On September 12, 2017, almost exactly four years after she started sitting with Morgan on the school bus, Anissa entered Judge Bohren’s courtroom for her criminal trial. Despite protestations from both Morgan’s and Anissa’s defense teams, Judge Bohren had refused to sequester jurors prior to trial on the basis that Waukesha residents could be counted upon to be smart and fair—regardless of what they might read in the press or on social media.
“All rise.”
Anissa stood for Bohren’s entrance into the courtroom. She fiddled with her white cardigan. She was almost sixteen years old and still believed in demons. She faced forty years in adult prison. Her attorney Joseph Smith began his opening remarks in a spooky tone:
“What a wicked web we adults would weave when at first we practice to deceive … Into the Internet, two little girls wronged, become lost and disappear, not far from home. Scary stories, just for fun, sadly believed, by two little ones …”
As Smith continued to rhyme, online commenters posted laughing-crying emojis under livestreams of the trial that were playing on social media.
“Anissa was involved; that is not in doubt,” Smith continued, his rhyme scheme screeching to an abrupt stop as he faced the jury. “You are here to decide whether Anissa suffered from a mental disease or disorder and lacked the substantial capacity to appreciate that her conduct was wrong, or to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law.”
When it was Assistant District Attorney Kevin Osborne’s turn to address the jurors, he challenged the idea that any one child could be more “delusional” than another. “Kids believe in Santa Claus,” he said. “Is that a delusion? Yes, it is.” With characteristic sarcasm, he referenced Anissa’s so-called diagnosis, saying, “There are all kinds of mental diseases or defects—I daresay most people have them—I’m afraid of heights; is that a mental disease? Yes. Would it justify me doing things like the defendant did in this case? Absolutely not.”
What this case came down to, Osborne argued, was not whether it was “crazy” to stab someone—of course that was crazy, all violent crimes were, in his opinion—but whether Anissa lacked “substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct.”
The legal definition of “insanity” was different from a doctor’s definition, Osborne explained. If Anissa understood at the time of her crime that she was breaking the law, then it was the jury’s responsibility to find her guilty and send her to adult prison.
Following the opening arguments, Anissa’s defense team set out to remind jurors of how young Anissa had been at the time of her crime. In addition to Anissa’s folie à deux diagnosis, they would argue, youth itself could be considered a kind of madness.
McMahon and Smith summoned their first witness, Anissa’s father.
“She would read books on horses,” Bill Weier testified, reflecting on Anissa’s innocence leading up to the crime. “She would read a lot about domestic cats—[and] certain things about dogs.”
Following Bill’s testimony, McMahon presented jurors with a sixth grade school photo of Anissa, emphasizing, “What she looked like at the time this happened.” How could these jurors, as responsible, compassionate adults, punish a little girl with an undeveloped brain and emotional problems as though she were mature, comprehending, and sane? “Shades of that child,” McMahon promised, “still remain within her.”
During expert testimony, Anissa listened with her gaze on the floor as Dr. Michael Caldwell described her pubescent body at the time of the crime. He referenced the Tanner scale, a five-point system used by pediatricians that ranked the development of secondary sex characteristics such as breasts and body hair. Point one meant the person had no secondary sexual characteristics whatsoever. Prior to her arrest, Anissa’s pediatrician had put her at a “Tanner Stage two,” which, as Caldwell said, “would be more typical of someone who is about ten years of age, for a girl … She was closer to a child than a pubescent adolescent.” He explained that brain scans using MRI machines—which Caldwell described as “a machine that allows, for the first time, to be able to look at what’s going on inside of a person’s brain without cutting their head open”—showed that pubescent children lacked self-control and were biologically incapable of forecasting long-term consequences. That part of the brain did not finish developing until the age of twenty to twenty-five.
The focus on Anissa’s youth riled state prosecutors. During cross-examination, they demanded to know whether the doctors who had evaluated Anissa harbored secret opinions about her case not being reverse-waived—was this some kind of political ploy to have her juvenile status reviewed? When one doctor testified to Anissa’s being NGRI, he was asked, “Are you just saying that because you can’t get her back in juvenile court?” During Dr. Van Rybroek’s testimony on child development, prosecutors accused him of being a know-it-all, snapping at him, “Well, you know everything, right?”
