Monday two Wisconsin girls were charged with attempted intentional homicide and face up to 60 years in prison, after they planned to murder their friend and then proceeded to repeatedly stab the victim at a slumber party, all in the name of Slender Man.
According to the criminal complaint filed, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier had been being planning this attack for months, as the pair were planning on becoming proxies for the mythological Slender Man, a character thought to have originated as an Internet meme around 2009 and also the subject of a popular video game. He is often depicted as a tall, thin man wearing a suit with a blank face. To accomplish the goal of becoming a Slender Man proxy the girls needed to “physically kill someone,” the complaint says that “many people do not believe Slender man is real,” and she “wanted to prove the skeptics wrong.”
The macabre plan was set in motion once the girls invited the victim to a slumber party. Originally the girls were planning to duct tape her mouth while she slept and stab her in the neck, but that approach would have been too messy, they then came up with the idea to kill her in a bathroom where cleanup would be easier, thanks to the presence of a floor drain.
Ultimately, the pair opted for something else altogether, and waited to attack the girl the next day while playing hide-in-seek in the woods of a nearby park. “One suspect held the victim down while the other suspect stabbed her 19 times in the arms, legs and torso,” Waukesha Police Chief Russell Jack said.
The girls stabbed her repeatedly with one telling the other to “go ballistic, go crazy.” Of the 19 stab wounds she suffered, one only narrowly missed hitting a major artery near her heart by a millimeter, which would have killed the girl.
T
he girls then left the victim alone in the woods hoping that she would eventually bleed out. Somehow the victim was able to stumble to her feet and make her way to a roadside were she was rescued by a passing cyclist. “Please help me. I’ve been stabbed,” she said according to the cyclist. The cyclist then called then called 911, and police brought the girls into custody a short time later after a sheriff’s officer found them walking near Interstate 94.
“There was evidence that was readily apparent when the two were taken into custody,” Jack told reporters. One piece of evidence included a large kitchen knife found inside a purse. The girls spoke candidly to investigators and gave all the information needed to understand why they perpetrated this heinous act.
One of the girls confessed to an investigator that “it was weird that I didn’t feel remorse.” The other explained that the Slender Man comes to her in her dreams, watching her, reading her mind and has the ability to teleport.
The victim is currently in stable condition. The two girls appeared in court on Monday and are due back in court next week and will be tried as adults rather than juveniles.