On November 10, 2020, after three years at Winnebago, Anissa submitted her first petition for release. Three doctors planned to testify in her favor at the upcoming status review hearing, which seemed promising.
In March 2021, several months before hearing, Stacie Leutner stopped by the Waukesha County Courthouse and dropped off a letter from Bella. At Bella’s request, the letter was sealed from public view. Bohren summarized its contents at Anissa’s review hearing later that spring, saying that it gave Bella’s “impressions” of the case and offered her recommendations for what should be done about Anissa.
“A terrible offense occurred,” Bohren said, and explained that their task for that day was to decide: “Does that person change? The person commits an offense. What happens afterward?”
At Anissa’s reverse waiver hearing in 2016, the DA’s office had argued that the seriousness of her crime made her a grown-up. Five years later, at Anissa’s status review hearing, prosecutors leveraged the same brain science they’d previously rejected to make the argument that Anissa should remain incarcerated in an adult facility because of her adolescent brain:
“As we were told repeatedly throughout this case, the juvenile mind is not fully developed until the age of 25. Until that time, the State believes she [Anissa] is a danger to others, as her mind is still immature, still forming, and still susceptible to dangerous influences. At this time she simply cannot safely be released.”
Citing the opinions of Anissa’s doctors, all of whom had advocated for her to leave the hospital, Anissa’s attorneys, McMahon and Smith, proceeded to make their case that Anissa was not a danger to herself, others, or property and should therefore be released from Winnebago.
They stressed that before and ever since her collusion with Morgan, Anissa had never once been violent. At Winnebago, she worked in the Log Cabin workshop, using electric power tools, “including a band saw,” stressed her lawyers, to build birdhouses and chairs. Anissa also worked as a cook in a kitchen, where the staff had entrusted her to handle knives. “[Yet] there has not been one episode of reported violence or threat of violence.” They emphasized that since her admission to Winnebago, Anissa had learned to “appropriately” respond to “mental health concern,” detailing a recent incident in which Anissa “was befriended by peers who introduced her to the Wicca religion. A week or so after being introduced to the practices, Miss Weier separated herself from the peers and shared with her mental health care providers that she had allowed herself to be drawn into a practice that she eventually realized was not healthy for her.” Anissa’s defense team also submitted letters from Anissa’s dad, her doctors, and Anissa herself.
In his letter to the court, Bill Weier promised that if Anissa were released, he would take care of her. He promised that she could live with him in Pewaukee and that he would pay for her college courses, mental health appointments, and anything else that she might need. “This is not a concern for me,” he wrote. “She is my daughter.”
Like Bill’s letter, Anissa’s letter to the court was serious and articulate:
“First of all, I’d like to thank the Court for giving me the opportunity to speak, I assure you all, I will not be wasting your time,” Anissa began.
Her touching letter included some of the following sentiments:
I hate my actions on May 31, but through countless hours of therapy I no longer hate myself for them.
I am not claiming to be a perfect person. Far from it, actually. Sometimes I take my medications a little late because life gets in the way. Sometimes I loose [sic] my way and down seems up, though only for a short period of time because I’ve learned to talk about what’s going on so I don’t become a danger again.
By petitioning the Court for conditional release, I am NOT saying I am done with my treatment. I am saying that I have exhausted all the resources available to me at Winnebago Mental Health Institute. If I am to become a productive member of society, I need to be a part of society.
I want to reiterate that I am not saying I am done growing, changing, evolving, or adapting. I just can’t do it here anymore.
Before making his decision, Bohren referenced the media storm around the Slenderman stabbing and unrest among his voters, who wanted Morgan and Anissa to be harshly punished: “The drama of the case, that’s something the court has to consider.”
“In this case, Ms. Weier doesn’t take psychotic-type medications,” he continued. “Ms. Weier followed the rules carefully at Winnebago. She never lied. She was honest. There was no deception in her comments to the treatment personnel. She was cooperative—she accepted responsibility.” But Bohren explained that many dishonest criminals “accepted responsibility” because it served them legally. “It’s like asking somebody how dinner was. They’ll always say it was good, whether it was terrible, or not.”
To everyone’s surprise, Bohren went on to say, “I’ll grant the petition for conditional release.”
For the first time in all her court appearances, Anissa allowed herself to smile. Her family was overjoyed. Even the Geysers rejoiced, likely assuming Morgan’s turn for release would come next.
But to others, Bohren’s logic in releasing Anissa actually boded badly for Morgan. In justifying his decision to release Anissa, Bohren had said, “[What is] important to the court, is there’s been no psychotic medication administered [in Anissa’s case]—people who require psychiatric or psychotic medications, if they go off those medications, it’s difficult to control what goes on after that.”
