“Slenderman” with Kathleen Hale

In 2014, 12-year-old Payton "Bella" Leutner was stabbed 19 times by two other tween girls. The crime was well publicized as the Slenderman stabbings because the two girls who committed the stabbing said a fictional character named Slenderman told them to do it. The girls were tried as adults for attempted murder and went to jail, Payton lived. 

In her book Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, journalist Kathleen Hale looks at this true crime story through a new lens: that the girls who stabbed Payton were dealing with severe mental illness that the justice system in Wisconsin ignored. 

Nora and Kathleen discuss the legal realities of this case, how the media portrayed the story and how we can all think about true crime consumption differently.

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The episode transcript can be found here.

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Nora: When you say you love true When you say you love true crime, what does that really mean? Does it mean you watch Dateline to relax and joke about how the husband did it? Because, I mean, he usually did. Have you paid to see a true crime podcast dissect their favorite murderer on stage?

Are you listening to the grisly details of an unsolved crime as you clean your house? If so, you are not alone. Not at all. True crime is literally the most popular podcast genre. Serial, which came out in 2014 if you can believe it, is widely credited for sparking the frenzy and starting the podcast boom, and much of true crime's popularity is fueled by women.

A lot of ink has been spilled as to why women are so drawn to stories of murder and missing persons cases and why young girls often exhibit shocking displays of cruelty and violence to one another as they mature. The thing about true crime is that it is true. But we always don't, but we don't always get the full story.

But we don't always get the podcasts and Keith Morrison. If you follow the news at all. You probably heard about the Slenderman murder in Wisconsin in 2014. Well, it wasn't a murder. The victim lived, and her assailants were her fellow 12 year olds and friends. Young girls who were later tried as adults despite the fact that both were dealing with significant mental health issues.

Issues that were all but erased by the Wisconsin court system. The story of Morgan and Anissa. Their families, their community, and the state that condemned them isn't a story you can wrap up in an hour long episode with some simply safe ads thrown in for good measure. In her book, Slender Man, journalist Kathleen Hale peeled back the many, many layers surrounding the Slender Man case, each more heartbreaking and infuriating than the last.

I'm Nora McInerny. This is the Terrible Reading Club, the easiest book club you'll ever join because I promise you We will never have to meet in real life.

This book was so good that I could not stop turning to whoever the person was next to me as I was reading it, saying, you have to hear this, I have to read this to you.

And I was so blown away by, not just the reporting, but by the way you told. The story itself. I know you already know this, but Jesus fucking Christ, you can tell a story, Kathleen. You are good. 

Kathleen Hale: I feel like if I knew that about myself I probably wouldn't be a writer. But, um, but... I really appreciate that. Thank you.

 My name is Kathleen Hale. Uh, I cover crime and social media for outlets such as Vanity Fair and my first true crime book. Slender Man, Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and The Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls came out last summer.

Nora: What got you into a niche of writing like the one that you are in? Thank

Kathleen Hale: You know, people have been asking me since I first started, uh, publishing, like, why are you interested in such violent content? Um, and I have found, I mean, you've probably read this too, that women are statistically more interested in true crime than men, although it's, you know, popular amongst, across the board, but, and I, and I think that that might have something to do with the fact that as women, you know, we've probably all felt endangered physically at some point in our lives, uh, some to a greater extent than others.

And engaging with these very, very violent stories kind of allows us perhaps to experience. re experience that fear, that sense of endangerment in a contained way within the confines of a story that doesn't include us. So it's like a safe sort of environment to re experience some of those emotions. And I think it also serves to sort of validate that dread that has followed us maybe through our 20s and into our 30s when we begin to be invisible to the predators who once, uh, hounded us.

It sort of. Reminds us that yeah, maybe we are, were right to be afraid. Uh, the world is a scary place. So I think that's part of why I gravitate toward these stories is just having been a girl, a teenager, a woman in my 20s. I've, I've been in some pretty scary situations and Um, there's something about horror stories and crime stories that, that, I don't know, it's just, it feels like a very safe space for me in a, in a strange and twisted way to, to be in that world.

And there's also something appealing about standing up for people, characters in the stories who perhaps weren't being depicted, uh, in the way like I felt like they should be. Um, and so there's a little bit of like a, um, there's, there's an element of that as well.

Nora: The internet is also its own kind of scary place as well.

Kathleen Hale: Yes, the internet is quite scary. It's true.