“No,” Van Rybroek responded. “I don’t know everything, about anything.”
But Van Rybroek felt certain about one thing: Anissa should be found NGRI. He did not consider her responsible for her actions. In Van Rybroek’s opinion, a guilty verdict in Anissa’s case required “suspending, minimizing or denying what is known about brain development, mental illness and pre-teen friendships.”
“Does a child behave like an adult?” McMahon asked.
The question seemed to exhaust Van Rybroek, who responded, “I have to drink water.” After doing so, he continued:
“We wish they would be like little adults … Sometimes we do a pretty good job of civilizing them … but we understand that they’re kids. And so they don’t behave in the same way as adults—because they’re kids.”
After establishing how being twelve might have affected Anissa’s thinking at the time of the crime, McMahon and Smith moved on to the issue of folie à deux. But to prove that Anissa had shared psychosis—that Morgan’s schizophrenia had essentially spread to Anissa—they first needed to establish that Morgan’s schizophrenia predated the stabbing.
Prosecutors disagreed. If Morgan had truly been living with early-onset childhood schizophrenia prior to the crime, surely her teachers, parents, or Detective Casey would have noticed. McMahon countered that Casey had never been trained in questioning children or suspects with mental illnesses. When Casey took the stand, he admitted to his inexperience but testified that Morgan had not been living with a mental illness at the time of their interview.
Upon reviewing the interrogation tapes, some might argue that Morgan’s wandering eyes and delayed responses told a different story.
“Do you know where you are right now?” Casey had questioned Morgan at one point.
“Huh?” Morgan responded. Her gaze slid around the room. She would later recall that she had been looking for Slenderman, waiting for him to walk through the interrogation room wall and whisk her away.
“Do you know where you are?” Casey repeated.
“Not really.”
“I believe that she was cognizant of her surroundings,” Casey wrote in his report. “And knew what was going on. Her answers were logical and correct.”
In a televised interview with 20/20, he would go further: “She was very aware of what was going on—actually, very sophisticated … She seemed a little bit more intelligent than a lot of people we deal with.” A forensic psychologist offered a different analysis: “You’d look at that video and say, ‘See, she’s bloodless. She’s coldhearted. She was gonna kill,’ and other people said, ‘Oh, she’s clearly disturbed.’”
“They made mistakes that day, too,” Morgan’s grandma Dianna Niesen later said, “and I think they just want this to stay under the rug where it got swept, and there were mistakes made. They won’t talk about it anymore.”
When asked in court whether Morgan had understood the consequences for her behavior, Casey testified, “Definitely.” He would not back down from his position that Morgan had been a healthy, mature, remorseless person on the day of her interrogation. He told Anissa’s lawyers that if anything, Morgan had simply seemed dishonest to him. In his opinion, she was “weird.”
As Casey left the stand, news cameras zoomed in on Anissa, who sat seriously, taking notes. Under a livestream of the trial on Facebook, internet commenters were offering their opinions of her character.
“She has a demonic force around her. She needs prayer for her salvation.”
“She’s an evil creature should have shot her along [sic] time ago.”
“She knew right from wrong so she should not get off on this & does not need mental help.”
Other commenters echoed the popular belief that NGRI verdicts were a “get out of jail free” card, while some seemed to genuinely believe mental illnesses were an invention of the rich, saying, “It’s mental illness if the parents have money (crying emoji).”
“That’s just it,” another commenter wrote. “Everyone has mental illnesses these days, didn’t you know?”
During their cross-examination of Caldwell, prosecutors attacked the concept of mental illnesses in general. “For the sake of argument,” they derided, “Anissa has a ‘delusion’—that doesn’t make her have to kill somebody, does it?”
“The delusion by itself doesn’t,” Caldwell answered, “but once it becomes a delusional disorder—there’s a compulsive quality to it … She and Morgan were the only people that had this insight, it was incumbent upon them to act, to defend the safety of their families from this person, from this evil force.” Regarding Morgan and Anissa’s shared psychosis, he testified, “It was temporary and it was terrible—and it was a delusion that was very bad, that influenced her [Anissa] more than she could control.”