If anything, Bohren’s decision-making set the stage for him to refuse all of Morgan’s future petitions, because her schizophrenia would never go away.
When news of Anissa’s release hit Gordon Hall, Morgan couldn’t help but feel “jazzed” for her former friend. Regardless of what had happened between them, they shared the horrifying experience of what had happened in those woods on Big Bend Road. They knew how it felt to live with a mental illness, and to realize that, while you were sick, you did something unforgivable—something you can never take back, something so bad that everyone involved in it would never really be okay.
At the same time, each girl represented to the other a painful, living reminder of the stabbing. What they’d gone through before and after their arrest would bind them forever. But Anissa’s release might give Morgan space to grow.
The girls had spent more than seven years feeling mad at each other and themselves. But over time, Morgan had learned forgive Anissa. The next step, for Morgan at least, was to find some semblance of peace; to learn to face herself in mirror and not fear whatever loomed behind her; to find meaning in a life that might always exist within the walls of Gordon Hall.
To Bella and Anissa, the future was becoming more and more clear. But even as Morgan settled into the most stable period her life had known in years, her future was clouded with uncertainty. Although treatment options for childhood-onset schizophrenia are poorly understood, the research that has been done suggests that the long-term prognosis for patients diagnosed as preteens is at best grim, and at worst dire. Even with medication, it was hard to predict whether Morgan could ever achieve what others considered normalcy. Every day that she had gone unmedicated after her arrest, the odds of her eventual recovery had worsened. What the future might hold in store for Morgan and her illness was anybody’s guess. Morgan, however, was unconcerned with what was yet to come. Her present was much more exciting: She was getting married.
Abaddon was a seven-foot-tall demon from the underworld. Morgan’s new doctor, who had administered her heavy doses of antipsychotics, called him a “coping skill,” venturing that Abaddon was not a “real” hallucination, but rather an imaginary friend, something created by Morgan rather than inflicted on her by genetics, to cope with some of the loneliness she must have been feeling. Because of COVID-19 protocols, she had not seen her family in person for more than a year.
“I hope you don’t get sick,” Abaddon said.
Vaccines for COVID-19 had been available for months, but Morgan refused to get one, paranoid that it would do something bad to her. Somehow she and Katy stayed healthy, even as they watched a lot of other patients get sent to the COVID ward. Morgan didn’t care if she got the virus. Nothing could make this place any worse.
But Abaddon made it better. Through everything, he stood by Morgan’s side, slouching to make himself shorter (so that he could fit through doorways and hear her better), his head lolling, his chin tucked in tight to his chest. She kept a whole folder of Abaddon drawings, in which she had carefully sketched the scars on his face, his lip ring, the upside-down cross tattooed on his cheek. He had long black hair that he could grow at great speed at will. Morgan thought he was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.
Morgan assumed that Angie would be pleased to learn about her future son-in-law. But instead Angie sounded worried, presumably nervous about how Abaddon might complicate their legal case. She didn’t even want to discuss him.
“You’re being rude,” Morgan said.
When she was younger, and still struggling with severe symptoms of depression and psychosis, it had been enough for Morgan just to hear her mom’s voice on the other end of the phone. But now that she was older, and had a fiancé for emotional support, she found herself wanting to ask tough questions that her family didn’t seem to want to hear. Why had they not believed her when she told them of her symptoms? Given Matt’s illness, how could they not have known?
“I can’t talk about things that aren’t real to me, Morgan,” Angie said.
She was referring to Abaddon, but as far as Morgan was concerned, Angie might as well have been describing the machinations of denial.
Morgan had not spoken to her dad, whom she now referred to as “Matthew,” in seven months. Angie seemed easier to forgive, but Morgan felt mad at her, too. Looking back on her childhood, she wondered why Angie was never around except to tuck her in at night. She demanded to know why Angie had considered it a good plan to leave Morgan alone with an unmedicated man living with mental illness as her primary caretaker.
“I had to pay the bills,” Angie pleaded. “I don’t know why you’re being so rude to me. I’ve never done anything but love you. Do you know how much stuff I’ve gone through in the past seven years?”
But Angie’s protestations only hardened Morgan’s resolve. For the first time in her life, she started holding grudges. She was nineteen years old.
“I don’t want to be part of my family,” she decided. “They were all there for me when it was too late.”
Instead of turning to her mom for support, Morgan focused her attention on wedding planning. She didn’t need her parents to walk her down the aisle. If she and Abaddon had to elope, so be it.
They wed shortly thereafter, in a demon ceremony orchestrated by Abaddon—just the two of them.
