Slenderman by Kathleen Hale

Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls by Kathleen Hale
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Time taken to read - in and out over 4 days

Pages - 348

Publisher - Ebury Press

Source - Bought

Blurb from Goodreads

The first full account of the Slenderman stabbing, a true crime narrative of mental illness, the American judicial system, the trials of adolescence, and the power of the internet

The Slenderman stabbing of May 31, 2014, in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, Wisconsin, shocked the local community and the world. The violence of Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, two twelve-year-old girls who attempted to stab their classmate to death, was extreme, but what seemed even more frightening was that they had done so under the influence of a figure born by the internet: the so-called “Slenderman.” Yet the even more urgent aspect of the story, that the children involved were suffering from undiagnosed mental illness, was often overlooked in coverage of the case.

Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls tells that full story for the first time in deeply researched detail, using court transcripts, police reports, individual reporting, and exclusive interviews. Morgan and Anissa were bound together by their shared love of geeky television shows and animals, and their discovery of the user-uploaded scary stories on the Creepypasta website could have been nothing more than a brief phase. But Morgan was suffering from early-onset childhood schizophrenia. She believed that she had been seeing Slenderman for many years, and the only way to stop him from killing her family was to bring him a sacrifice: Morgan’s best friend Payton “Bella” Leutner, whom Morgan and Anissa planned to stab to death on the night of Morgan’s twelfth birthday. Bella survived the attack, but was deeply traumatized, while Morgan and Anissa were immediately remanded into jail, and the severity of their crime meant that they would be prosecuted as adults. There, as Morgan continued to suffer from worsening mental illness after being denied antipsychotics, her life became more and more surreal.

Slenderman is both a page-turning true crime story and a search for justice.


My Review

I watch a lot of true crime so I had heard of this case before but just the basics, two kids, pre teens had taken their friend and tried to kill her. It was a brutal crime made worse by the fact they were all kids and friends. This book is written by someone who lived in the small town before and a lot of the community wouldn't talk to outsiders although I am not sure how much more access/info this person had compared to others.

The book takes us to before the wean was born, her father and mothers meeting, her fathers mental health issues and then her being born. The issues she had and experienced and instead of her parents watching for the signs, getting her help and acknowledging what she was going through it was basically ignored so the wean suffered in silence and navigate what she was seeing and hearing. Her parents opted the route of not telling her about her fathers illness until she was sixteen which of course would be far too late.

The book goes through the history of the three kids, their families, upbringings, backgrounds and how they all met and interacted and the discovery of creepy pasta and the slender man. It then takes us through the lead up of the crime, the crime itself and what happened after until the girls are arrested and their incarceration and sentences. I still find it wild how things played out, charging them as adults, the one who carried out the physical attack was confirmed with a mental health condition yet still didn't get healthcare she desperately needed. They were more interested in making sure she knew and understood the law process (she was twelve and more accurately it was ensuring she parroted more than understood). The amount of red flags, missed opportunities and times my jaw dropped because of what I was reading, wild! I absolutely get that people want offenders to pay for their crimes especially when they are so horrific and violent but this wasn't someone pretending to be unwell and even when this was diagnosed and recognised she still had medication and treatment withheld. It is a wild one for sure, 4/5 for me for this.

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