‘Slender Man’ stabbing case attacker found after cutting off monitor. What we know about the crime and the internet boogeyman

By Amanda Musa, CNN

(CNN) — On a chilly Saturday night, Morgan Geyser left the group home where she was living in Madison, Wisconsin, and met up with an acquaintance on a quiet residential street nearby.

Before she vanished, police say the 23-year-old cut off the monitoring bracelet law enforcement used to track her whereabouts, years after she pleaded guilty to attempted murder in the “Slender Man” stabbing of her 12-year-old classmate.

Payton Leutner was stabbed at Waukesha park in 2014 by Geyser and her friend Anissa Weier, who were also 12 at the time. The girls told investigators the attack was meant to impress the fictitious boogeyman.

Late Sunday, Madison police said it received confirmation that Geyser was taken into custody in Illinois, more than a hundred miles away.

Here’s what we know about the search for Geyser and the internet-created boogeyman that prompted an attack that shocked the nation more than a decade ago.

Who is ‘Slender Man’?

Slender Man, a menacing, faceless man in a dark suit – sometimes portrayed with octopus-like tentacles – was a crowdsourced internet-created boogeyman that first appeared in an online forum in 2009, according to Shira Chess, an associate professor of entertainment and media studies at the University of Georgia and and co-author of the book “Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man.”

“He falls broadly into a category of fiction that is colloquially referred to as ‘creepypasta,’ or internet legends that have meme-like qualities, typically lack known authorship, and are easily spreadable,” Chess told CNN in an email Sunday.

In June 2009, a Photoshop contest for images that appeared to be paranormal was launched in a forum on the website Something Awful. According to Know Your Meme, a blog that chronicles web culture, the goal of the contest was to create the images and then use them to fool, or “troll,” other web users by submitting them to paranormal websites.

Site member Eric Knudsen (under the screen name “Victor Surge”) submitted two images to the contest, both black-and-white images of children, one of which appeared to show a largely undefined figure lurking in the background.

Many imaginative fans saw Slender Man’s facelessness as a blank canvas in which to reimagine him in any number of ways, Chess added.

Following the stabbing, Geyser and Weier told police they knew the character from the Creepypasta Wiki, a site that compiles such fiction. The site has issued a statement condemning the attack.

Slender Man’s popularity has gone down in recent years, according to Chess, who noted the fandom peaked in the early-to-mid 2010s.

“I can anecdotally say that he still performs the role of boogeyman on playgrounds,” Chess told CNN.

How did the stabbing unfold?

In May 2014, the trio had gone to Geyser’s home for a slumber party to celebrate her birthday, Leutner previously told ABC. During those times, Geyser constantly talked about Slender Man, she added.

“I thought it was odd. It kind of frightened me a little bit,” Leutner said of her friends’ fascination with the character. “But I went along with it. I was supportive because I thought that’s what she liked.”

As the friendship between Geyser and Weier grew, so did the pair’s fixation with Slender Man, Leutner said. While Leutner didn’t know her friends planned to harm her, something felt off that night in retrospect, she said.

“At all of our past sleepovers, (Geyser) always wanted to stay up all night because she could never do that at home,” Leutner said. “But on (the night of) the birthday party, she wanted to go to bed.”

Her friends later told investigators they had planned to kill Leutner in her sleep that night but then decided to do it the next morning at a nearby park.

When she woke up, they were downstairs on the computer so she joined them for doughnuts before heading to the park. While there, they told her the plan was to play hide-and-seek and asked her to lie down under the leaves and sticks as part of the game, she said.

That is when Geyser repeatedly stabbed her with a kitchen knife and the girls left her alone in the woods, bleeding and struggling to get help. After she crawled out of the woods, a passing bicyclist found her and called 911.

Where was Morgan Geyser?

Authorities said Sunday they were searching for Geyser, who was last seen in a residential neighborhood on the west side of Madison, Wisconsin, around 8 p.m. Saturday with an adult acquaintance, police said in a statement.

Police later said in an update that they received confirmation around 10:34 p.m. that Geyser had been taken into custody in Illinois.

Geyser was found sleeping at a truck stop in Posen, Illinois, around 150 miles from Madison, Posen police told CNN. She was with another person, whom police did not identify, and the two were taken into custody, police said.

Geyser’s attorney, Tony Cotton, had earlier urged the 23-year-old to turn herself in immediately, saying in a statement: “We worked too hard to secure her freedom for her to continue on this path.”

It is unclear how Geyser broke out of the group home or who helped her, Cotton said in a video posted to social media.

At age 15, Geyser pleaded guilty to a charge of attempted first-degree murder in a deal with prosecutors to be placed in a mental institution instead of serving jail time.

Weier pleaded guilty to attempted second-degree homicide due to mental illness or defect as part of a plea agreement. She was committed to 25 years in a mental hospital, The Associated Press reported, but was released in 2021 on condition she live with her father and wear a GPS monitor.

At her sentencing in 2018, Geyser apologized to Leutner and her family.
“I never meant this to happen,” a tearful Geyser said. “I hope that she is doing well.”

In January, a judge ordered Geyser could be released from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute, where she spent nearly seven years, the Associated Press reported.

In August, a facility in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, declined to take her due to negative publicity they were receiving about the potential move, according to CNN affiliate WMTV, but Madison police confirmed with the news station Geyser is currently living at a group home in Madison, on the same street where she was last seen.

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CNN’s Chris Boyette, Dakin Andone, Doug Gross, Faith Karimi, Alex Stambaugh and Karina Tsui contributed to this report.