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.

True Crime Files

Lost and Found
By John Glatt

The crime:

In 1991 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was grabbed off the street by convicted kidnapper and sex offender Phillip Gorrido and Gorrido’s wife Nancy. Dugard would be kept by Gorrido as a prisoner in a backyard compound he had specially prepared for the next 18 years, during which time she was repeatedly raped and bore two daughters (the first at the age of 14). In 2009 Gorrido, who had become increasingly erratic in his behaviour, was apprehended and Dugard and her two daughters freed.

The book:

I’ve talked before about how a lot of true crime writing takes the form of timely reporting, with instant books trying to cash in on the notoriety of a particular case that has been in the headlines. That was certainly the case here, as the book ends abruptly just before Gorrido’s trial was set to begin (they would both plead guilty, with Phillip receiving a sentence of 431 years to life and Nancy 39 years to life). This is unfortunate, because while John Glatt does a respectable job covering the case, including taking a very full look at Gorrido’s first conviction for kidnapping and rape and interviewing a number of people who knew him during the years he was keeping Dugard a prisoner, you don’t feel like you’re getting the full story, even if what’s missing is what turned into a lot of confusing legal maneuvering. I think it’s still a book worth reading, but you’d be advised to supplement it with further research on the Internet.

You’ll find a lot of information online. This case was huge at the time, though as per usual I think it’s been mostly forgotten today. It was one of three “captivity” cases that made headlines within a few years of each other, the other two being a pair of sensational stories out of Austria: the abduction and imprisonment of Natascha Kampusch (subject of the book Girl in the Cellar), and Josef Fritzl’s house of horrors (subject of another book, also written by Glatt, called Secrets in the Cellar). For her 18 years of hell Dugard received a modicum of fame, a book deal, and a $20 million payout from the State of California (they had been slack in following up on Gorrido’s parole). But I think it’s probably been a blessing to her that the spotlight moved on, as it always does.

Anyway, even for someone steeped in crime writing I find these stories particularly disturbing, and the offenders representative of a particularly unconscionable expression of evil. There’s more to it than just the violence. It’s the demonic inversion of family values, and most notably the abuse and betrayal of a position of authority and trust. But there’s something more to it as well. Serial killers are driven by uncontrollable urges that explode into sexual violence and then go into remission for a while. They are like werewolves: temporarily possessed but the rest of the time able to at least pass as normal. Fiends like Wolfgang Priklopil, Josef Fritzl, and Phillip Gorrido made their evil into a lifestyle. I think that may be why they tend to be such terrible people in all regards. I’ve followed up my hot take on Priklopil with a couple of posts (see here and here) on the foul psychology of the booby or man-baby, enabled by submissive women. There’s a reason these people don’t have any friends. I also noted in my review of Secrets in the Cellar how Fritzl’s wickedness didn’t end with what he did to his daughter:

Not only was he selfish and cruel, he was also cheap: not tipping at the bordellos he frequented, trying to nickel-and-dime the tenants in his apartment building, and even fostering his own children instead of adopting them because it got him a bigger government cheque. Despite this streak of vicious mean-spiritedness he was a lousy businessman and was deep in debt at the time of his arrest. Of course being a miser was far from his worst personal failing, but it just goes to show how some people are bad all the way through.

I was reminded of this as I read Lost and Found. Gorrido was also a mama’s boy, living at home with his aged mother all the time he had Dugard penned in the backyard (like Priklopil, he would first let his captive out only so she could clean the house). Meanwhile, his wife Nancy became a mindless domestic servant who “worshipped” Gorrido and took care of his mom. In short, he was doubly enabled. And like Fritzl his meanness was of a piece. In addition to satisfying himself sexually on Dugard he also used her as slave labour in a print company he started up, and befriended an elderly neighbour who he swindled for thousands of dollars. Gorrido was one of those people you just can’t find any good in, and who the wickedness runs right through.

From being the crazed head of a captive “family,” where does one go? Naturally, to creating one’s own religion and becoming a cult leader. When Gorrido came up with an idea for a black box that would allow the user to listen to angels as well as cure schizophrenia and sex addiction (it was just an amplifier that you could plug headphones into), it’s hard not to think of L. Ron Hubbard’s E-meter machine. But of course the stronger connection to Scientology was that it was just a cynical way of turning religion into cash. Gorrido quickly incorporated his God’s Desire Church and boasted to his brother that it was going to make him rich. And of course there would be the payoff that’s at the core of most cults, something that burns even hotter than the desire to get rich: a fanatic obsession with sex as a weapon of domination and procreation. As Stephen Singular put it in his book on Killer Cults: “a common thread in almost all [cults] is an attempt to control sexual behavior.” What most cult leaders seem to want more than anything is possession of an exclusive harem and the ability to make lots of babies.

