Over the course of Morgan’s three-year legal battle, Angie had discovered how dark and cruel the internet could be. It was where Morgan had nurtured her madness, her belief in Slenderman, and it had become a place where Angie nurtured her guilt, reading the comments under articles about Morgan.
But while the internet could be a minefield—a podium for trolls, Russian hackers, and hate groups—Angie eventually found solace there, too. When news of Morgan’s case went viral, other mothers of children with mental illnesses reached out to Angie. They welcomed her into their message boards with open arms.
“We call it the club that nobody wants to be a part of,” Angie later said, “and there are more of us than you would think.”
Angie’s new friend Hillary* always made sure to record the threatening phone calls from her son, Isaac*, hoping that, with enough evidence, she might finally convince the police to have him institutionalized. When Isaac called the house, he spoke with a disembodied laugh, like the clown from the Stephen King novel It, and referred to himself in the third person as “Feelings.”
In phone calls to Hillary, Feelings described leeching off Isaac’s host body, “sucking” from it, and made threats to kill Isaac. But no matter how Hillary begged or pleaded, no matter how many recordings she played for the police, she could not get Isaac help—because Feelings was in control. It spoke to the police on Isaac’s behalf and did not want to submit to its own obliteration. When police asked Isaac’s body, “Are you a danger to yourself or others?” Feelings answered for him: “No.”
Later, Feelings phoned Hillary’s house, saying, “Isaac is asleep right now … I almost killed Isaac so that I could be out—I am the monster inside of him—are you afraid?”
“Should I be afraid?” Hillary asked, still hoping to bait definitive proof that might convince the police to save Isaac from Feelings.
“I’m in you, too,” Feelings warned. “You should be afraid to let me out.”
Many of the women whom Angie came to know and care for had similar stories; they’d watched their children descend into full-blown psychosis, but they had been unable to get them mental health care because their children were over the age of eighteen. Among those same women, some were forced to wait for their children to become violent—to hurt themselves or someone else—before mental health treatment was finally made available.
Angie grew closest with Ruth, whose adult son Levi had stabbed Ruth’s mother to death—after the police refused countless times to hospitalize him because Levi did not want to go. Levi had schizophrenia and autism, and when his case went to trial, both Ruth and Levi’s grandfather, now widowed, testified on Levi’s behalf, saying that they had forgiven him and only wanted him to receive the help he needed—help that the government had so far denied him—in a hospital setting. Instead, Levi received twenty-five years in prison.
Angie’s new internet friends understood what she was going through in ways nobody else could. While Matt cried and slept in Morgan’s bedroom, Angie gathered courage from people like Ruth, who loved their children in spite of everything, who rooted for them and advocated for them, even as the justice system sought to erase them, and the rest of the world dismissed them as monsters. Ruth and the other mothers told Angie to keep with it, keep showing up to court, keep fighting on behalf of her daughter. They warned her of how dangerous it was to bet on an NGRI—Anissa’s verdict represented an infinitesimally small percentage of outcomes. Another jury might issue a reactionary verdict.
“Take a plea,” they said.
On September 26, 2017, two weeks after Anissa’s NGRI verdict, Joe Leutner held the door for Angie as the two walked into court for what was meant to be Morgan’s last pretrial hearing. It was the first time he had acknowledged Angie’s presence in three years, and the gesture meant a lot to her.
As at a wedding, the two factions on Morgan’s case sat divided by an aisle. The Leutners and their supporters filled two rows of pews behind the prosecution table, and across the courtroom, marooned on a bench by herself, sat the defendant’s only supporter that day: her mother.
Finally, the swish and clank of shackles echoed in the hall, and fifteen-year-old Morgan entered the courtroom staring at the ground, lips parted, her hands and feet leashed to her waist by chains. She wore shoes with white cat faces decaled on the toes.
Once the courtroom had settled, the district attorney’s team and Morgan’s attorneys announced to the public what the Geysers and the Leutners already knew: there would be no trial. Earlier that day, Morgan’s parents had accepted a plea agreement with the prosecution, conceding to plead guilty in exchange for an NGRI verdict.