Nora: And especially for women, too, I think that the way that women are treated online is a reflection of the way people feel privately about women, even other women, and a reflection of our own standing in society,

Kathleen Hale: hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, um, there's a lot of Things that happen online that have historically occurred on social media platforms that do feel very gendered. I mean, the first thing that springs to mind is just our cancellation era. We sort of seem to be exiting that. I don't know if you followed the University of Idaho murders, but one of the sleuths who pounced on that case, she...

She, uh, released so many videos, uh, defamatory videos, accusing a professor at the University of Idaho of committing those crimes. And the University of Idaho professor sued the TikToker, the sleuth. And that's kind of like a turning point if that lands at all. And it seems as though it has. Um, I don't know about what the financial situation is.

I don't know if she's had to. You know, pay anything in the lawsuit, but she has stopped making the videos. And that to me kind of signaled like the end of cancellation. But when we were really in the cancellation era, I was very aware that, you know, men were being canceled for, um, crimes that could be prosecuted in court, you know, whereas women were being canceled for, um, maybe being obnoxious or problematic or.

you know, in some cases simply imperfect. And I was, I was just very aware of like what that said about, um, ingrained sex, sexism and our culture and sort of how far we think we've come versus how stuck we actually are.

Nora: I, I'm 40. I don't know how old you are.

Kathleen Hale: I'm 36. Mm hmm, mm

Nora: Okay, you're 36. So almost peers, and yet there's something about being four years older than another person. The reason that we are not the same, the reason that my sister, who is eight years older than I, are not the same, is because of the way The internet shaped us and the ways that we shape the internet.

My husband is young Gen X You know, I think by the time he made a Facebook, he was already a dad You know, whereas I was a college junior, and you were a high schooler, and I was a little girl, a middle schooler who had never kissed a boy, who was on AOL chat rooms, catfishing, what I now know were probably other seventh grade virgins, uh, pretending we were, like, my friends and I would be like, I'm a hot lady with big boobs.

What about you?

Kathleen Hale: and the 13 year old boy was like, I'm a man at a company with a car.

Nora: I was, I was a part of that generation where people were very afraid about what the internet would do to us and what would happen to us if we were there unsupervised. And in a lot of ways, I think we are seeing with You know, the Surgeon General saying what we've all known for a while, that social media is not good for children, that, um, maybe some of those fears were founded, just not in the way that we were

Kathleen Hale: Mm hmm.

Nora: not in the way that our, our parents or teachers warned us against.

Kathleen Hale: Yeah, so when we were, you know, first going on AIM, you and me, uh, in the, what was that, the early 2000s, late 90s, um, We were being warned by authorities and perhaps our own parents that there were creepy people online. That there were, you know, sex predators, all of that stuff.

And what we've since learned is that the biggest threat that the internet and social media poses to our health and safety is... is within us already. It's about self comparison, you know, we're our own worst enemy, our own worst sort of predator, and we're on this sort of self destructive course through social media, we've since found, especially young people, where our felt reality is quite different than the reality that we live in.

And we're, you know, much more likely to fuck with ourselves and our own mental health than we are to be fucked with by a sex criminal in, you know, Louisiana or something on, on a message board. And I think that that's what makes the internet and social media quite insidious is where our own worst enemies online.

Nora: am definitely, I call it digital cutting, and I will be like, hmm, what can I do to hurt my feelings today?

Kathleen Hale: Yeah, yeah,

Nora: Hmm. Hmm. Should I look up my books and only read the one star reviews? Yeah.

Kathleen Hale: yeah, yeah. Should I look at before and after pictures of mini facelifts and like make an appointment somewhere? Wait, it's been three hours since I started looking at these pictures? What the fuck?

Nora: So when it's 2014 and you first hear about this incident, about this case, do you see about it as a consumer and as a reporter?

Kathleen Hale: When this story first hit the news in 2014, I kept waiting for the media to stop talking about Slenderman and the evils of the internet and to ask the question. that haunted me most, which was why was my home state of Wisconsin prosecuting a mentally ill child as an adult? Um, at the time of her crime, Morgan Geyser had just turned 12, and though she wasn't officially diagnosed with schizophrenia until a few months after her arrest, she'd been experiencing hallucinations since age three, and by the time she arrived at the Washington County Juvenile Jail, her hidden symptoms had escalated into full blown psychosis, and it was obvious to everyone who interacted with her at the jail that she was suffering, yet nobody helped her.

Despite multiple bids by her attorneys, Morgan did not receive medication for 19 months. For that entire time, she was in a state of florid psychosis, which cooks the brain like a fever. Untreated psychosis leads to cognitive decline. Morgan lost the ability to read and do basic math. That's child abuse, and that's what our country does to little kids.

