Both girls would give very different accounts of what happened next.
“It was Morgan’s idea,” Anissa alleged years later, dressed in her jail uniform. “She was doing more planning than I was. She was mapping out pathways and trying to figure out everything else.” According to Anissa, Morgan came to her in the winter of 2013, saying:
“I had something to ask you but never mind, you’ll think I’m crazy—we should be proxies to Slenderman.”
“How?” Anissa asked.
“We should kill Bella.”
Anissa hesitated. “Is there another way to become proxies?”
“This is the easiest way.”
Anissa would tell court-appointed doctors, “It was kind of like, I don’t know any other way to explain it—like someone from the army who takes orders from someone else. A private takes orders from a general. In this case, I’m the private and Morgan is the general, and she takes orders from the president.”
But Morgan would always maintain that the plan had been Anissa’s—Anissa who had introduced Morgan to Slenderman; Anissa who made sense of the visions and voices, encouraging Morgan to see things that were not there. Anissa, a lonely child who wanted to spend the rest of her life with Morgan.
According to Morgan, Anissa came up with the idea that they needed to become proxies and kill for Slenderman in order to avoid being murdered themselves. And it was Anissa who insisted that in order for their sacrifice to count, the victim specifically needed to be someone Morgan loved. And Morgan loved only one person other than her family: Bella.
Regardless of whose idea it was, the two girls started planning the murder around Christmas.
On Morgan’s computer, investigators would later find a series of letters made to look like an advice column. Presumably created as part of a Creepypasta story, the letters featured a fictional correspondence between a user named SadMommy and an advice giver named Anri. SadMommy was distraught that her darling son had been “chosen to be sacrificed.” She told Anri that she did not want to give up her little boy and pleaded that he help her save her only child. Anri replied that refusing the sacrifice would only result in greater suffering. “You must sacrifice your child,” he wrote. “It is law.”
It was a sentiment that Spock, Morgan’s favorite Star Trek character, frequently relied upon, often reminding Captain Kirk, “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” In the 2013 reboot Star Trek into Darkness, Spock’s scruples are put to the test when he finds Captain Kirk shut inside a radioactive chamber. Spock wants to open the door and save Kirk’s life, but he knows that doing so will expose the entire crew to deadly radiation. Captain Kirk understands what needs to be done, and the two share an emotional goodbye through the door.
“I’m scared, Spock,” Kirk weeps. “Help me not be. How do you choose not to feel?”
Spock begins to cry. “I do not know. Right now I am failing.”
“I want you to know why I couldn’t let you die,” Kirk says. “Why I went back for you.”
But Spock already knows: “Because you are my friend.”
They press their hands together on either side of the sealed door until Kirk dies quietly, his hand slowly falling away. When he stops breathing, Spock screams in agony.
Star Trek into Darkness is a Hollywood movie, and Kirk does not stay dead for long, as he gets revived with a blood transfusion from a genetically modified super-soldier. But that doesn’t change the fact that he goes willingly into the night, swayed by Spock’s logic, loving Spock even as Spock kills him, truly believing that his destiny is to die selflessly in order to save lives.
Perhaps Morgan thought that Bella would feel the same way: one death to save the lives of many (Morgan, Anissa, and both of their families). Bella was a good person, and she and Morgan would always be friends. Besides, on-screen, there was usually a way out: a last-minute escape hatch, a quick Band-Aid on the plot that let the lead characters save their loved ones after all.
Over the next few months, Morgan and Anissa discussed their plan on bus rides to and from school. Given her gaming experience, Anissa assumed killing Bella would take one blow at most, at which point she’d wither and disappear in a bloodless poof, like a defeated video game character. They decided Morgan should have a sleepover, and Anissa would stab Bella in the neck while she slept. Anissa had read online that it was easier to kill someone in their sleep. “When you look into a person’s eyes, you can see yourself,” she later explained, “and you don’t wanna be killing yourself, supposedly. So, you don’t look in their eyes. But, when they’re sleeping or unconscious, they can’t scream, and wiggle around to make it harder.” As one psychiatrist later testified at Anissa’s trial, “She failed to appreciate that such violent behavior is likely to awaken the individual unless expertly and precisely implemented.”
Morgan warned Anissa that if anyone found out, they would go to prison or be electrocuted. The death penalty had been abolished in Wisconsin in 1853, but if fourteen-foot-tall demons existed, anything was possible. They needed an escape plan.
They had since decided that Slenderman lived with his other proxies in the Nicolet National Forest, a 664,822-acre woodland in northern Wisconsin. According to Anissa, Slender Mansion was “supposedly right near the middle.” Together, she and Morgan consulted Morgan’s notes about how to survive encounters with creepypasta characters like Jeff the Killer (pepper spray) and Masky (offer cheesecake).
“We thought we would find the Slenderman Mansion with all the creepypasta characters,” Anissa later said. She and Morgan discussed what Slenderman might expect of them as tenants. “We thought it would be our job to do whatever he told us to do or kill people. I remember thinking it wouldn’t be morally okay to do that, but then thinking it would be fine.”