The confusing wording—that Morgan was guilty and yet “not guilty by reason of insanity”—did not change the NGRI outcome, which was that Morgan would remain at Winnebago for a duration of time that had yet to be determined. Like all NGRI patients, Morgan would be able to petition for release from the institute every six months. If released back into the community, she would have no criminal record.
Bella’s family had wanted the max for Morgan, sixty-five years in prison, but Stephen Lyons would tell the press that they had agreed to the plea because it eliminated the chances of Bella testifying in open court at Morgan’s trial. “Traumatizing [Bella] further didn’t seem worth it.”
Morgan’s family was elated. By the time Bohren read the plea in open court, they had long ago stopped hoping the law would somehow turn out in her favor. Now, all they wanted was for Morgan to be safe and remain in a hospital setting, where her rare form of schizophrenia would be recognized and taken seriously.
But first, Judge Bohren needed to accept the plea. He looked over at Morgan, who had grown six inches since her arrest. When she was twelve years old, he had sanctioned her prosecution as an adult. Now she finally resembled one.
Bohren told the court that he would make his decision in one week’s time. The defense and prosecution would reassemble in open court on October 5 to hear his opinion on the matter.
Though the plea deal came as no surprise to Bella’s family—Joe and Stacie had agreed to it—the Leutners and their friends made a point of storming from the courtroom in angry silence. Later, Bella’s parents would express their feelings in a press release: “Though we do not believe that an institution is where these attempted murderers belong, the current legal system does not favor victims in this situation.”
Angie couldn’t help but think that if the Leutners ever visited an adult psychiatric hospital, they might not think it was so different from prison after all. “From my perspective the justice system has failed my daughter,” she said. “I mean, being tried as an adult for something that happened when she was twelve?” She laughed softly, trailing off. After a long pause she added, “I still can’t wrap my brain around it.”
“It’s a sad story with lots of sad stories within the sad story,” Lyons acknowledged, but what was really sad, he said, was “a little girl who’s going to spend her whole life dealing with scars from nineteen puncture wounds.”
Lyons echoed his clients’ feelings that the plea was unjust. “There’s so much discussion on what’s best for those who committed the assault rather than what’s best for the victim and the community.”
Over and over again, he emphasized, “There is only one victim in this case.”
Because of Winnebago’s maximum-security protocols, Angie met with Morgan in the hospital cafeteria. She had never actually seen the hallway or the bedroom where her daughter spent her days. Typically, toward the end of the visit, Morgan started doing what Angie called “clock watching,” counting the minutes left in their visit.
“I want to come with you, Mommy,” Morgan begged. “I want to get in the car with you and drive home.”
Angie tried not to cry. “I want that, too.”
Once the plea agreement was announced, Angie and a reporter went for a quiet celebratory lunch at Taylor’s People’s Park, arguably Waukesha’s fanciest restaurant, located in what its website described as “the heart” of downtown Waukesha.
After negotiating the plea deal on the Geysers’ behalf, Tony had assured Matt and Angie that it was basically impossible that Bohren would reject it; Morgan would remain safely in the hospital, and no matter how long Judge Bohren ended up committing her for, she would be able to petition for release twice a year. Since Morgan had already served more than six months at the Winnebago, she would be up for “conditional release,” the NGRI equivalent of parole, as soon as her disposition hearing, which was only weeks away. Her doctors were prepared to testify that she was ready to leave Winnebago, which meant she might be coming home as soon as February.
But on September 29, 2017—the same day Morgan’s plea was announced in court—the New York Times released a podcast episode about NGRI laws, “When ‘Not Guilty’ Is a Life Sentence,” which painted a far less optimistic picture of Morgan’s chances at release. The segment featured journalist Gabriel Mac, whose cousin, Jackson, had been found NGRI after stabbing his father (Mac’s uncle) to death. Mac, who’d covered NGRI laws extensively, explained that if Jackson had been found “guilty” at trial, he would have been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison—but instead Jackson “won” an NGRI verdict, which had allowed a judge to order Jackson to be confined to a psychiatric institution for up to 587 years. If Morgan’s case turned out similarly, she would never leave Winnebago.
