US woman behind Slender Man stabbing caught after escaping from group home | Wisconsin
The Wisconsin woman who admitted to repeatedly stabbing a sixth-grade classmate to please the fictional online horror character Slender Man in 2014 was captured after authorities said she cut off her monitoring bracelet and left the group home.
Morgan Geyser, 23, was found Sunday evening in Posen, Illinois, authorities said. Police in Madison, Wisconsin, issued an alert for Geyser earlier in the day, saying he was last seen with an adult acquaintance Saturday evening.
Posen is about 170 miles south of Madison. CBS News reported Geyser was captured at a truck stop here after local police responded to a complaint of two men loitering behind a building.
Geyser allegedly initially gave police a fake name, according to CBS. He also reportedly said he didn’t want to identify himself because he had “done something really bad” and that police officers could “Google” him.
However, Geyser eventually identified himself and was taken into custody. According to CBS, a friend of Geyser’s was also arrested on charges of obstruction of identity after giving a fake name to police, which he attributed to an interview he conducted with his friend.
Police said Geyser initially gave police a false name, and after repeated attempts to identify him, told police he did not want to tell police who he was because he had “done something really bad” and suggested officers “just Google” him.
In 2014, when all three girls were 12, Geyer and her friend Anissa Weier persuaded their classmate Payton Leutner to go to a park in Waukesha, Wisconsin, during a sleepover. Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times while being provoked by Weier. Leutner barely survived.
The crime made international news headlines after Geyser and Weier told investigators they attacked Leutner in the hope of becoming a servant of the internet bogeyman Slender Man and were convinced he would harm their family if they did not carry out the stabbing.
Slender Man, an unnaturally tall and slender figure, was created by an internet forum user named Eric Knudson in 2009, then digitally transformed by other users into ordinary photographs of children playing. The figure has appeared in video games, online lore, and even in a 2018 movie.
Weier and Geyser were convicted of attempted murder. Geyser was sent to a psychiatric institution in 2018 and transferred to a group home in Madison in March of this year.
State Department of Corrections officials received an alert Saturday night that the monitoring bracelet on Geyser’s ankle was malfunctioning. Two hours passed before the department of corrections contacted the group home where Geyser was living and learned he had escaped after removing the bracelet, Madison police said. a statement.
The Madison police department added that it was not notified of Geyser’s disappearance for nearly 12 hours until someone from the group home called the agency Sunday morning. Wisconsin’s corrections department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, the AP reported.
Before Geyser was found, Geyser’s lawyer Tony Cotton released the following: a social media video On Sunday he was urging him to surrender. “We worked hard to secure his freedom so he could continue on this path,” he said in the video.
The friend who was with him on Sunday told CBS, based on information police shared with him, that Geyser was in danger of being sent back to the psychiatric institute where he was sent in 2018 after the court hearing.