That was all they needed anyway, Morgan thought: each other.
About a week later, Abaddon went missing. Frantic to get her husband back, Morgan decided to go look for him in the underworld. But to get there, she needed to die. She told the staff how she felt, and was promptly smocked and sent to segregation.
Morgan hated being naked underneath the heavy turtle suit, and being alone was boring, but to her delight, Abaddon quickly returned, scolding Morgan for wanting to hurt herself. They settled back into married life. For dinner, they ate “tater-tot green-bean casserole” from the cafeteria, which they both agreed tasted like animal food. Over the course of the next several weeks, Morgan slowly earned back her privileges; once doctors trusted her not to cut herself with underwire, or strangle herself with her own panties, she was allowed to wear a bra under the turtle suit, then underwear. After she graduated back to wearing her normal clothes, Morgan was eventually allowed to move back in with Katy. A female guard still watched Morgan shower, but Morgan joked that it was probably more awkward for the guard than for her, since Abaddon liked to wash Morgan’s hair.
A few days later, Tony Cotton phoned Morgan for the first time in what felt like ages. He wanted to discuss her next petition for release.
“I’m not petitioning,” Morgan said.
She had grown comfortable at Winnebago. Over time, she’d earned the privilege of going on chaperoned walks around the lake.
Part of Tony wondered whether Morgan’s grandpa was still alive—the $120,000 from Bob’s police pension had run out long before they’d reached a plea bargain, and if the Geysers wanted to proceed, Tony couldn’t afford to work on their case for free anymore, not with two sons at home—but the question didn’t seem worth asking; so long as Morgan wanted to stay at Winnebago, Tony wasn’t sure what to do with her.
On weekends, he jogged along the Fox River, tracing Morgan’s and Anissa’s steps to Slender Mansion. All around him, the city seemed to be changing. Pain clinics were popping up across town, fueling opioid addiction, and homelessness was on the rise. Recent tests showed that the Fox River, where local kids still swam every summer, was officially toxic, due to poisonous water runoff from local paper mills. One day, during his river run, Tony saw three men crouched near a tree: two of them were having sex, while the other one videotaped the encounter on his phone. If Tony had been a more emotional person, he might have called the police. But as a criminal defense attorney, he’d handled his share of cases involving unpalatable sex acts, and in situations like these, he tended to see things from the criminal’s point of view.
Tony had a hunch that the three guys in the bushes were patients at one of those predatory pain clinics, where crooked doctors turned patients into addicts, getting them so hooked on opioids that they couldn’t work anymore, couldn’t do anything, but still needed to make hundreds of bucks a day, or more, to cover the clinic’s expensive “prescriptions,” because if they didn’t get the pain pills, they became violently ill. Someone that desperate will commoditize anything. It could happen to anyone, really. Addiction hits you, and before you know it, you’re having full, penetrative sex in broad daylight, out in the open for kids to see, next to a poisonous river, all because someone offered you ten bucks for an amateur porn tape. Or something. Who knew what the relationship between the three men truly was—Tony didn’t stop to ask.
Instead, he turned away and jogged in the opposite direction, reminding himself that he couldn’t bear witness to every single tragedy. Some were insurmountable, the layers of calamity so thick, so inextricably entwined, that it would take a squad of lawyers, doctors, and politicians to even begin to sort it out. Sometimes it was easier to just pretend it wasn’t happening, to admit that certain things were out of your control.
When Tony called, and Morgan refused to leave Winnebago, it restored her sense of agency.
Tony had petitioned Bohren so many times, for so many lesser things than freedom, but aside from the plea deal, they had never won, not once. Saying she wanted to stay at Winnebago, even claiming that she liked it there, made her feel like she was in control of her destiny. She might stay at Winnebago forever. But at least she could say it was her choice.
When the phone rang and staff told Morgan that it was her dad calling again, she sent Katy to talk to him.
“Is she okay?” Matt asked. “She hasn’t been answering my calls, she hasn’t been calling me.”
“She’s sleeping,” Katy lied. “Goodbye.”
Later, Morgan lay in bed feeling powerful. Memories from her twelfth birthday party still washed over her sometimes, but they didn’t wreck her. When she thought of that night, she remembered the stuffed banana Bella had given her, how they’d all held hands at Skateland, how the next morning Bella had dressed up as a princess and Anissa wore red lipstick to the park.
Morgan had heard about Bella’s college scholarship and felt proud of her. She was even happy for Anissa, who would be leaving soon.
Wrapped in her demon husband’s arms, Morgan marveled at how far the three of them had come.
“We’re grown-ups now,” she thought.