One in two girls in Wisconsin who repeatedly stabbed a classmate for believing that a fictional horror character named Slender Man would attack her family if they did not appeal to the girl who killed the girl on Wednesday.
Morgan Geyser was 12 at the time of the 2014 attack, which Payton Leutner survived. Geyser’s attorney Matthew Pinix had argued that she should be charged with attempted second-degree intentional murder, which would have placed the case in juvenile court. Instead, she was accused of attempted first-degree murder, which put the case in adult court.
But Wisconsin’s 2nd District Court of Appeals found that the Waukesha County Circuit Court held the case correctly in the adult court, saying it found the probable cause she had attempted to commit a first-degree intentional murder.
Pinix said he planned to appeal Wednesday’s ruling to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Payton Leutner survived the 2014 attack.
(Facebook)
“Morgan’s fight is not over,” Pinix said. “The Court of Appeal escaped serious problems in the case and has struggled with some of the areas of the law.”
Waukesha County District Attorney Susan Opper, who is pursuing the case, declined to comment.
Geyser pleaded guilty to attempting first-degree intentional murder in a deal with prosecutors to avoid jail time. She was not found guilty of mental illness as defective.
Geyser and co-defender Anissa Weier lured Payton Leutner from a sleepover to a nearby forest park in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha. Geyser killed Leutner 19 times because Weier encouraged her, leaving the girl dead. All three girls were 12 at the time.
Leutner recalls in a 2019 interview with ABC News how Weier told her before stabbing her to lie on the ground and cover herself with sticks and leaves, as part of what Leutner believed was a game of concealment. After stabbing, Leutner said she finally got up, grabbed trees for support and made her way to a road where a cyclist found her and called for help.
Anissa Weier (left) and Morgan Geyser (right) lured Payton Leutner into the woods in a park in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha in 2014 and attacked her, investigators said.
(AP, file)
1 DEAD IN MACHETE ATTACK BY COLORADO HOME
Geyser was assigned to spend 40 years in a mental health facility because she was the mastermind and did the stabbing, prosecutors said. Weier was committed to a mental health facility for 25 years.
Geyser’s attorney argued on appeal that Geyser could not really understand what rights she was giving up when she agreed to speak only with a detective while she was in custody and familiar with the stabbing.
The appellate court said it did not have to decide on whether the lower court made a mistake in allowing the comments to police.
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Even if the lower court were wrong, “such errors were harmless beyond a reasonable doubt because of the additional, unrestricted and overwhelming evidence in this case,” the appellate court said.
The case attracted widespread attention in part because of the girls’ fascination for the character Slender Man. Slender Man was created online in 2009 by Eric Knudson as a mysterious spectacle photo-edited in daily images of children at play. He is typically depicted as a slender, spidery figure in a black suit with a free white face. He has grown into a popular boogeyman and appeared in video games, online stories and a 2018 movie.
