On May 31, 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, 12-year-olds Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier lured their friend Payton Leutner into the woods under the pretext of playing hide-and-seek. Once there, Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times with a five-inch blade. The attack was planned for months as a supposed “sacrifice” to Slender Man, a fictional horror figure from the internet. The girls believed that by killing their friend their families would be protected, and they would become his “proxies”. Leutner suffered severe wounds – two nearly fatal. One missed a major artery by less than a millimetre while another pierced her diaphragm, liver, and stomach. Despite her life-threatening injuries, she crawled to a nearby road, where a passing cyclist found her. Rushed into emergency surgery, she survived. Meanwhile, five hours after the attack, police found Geyser and Weier 8 km away, carrying the knife in their bag. They told officers they were heading to Slender Man’s mansion, believing they were on a mission to prove their loyalty. During questioning, their stories conflicted – one claimed she was excited to prove Slender Man was real, while the other said she was terrified of what would happen if they disobeyed him. Psychiatric evaluations revealed that Geyser suffered from schizophrenia and had experienced hallucinations since early childhood. She described seeing a figure she called “It” in mirrors and claimed Slender Man communicated with her. Weier, in contrast, expressed guilt over the crime but still insisted they had to carry it out.

Both were tried as adults. Weier received 25 years to life but was released in 2021 under strict supervision, including GPS tracking, psychiatric treatment, and restricted internet access. Geyser was sentenced to 40 years in a psychiatric facility, with a minimum of three years of treatment before any potential release. In March 2024, it was announced that Geyser will soon be released from the Mental Health Institute where she has been undergoing treatment, sparking debate over whether she is truly rehabilitated and what risks her release might pose. “I’ve come to accept all of the scars that I have. It’s just a part of me.” The attempt murder happened on Geyer’s 12th birthday. “Once I look back on it, I was like, that is really weird. Why didn’t I see something? Why didn’t I notice something was weird? But I’m not blaming myself at all. Because who could ever see something like this coming? […] They (…) wanted to go on a walk. And I didn’t think much of it. It’s just a walk. It’s in Waukesha. What bad stuff happens in Waukesha, Wisconsin? Anissa told me to lie on the ground and cover myself in sticks and leaves and stuff to hide. But it was really just a trick to get me down there.” Payton said that even though she does not remember the attack itself in detail, she remembers that her trust was immediately gone and didn’t believe when the girls went “for help”. “I got up, grabbed a couple trees for support […] [a]nd then just walked until I hit a patch of grass where I could lay down. I couldn’t focus much because my body was working so hard to stay alive.” “After I heard why she did it, I was like, ‘Well, this doesn’t surprise me at all because she believed so hard in this thing that she would do anything for it.’ It was a little shocking to me to see that they had this big, huge plan that they had been working on for months.”

Leutner said she is aware of the longstanding public debate about whether the two girls were old enough to be charged in adult court, but doesn’t question herself whether their cases should have been handled in juvenile court. “Adult crime is adult court. […] If they had stolen a candy bar, sure that’s a child. But you tried to kill somebody. That’s an adult crime.”
Payton Leutner surprised herself when answering to the question of what would she like Geyser to know. “I would probably, initially thank her. […] I would say, ‘Just because of what she did, I have the life I have now. I really, really like it and I have a plan. I didn’t have a plan when I was 12, and now I do because of everything that I went through.’ […] I wouldn’t think that someone who went through what I did would ever say that, [b]ut that’s truly how I feel. Without the whole situation, I wouldn’t be who I am.”