About four years later, people were still talking about the influence of the internet monster Slender Man. America has a long history of erroneously blaming child violence on television shows, video games, detective novels, heavy metal, and so on. But the idea that Slender Man caused Morgan's crime implies that she was possessed, and it demonizes mental illness.

It's something America has been doing for centuries, dating back to witch burnings. When I looked at Morgan, I saw a child, and I didn't realize how controversial that angle on the story would be. You know, that both Morgan and her co conspirator, Anissa Weyer, were children at the time of their crime. The United States sometimes adjudicates children as adults so casually that people have become desensitized to that kind of abuse.

And I quickly discovered that my lens into this story was not only unique, but depend, but like potentially divisive, um, in Wisconsin, children as young as 10 can be prosecuted in the adult court and nobody is interested in changing those laws. And I was blown away by that. And so, you know, yes, the internet played a role in this crime and yes, social media has.

a destructive input, uh, a destructive impact on our self image and, you know, uh, our mental health. But in this particular case, I think that Slender Man was very, very much overemphasized. in relation to the stabbing, uh, and the bigger factors were getting lost in that hysterical conversation about screen time and, and what it does to kids to be unsupervised online.

Nora: I think it's so... Much easier as a mother, as a citizen, as a overwhelmed person who every day drinks from a geyser of human suffering to Look at a situation and say, Oh, I figured it out. It's a bad, scary thing that I can control by limiting my child's time with an iPad. This is something that I can inoculate myself and my family against the same way we do, I think, mentally.

By consuming true crime content, I think a part of it is sort of raising our own cortisol levels, our own awareness of a scary situation as a way of sort of, like, safeguarding ourselves against it happening SVU, uh, You know, it's not gonna, I'm not gonna get lured onto a rooftop, right? I'm not gonna take a drink from a guy that I know personally, ever.

I will obviously be pouring all of my own beverages, myself, for my whole life. And I think, to me, There's like a connection there mentally with just saying oh there's this simple answer and the answer is that it all just comes down to Bad

Kathleen Hale: hmm, mm hmm,

Nora: right? It just comes down to bad parenting. I Had forgotten Kathleen.

I had forgotten that they were 12 and I gasped out loud at that detail but more importantly I was shocked when a few chapters in, you mention that their victim, the girl that they had stabbed, was alive. I had referred to it, like many people, as the Slender Man Murder.

Kathleen Hale: Yes, that particular myth is so pervasive that even the judge on Morgan's case to it a couple of times as a murder, which is not great for the judge on a case, on an attempted homicide case to make that mistake, especially since he was going to be so involved in her sentencing and her anonymous sentencing.

But yeah, I think, I think that that Misconception about the case was definitely bred by the articles that focus so much on Slenderman and the number of stab wounds. 19 stab wounds is really gnarly, and we just assumed someone couldn't survive that, and so Peyton Leutner's survival did get lost in that narrative, and I think because people thought she had been murdered. They were more easily able to look away from the adult prosecution side of things. Surely, two 12 year olds would not be prosecuted as adults if... their victim had survived the attack. That sort of seemed to be part of the thinking, although it didn't really seem like anyone was thinking very deeply about the adult prosecution because it wasn't really included in the news bites about the case, but I do think that when people were aware of it, they just thought, well, I mean, they did kill somebody, you know, and it just sort of got swept aside as a Righteous punishment given what had happened to their victim or what people thought had happened to the victim.

Nora: So you start, you go to the site in 2014, you said. Did you just happen to be in Wisconsin or were you?

Kathleen Hale: to be in Wisconsin three weeks after the crime. Um, and I... pitched a piece, a short piece to Vice, Rest in Peace, Vice magazine. Um, and I basically was going around to young women, high schoolers, middle schoolers, and asking them what they thought about this crime. Um, and it wasn't like a great angle on the story, but I definitely found that they were much more sympathetic toward Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weyer than Wisconsin adults were.

And I think it was because these, these girls, it hadn't been so long since they'd been 12. And they understood more than adults did what it felt like to be that young. And the sort of magical thinking and, you know, the hormonal, uh, you know, rollercoaster ride of puberty and living with one foot in a fantasy world.