When asked to differentiate between delusional beliefs and a belief in Santa Claus—which, as McMahon pointed out, prosecutors referenced “a number of times”—Caldwell explained that when presented with hard facts that contradicted the existence of Santa Claus, “an average person” with “normal salience processing … would question their beliefs,” whereas someone like Anissa, who had developed a delusion, would ignore the contradiction—in fact, dissenting viewpoints might even cause her to double down on her beliefs. Scholars of conspiracy theory and cult membership call this “cognitive dissonance.” According to Caldwell, Anissa would have considered anyone who challenged her conspiracy theory to be “part of the conspiracy. Or else they just simply don’t have the special gift to see.”
“People with delusional disorder have a compelling need to either save the world or save their family or something like that,” Caldwell said, “and they can’t let that go.”
Caldwell disagreed with the state’s assertion that Anissa was irrefutably sane at the time of her crime because she had understood the law (or, at least, she had thought she would be executed if she murdered someone, which demonstrated a fractured understanding of the legal process). “I think she understood that the behavior was going to be criminal, that they could be arrested,” Caldwell countered. “[But] I think that she was acting out of a sense of altruism, that she was saving someone—I don’t think she fully had an appreciation of the wrongfulness, even though she understood the legality of the behavior.”
On Friday, September 15, 2017, the fourth and final day of Anissa’s trial, camera crews assembled in Bohren’s courtroom. In their closing argument, prosecutors focused on Anissa’s ability to follow rules at school, which they argued made her sane in the eyes of the law. They emphasized the planning stages of the crime, which had taken place on the school bus over the course of several months; they considered this to be the definition of “premeditation” and argued that if Anissa and Morgan were capable of long-term plotting, they were also capable of long-term thought and must therefore face the harshest long-term repercussions.
As the Leutners’ rep, Stephen Lyons, later put it, “They had different weapon plans—they had code words around their parents, so this was a well-planned, frankly, you know, military-operation kind of endeavor.”
But according to Anissa’s defense team, any twelve-year-old plotting murder was the definition of insanity.
“Horrible? Yes,” said McMahon, acknowledging the seriousness of Anissa’s crime. “Meticulous? No. Madness? Yes.”
She reminded jurors that Anissa had colluded with Morgan to please “their personal devil, Slenderman,” who “stalked, stole, and strangled children and their families.”
“This sounds crazy because it is,” McMahon concluded.
At various points during her closing argument, McMahon became emotional. She called Anissa by her nickname, “Ani.” She referred to her as “the girl who wanted to learn to dance but when her father told her he couldn’t afford to send her to the dance classes, what did she do? She turned to the Internet, to YouTube, to practice dance moves alone in her room.”
“Just as she had, on her own, sought out the depression group in school, she tried to help herself,” McMahon continued, referencing Anissa’s enrollment in a “divorce group” for kids at her elementary school. “And as the sadness and darkness within the home grew deeper, and in Anissa grew deeper, she turned further for comfort to the web, to Morgan, and so to Slenderman.”
In previous days, more often than not, McMahon had spoken of the girls as a unit, saying “they” instead of “she.” By referring to the girls in tandem, McMahon implicitly underlined the “shared” nature of folie à deux.
But now, as she faced the jury for her final remarks, McMahon spoke of one of the girls with significant pathos—and it was Morgan, not Anissa, who provided the emotional linchpin to McMahon’s case. With tears in her eyes, McMahon said:
“We know Morgan Geyser is a schizophrenic, has schizophrenia. One of the most terrible and difficult psychotic disorders known to our society. One that in Middle Ages would’ve labeled her a witch and [seen her] burnt at the stake.” McMahon gritted her teeth and added, “But we’re not in the Middle Ages anymore, we do not treat sick children that way …”
“There is a natural tendency, when a child is hurt, as Payton was, to want vengeance. But vengeance isn’t justice—vengeance is an appeal to passion and prejudice, an appeal to ignore the facts and the law. The state is asking you to do that. And the judge has told you, you cannot do that—we have a law that says when someone commits a crime because they have an illness that makes them unable to either stop themself from doing the wrong thing, or even understanding that the thing is wrong, that we commit them, and place them in an institution for treatment.”
