On May 31, 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, 12-year-olds Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser lured their 12-year-old friend Payton Leutner into the woods and stabbed her 19 times in an attempt to impress the fictional character Slender Man. Leutner crawled to a road where she was found and she recovered after six days in the hospital. Weier and Geyser were found not guilty by reason of insanity and by February 2018, they were convicted and sentenced to long periods in mental health institutions.
Slender Man is a fictional entity created for a 2009 Photoshop contest on Something Awful, an online forum, the goal of which was to create paranormal images. The Slender Man mythos was later expanded by a number of other people who created fan fiction and additional artistic depictions of the entity. Slender Man is a tall, thin character, with a featureless white face and head. He is depicted as wearing a black suit and is sometimes shown with tentacles growing out of his back. According to the Slender Man mythos, the entity can cause amnesia, bouts of coughing and paranoid behavior in individuals. He is often depicted hiding in forests or stalking children.
Weier, Geyser, and Leutner were all classmates enrolled in the same school. Their principal later said none of them had any disciplinary issues. They had been at a sleepover together the night before the stabbing. The attackers had discovered Slender Man on the Creepypasta Wiki, a website that hosts Creepypasta. They later said they had believed Slender Man to be real and had wanted to prove their loyalty to him so they could become his “proxies,” prove his existence, and prevent him from harming their families. They believed the only way to do that would be to kill someone, after which they would become servants of the Slender Man and live in his mansion, which they thought was located in Nicolet National Forest.
Weier and Geyser initially planned to attack Leutner on May 30, 2014, during a sleepover. They planned to tape the victim’s mouth shut, stab her in the neck, and flee. But they did not do it then because Geyser wanted to give Leutner one more day to live. A second plan called for attacking Leutner in a bathroom at a local park.
The actual attack took place in a nearby forest during a game of hide-and-seek on May 31, 2014. Leutner was pinned down and stabbed 19 times in the arms, legs, and torso with a five-inch-long kitchen knife. Two wounds were to major arteries, one missed her heart by less than a millimeter, and the other went through her diaphragm, cutting into her liver and stomach. Weier and Geyser then told Leutner they would get help for her but instead simply left. Leutner dragged herself to a nearby road where she was found by a cyclist.<3>
Professor Jacqueline Woolley, of the University of Texas at Austin’s department of psychology, studies children’s thinking and their ability to make distinctions between fantasy and reality. She has found that by the age of 2½, children understand the categories of what’s real and what’s not, and over time they use cues to fit things like unicorns, ghosts, and Santa Claus into the real and not real boxes. By age 12, the age of the girls in question in this case, Woolley said she believes children should have as good an ability to differentiate fantasy from reality as adults. “I don’t think that a 12-year-old is deficient or is qualitatively different from an adult in their ability to differentiate fantasy from reality, so I don’t think they’re lacking any basic ability to make that distinction at age 12,” she said.
Woolley did suggest, adding she was purely speculating, that the fact the frontal lobe of the brain is not fully developed until age 25 could be relevant in this case. The frontal lobe controls what’s called executive functions, which include impulse control and planning in the sense of anticipating all the different aspects of an outcome.<4>
CITED REFERENCES
3. Wikipedia contributors, “Slender Man stabbing,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slender_Man_stabbing (accessed April 4, 2019).
4. “Slenderman stabbing case: When can kids understand reality vs. fantasy?”
Kelly Wallace. CNN: June 5, 2014.
Link: https://www.cnn.com/2014/06/03/living/s ... index.html (accessed December 10, 2018).