So they understood that more. So that was sort of helpful for me. And I also went to the crime scene and, you know, it was interesting. I'm glad that I got to do that before they raised the woods where this crime took place. You know, just cut it down, uh, sweep it under the rug. Maybe nothing like it will happen again because people were.

selling candles out of the, out of their driveways. There were poster boards and stuffed animals and flowers like lining the ditch near where Bella, Peyton Leutner, that's her nickname, Bella, was discovered by a bicyclist and rescued. And it reminded me of Princess Diana's death in terms of the, sort of, the poster boards and the offerings of teddy bears and, and I, and I just sort of realized like, oh my god, even people who live here, they might not.

think she's dead, but they are equating this with a, with a death. Like, who are these offerings for? Bella's in the hospital. Um, she's not in heaven. Are, are these, uh, are they hoping that other people will see them and, and, and realize, you know, how kind they are for putting them here? I just didn't, I was, I was confused by it in a way that sort of interested me.

Like, what's going on here? What are these offerings about? Um, and, And yeah, and then over the next four years, I just really kept waiting for someone else to answer my questions because there was just so much about it in the news and I thought, surely I can't bring an angle to this that hasn't or won't yet be

Nora: I read

Kathleen Hale: the attack, although that is a big part of the book, more focused on Morgan as the antagonist and protagonist of this sort of coming of age story that encompassed themes like female friendship and, um, online activity and mental illness and Wisconsin culture, which are all things that I was really interested in.

And it just held my attention for such a long time. And, which is good because the book took a really long time to write.

Nora: What you wrote about was, to me, more frightening than any physical attack. I really liked, enjoyed, respected your choice. not to focus so heavily on the details of the attack itself, while also not minimizing the seriousness of what that was for the victim, for Peyton slash Bella, but to focus on the frightening reality of the criminal justice system and the Mental health care system in Wisconsin, specifically.

Because Morgan is not just a child, she is also a very, very sick child. Um,

Kathleen Hale: Yeah. Well, thank you. Um, yeah, for me, the book is divided into two sections and the first one is about the crime itself. And it's very scary, but I, I, um, I felt, in a good way, limited by facts, you know, I, I... I fact checked this story. I had it professionally fact checked several times. I wanted every single sentence that I wrote to be true in an unassailable way.

And what that meant in terms of the, the stabbing itself was I was limited to, uh, what was, what came out in the police reports, the forensic interview with Bella, um, interviews with Morgan, and I pieced together all of these varying accounts, but There were still holes, right? But I, like, you know, what did it actually look like in those, in that moment, um, when Morgan was straddling Bella in the, in the woods?

And I, I couldn't get as deep into the stabbing itself as maybe, someone would have been able to if it were fiction or not so heavily fact checked, and I had embellished it, but I was, I was stuck with these, with these details and putting them in order that definitely told the story of the attack, but in a less gruesome way.

I couldn't say things like, you know, I couldn't assume that just because she'd been stabbed in the back that there were, uh, perforations in her lungs, or like, I once had a really gross, sort of, too much, way too much sentence in there about, like, how she might have heard her breath in, like, a wet rattle kind of, like, escaping through the holes in her back.

And I was like, well, I can't say that, you know what I mean? Like, that's just me being kind of, like, too dark and gross and intense. I can't back that up with, with facts. So, um... But yeah, the part two of the book is called Welcome to Slendermansion because that's where Morgan and Anissa were trying to escape to after the stabbing.

They really thought that they needed to go live with Slenderman after that and be his servants forever to protect the the lives of their family members and instead they They find themselves in a criminal justice system that is so, uh, medieval, gothic, arcane, um, and that turns out to be much scarier than what they had anticipated in Uh, in the woods, when they embarked on Slender Mansion.

I mean, they were planning to go live in a house with a terrible monster, and a bunch of other murderers from these stories that they'd read online, and instead they ended up in a much darker place, which is... The juvenile justice system in Wisconsin, the, the adult, uh, criminal justice system. And, you know, later in a locked psychiatric facility with, with adults.

And so, yeah, so I'm, I'm happy to hear you say that because to me, that was like a very, very frightening part of the story and I wanted it to be as horrifying and to, to lean into the horror genre as much as possible in the way that I told that part of the story so that people could grasp without me.

shoving it down their throats or lecturing them that this is a, this is a bad, a bad thing in our country. This is a scary thing in our country. Um, especially for, for a little girl like Morgan, who was sort of trapped in her own mind within this justice system framework.

Nora: that You were surprised that your approach, your lens was divisive, and I was too. I was very surprised by that, but it seems like... People have a hard time holding two things to be true, um, that these girls, and specifically Morgan, did stab their friend 19 times, leave her four dead in the woods, and that Morgan was not operating in, I mean, neither of them, right?

But that they were not operating with a fully formed prefrontal cortex, that one of them was severely mentally ill, and that In the aftermath of this attack, they were two 12 year old girls walking along the highway in rural Wisconsin with a bottle of water and a couple granola bars between them, hoping to walk, what, 100 miles?

