judge Bohren that if Morgan were released on bail, she would live with her grandparents. Bob was a retired police chief. She would wear an ankle monitor. The community would be safe—and once Morgan received the proper medical attention, she’d be safe as well.
When Bob took the stand, he swore that he would make sure Morgan took her Abilify and drive her to psychiatric appointments. He had already given away his guns to a friend for safekeeping and promised to lock up the kitchen knives, too. He testified that he was not afraid of her.
But state prosecutors argued that neither Morgan’s nor Anissa’s families could be trusted to keep them from doing something bad, since they had not kept them from doing something bad in 2014. They made the case that both girls were flight risks, on the basis that they had tried to run away before (to Slender Mansion), and that the community would not be safe with them on house arrest. They grouped the girls together, clearly hoping to convince Bohren that he needed to be consistent in his rulings; if he denied Anissa’s bail reduction, he must deny Morgan’s as well.
In his closing argument, Tony tried to differentiate Morgan from Anissa, emphasizing that, unlike Anissa, Morgan had a diagnosed mental illness that existed in isolation. “This crime, this horrible thing,” he said, “is not adult behavior—this is sickness. She’s not here because of peer pressure”—he gestured dismissively at Anissa—“or whatever the situation is over here.”
Tony focused on Morgan’s improvement since beginning mental health treatment. “She is a different person now.” He pointed at her family. “She’s the Morgan they knew—she’s crying in court. I’ve never seen that, never seen that from her. She’s different—she is not her codefendant. She doesn’t have whatever those issues are, doesn’t have them. She is a sick child who had an illness and has been treated and she should be permitted to be in the community to continue getting those services.”
Bohren thanked Morgan’s team and proceeded to analyze her case aloud, weighing the opposing viewpoints, as if working out his decision in real time.
“The crime Ms. Geyser is accused of is one of the most serious offenses that the community can be aware of,” he said. “Although Ms. Geyser is young and one could posit immature, she nonetheless participated in … what in some respects is a sophisticated plan to kill someone … planned over a long period of time … that shows a certain amount of ingenuity, drive and focus … Ms. Geyser as well as her co-actor are intelligent people—young people, but nonetheless intelligent …”
“I’m aware that she’s very young,” he continued, “so it’s easy to say, ‘She’s a kid. My God, she couldn’t do any of this. She’s going to do what her grandfather says and everything will be good.’ But, when you look at what happened in this case, other things happened, a very dangerous incident, life threatening … There’s a history of running away. The running away was to fulfill the Slenderman myth, but still when they’re on the move, they showed tremendous ability as young kids of 12 to be out on the land and moving away from the event that happened …”
“You can look at the good mental health treatment. And then it’s like a magnet, you immediately get drawn, as I look back at it, back to the seriousness of the offense. Bail will remain as fixed.”
Morgan and Anissa left the hearing separately, both of them feeling depressed.
For her part, Anissa had been genuinely optimistic about her chances of going home, and after hearing Bohren’s verdict, she “sort of wanted to die.” Back at Washington County Jail, she admitted her feelings to guards, saying she didn’t “trust” herself. In response, Anissa “got smocked” and sent to segregation.
Anissa later recalled how she had sat alone in the secluded cell, wearing the turtle suit, until the suicidal ideation “went away … I realized I would be leaving my little brother and my parents and there is no way in hell I would do that.”
Whether she meant it or was simply telling doctors and guards what they wanted to hear, Anissa never admitted to suicidal ideation again. Getting smocked twice had taught her a lesson: opening up about her feelings resulted in humiliation and punishment.
After the bail reduction hearing, Morgan wanted to kill herself, too. The stress of her ongoing depression had resulted in what psychiatrists call a “breakthrough symptom.” For the first time in months, Morgan heard Maggie’s voice again, saying, “Cut yourself.”
For Morgan, the idea of sleeping in her mom’s childhood bedroom at Bob and Dianna’s—where Holiday Barbies from Morgan’s Christmases spent in prison waited for her, still in their boxes—had temporarily quieted the overwhelming feelings of isolation. Once that hope had been squashed, nothing remained.
So Morgan rooted through the art supplies in her iso-pod. She found a red colored pencil with a sharp tip. As a security camera flashed overhead, Morgan pressed the pencil tip against the soft side of her wrist. She broke the skin. She pulled.
When guards in the control center saw Morgan hacking away at her arms on their security cameras, they raided her cell. As with Anissa, Morgan “got smocked” and was put under suicide precautions. Her cell was emptied. Her glasses were confiscated. The world turned blurry as she stepped out of her underpants. She spent the next seven days naked under the smock, unable to see. During that time, the jail allowed Angie to visit Morgan.
“She would sit in the visitation cell with her smock and without her glasses on,” Angie later recalled. “She looked like a caged animal. It was horrible.”
Back in the iso-pod, without anything to do, Morgan rocked back and forth and tried to soothe herself by singing Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane over the Sea,” one of her mother’s old lullabies.