Noted in passing:

There’s a reason sex offenders have to be in a registry that’s accessible to the public. That sort of behaviour is in the blood and there’s not much you can do to change it except by the most drastic measures. And while I don’t think it’s right to persecute or stigmatize such people, a red flag is still a red flag. Unfortunately, Gorrido’s home near Antioch, California, affectionately dubbed a “shithole” here by one resident, was a magnet for people with such flags since laws prohibited sex offenders from living near schools, churches, and parks, and his immediate neighbourhood had none of these. As a result there were apparently some 1,700 registered sex offenders living in the county. Gorrido fit right in.

That being the case, I’m actually not as critical of the parole officers in this case as many were. To be sure they could have done a more strict follow-up at various times, but you could probably say that about most of the parolees they were managing. Was Gorrido behaving in a manner that was especially suspicious? In many ways he must have seemed like a successful case of rehabilitation: married, living with his mother, and running a successful small business. I mentioned in my post on Anne E. Schwartz’s Monster that Jeffrey Dahmer’s parole officer didn’t even go to visit him at his apartment because Dahmer lived in a bad part of town. I raised an eyebrow at that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was more the norm than an exception.

Takeaways:

Priklopil and Fritzl kept their captives in basement dungeons, expertly concealed. I don’t believe in being a nosey neighbour, and it’s true that Gorrido’s was a bad neighbourhood to begin with, but at some point you have to be suspicious as to why the guy next door is doing putting up eight-foot fences around the back half of his backyard.

True Crime Files

Pizza Bomber: The Untold Story of America’s Most Shocking Bank Robbery
By Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella

The crime:

On August 28, 2003 a pizza delivery man named Brian Wells robbed a bank in Erie, Pennsylvania with a bomb locked to a collar around his neck. He was almost immediately apprehended by the police and the bomb detonated while he was in custody, killing him instantly. After years of investigation a rough outline of the robbery plot was pieced together, principally involving a mentally ill woman named Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, a superficially genial but disturbed handyman named Bill Rothstein, and a couple of junky lowlifes named Barnes and Stockton. Diehl-Armstrong was the only one who would go to trial for the crime, as Rothstein died of cancer before he could be charged with anything, Barnes pled guilty for a reduced sentence, and Stockton was granted immunity for testifying against Diehl-Armstrong. Barnes and Diehl-Armstrong both died in prison.

The book:

I’d forgotten all about the Pizza Bomber case. At the time it was headline news, receiving national (and some international) coverage and having seven episodes devoted to it on America’s Most Wanted. But the churn of new and shocking crimes is endless and it took reading this book, which was published in 2012, to bring the story back to me. I then went and watched the four-part Netflix documentary Evil Genius that came out in 2018, which brought the story up to date. But more on that in just a bit.

Both authors were involved in the case – Jerry Clark being the lead FBI agent in charge of the investigation and Ed Palattella covering the story for the Erie Times-News – and there’s a bit of a joke near the end of the book where the lawyer for one of the conspirators tells Clark that his client is looking for a book or movie deal. “Get in line,” Clark tells him. “Everyone who’s touched this wants that.”

Indeed, and it was a “line” that Clark himself was near the front of.

The reason there was such a line is that the story is true crime gold. All of the essential elements are here: a cast of eccentric characters, a strange and sensational crime, and a mystery remaining at the end as to what exactly was going on. As the judge at Diehl-Armstrong’s trial put it, “This case represents the unfortunate combination of the incredibly bizarre and the sadly tragic.”

The biggest question has to do with how much Brian Wells knew about the plot in advance. Was he a total innocent, grabbed nearly at random, or was he a semi-willing co-conspirator in the bank robbery? Did he know the bomb around his neck was real? Law enforcement at the time felt that he was involved in the plot to some degree, and they had grounds for thinking so. One witness put him together with Rothstein the day before the robbery, and his behaviour leading up to his death was very strange. On the other hand, in the Evil Genius documentary a prostitute Wells associated with confesses that she basically set him up as the stooge (this is, by the way, perhaps the bit of information that Clark thought she was holding back at the end of the book). Is she a credible witness? No. Is she more credible than the other participants in the scheme? Yes.

