Two 12-year-old girls who are accused of viciously stabbing a classmate 19 times have been identified for the first time publicly since telling police that they plotted for months to commit murder.
Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier face attempted murder charges after attacking their friend, saying that they did so because they wanted to join the cult of the ‘Slender Man’ after reading about him online.
The girls told investigators they believed the Slender Man was real and they wanted to prove it by slaughtering their friend after inviting her for a sleepover in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, Wisconsin.
The two suspects the knife back and forth between them before one girl held the victim down and the other stabbed her 19 times. It is not clear which one held the victim down and which had the knife. One girl told detectives she regretted it and the other said she was sorry.
Geyser and Weier told police they read about the fictional character on a website known as Creepypasta Wiki, where scary stories are submitted by users. One of the suspects is understood to have told police a user must kill someone in order to climb into the Slender Man’s realm.
When the victim escaped in the midst of the assault, her assailants grabbed her and pulled her into the woods and told her to lay down and be quiet, hoping she would bleed out and die, according to court documents.
She eventually crawled out of the woods, covered in blood after being stabbed in the legs, arms and torso. A passing cyclist saw her and called police. The girl was taken to the hospital and is expected to live, despite being stabbed a dozen and a half times.
Surgeons say she was a ‘millimeter from death’ – one of the stab wounds nearly sliced open a major artery. ‘It was weird that I didn’t feel remorse,’ one of the girls told detectives.’The bad part of me wanted her to die, the good part of me wanted her to live,’ the other girl said.
Both girls are charged as adults with attempted pre-meditated murder. If convicted, they face 65 years in prison and are being held on $500,000 bail each.
The criminal complaint spells out how the Geyser and Weier initially planned to put duct tape over their friend’s mouth while she was sleeping and then stab her in the neck as she lay in bed, but then they thought that a bathroom would be a better scene for the crime because it would be easier to clean up after, according to CNN. They opted against both of those theories, however, and chose to go for the attack during a game of hide and seek at a nearby park.
‘As they left for the park … (the victim) was walking in front of them and Geyser lifted up the left side of her white jacket and displayed the knife tucked in her waistband. Weier stated she gave Geyser a look with wide eyes and, when asked what that meant Weier stated, “I thought, dear god, this was really happening,”‘ the report states. The girls were found walking near an interstate highway shortly after their victim was rescued. They had a backpack full of snacks and a five-inch knife.
They said they had planned to run away and join the Slender Man in his mansion in the woods outside of town. One girl even had a picture of her family with her. She said she packed it because she didn’t want to forget what they looked like.