Many, many miles into a 300 miles into a state forest to go live with a monster online. After reading comments about this book, people have a hard time reconciling that there can and should be compassion for all three of these girls, and that giving some to the girls who did this crime does not It's not siphoning it away from Peyton.

Kathleen Hale: When I first started working on the long form piece, I was actually originally supposed to do it for The Guardian, which is a really liberal publication. And I was shocked because when I came back. with my draft, um, where, you know, it, a lot of it was from Morgan's perspective, her family's perspective, and it acknowledged both that she had victimized Peyton Whitner and then that she, as in Morgan, had been victimized by our justice system, and the Guardian was like, we can't print this.

Like, they were just sort of worried about getting canceled. They didn't want it to seem like victim blaming. And that's when I sort of realized I was really, really onto something where even this like liberal outlet wouldn't, wouldn't publish my piece, even though it was factual and stuff, just because they worried about how they'd be seen.

Um, and that's when I was like, oh wow, like, it, taking a compassionate approach toward an assailant is really not permitted, even, even today, um, despite how sort of far we've come. And, and it just, it really galvanized my work and my wanting to make sure that this story did live somewhere.

Nora: For me the clear villain in this story, and there were a few of them, but one very clear villain for me in this story was the judge, who seemed to have two huge blind spots. Three. Uh, not understanding humanity, not understanding girls, adolescent girls at all, not understanding the internet, and not understand, now I'm on four, not understanding mental health or mental illness. Um,

Kathleen Hale: illness as a concept be disputed.

Nora: Um,

Kathleen Hale: 2019. I just couldn't believe it. I mean, I could, having grown up in Wisconsin, but it was still shocking. Um, and then the other part was that Morgan's attorneys and Anissa's attorneys had to prove that they were children at the time of their crime.

To try to get their case waived into juvenile court. And they literally had doctors on the stand talking about, you know, where they were on the puberty index at their last. And, and they couldn't, and they couldn't successfully prove it, you know, to, to anyone who, any of the powers that be in the courtroom.

At the end of the day, Judge Boren decided that they were adults, you know, and that's what he wanted because from the very beginning, he wanted to punish them. Uh, to the harshest extent of the law, and that happened to be adult prosecution. But you know, like, only in America would two children be so casually prosecuted as adults, and what makes Morgan and Anissa's story distinctly Midwestern is that many Wisconsinites would have preferred that Morgan and Anissa receive the death penalty.

Waukesha, Wisconsin, where this crime took place, is one of the most conservative counties in a state that has been drifting to the far right, you know, especially in down ballot elections. Juvenile justice advocates have been campaigning in Wisconsin since the 90s to stop The adult prosecution of minors, or at least raise the minimum age of adult prosecution from 10.

But it's been impossible to move the dial because law and order politics have become synonymous with the Republican Party as a whole, and nobody wants to break the party line. And part of the problem is that judges in Wisconsin are elected, which means that the judge in this case, Judge Michael Boren, was under considerable pressure from his electorate during his handling of the Slenderman stabbing.

to ensure Morgan and Anissa received the harshest possible sentence, and he refused to waive their case into juvenile court. He ruled in favor of the prosecution on almost every issue. Politically, his obstinacy makes sense. Bourne's voters were on social media calling for Morgan and Anissa to be murdered.

which, you know, the death penalty has been outlawed in Wisconsin for over a century. For any politician that wants to be re elected, keeping the girls in adult court was a no brainer, and he was up for re election at the time. But Boren's decision making also reflects a widespread reluctance to change things despite new information.

Adult prosecution of minors, for example, is based on fake research. In the 90s, a man named John DiLulio Jr., a former Princeton professor, and consultant for the Bush administration published quote unquote studies showing that quote unquote kiddie criminals raised in urban areas were becoming wolf packs, is what he said.

And he said these kids were born sociopaths, or as he put it, super predators, and they could not be rehabilitated and the only way to deal with them was to put them in adult prisons. A few years later it turned out that Delulio had made up everything. But by then, Democrats and Republicans had united in their determination to codify the superpredator theory into law.

And nobody wants to admit that they've been tricked. So, I want to be clear that... Although this is now a Republican sort of, uh, leaning issue, the adult prosecution of minors, it began as, as a bipartisan, um, issue. And some states have changed these laws, but in places like Wisconsin, statues set up in service of Delilio's theories persist to this day.

And so in a way, The Super Predator has become the grown ups version of Slender Man, which is just this terrifying evil that must be stopped at all costs, and a terrifying evil that doesn't actually exist.

