At Winnebago, moments of the bizarre punctuated daily tedium. Staff wrestled screaming patients away to seclusion. Sometimes they left them strapped to boards in the hallway. One morning, a woman in Morgan’s ward got taken away to the dentist, and when she returned smiling, all her teeth were gone. Life felt simultaneously boring and dangerous. Seasons changed through the windows as if on fast-forward.
One night, Morgan woke to see a girl with a mummified face sitting on the edge of her bed, wearing a noose like a necklace. When Morgan tried to hide under the covers, she felt them ripped away, and bolted upright to find a strange man crouched at the foot of her bed, gripping her blanket in his hands.
When Morgan told her doctors about the ghosts, they upped her dosages until her hands shook so badly that she could no longer draw good pictures of Sev, whose face was fading from her memory. When forced to make art in art group, Morgan sloppily sketched the same image over and over again, of a girl caught inside a tornado of spiraling words: “Die.” “Bitch.” “Hate you.” “Unloved.” “Worthless.”
Morgan’s visits with her parents brought little comfort. They visited separately now, ostensibly so that someone could visit her every single day, but Morgan knew it was because they didn’t get along. During visits with her father, Morgan watched as Matt painstakingly removed the green candies from a bag of Skittles, put them into a Styrofoam cup, covered it with a napkin, and pushed the cup as far away from himself as he could reach.
“What are you doing?” Morgan asked.
“Grown-ups can have secrets, too, Morgan.”
Morgan wanted to be strong like her mom. She spent her days slowly typing up stories about children inheriting terrible secrets from their families and breaking the cycle of generational trauma by being brave and changing the world. One day, she was writing at the computer when she spotted a new patient wandering around, looking heartbroken. Katy was ten years older than Morgan, but she looked gentle and childlike, standing only five feet tall.
Morgan waved at Katy. She invited her to come sit down at the computer. The two tried playing each other their favorite songs from the music library. But the tracks kept skipping—an unusual problem for a downloaded song—as if the computer itself were haunted. When Morgan told Katy about the ghosts, Katy believed her. They started braiding each other’s hair and sharing headphones when they listened to music on Morgan’s iPod, which Morgan had bought using indigent money from the state—she received around ten dollars per week. During outdoor time, they stood shoulder to shoulder, staring beyond the barbed wire fence in the exercise yard, looking for animals. When Morgan read to Katy from her novels, Katy insisted they would all become bestsellers. The only thing they disagreed on was whether Morgan was ugly; Morgan said she was, but Katy said she wasn’t. Morgan asked her parents to bring extra packs of Starburst or Skittles with them to visits and left them in Katy’s cubby for snack time. Katy had no visitors of her own. Her family had disowned her, because of what she’d done.
Everyone in the hospital knew about Morgan’s crime because it was famous, but unlike other patients, Katy never asked about the incident or made Morgan feel bad about it—and to return the favor, Morgan never asked about Katy’s crime, either. She surmised that it beat hers, in the legal scheme of things, because Morgan had gotten forty years, and her victim hadn’t even died, whereas Katy had gotten life, which implied that someone had. But she didn’t want to know the details.
To those who knew the whole story, though—to the doctors and staff who oversaw the ward—Morgan and Katy’s friendship made perfect sense. Each represented to the other a fresh start, a way to atone for and fill the voids created by their respective crimes. At Slenderman’s behest, Morgan had stabbed her best friend nineteen times, and now she longed for a new friend to do right by this time. At Satan’s behest, Katy had taken a plastic bag from the grocery store and wrapped it around her toddler’s face until he suffocated. She needed a new baby.
With Morgan’s sixteenth birthday on the horizon, she and Katy decided that it was probably time for Morgan to find a boyfriend. The two decided to sign up for Winnebago’s pen pal program with the Wisconsin Resource Center, a men’s prison for inmates with severe mental illness, situated just across campus from Gordon Hall. After waiting weeks for a response, Morgan received a letter from WRC prison inmate #391563. Like Morgan, thirty-one-year-old Craig had schizophrenia and took Haldol. He’d been prosecuted in adult court when he was still a child for beating to death an elderly couple with a fire poker and stealing their guns. Unlike her, he was found guilty, not NGRI, and was serving life in prison.
Morgan could tell from Craig’s letters that he was good boyfriend material, because he said the things a boyfriend should say, like how he wanted to marry her, and give her a child, and kiss her “with tongue” when they finally met in person.