Surviving in a demon’s house, with murderers for roommates, was its own riddle. But getting to Slender Mansion would be just as difficult. According to Google Maps, walking to the Nicolet National Forest took between 100 and 103 hours, not counting breaks to sleep, eat, or go to the bathroom. The trek would take them a week at least. Once they got to the Nicolet National Forest, the park’s massive acreage would slow them down, too, as they wandered through 1,039 square miles of expansive woods in search of Slenderman’s house.
In preparation for their voyage, Morgan and Anissa discussed various ways to “defeat the animals,” such as badgers, the Wisconsin state animal, and braced themselves emotionally for what Anissa described as “staying in the woods, being recluses the rest of our lives, never going home.” In order to protect their real families, they believed they needed to join Slenderman’s household forever, to “live in a dystopian world under his control.”
“We thought we had to for real kill someone,” Anissa later recalled, comparing the murder plot to an archaeological dig. “It was exciting to talk about. It was kind of like discovering something completely new, ‘This little rock could be a geode,’ or, ‘The earth wasn’t the center of the universe.’” Anissa felt like together she and Morgan were “making discovery and proving all naysayers wrong.”
The girls were living in a fantasyland, unprepared for the deadly reality of what had yet to unfold.
“I didn’t know what it would be like to watch someone bleed out,” Anissa said. “I never watched something die. I didn’t exactly know how weird and scary it would be … I didn’t know it would take so long.”
MRI brain imaging has conclusively shown that frontal lobes, which govern a person’s impulse control, executive functioning, and long-term forecasting skills, do not fully develop until a person’s late twenties. By the time Morgan and Anissa, eleven and twelve years old, respectively, embarked on their plan to murder Bella in self-defense against a fictional internet character, they were pubescent. Their frontal lobes were still developing. They planned to walk hundreds of miles without a map or camping supplies. They believed death was temporary. Morgan thought that Bella of all people would understand what needed to be done.
When they started planning Bella’s death, the voices in Morgan’s head were loud, the purple dinosaurs vibrant, and her paranoia about Slenderman so pronounced that she’d almost completely lost touch with reality. “I was confused,” she later told police officers softly. “I didn’t really understand.”
On the bus, she and Anissa used code words to deliberate strategies because the bus was full of “eavesdroppers,” as Anissa called them.
“Deed” or “it” meant “killing,” “cracker” meant “knife,” and “camping trip” or “our secret trip to Pennsylvania” referred to the Nicolet National Forest.
As the day of the murder approached, Morgan and Anissa drew pictures in their school notebooks of people holding knives and bleeding from their torsos. At the same time, Morgan tried to enjoy her remaining time with Bella, whom she loved (that was why all of this was happening: it had to be someone Morgan loved, Anissa said), often reaching for her hand at school, where they skipped together down the hallways. The two remained close, sleeping over at each other’s houses.
While Morgan’s parents overlooked her symptoms, there was one adult who did not miss Morgan’s increasingly odd behavior: Bella’s mother.
“Her mom thought I was a bad influence because I was batshit crazy,” Morgan later explained. “A lot of people, like, they deny it now, but I know they could tell there was something a little bit off about me. And, like, she [Bella’s mom] is, like, one of the only people who’s, like, admitted to that. Like, I know that people thought that—it’s, like, impossible not to, because I know I was a messed-up kid—and, like, she could tell and didn’t want me hanging around her daughter because I was ‘off.’”
One month before the stabbing, Morgan slept over at Bella’s house, and after Joe and Stacie Leutner went to sleep, the girls decided to build a Molotov cocktail. They filled a jar with nail polish remover. They grabbed matches. They hid themselves in a closet in the basement, lit a match, and dropped it inside the jar. When the fire whooshed out, it frightened them, causing them to drop the jar, which shattered and set the closet on fire.
Morgan and Bella managed to put out the flames with a blanket. They disabled the smoke detector before it woke Bella’s parents. To cover the smell of singed carpeting, they doused the area with hand sanitizer. It was a fun night.
But when Stacie came downstairs the next morning, she asked, “Why does the basement smell like smoke?”
“It doesn’t smell like smoke,” Morgan countered. “It smells like hand sanitizer.” When Stacie found ashes in the closet, Morgan said, “Well, we don’t know about that.” Stacie felt disconcerted by Morgan’s strident tone. It was a side of Morgan that Anissa would later warn police about, saying, “She can be kinda mean. But that’s only when she’s threatened.”
Anyone would have forgiven Stacie for calling Morgan’s parents and forbidding Morgan from coming over ever again. But in a decision that later confounded Morgan’s family, Stacie did nothing. Born and raised in a culture grown from the snow itself, she avoided the heat of confrontation—just one more uncomfortable conversation swept under the rug.
A few weeks later, Bella RSVP’d yes to Morgan’s sleepover birthday party on Friday, May 30, 2014. Her death was scheduled for that night.