The Wisconsin woman who admitted to repeatedly stabbing a middle school classmate to delight the fictional online horror character Slender Man in 2014 has been caught after authorities said she cut off a monitoring bracelet and left her group home.
Morgan Geyser, 23, was found in Posen, Illinois, on Sunday evening, authorities said. Police in Madison, Wisconsin, had issued an alert for Geyser earlier in the day, saying she had last been seen with an adult acquaintance on Saturday evening.
Posen, a Chicago suburb, is about 170 miles south of Madison. CBS News reported Geyser was apprehended at a truck stop there after local police responded to a complaint that two people were loitering behind a building as well as sleeping on a sidewalk.
Geyser allegedly gave police a false name at first, according to CBS. She also reportedly said she didn’t want to identify herself because she had “done something really bad” – and that officers could just “Google her”.
However, Geyser eventually identified herself and was detained. A 42-year-old companion of Geyser was booked with obstructing identity after giving police a false name, too, CBS reported, attributing that to an interview with the friend.
In 2014, when all three girls were 12 years old, Geyer and a friend, Anissa Weier, convinced their classmate Payton Leutner to go with them to a park in Waukesha, Wisconsin, during a sleepover. Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times while being egged on by Weier. Leutner barely survived.
The crime made international news headlines after Geyser and Weier told investigators they had attacked Leutner in hopes of becoming servants to the internet boogeyman Slender Man, having become convinced that he would hurt their families if they failed to carry out the stabbing.
Slender Man – an unnaturally tall, thin figure – was created in 2009 by an internet forum user named Eric Knudson, then digitally edited by others into mostly mundane photos of children playing. The figure appeared in video games, online lore and even a 2018 movie.
Weier and Geyser both pleaded guilty to attempted homicide. Geyser was sent to a psychiatric institute in 2018, and in March she was transferred to a group home in Madison.
State corrections department officials received an alert on Saturday night that a monitoring bracelet on Geyser’s ankle had malfunctioned. Two hours passed before the corrections department contacted the group home where Geyser lived and learned that she had absconded after removing the bracelet, Madison police said in a statement.
The Madison police department added that it had not been notified of Geyser’s disappearance for nearly 12 hours – until someone from the group home called their agency on Sunday morning. The AP reported that Wisconsin’s corrections department had not immediately replied to a request for comment.
Before she was found, Geyser’s attorney, Tony Cotton, published a social media video on Sunday urging her to surrender. “We worked too hard to secure freedom for her to continue on this path,” he said in the video.
Geyser faced being returned to the psychiatric institute to which she had been sent in 2018 after a court hearing, the friend who was with her on Sunday said to CBS, citing information shared with her by police.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