To maximize their time together, Morgan and Katy started skipping group therapy, at which point staff decided that their friendship was no longer “therapeutic” and moved Katy to a different wing of Gordon Hall. From then on, Morgan and Katy could interact only outside and at meals. They were devastated by the change, but not exactly surprised. A deep-seated part of them felt they deserved every bad thing life could throw. During outdoor time, they spoke through the barbed wire fence that separated their respective exercise pens. They still got to sit together at meals, and passed the time in the cafeteria playing with slices of bread and describing each other’s personality in toast form. (Katy’s “inner toast” harbored secret plans to kill itself in the toaster.) Even though they were separated, it seemed that nothing could come between the two.
Nothing, it turned out, except for Anissa Weier.
Until then, Anissa had resided on the other side of campus in Petersik Hall. Typically, Petersik Hall was reserved for more extreme cases, and Anissa’s assignment there caused some confusion. Some people said she was still there because the hospital didn’t know how else to keep her and Morgan apart. Others claimed Anissa had threatened to kill an orderly, although Anissa’s disciplinary record showed no such incident.
In any case, a few months after Morgan’s sixteenth birthday, staff in Gordon Hall received word that, after a longer than usual stint in Petersik, Anissa would be moving into Morgan’s forty-person unit. To keep the girls apart, staff moved Morgan, along with the ward’s most acutely psychotic patients, into a dusty, unused annex that abutted the ward. Morgan’s new neighbors were known for their unpredictability, swinging from drooling silence into wild psychosis if you talked to them the wrong way.
Since there was only one cafeteria, administrators decided that Morgan and Anissa would take turns eating there, switching off every thirty days, while the other ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner alone in her bedroom.
Morgan’s happiest moments were when she saw Katy outdoors through the barbed wire fence or spotted her down the long, shared hallway that connected their corners of the building.
One day, Morgan was pacing the corridor hoping to catch sight of Katy, when she saw Anissa walking toward her instead. Back in middle school Anissa had affectionately called Morgan “Kitty.” But now, as the two drew closer, Anissa glanced at Morgan’s favorite hat, which had cat ears on it, and rolled her eyes. The two crossed paths in silence. They were enemies now.
Later, during outdoor time, Morgan was talking to Katy through the fence when they heard someone screaming, and looked up to see Anissa wailing on the other end of Katy’s pen.
Staff descended on Anissa, asking her what was wrong. Had she been hurt? Yes, Anissa said, in a way—Morgan’s voice was “triggering” for her. It made her feel delusional again.
Following the incident, the staff restructured Gordon Hall’s daily schedule so that Morgan and Anissa no longer overlapped outdoors, which meant that Morgan and Katy no longer overlapped there, either. Morgan reassured herself that they would still see each other every thirty days at mealtimes. But the next time she sat down with Katy in the cafeteria, Katy wouldn’t meet her eye.
“Why are you acting weird?” Morgan asked.
Katy reluctantly explained that she wasn’t allowed to talk to Morgan anymore. Anissa had forbidden it.
It wasn’t long before Morgan’s brain found ways fill the silence. Her new hallucination, “Gage,” was weaker than earlier ones, his personality muffled by medication. Often Gage just made funny sounds. Sometimes he sang nonsense words. When he spoke coherently, it was usually to praise Morgan in simple terms for doing something well or being nice to people. (“Good job, Morgan!” Gage exclaimed. “You’re doing a great job.”) Morgan’s doctor reassured her that breakthrough symptoms were normal and asked her to inform him if Gage’s personality changed, or if he stopped listening to her when she asked him to be quiet.
During one of his more verbose moments, Gage speculated whether it might be time for Morgan to reach out to Anissa directly. After all, she spent a lot of time wondering why Anissa had taken Katy away.
Morgan harbored no delusions that her past with Anissa could be forgotten or forgiven. But if she and Anissa were going to live, and maybe even die, in the same building, then Morgan wanted her to know that she didn’t hate her or blame her. She wrote Anissa a letter, saying that just because everyone else was making a big deal about them being on the same ward didn’t mean that they had to make a big deal out of it, too.
Morgan gave the letter to her psychiatrist, leaving it up to him whether or not to pass along the message. Shortly thereafter, Morgan’s psychiatrist left the institute for unknown reasons, and Morgan did not know whether he had given her message to Anissa before he left. But the next time Morgan saw Anissa in the hallway, Anissa smiled at her, making her think that maybe he had.
Morgan smiled back.
