Over the course of the next few weeks, several court-appointed psychologists diagnosed Anissa with folie à deux (“the madness of two”), also known as “shared psychotic disorder.”
First conceptualized by nineteenth-century French psychiatrists, “shared psychotic disorder” described an otherwise mentally healthy person developing a mental illness through close proximity to someone with a mental illness. “The disorder is quite rare and most often occurs in sufficiently close relationships,” reported Dr. Melissa Westendorf, a court-appointed psychologist, on her assessment of Anissa.
Westendorf identified Anissa as the “submissive or recipient” partner in her relationship with Morgan. In reaching her conclusion, Westendorf referenced Dr. Caldwell’s report, which described Anissa’s fearful attitude as a self-fulfilling prophecy that alienated her from more socially confident or optimistic people. According to Westendorf, Anissa’s preexisting worldview about malevolent forces had been a near-perfect incubator for Morgan’s delusions. Loneliness factored into the dynamic as well; Anissa’s desperation to show loyalty to Morgan was so all-consuming that it warped Anissa’s sense of reality, an issue compounded by Anissa’s low processing speed.
“She got painted into a terrible corner,” one psychologist later testified. “The whole circumstance was a terrible corner of some kind.”
Anissa’s legal team now planned to plead NGRI at trial, using the argument that Morgan’s schizophrenia had essentially been contagious—that by the time of the stabbing Anissa could no longer differentiate between what she had pretended to see and hear to win Morgan’s trust and what she actually saw and heard.
One year prior to Anissa’s trial, in September 2016, Dr. Gregory Van Rybroek interviewed Anissa for four and a half hours. At the time, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were competing for the presidency. Recently, an angry driver had careened to a stop outside Tony’s home and stolen his Clinton campaign sign. According to Van Rybroek’s notes, Anissa “volunteered her perspective on the pros/cons of both presidential candidates.” She told him that she loved cats and dogs “and became animated and excited talking about them.”
Van Rybroek noticed that Anissa seemed far less enthused when discussing the “relationship difficulties” with her mother. She cried at times, explaining to him that she had been working on codependency issues (“emotionally sacrificing oneself for another person’s benefit”) and getting better at saying no. She told Van Rybroek that prior to the stabbing, she had felt neglected by both of her parents. She “pointed out the irony of how today she feels she is receiving more attention from her parents ‘than then.’” She told him about jail school—strangely, as she had been just prior to her arrest, Anissa was once again engaged in a course on “character education.” Anissa told Van Rybroek that she found the subject matter far more difficult to get into than she had in sixth grade, saying “It forces me to be vulnerable and I hate it.”
“She reports having a hard time trusting people,” Dr. Van Rybroek noted, “she said she can talk about ‘superficial things,’ but this class evidently is more about personal values that are deeper and more sensitive.”
When pressed to talk more about the stabbing, she warned Dr. Van Rybroek that she had told her story “millions of times by now.” She recited it quickly, having learned the whole story by heart long ago. “What I did was so cold and uncompassionate, I make Satan look like a saint,” she said. “I’m still a monster—a monster who deserves nothing … I’ve made my peace with God—I pray a lot, read the Bible, what He does with me now is on His terms.”
“On the non-spiritual side,” as Anissa called it, she worried about her job options, should she ever be released into society. “Who would hire me, knowing who I am? I would be the hardest worker, but I wouldn’t get the job.”
In addition to being a psychiatrist, Dr. Van Rybroek was the director of Mendota Mental Health Institute, the only men’s forensic hospital in the state, as well as a University of Wisconsin professor. He also was a law school graduate.
“Could you have stopped yourself from doing all this to Bella?” Van Rybroek asked Anissa.
“I couldn’t,” Anissa insisted. When asked about her feelings while planning the crime, she explained that she had wanted to stop Morgan, “but she was the only friend I had at school and I didn’t want to lose her.” Reflecting on their friendship, Anissa said, “I thought there might’ve been something wrong with her, like mental, but then I thought she might have been daydreaming. She told me about talking to Harry Potter characters and purple dinosaurs. I thought it was to get attention.” According to court documents, Anissa had recently been “convinced by another inmate who is a devil worshipper that her co-actor, meaning Ms. Geyser, is possessed.”
Anissa admitted to Van Rybroek that she still enjoyed “fictional fantasy stuff,” on the basis that she was “really creative and these games allowed for it.”
Van Rybroek’s conclusions about Anissa’s mental health matched Westendorf’s: “The intense relationship of two pre-adolescents, combined with a website of macabre death content, viewed repeatedly and discussed continuously, can create a psychotic, transitory, delusional state. The condition can be acute. It can lead to very poor judgment and dangerous behavior.”
At Winnebago, doctors noted that Morgan’s hallucinations had “greatly diminished.” After her medication was switched from Abilify to Haldol, Morgan’s friend-turned-nemesis Maggie finally disappeared. Morgan’s mood also improved. She “gained insight into her illness,” doctors noted. “She also seems to have a lot of regret for her own life now.” Though it killed her close friends, Morgan took the Haldol willingly. “She did not want to stop the medications,” Dr. Robbins said. “She felt like she was now thinking more clearly, and the thought of committing some other act as a result of her psychosis was clearly very frightening to her, a fairly remarkable insight for somebody of her age.”
But while doctors celebrated her progress, Morgan spent a lot of time feeling sad. Being in Petersik, Winnebago’s acute, short-term unit, meant that people were always coming and going. Older women orbited Morgan in states of acute psychosis, which usually acted as an impenetrable social barrier. The shifting patient population made it difficult to start or maintain friendships. Still, Morgan tried; during her time in Petersik Hall, her only disciplinary infraction, aside from a verbal warning for once running in the hallway, was for standing up for a woman who was being bullied. (“I’m with her,” Morgan allegedly said, which happened to be Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan at the time.) Patients were not supposed to intervene in one another’s altercations.
Dr. Robbins lamented that Morgan’s options for friendship were limited to people twice her age. “It’s a critical part of growth for any person during their adolescence to learn how to interact with peers, to get a sense of who they are, how they get along,” he said. “When one has schizophrenia, this kind of socialization is particularly important. Schizophrenia really has three components. There are ‘positive’ symptoms like hallucinations and delusions. Certainly Morgan has experienced those symptoms, but there are also ‘negative’ symptoms—which are things like apathy and a decrease in energy and a decrease in motivation. And to avoid those, the best thing we know about is to improve interpersonal interaction and give someone a meaningful existence.”
For now, Morgan sought meaning where she could. The medication caused her hands to shake, making it difficult to thread beads in her jewelry-making group, but she spent hours making friendship bracelets, just in case. She remembered the good times with Bella. She cried.