Illinois police arrested Morgan Geyser, who was convicted in 2014 of stabbing a classmate to appease the online character Slender Man. She escaped from a group home in neighboring Wisconsin where she was being held.
Police said Geyser, 23, removed his bracelet monitoring device and fled his Madison home Saturday night and remained on the run until his arrest Sunday.
Officers found her at a truck stop in Posen, Illinois, where Geyser told them to “Google” her name and that she “did something really bad.”
When Geyser was 12 years old, he stabbed a classmate 19 times. She was sentenced to 40 years in a psychiatric hospital in 2018 and received conditional release in July.
Geyser was found with the man at a truck stop outside Chicago, about 170 miles south of Madison. Police received a report of a man and woman wandering around.
“When officers arrived, they found two subjects sleeping on the sidewalk,” Posen police said in a statement. “The woman repeatedly refused to give her real name and initially gave a false name.
“After repeated attempts to confirm her identity, she finally told police she did not want to tell police who she was because she had ‘done something really bad’ and suggested police they could just ‘Google’ her name.”
She and her companion were taken into custody after police determined she was wanted in Wisconsin. The BBC’s U.S. partner CBS News reported that the 42-year-old’s companion was charged with trespassing and obstructing identification and was later released.
The so-called ‘Slender Man stabbing’ shocked Wisconsin and attracted national attention.
Geyser and her friend Anissa Weier, who was 12 at the time of the attack, lured the classmate to a park after a night out, and Geyser stabbed the classmate repeatedly, with Weier encouraging her to continue.
The victim, 12-year-old Payton Leutner, survived the brutal attack and was found by a cyclist.
Geyser and Weier were tried as adults. Geyser pleaded guilty to first-degree intentional murder and was sentenced to 40 years in prison. A judge allowed her supervised release from a group home in July.
Weyer was charged with attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years in a psychiatric hospital, but was released in 2021.
Who is Slender Man?
Geyser and Weier said they were inspired to attack their classmate after reading about Slender Man in creepypastas, short online stories designed to shock or scare readers.
Slender Man is a thin, shadowy figure who has appeared in photos, paintings, and articles across the Internet. Some claim he has tentacles sprouting from his back, while most say he wears dark clothing and has a pale face.
The girls believed Slender Man would kill their relatives if they did not kill their friends to please him, Geyser’s lawyer told the court. Authorities said the girls had hoped to live with Slender Man after the attack.
Slender Man first appeared on the Internet in 2009.
The character was created by a Florida resident in response to a call for submissions from the comedy website SomethingAwful. The character was depicted behind a crowd.
After the stabbing, a message was posted on a website urging people not to kill people because of the Slender Man.