In response, Assistant District Attorney Ted Szczupakiewicz warned jurors to remember Bella and her gruesome injuries. “Please don’t forget that in all of this, this was a brutal crime. Payton was stabbed at Anissa’s direction nineteen times … If you boil this whole thing down, it’s very simple. It comes down to: did she have to, or did she want to?—It was not kill or be killed. It was a want—It was a choice—and it was a choice that she needs to be held criminally responsible for.”
In the United States, defense teams have the last word at trial, and in McMahon’s rebuttal, her last chance to sway the jury, she again refocused the narrative on Morgan, the source of the folie à deux.
“You saw that child, Morgan, singing in the room with Detective Casey,” McMahon said, referring to Morgan’s interrogation video, which had been submitted to the jury as evidence. “He seemed to think she was lying to him. I think my eyes tell me something else … The state asks you to ignore three doctors because they don’t like what they say. And I think in part they don’t like what they say because it’s frightening. We don’t want to believe children are sick, and we don’t want to believe we miss it. You have the opportunity to fix what was missed—to place this child [Anissa] under commitment—to place her in an appropriate institution. She’s been held for long enough. Let’s place her where she belongs.”
Jurors were asked to fill out the following questionnaire:
1. At the time the crime was committed, did the defendant [Anissa Weier] have a mental disease or defect?
2. If you’ve answered question 1 yes, then answer this question: As a result of the mental disease or defect did the defendant lack substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of their conduct, or to conform that conduct to the requirements of the law?
When the jury returned from its deliberations, Anissa’s body trembled. Bohren read the verdict: “We, the jury, find as follows as to question one—’Yes’—question two—‘Yes.’”
A hint of relief flicked across Anissa’s lips as he continued:
“Anissa Weier was found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect to the crimes charged—with that I will order that she be committed to the Department of Health Services.”
Instead of going to prison, Anissa would be joining Morgan at Winnebago.
As Anissa’s NGRI verdict aired live on social media, Angie rejoiced at her computer—not because the verdict boded well for Morgan’s trial; if anything, it left Morgan’s family anxious that the emerging backlash against Anissa’s jury might prevent jurors at Morgan’s trial from making the same call. But Angie didn’t want Anissa to go to prison. She was a mother. Anissa was a child. The verdict was a victory. It was humane.
“I was in tears,” she said of the jury’s decision. “I watched the live feed of it … I actually sent Anissa’s parents a message the day of her trial, the day that the verdict was read, saying that I was thinking about them. They’re really the only people who understand what we’re going through, obviously.”
Stephen Lyons said on behalf of Bella’s family that they considered Anissa’s verdict a “get out of jail free” card.
“Is anyone sane who tries to commit murder?” Lyons asked, questioning NGRI verdicts in general. “I mean, that’s a more global question, right?—Sane people don’t try to commit murder. So by default they’re insane when they do these horrific crimes.”
Lyons wholly rejected the NGRI concept on behalf of Bella’s family as being at best redundant and at worst dangerous. He argued it put the community in an unsafe position to arbitrarily favor certain violent offenders by committing them to hospitals, while the rest remained where all of them belonged: “behind bars.”
Anissa’s jury recommended a hospital sentence of at least three years. But the full length of her commitment still rested in Judge Bohren’s hands. He would sentence Anissa sometime over the winter holidays, in what’s called a “disposition hearing.” For now he dispatched the jury, saying, “It goes without saying that this has been a long week … This has been an interesting case, a long case. Have a great rest of the summer, and a great life.”
Following the verdict, bailiffs handcuffed Anissa and led her from the courtroom. She would remain at Washington County Jail until her disposition hearing. After that, Anissa would reside with Morgan at Winnebago until Morgan’s criminal trial, which would determine whether Morgan remained at Winnebago with Anissa or spent sixty-five years in adult prison.