The next time she was allowed to eat in the cafeteria, Katy sat down with her and said that Anissa was letting them be friends again.
“I take back everything bad I ever said about Anissa,” Morgan said.
In October 2019, Bella sat down for an exclusive interview with 20/20. Her face and lips looked ghostly pale, as if she had never fully recovered from the blood shed at Morgan’s twelfth birthday party.
“They just wanted to go on a walk,” she recollected. “Who could ever see something like this coming?” She shook her head. “Like, nobody.”
Five years earlier, the police had been forced to crank up the volume when replaying their interviews with Bella because she spoke so softly. But now her voice was hard and cynical, and she didn’t go by “Bella” anymore but by her given name, Payton.
“And you were twelve years old,” the interviewer said.
“Exactly. Oblivious.”
Payton was not oblivious. She was seventeen years old with a perfect GPA. Dan Klein, the first cop to kneel at her side after the stabbing, had recently become her “school resource officer,” tasked with saving all their lives if a school shooter should emerge, and it made Payton feel safer and better able to focus on what the teachers were saying in class, knowing that “Officer Dan,” as she called him, stood just around the corner with a gun.
Still, Payton told 20/20 that she slept with a broken pair of scissors hidden underneath her pillow “just in case.” The child who’d once held Morgan’s hand, even though Morgan sometimes scared her, had died on May 31, 2014. The once shy and sweet girl who’d showed indiscriminate kindness had grown into a discerning and guarded teenager, saying on 20/20, “I have good friends that I trust,” before amending the statement to say that obviously she did not trust anyone completely anymore, but she trusted her closest friends “pretty much.”
To which the interviewer responded, “I imagine that the trust part is the hardest part?”
“Yeah,” Payton said. “I would say that trust is a big, big thing for me.”
“But you’ve worked on that?”
She nodded. “I’m trying, yeah.”
“If she [Morgan] saw this interview, what would you want to say to her?”
Payton exhaled. “Ooh, there is a lot that I would want to say to her.” It sounded as though she were about to unload years of furious resentment. Most people would have responded to the question with vitriol. But Payton Isabella Leutner still had some “Bella” left in her, that same core of goodness. She was not “most people.”
“I would probably … thank her,” she said finally. “Because of what she did, I have the life I have now, which I really, really like—I’m surprised to hear myself say that—I wouldn’t think that someone who went through what I did would ever say that. But it’s truly how I feel, like without the whole situation, I wouldn’t be who I am.” She smiled, thinking about her life without Morgan, and added, “What happened to me has made me who I am and I love it.”
Regarding Angie, Payton commented, “I’ve thought about what she’s going through and how hard it must be for her—because I’m sure a lot of people are saying that it was her fault, that she raised her wrong. And it wasn’t her fault. Morgan’s schizophrenic.”
In July 2020, Payton Leutner graduated high school in a socially distanced ceremony held outdoors due to COVID-19. It was windy that day and Payton’s red graduation gown billowed in the breeze. While other students had dressed formally for the ceremony, with high heels and leather shoes peaking out underneath their gowns, Payton wore white rubber sandals with Velcro straps and white socks. Recently, she’d released instrumental renditions of Taylor Swift songs online for her friends and family, playing only the kazoo.
When the principal called Payton’s name, she ascended the stage to collect her diploma as her family cheered. Earlier that year, she had accepted an academic scholarship to the University of Wisconsin–Parkside, where she planned to study medicine, a major inspired by her harrowing experiences at Waukesha Memorial Hospital.
The ceremony was “no-contact,” so Payton grabbed her diploma off a stack on the table. She smiled out at the audience. She turned to exit the stage. She moved on.
Meanwhile, Winnebago lifted its rules that had been set up to keep Morgan and Anissa apart, on the basis that both girls were now eighteen. Morgan was allowed back into the general population of Gordon Hall. She dined in the cafeteria at every meal. Partly out of habit, and partly out of respect for each other’s criminal cases, which were still pending—it would have been so easy for prosecutors to latch onto any relationship between Morgan and Anissa, citing some renewed connection as evidence that they were plotting an even more dangerous crime—Morgan and Anissa still didn’t speak. But they smiled at each other in the hallway, which felt good. They’d wasted so much energy already, hating and fearing each other.
Best of all, staff permitted Morgan and Katy to become roommates. They listened to music, talked about boys, and braided each other’s hair. At night, they whispered in the dark.
For Morgan, every day felt like a slumber party.