It seems unlikely we’ll ever know what was going on now. But the question of Wells’ involvement underlines a bigger mystery relating to the case: Just how smart were these guys?

Clark and Palattella go out of their way to make the argument that Diehl-Armstrong, Rothstein, and even Wells were smarter than average. Perhaps. Wells, however, was a middle-aged man delivering pizzas and using prostitutes. Diehl-Armstrong and Rothstein both came from privileged backgrounds and were recognized as intelligent, but they had both bottomed out: living in hovels, with no jobs and not only associating with criminals but being engaged in various criminal activities themselves. That they considered themselves to be intellectuals and the smartest people in whatever room they happened to be in is pretty strong evidence of the contrary. Being smart is not something that really smart people brag about.

They might have been “fractured intellectuals,” to use the term Rothstein adopted for one of his clubs. Diehl-Armstrong in particular was mentally ill. But it’s probably as accurate, and more to the point, to just describe them as bitter losers, experiencing the full measure of downward mobility with the next stop being homelessness and a potter’s field. As Clark and Palattella observe, “their avarice fit with their obsession to hang on to the past, to the prosperity their families once enjoyed.” The robbery they planned made no sense whatsoever except as a way of lashing out at forces they felt had conspired against them.

So, intelligent? I guess it depends on how you define intelligence. Clark and Palattella mention IQs on occasion, but I don’t think that means much. Criminal masterminds? Hardly. In my notes on Julie K. Brown’s Perversion of Justice I brought up the subject of criminal intelligence, but I don’t think even by those loose standards anyone here qualifies. “For people who were supposed to be brilliant,” the authors write, “Diehl-Armstrong and Rothstein did a lot of stupid things.” Perhaps the best assessment came from Diehl-Armstrong herself, describing Rothstein: “as very stupid but very, very intelligent and dangerous.” A good example is the collar bomb itself, considered by one of the agents as “the most sophisticated improvised explosive device (IED) he had ever seen.” Despite all its cleverness though, it was also a Rube Goldberg doohickey that only half worked as it was supposed to. Or was it supposed to work at all?

I do have to credit the gang with one very notable accomplishment though. The hardest part in any conspiracy is getting everyone involved to keep a secret. This never works out. So how did this gang of broken and burned-out cases manage to maintain so much solidarity in silence? Even Brian Wells, wearing the collar, played his part until the end, making up some story about being shanghaied by a bunch of Black guys.

I guess fear was the main motivator. In the documentary, Diehl-Armstrong says all the co-conspirators were afraid of the death penalty and so watched each other’s backs. They may also have been afraid of each other, and Diehl-Armstrong in particular. She’d already killed a couple of partners. In Evil Geniuses it’s suggested that Rothstein was still carrying a torch for Diehl-Armstrong, but since he’d already dropped the dime on her for Roden’s murder I have trouble squaring that.

Still, it’s impressive that there was so much solidarity. Even after copping pleas, Barnes and Stockton clearly didn’t want to rat their partners-in-crime out.

So there you have it: violence, weirdos, and mystery. True crime in its purest form.

Noted in passing:

There are often moments when you’re reading the description of some action in a book that you have to stop and wonder just what’s happening because it’s so hard to visualize. For example, in the authors’ brief recounting of the stormy relationship between Diehl-Armstrong and then-boyfriend Jim Roden (she ended up killing him and stuffing his body in Rothstein’s freezer) this little nugget is served up: “Violence plagued their relationship for a decade. He cut her thigh by pushing her into a broken glass panel of a stove door in July 1994.”

Now just how did this work? Stove doors are usually pretty low to the ground and Diehl-Armstrong was a very tall woman. How would he push her thigh into a stove door? Or was the glass panel completely detached from the stove door and located somewhere else?

Takeaways:

Dead men tell no tales. But dying men can be liars even on their death bed. Clark and Palattella talk about the admissibility of “dying declarations” as evidence (they are considered an exception to the rule against hearsay) because the circumstances under which they are made support their credibility. But Bill Rothstein repeatedly lied that he’d had no involvement in Wells’ killing, even just hours before his death. Does it make sense to believe that someone’s character is going to change in their final days, or even minutes? Thinking like that seems to belong in a time when there was widespread belief in deathbed conversions and sneaking into heaven by a whisker. I don’t think it applies very much today.

True Crime Files