Nora: Reading the parts of the book that take place in the courtroom, illness exists in the prosecution when it can be weaponized as something to be

Kathleen Hale: Mm hmm.

Nora: and it doesn't exist if it could become a mitigating factor or a factor to help explain it. This behavior or explain the state of mind and all the, all these girls, right, are children.

They're all little girls. I consider a 12 year old girl to be a little girl. I have a 10 year old right now, a 10 year old boy. I've had a 12 year old girl. They are little kids still, right? Um, and Peyton's little girlhood is never disputed, though she's the same age as the girls who attacked her. No one says. That she is an adult. She's a woman. She's a little girl, but the girls who attacked her, who had a sleepover with her, were somehow adults.

Kathleen Hale: Yes. Uh, that's a very good point. When this was reported on, Peyton was referred to as Little Girl in a lot of the newspaper articles about this case, whereas Morgan and Anissa... Um, were referred to as young women sometimes, which was shocking. More often, assailants, attackers, words like that that concealed their age.

And so, again, like, I just didn't realize how controversial it was gonna be for me to say that there were three little girls in this case. But, it was something that people were reluctant to, I don't know, to acknowledge, I guess, um, in the media. I don't know why.

Nora: We're coming up on 10 years. So these girls are now. in their 20s. Um, I would still consider you in your 20s to be a little baby girl. I really would.

Kathleen Hale: Me too. Yeah.

Nora: What are their lives like now?

Kathleen Hale: Um, that's a very good question. So, Peyton. Lives a very private life and, you know, deserves that. I know that she got a full scholarship to a University of Wisconsin school. I know, based on divorce records, uh, her parents divorce records, that she embarked on to... you know, her adult life or whatever you want to call it.

I also agree that kids under the age of 25 are kids just, I mean, based on my own personal experience and also based on neuroscience.

Nora: uh,

Kathleen Hale: on the world with about 250, 000 left over from her Hearts for Healing GoFundMe, which was set up to cover the cost of her medical care. Cause that's the country we live in where we crowdfund medical care.

Cause there's no. mental health care, uh, or it's all messed up. And so she, you know, I, I, I hope that that, she wants to be a doctor. That was the last time I checked. She wanted to be a doctor. She seems to have a pretty good sense of humor. Um, the last time I checked, she had just put up on, I think, Spotify or some,

Nora: time

Kathleen Hale: some personal music channel, an entire album cover of Taylor Swift, just acoustic with the kazoo.

So I was like, oh, this is, she's, you know, she's still funny. She was always sort of funny and silly. Anissa was released a few years ago. She now lives with her dad. Um, last I talked, she was wearing an ankle monitor. I don't know if that's still the case, but I did find out at one of the book festivals that I went to for this book, uh, I met somebody who knew.

Anissa's parole, uh, officer or, you know, claimed to have and apparently she had just been denied an outing to go see a scary movie. So even now the scary movie thing is sort of Or scary character, scary slender man, scary internet, is still sort of being attributed, like blamed, you know, for the violent crime that she conspired to commit.

Morgan is still at Winnebago, still on Gordon Hall.

Nora: from

Kathleen Hale: She's an avid writer, quite good. She just finished her first complete novella, which I've read and it's really good.

Nora: time

Kathleen Hale: She's about to petition for release. Again, um, quite nervous about that. Don't see a world in which that petition will be granted because it's still on Judge Boren's docket, so I don't know why he would decide.

I just don't see a world, but I have my fingers crossed that she can. you know, get out and, um, start outpatient stuff, go to a halfway house. She wants to be a writer. She also wants to be, you know, a mental health advocate and work in, um, uh, work with, you know, incarcerated or hospitalized. people. The thing that is so shocking about Morgan still being at Winnebago, I mean there's many things about it that are shocking, but in the book I talk about her friend Katie, who's the second youngest person on the ward, and Katie was, she was prosecuted, found not guilty by reason of insanity for, for suffocating her two year old, and I assumed, based on how Morgan was being treated, that Katie would be at Winnebago for life, and she was released a couple years ago.

So

I, and I'm not saying that I think that Katie should necessarily be locked up. What I'm saying is that if Kate, if the Katies of the world are being released back into society, why is Morgan Geyser, why is Morgan Geyser still stuck in this, in this? I mean, I don't mean to sound flippant, and this isn't, like, a pun, but in this completely crazy, crazy place that she spends her days.

Nora: I mean, you described it as gothic, if we took out the dates and described it and said it happened in the 1600s, everybody online would be like, wow, this, I'm so glad we're not like this anymore.

