12-Year old girls Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier have been charged with attempted murder after they allegedly stabbed another 12-year-old 19 times to please Slenderman
(CNN) -- They thought they had something to prove to someone they found on a ghoulish website, police say. So, two girls lured a third girl into a wooded area in Waukesha, Wisconsin, over the weekend and stabbed her 19 times, according to authorities.
The suspects allegedly left the victim to crawl to her own rescue. The three girls, all 12 years old, were friends.
A bicyclist found the wounded girl alive Saturday, lying on a sidewalk in Waukesha, Police Chief Russell Jack said. She was in stable condition at a hospital Monday
The girls were trying to impress a certain "Slenderman," according to a criminal complaint. One of the girls encountered the name on a website known as Creepypasta Wiki.
Slenderman
Slenderman is a fictional character and Internet meme that often appears in horror stories, videos and images. One of the suspects told police that Slenderman is the site's supposed leader, and to climb into his realm, a user must kill someone.
On Tuesday morning, a lengthy statement was posted on www.creepypasta.com.
The statement expressed condolences for everyone involved and stressed that the site does not condone or encourage violence in any way. But it also noted that "it's hard to justify pinning blame on an entire genre of writing."
Creepypasta is a play on the term "copypasta," which is derived from the keyboard action "copy-paste." Creepypasta is horror fiction written with the Web in mind and, often, comes in a style that makes it look like a news or true crime story.
Did 'Slenderman' inspire stabbing?
Numerous plans of attack
Two girls, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, were arrested hours after the victim was discovered Saturday, the complaint says. They were being held on preliminary charges of attempted first-degree intentional homicide.
Morgan Geyser
Geyser and Weier are being charged as adults and appeared in court Monday. Bail was set for each in the amount of $500,000, Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel said.
Anthony Cotton, Geyser's attorney, told CNN on Tuesday that he's spoken briefly with her. She is housed at a juvenile facility for females, he said, and the girl's family is in "shock."
Anissa Weier
Geyser has not had a mental evaluation yet, but her lawyer expects her to be given one soon.
Attempts to contact an attorney for Weier were unsuccessful Monday and Tuesday.
The suspects attended the same middle school as the victim and had a sleepover at the home of one of the suspects Friday night, Jack said.
"Both suspects had a fascination with a fictitious character that often posted" to websites dealing with stories about death and horror, the police chief told reporters at a news conference.
According to the criminal complaint, the suspects had been planning the attack since February.
They first thought to kill the victim by placing duct tape over her mouth while she was sleeping and stabbing her in the neck, the complaint says.
Next, the plan was to kill her in a park bathroom where there was a floor drain that could make cleanup easier, it continued.
But, finally, the girls decided to carry out the attack in the park while playing a game of hide-and-seek, the complaint says.
It states: "As they left for the park ... (the victim) was walking in front of them and Geyser lifted up the left side of her white jacket and displayed the knife tucked in her waistband. Weier stated she gave Geyser a look with wide eyes and, when asked what that meant Weier stated, 'I thought, dear god, this was really happening.' "
'One millimeter away' from death
The victim was stabbed near her heart, and she was "one millimeter away from certain death," the complaint says.
When the bicyclist found her, the girl pleaded, "Please help me. I've been stabbed."
She was in extreme pain and could only answer yes or no questions, the complaint says.
Authorities searched for the two other girls, and a sheriff's officer found them walking near Interstate 94, Jack said.
He declined to say whether the suspects had blood on their clothes, but added: "There was evidence that was readily apparent when the two were taken into custody."
That evidence included a large kitchen knife inside a purse that Geyser identified as one of her mother's old purses, according to the complaint.
Mary Ellen O'Toole, a former FBI profiler, described the case as "very unusual -- not just because is involves young females," she said, "but the brutality of it."
I’ve recently been alerted to the horrific events that took place in Wisconsin.
I’ve received both messages of concern and blame, and while it seems that the Creepypasta Wiki is bearing the brunt of media attention and finger-pointing, I feel it’s necessary for me to make a statement.
