Judge OKs Release of Woman Convicted in Slender Man Case

A Wisconsin woman will be released from a mental hospital more than a decade after she nearly stabbed a classmate to death to please the horror character Slender Man, a judge decided Thursday. Waukesha County Circuit Judge Scott Wagner signed off on the conditional plan to release Morgan Geyser, now 22, from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute, a psychiatric hospital where she has spent the last seven years. Another judge had ruled in January she could be released after three experts testified she has made progress battling mental illness. In April, prosecutors objected to Geyser's original conditional release plan after the mother of the victim, Payton Leutner, expressed concern that Geyser's group home was 8 miles away from Leutner. The judge then ordered the state's Department of Health Services to draft a new plan, which was approved Thursday, reports the AP.

Geyser and her friend Anissa Weier lured Leutner to a Waukesha park after a sleepover in 2014. Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times while Weier egged her on. All three girls were 12 years old at the time. Geyser and Weier told investigators they attacked Leutner to earn the right to be Slender Man's servants and feared he would hurt their families if they didn't follow through. They'd planned to walk to Slender Man's mansion in northern Wisconsin after the attack, they said. Leutner barely survived. Geyser ultimately pleaded guilty to being a party to attempted first-degree intentional homicide in 2017 but claimed she wasn't responsible because she was mentally ill. The following year, Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Bohren committed her to a psychiatric hospital for 40 years.

State health officials argued in March that Geyser couldn't be trusted after learning that she hadn't told her therapists that she'd read a novel about murder and black-market organ sales. They also alleged she'd been communicating with a man who collects murder memorabilia and sent him her own sketch of a decapitated body and a postcard saying she wants to be intimate with him. Bohren concluded that Geyser wasn't trying to hide anything and ordered state health officials to continue developing a release plan.