Like, I think people would actually be pretty shocked

Kathleen Hale: right. Ugh, I know, I've been asked this before, and I feel like I always sound really pessimistic just because the, the things that we need to change, um, live in so many different, of government and would require a lot of cross pollination, collaboration, cooperation, whatever, um, you know, there's the mental health care aspect of it and where we're at as a nation where.

Our largest mental health care system is our prison system. There's the adult adjudication of minors, which is, you know, being eased across the country, but in Wisconsin, people are just, they've dug in their heels. And I'm not sure how anyone outside Wisconsin can change that, because it's really on Wisconsin voters to do that.

And then, you know, it's,

Nora: how do

Kathleen Hale: not guilty by reason of insanity for a violent crime, especially an infamous violent crime, are not the best poster children for change. And I think that that's part of it. Like, we've started as a nation to rally behind the wrongly accused, the wrongly incarcerated, as we should.

I mean, the Innocence Project is an incredible organization, but we don't have a lot of sympathy for people who have committed crimes. And in other countries, that's not the case. The idea of rehabilitation is sort of baked into the legal system. It's baked into the culture, um, societal. Uh, expectations of people who get out, and you can get out of prison for committing a violent crime, and You can embark back onto the world, you know.

In the United States, if you commit a violent crime and you're incarcerated, your life is basically over. Uh, what work can you get? And so that's why the rate of recidivism, especially among juveniles who've been prosecuted in the adult court, is so high, um, because they don't have access to any kind of, any kind of aid upon their release.

I think that one thing that listeners can do, um, um, Is to try to keep this in the news or on people's radar. I wish that people were following Morgan's attempts at release a little bit more closely. Um, I think people got sick of the case as they often do when it went to trial and the punishments were enacted.

That's usually when we move on to a new crime as true crime fanatics. We want to watch, we want to We want to watch justice unfold. It's part of the true crime narrative. The second half of true crime stories usually unfolds in a courtroom. And once that's over, we have this kind of catharsis. Okay, the story is done.

And. But this is a, you know, it's a, this is a different kind of, this different kind of case, like these were children and one of them is still locked in this totally unfair system. And I guess, you know, that's one thing is journalists or sleuths or anyone who's active online in the true crime sphere could draw more attention to these, uh, to Morgan's petitions for release.

And, uh, level a bit more scrutiny at the process for that release and, um, and not just sort of like slink away from the crime once the assailants are put away, which in this case was not, uh, it's just, it's just totally wild. So, so yeah, I guess that that's one thing that I would say people could do is just pay attention and try to.

force other people to pay attention to the ongoing nature of the case. It's not over yet. It's, it's still happening for, for Morgan Geiser.

Nora: I think this sentencing reflects two very American viewpoints. And one is personal responsibility. And above all else, right? You are personally responsible for what you do.

Kathleen Hale: right,

Nora: No ifs, ands, or buts. And, quote unquote, justice, which is, if this, then

Kathleen Hale: mm hmm,

Nora: If you make a mistake, then our only job is to punish you, is to make sure you suffer. And we do not have any yardstick for what that could possibly mean, other than if you do a bad thing, you should experience something worse than what you

Kathleen Hale: right,

Nora: I will say this in the narration too, you are not saying, well, I mean, it's no big deal that, you know, Bella, Peyton was stabbed 19 times and experienced an incredible, no, who cares about her, right? Like we are not minimizing what, it is not minimizing what happened to Peyton or Bella to say, let's widen the aperture a little bit and also look at the environment.

that created Morgan, which was her genetics, her, you know, her family, and a, I mean maybe there's a way that you can say this in a smarter way, but like, a series of systems that could not register that she was a little kid who was

Kathleen Hale: yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, I mean, our justice system stopped being rehabilitation oriented a very long time ago, and now it's just built around revenge, and that's why elected judges are so problematic, because it's up to a judge to say, Okay, this, this victim and their family has been through hell, but they are not in charge of, of the prosecution in this case.

Like, they are not. Their, their wishes are valid, and perhaps I would feel the same way too, if my child were victimized in this way. But that, that's outside the courtroom. Inside the courtroom, we're looking at the facts of the case. We're, we're thinking. in a way that's geared toward rehabilitation for the people who have already confessed to committing this crime.

And instead, what we often have is, you know, victims and their families driving the, the punishment that, of the case. And in, in this particular crime, um, that, what that looked like was Bella's family showing up with an entourage to court, um, and really sort of creating a visible reminder to Judge Boren.

