Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls
By Kathleen Hale

The crime:

Three Waukesha, Wisconsin girls — Morgan Geyser, Anissa Weier, and Payton Leutner – went into the woods on May 31, 2014. Geyser and Weier had planned beforehand to kill Leutner as a sacrifice to the Internet bogeyman Slenderman (or Slender Man). Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times and then ran off with Weier. Leutner fortunately survived the attack. Geyser and Weier, who were both 12 years old at the time, were quickly apprehended and found not guilty by reason of insanity at trial.

The book:

This is a story that became a media sensation at the time, which rarely does anyone any good. A lot of the reporting was misleading. For example, Kathleen Hale mentions the false impression received by many (and I can raise my own hand here) that Leutner had been killed in the woods. Also, the focus of a lot of the coverage was on the idea that the girls had been corrupted in some way by the Internet. But there were shocking crimes like this long before the Internet, or even television, and as Hale convincingly argues Geyser in particular was already in a bad way before she ever met up with Weier and started visiting the Creepypasta site, source of the Slenderman mythos.

I doubt this will be a crime that has the staying power in the popular imagination as more celebrated cases involving children, like the Parker-Hulme murder (which the film Heavenly Creatures was based on), Mary Bell strangling two even smaller children in Newcastle, Robert Coombes killing his mother (the subject matter of Kate Summerscales’ The Wicked Boy), and the murder of James Bulger by Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. For purposes of comparison, Hulme and Parker were 15 and 16 respectively, Bell just turned 11, Coombes was 13, and Thompson and Venables were both 10. Now that they’ve played out, is there a lesson we can learn from those earlier crimes?

If you believe that the primary purpose of the justice system is rehabilitation, then crimes involving young people provide the most instructive test cases. Let’s face it, by the time you’re 30 or 40, you are what you are. I’d even say you’re mostly set well before that. But children can change, unless they’re truly bad by nature. So what does the evidence of those previous cases tell us? Julie Hulme went on to become the famous mystery writer Anne Perry and Pauline Parker started running a children’s riding school. Mary Bell, her identity still concealed, has apparently gone on to live an incident-free life. Robert Coombes moved to Australia and would serve with distinction in the First World War as a stretcher-bearer at Gallipoli before settling down to operate a market garden. Robert Thompson, considered by authorities to have been the dominant partner in the Bulger slaying, hasn’t re-offended since being released from a young offender’s institution in 2001. Only Jon Venables has turned out to be incorrigible, continuing to have several serious run-ins with the law relating to the possession of child pornography and disorderly conduct.

In other words, even the most violent and dangerous kids can get better. Slenderman foregrounds the question of what to do with two young offenders, one of whom (Geyser) was clearly suffering from some form of mental illness (Anissa Weier’s defence of folie à deux, on the other hand, didn’t fully convince me). To what extent are such individuals a risk to themselves and others if they get early release? How can they best be treated? There’s a lot of disagreement even among experts when it comes to matters like these, but the bottom line is that any way of dealing with the problem is going to take a lot of time and money, and the general public can’t be expected to feel particularly generous toward such types.

Hale, who has written a couple of YA novels, is a responsible reporter of the events, extending sympathy to everyone caught up in the tragic whirlpool of events. It’s heartbreaking to read her account of the assault and the events leading up to it. She doesn’t have to do anything to work up the pathos, and aside from a few minor and forgivable touches (like the victim’s blood staining the words “love,” “hope,” and “justice” on her t-shirt in a fading red) I didn’t think she was trying to tell the story slant. But what I found most interesting in her account was the shadow cast not by Slenderman but of what has become an American nightmare.

What I mean is the pervasive sense Hale gives of a nation not just in decline but almost in ruins. There’s the collapsing justice system that has seen underfunded mental health institutions and the prison-industrial complex being crudely bolted together in a merger made in hell. There’s Leutner’s parents struggling to pay her astronomical hospital bills and Geyser’s parents (and grandparents) cashing out their savings and going into debt to pay for her legal defence. And then there’s the book’s strange final vignette, which has the lead defence lawyer going for a jog by a river declared officially toxic due to poisonous water runoff from local paper mills and seeing a group of three men making a video of themselves having public sex. The lawyer has a hunch the three are opium addicts hooked on drugs dispensed by predatory pain clinics.

We are told, in passing, that Waukesha is “one of the most conservative counties in what was becoming an increasingly conservative state – one that by around twenty thousand votes would swing the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s favor.” So American carnage then, all the way.

Noted in passing:

The book spells Slenderman as all one word. Wikipedia designates him as Slender Man with Slenderman as an alternative spelling. Apparently he was described as “The Slender Man” in his first appearance online. It’s testimony to how completely the Internet has taken over our sense of orthography that I figured Slenderman must be right. We smush all our words together now as a matter of course. I wonder where this will eventually lead. Perhaps we’ll go back to the style of ancient times with whole pages of text unbroken by any spaces between words. Then, in some future renaissance, we’ll rediscover Carolingian minuscule . . .

The cover shows what seems to be a very upscale suburban street, with pretty houses and a big flag flying from a front porch. Is this Waukesha? In any event, Geyser and Weier were both condo kids, and not fancy condos either. I guess the publisher was trying to sell the idea that these were all-American girls, and that beneath the pristine surface of American life all sorts of evil is bubbling away, but I found it misleading.

In my notes on Obsessed by William Phelps I made some remarks on the decline of cursive handwriting. Whatever else one thinks of its loss, being able to write cursive can be a useful skill, especially when having to write quickly because you don’t have to lift your pen up from the paper as often. I think it would have helped the detective here who took down Anissa Weier’s confession in all-uppercase handwriting. I can’t imagine how awkward that must have been.

There’s one moment of black humour that I loved. At one point the budding psycho Anissa is described as taking “a field trip with her FLIGHT class to talk to her third grade ‘buddy’ about the difference between right and wrong.” And it gets better:

In FLIGHT (facilitating learning through integration, guidance, high expectations, and technology), she [Anissa] was studying PBI (positive behavior intervention), helping younger students at the nearby elementary school make good decisions and stay out of trouble. Earlier that year, Anissa had confided in another girl in FLIGHT that she had found a way to become a proxy [a murderous disciple] of Slenderman, saying, “You have to kill one of your friends.” The other girl, identified in court by her initials, K. N., would later testify, “And when I looked at her like ‘What are you talking about?’ She was like, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not you – and I was kind of like, confused? But I didn’t think she actually was like, gonna do it because she didn’t seem like that kind of person.”

I could add this to the list of background evidence of a nation in decline. Oh, the horror of what grade school has become. The horror.

Takeaways:

Hale makes a strong case for the importance of understanding and being sympathetic toward mental health issues. My own advice, however, is this: Unless you’re a professional you should stay away from these people. Interaction with them should be limited to steering them toward someone who can help.

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