Prior to appearing on the podcast episode “When ‘Not Guilty’ Is a Life Sentence,” Mac had published an article in the New York Times under the same title—the result of one year’s work—describing a case that mirrored Morgan’s judicial timeline almost exactly:
At the police station, James signed a statement saying he understood his rights. He waived the right to representation. He signed a confession.… When doctors subsequently evaluated him, they found him so unstable that they ruled him incompetent to stand trial. He was remanded to a hospital for several months, then sent back to jail, where he regressed again, then sent back to the hospital for several more months, stabilized once again.
Like Morgan, James signed a plea deal that found him NGRI. Like Angie, his mother, Ann, was initially thrilled—she “‘put everything on hold’ for what she thought would be a few years.”
“Instead, James, now in his 40s, has been in the hospital for almost two decades,” Mac wrote. “This isn’t because he was sentenced to 20 years, or to 25. He was not sentenced at all; he is technically, legally, not responsible.”
“I shouldn’t have taken the plea,” James confided.
According to Gabriel Mac’s research, NGRI patients often languish far longer in hospitals than they would have served in prisons. This has nothing to do with doctors, because doctors do not get to decide when NGRI patients are released from the hospital. That decision rests with a judge—in Morgan’s case, an elected official whose voters mistook Morgan for an adult, and a murderer. Mac explained in his article for the New York Times:
Despite its reputation as a ‘get out of jail free’ card, the insanity defense has never been an easy way out … And when an NGRI defense does succeed, it tends to resemble a conviction more than an acquittal. NGRI patients can wind up with longer, not shorter, periods of incarceration, as they are pulled into a mental-health system that can be harder to leave than prison … In 1983, a national study found that NGRI patients often lost their freedom for twice as long as those actually convicted of the same offense.
Mac described NGRI cases as a forgotten population. While U.S. prisoners are meticulously inventoried, almost no data exists on forensic patients. As of 2017, “more than 10,000 mentally ill Americans who haven’t been convicted of a crime—people who have been found not guilty by reason of insanity or who have been arrested but found incompetent to stand trial—are involuntarily confined to psychiatric hospitals—even a contributor to the study concedes that no one knows the exact number.”
Angie didn’t know about Gabriel Mac’s research. Following the plea announcement, she felt relieved and optimistic.
At Taylor’s People’s Park, she and the reporter followed the hostess up a steep flight of stairs to Taylor’s famous rooftop deck. Angie told the reporter that despite living in Waukesha, she “never really” ran into anyone related to Morgan’s case—but then she spotted Detective Thomas Casey, the man who’d interrogated her daughter, about ten feet away, enjoying a beer and a burger in the sunshine. Angie squeezed the reporter’s arm and quickly retreated back down the steps before Casey could notice her. Forcing a smile, she asked the hostess if they could please sit at a small metal folding table out on the sidewalk instead.
“I can’t wait to not live here,” Angie said, settling into her new seat. Not wanting to sound dramatic, she added, “But I don’t think it’s a horrible place to live, either.”
Hearing raucous laughter above as Casey and other patrons dined closer to the sun, Angie ordered one of the more expensive menu items, a salad with salmon, and an IPA, still determined to celebrate the plea. She rolled up her sleeve to show the reporter her new tattoo, a lily of the valley inked prettily onto her upper arm. It was the flower of Morgan’s birth month. “Supposedly,” Angie explained, “it symbolizes a return to happiness.”
The round trip from Waukesha to Winnebago took almost four hours, for what amounted to forty-five minutes with Morgan, and Angie liked to get there extremely early to avoid being even one minute late. En route, she always stopped at the same gas station to refuel and buy snacks before visiting hours began.
One day, while pumping gas into her car, Angie noticed a feral kitten poking around the parking lot. The kitten looked sick, and the next time Angie drove to visit Morgan, she brought along a cat carrier, planning to wrangle the feral kitten and take it to an emergency vet before visiting hours started.
“I can’t rescue who I want to rescue,” she admitted to herself. “So a kitten will have to do for now.”
After prowling the perimeter of the gas station with a cat carrier in one hand, Angie finally spotted the feral kitten she had come to save and cornered it. But then an adult cat emerged from the shadows and stepped protectively between them. The relationship between the two felines was clear. So, Angie returned to her car empty-handed. Sick or not, she decided, the kitten belonged with its mother.