First and most importantly, my condolences go out to all the families involved. I cannot even imagine how painful and confusing and awful this has to be for them. I don’t have children, but I can imagine how my mother would feel if something like this happened to me, and it absolutely breaks my heart to even consider her having to go through that. The families of the young ladies who committed this crime also have my heart going out to them – I know this can’t be easy for them as well, and I’m sure they’ll have to deal with mistargeted backlash and anger even while they try to get through such a trying time themselves. So when I say that I extend my deepest sympathies and my prayers to those affected, I hope that you understand that I mean it. I know that words can seem hollow or come off as mere lip-service to the cynical, but it’s the truth.
Of course, the next thing I want to talk about is this site and the creepypasta phenomenon at large as I’m sure that many people are here because they want to know precisely what is being blamed for this event.
Creepypasta comes from the word copypasta, which itself is a play on the “copy and paste” function. They were short, creepy stories that people spread around the internet for fun. This website is one of the many Creepypasta communities that accept submissions; people write their paranormal stories, I read them and decide which ones I personally like enough to post, and visitors read them and post comments – usually from the perspective of how the author can improve as a writer. I think that, more than other Creepypasta websites, we focus more on being a writer’s community. We have a spin-off site dedicated to getting feedback (don’t use so many ellipses, please don’t write romance stories about serial killers, please remember to proofread – that sort of thing) for authors who ask for blunt community critique and I try to do community promos for writers who self-publish or work on other projects like movies, anthologies, comics, and so on.
Creepypasta is not solely dedicated to horror and murder or revenge fantasies, despite what some media outlets claim. They come up, of course – but so do ghosts, zombies, angels, mythology, urban legends, conspiracies, lost civilizations, aliens and sci-fi, vengeful deities, as well as real-world struggles, sorrows, and dangers. It’s a wide umbrella of inspiration, to be sure, but I’m sure that anyone who has ever browsed the horror or paranormal or sci-fi sections of a library or bookstore has noticed just how vast the possibilities are within those genres.
I think that most of you will understand when I say it’s hard to justify pinning blame on an entire genre of writing. Unless you’re okay with blaming the world’s ills on Stephen King or H.P. Lovecraft, I don’t believe that it makes sense to say paranormal writing or an interest in the macabre should be blamed or even used as an indicator of a “sick” person (as a few emails have already felt the need to call both myself and all the authors here). The human race has long held and encouraged a fascination with things that go bump in the night.
So while I understand and accept that some people will blame us as a way to channel their anger and grief, I simply cannot agree. While I cannot speak for the owners and operators of the hundreds of wikis, websites, and YouTube channels that exist in the Creepypasta fandom, I believe that the community members here are aware that as the admin of this specific website, I truly care about the people who visit this website. It’s for that reason that I’ve tried to take steps to keep this from becoming a mere shock site and turn it into a place where we could foster the interest of reading and writing. Obviously, we cater to people who find interest in the paranormal and all the weird and creepy things that exist in the universe, but I believe placing blame solely on an interest in reading/writing about horror, paranormal, myths, urban legends, etc for a tragedy would be off the mark. Hundreds of thousands of people read scary stories, play horror video games, watch TV shows about ghost-hunting and all other varieties of the macabre and creepy (Hannibal and Dexter come to mind as recent wildly-popular shows that one could argue romanticized killing far more than this site ever could) and if we could truly blame any violent crimes solely on one specific form of entertainment as the trigger – well, I suppose it would be a relief as we’d be able to expunge said cause and clear the world of such awful happenings.
However, the fact of the matter is it can’t be that simple. Most people don’t watch Hannibal and turn into serial killers. The popularity of the Paranormal Activity franchise did not cause a spike in violent crimes. I play Skyrim as a pickpocketing rogue, but I’ve never so much as stolen a pack of gum, nor have I murdered anyone. You can insert countless examples here of people enjoying popular culture without acting it out in real life, so I hope that you see my point.