We are your electorate, we are the important people in this case, um, and, I mean, it's, I don't, I don't know how to say this without sounding dismissive of them, and I'm not, like, they've been through absolute hell, but, They should not be in charge of, of prosecution and sentencing or disposition hearings or anything like that.

Um, and yeah, there were a lot of systems in place once you, you know, read the book and you sort of zoom out a little bit. Systems that helped facilitate this crime that uh, were built around Morgan and Anissa. And, you know, in the days and months leading up to the crime, teachers at Morgan and Anissa's middle school witnessed Morgan talking to herself, laughing spontaneously for no reason, barking like a dog, chasing invisible people in the playground, writing die over and over in a notebook, and even painting with her own blood.

And in response, Morgan's math teacher told Morgan to wash the blood off of her hands. Um, and there was no intervention, and because of that, later Morgan was washing someone else's blood off her hands in a Walmart bathroom. The guidance counselor told Morgan not to write die in her notebook. Morgan's favorite teacher instructed her to stop barking, but nobody probed any deeper than that, and they dismissed Morgan's objectively bizarre and troubling behavior as attention seeking.

And part of why that happened, I think, is because they were living in a culture of silence. Wisconsin is a beautiful place. People there are extremely friendly. It's considered weird in certain parts of the state, the parts where I grew up, to not smile and wave at strangers. But it's also a place where conformity is baked into the culture.

So it wasn't really. that any one person failed Morgan and Nisa. There was a perfect storm of factors, and I had to accept that there wasn't really any one person to blame, and that I needed to report the story with compassion as well as dispassion, because as good as it might feel to vilify one person for dropping the ball in this case, there were so many different people who missed.

So many red flags, but I agree with you that if there is any villain, it is Judge Boren, and, and there is one more, and that's Detective Thomas Casey. There were these two men, um, completely integral to the case against Morgan and Anissa, and they took it upon themselves to treat these two little girls as sociopathic monsters, uh, despite having no experience interrogating or, uh, trying a child.

They had no experience with Adolescents know, uh, training in adolescent brain development or how to talk to children and how to, um, you know, how to deal with them when they do something very, very awful. And they were, I mean, they were sexist, they were uninformed, they were sadistic, and they're still out there.

And... Morgan is, you know, stuck in a locked building with a rotating cast of psychotic adults whose presence in her life has been constant since she was a little girl and that's That's where she comes of age, while Judge Boren goes to the theater and drinks martinis and has his hair professionally styled before hearings, and he's just, he's a, he's a cartoon character of a, and, and, you know.

Casey rests easy thinking that he did the right thing by railroading Morgan. It's, it's um, yeah, I, I really, I had, I had someone kind of challenge me in one of my readings, like, Um, seems like you really hate these, these two guys. Like basically trying to imply that I had a bias. And also it's very unpopular in Wisconsin to speak out against law enforcement of any kind.

Cause there's this real rallying cry to support them, especially in the wake of like Black Lives Matter. Um, people are really like militarized against that. And there's a lot of Blue Lives Matter, um, movements there. And I just told him, I was like, there's. I can't say enough bad things about him. Like, I just can't.

Like, I mean, like, what do you want me to say? Like, he's, he's an idiot. And he's an idiot with so much power. And Detective Casey is all, and they're unrepentant idiots. And that's like a, that's, there's a layer of, of male privilege in there. That I just find so disgusting. That they have completely... Ruined this child's life, and they did it with such glee, such undisguised passion to make her suffer.

And Casey gets to go on 2020 and talk about how she's a psychopath, and presumably get paid for that appearance somehow. Um, I just, I just don't understand it. I don't understand... How they sleep at night, and, um, when Judge Bourne is getting quite old, and I don't think he really realizes that when he dies, this is the legacy that he's going to leave behind, and he looks, he looks like a complete moron, and a dangerous one, which is kind of the worst kind of moron, is it?

Nora: It's just truly like such a brilliant book and you're just so smart. I've always loved your writing. 

Love this book and I hate this book. I hate this I really hate this book. I truly was like, what the fuck?

Like, the number of times I said, what the fuck? Like, whew. 

When I say I loved and hated this book, I mean that I've given it to several people and also, and all of them have said the same thing. And also all of them have said, what the fuck more times than we can count. And yes, Morgan and Anissa did something horrible and wrong, and they are also victims of our failed mental health support systems of a court system that refused to see them as children or even humans.

Victims of our greedy obsession with true crime. This book, to me, was a reminder to look a little deeper than the headlines, to look a little deeper at stories that captivate us, and to aim our anger and our quest for justice a little higher. Because our governments are meant to work for us, not against us, and in the end, nobody in this story comes out any safer or any healthier.