This isn’t to say that I believe that anything goes with regards to entertainment. I’ve mentioned it quite often in the comments here, as well as in the FAQ and on our writing review sister site, but I do draw the line with what I’m willing to accept and post as entertainment on my website. I’ve tried to contact writers who sent in things that troubled me – particularly teens who were clearly writing out their own unhealthy, violent revenge fantasies – and tried to direct them to websites or hotlines where they could find someone to talk to if they were having trouble. For the sake of both my own sanity and that of my readers, I have policies about flat-out rejecting things that I believed glorified abuse or suicide. I know that we live in a culture where, for example, sexual violence is considered so entertaining that one of the top-rate TV shows is entirely dedicated to a new assault every week (Law & Order SVU) and I believe it would be dishonest to say that things like that don’t contribute to people becoming desensitized. We recently had a conversation in the comments about “fridging” women in stories – the tendency for authors to violently kill off a woman in order to give a male character a backstory or motivation – and I absolutely believe that such a phenomenon, for example, does betray the internalized misogyny that tends to be prevalent in entertainment. I know that I’ve derailed a bit, but I suppose my point here is that I do believe any entertainment creators do have a responsibility to look at their work and decide what attitudes they’re normalizing or even promoting. So please don’t take what I’m saying here as my dismissing entirely any concerns about the premise of this website!
Jeff the Killer
In this specific scenario, I’ll be honest: I have tried to keep Slenderman stories limited here. I’m aware that he and Jeff the Killer have become absurdly popular recently, with fans expanding upon their origins (in Slenderman’s case, he was created on the SomethingAwful web forums many years ago in an attempt to cooperatively create new folklore – an experiment that has apparently been quite successful). Stories about Slenderman and his proxies are not the central focus of this website. I am not intimately familiar with all the various additions and expansions to his “legend” that have cropped up all over the internet – to be frank, I did not find him particularly interesting and as such I’m really not going to be very helpful with explaining the details of his popularity and stories to all the people who most certainly have questions. I know that might seem ridiculous given that I run a website dedicated to a meme that’s become – for some – synonymous with Slenderman, but it’s the truth. I’ve been trying to encourage writers here to break out from the serial killers and Slenderman cliches that tend to overrun the Creepypasta fandom, though my motivation was less that I believed Slenderman was harmful (the Jeff the Killer fangirls and spin-offs, I did find somewhat troubling – I’ve mentioned before that I feel romanticizing serial killers is not really something I feel comfortable with promoting via publishing all the Jeff love stories and self-inserts that people tried to submit; the only Jeff spin-off I did let through was one that I felt had a decidedly non-romantic view) but more because I view this website as a place for people to become better writers and readers. You can visit the post where I talked about wanting to start an ‘inspiration’ book club to spur originality and creativity in our writers (via reading stories about things like the women who successfully climbed K2 and what that sort of experience both required from them as people as well as giving the readers exposure to the fascinating world of mountaineering), or maybe some of the comments where I’ve scolded kids for not wanting to improve their vocabularies. I’ll admit it: I have an agenda here, and that agenda is to get people to read and write!
But if I may be so bold, I don’t believe that it’s the fault of Slenderman or horror writing in general that this happened. I remember reading scary stories and watching slasher movies when I was a child and young teenager and while they certainly gave me nightmares, they did not instill within me a desire to murder my friends. For someone to make the jump from reading a creepy story that is – at least on this website, once again, I can’t speak for all creepypasta websites – being presented as 100% fiction into actually using it as a motive to plot and murder another human being – something else has to be going on there.
We live in a culture with a very unhealthy relationship with mental illness. People with mental health issues are frequently dismissed (people who deal with anxiety, depression, etc have almost certainly experienced people telling them that their problems don’t exist and that they should “bootstrap” and just “get over it”), shamed and bullied (consider Miley Cyrus’ tweets where she mocked Sinead O’Conner for acknowledging her own struggle with mental illness and asking for help), and often ignored or denied necessary treatment because people either choose to look the other way when they see symptoms or their attempts to help are met with resistance because the sufferer has internalized all the negative cultural messages about having and admitting to mental illness.
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