Review: 'Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls' by Kathleen Hale

Slenderman was a more impactful reading experience than I expected. I dabble in True Crime quite actively, but Kathleen Hale impressed me immensely with her very human approach to a crime that has been sensationalised to such an extent key details are often missed. While a difficult read, Slenderman is also a very insightful one. Thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 8/16/2022
Publisher: Grove Atlantic; Grove Press

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

On May 31, 2014, in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, Wisconsin, two twelve-year-old girls attempted to stab their classmate to death. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier’s violence was extreme, but what seemed even more frightening was that they committed their crime 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 suffered from undiagnosed mental illnesses, often went 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 seen Slenderman long before discovering him online, 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 party. Bella survived the attack, but was deeply traumatized, while Morgan and Anissa were immediately sent to 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.

There are certain true crime cases that come to define a cultural moment. The "Slenderman Murder" was one of those cases. While I don't remember it in the sense of 'I knew exactly where I was when...' I do remember looking into Slenderman after reading about it and wondering how something like this could happen. In 2014 I was 2 years into my BA degree and I spent a lot of my time reading and getting lost in fantasy worlds, so in some way I could understand. On the other hand the whole uproar about children having access to the Internet etc. felt overblown to me and so I swept a lot of it aside. Years later I read Kathleen Hale's Vice article and realised there was more to the case than I had imagined. Even then, however, I was still caught up in what the case "meant" for the moment, rather than what had actually happened, who was actually involved, and how things played out later. Now Hale is back with a full-book treatment on the case and her insight once again amazed me.

On May 31st, 2014, three girls headed into the park after a birthday sleepover. What happened in that park became the centre of a mediastorm to such an extent that many of the details of what really happened were lost. While two girls emerged from the park, planning to trek 300 miles to a national park to meet Slenderman, the third girl also crawled her way back to a public road, despite bleeding from 19 stab wounds. But this is not where the story starts. In Slenderman Kathleen Hale starts much earlier, showing us the way the friendship between the three girls developed and how they grew up. Bella, Morgan, and Anissa emerge not as carboard representations of victim and perpetrators, but as what they were, young girls. Hale, with deep empathy, sketches the way Morgan was lost to her schizophrenia from an early age, how Anissa grabbed onto any kind of recognition and connection that came her way to fill a void left by busy or absent parents, and how Bella strived to have her life be defined not by what happened but by the kindness that made her initially befriend Morgan. Hale also does not end with the murder, but rather tracks the girls' lives up until a year before the book's publication. I also appreciated that although it is named after the Creepypasta character that, in some way, led to the murder, Hale's book does not dwell on it over much. Slenderman and the mythos around him is explained, as is the fact he is pure fiction, but only as one of the elements of this case, not as the defining factor. In that way, Slenderman does set itself apart from a lot of other true crime writing. Hale isn't out for sensationalism, but rather for understanding.

It is hard to review this book without discussing in detail what Kathleen Hale manages to do throughout this book. Doing so would stretch this review into infinity, but a few things stood out to me. On the one hand she tells the story of all three girls independently, making sure to differentiate them clearly for the reader to avoid the way many media reports conflated them. On the other hand Hale manages to introduce a lot of background information without distracting from the girls and their experiences. She has done countless hours of interviews and poured through stacks of official documents in order to present a full picture of what exactly happened. She covers the parents' backgrounds, the legal system of Wisconsin, issues around psychiatric care, and more, all of which add to the depth of the book. I was amazed by some of the things I didn't know. For example, I thought this was a murder case. Imagine my relief, but also surprise, that Bella survived. How could that be a forgotten detail in so many reports?! And that they were going to try them as adults even though Morgan and Anissa were 12? 

Hale admits that she had more access to Morgan than anyone else and it does show in the book. Not at all through any sense of bias, but more in the sense of eyesight. My heart hurt for Morgan as Hale described how disconnected from reality she became. My heart hurt equally for Bella, betrayed by the friend she had stuck by despite all the weird behaviour over the years. And my heart hurt for Anissa, lost without any real grounding, looking for connection desperately. It is weird to feel sorry for two people who tried to murder someone, but as Hale makes very clear throughout Slenderman, they were young children, hardly capable of what they set out to do. In treating them as the children they were Hale in no way argues their complete innocence, but she does make it very clear that so much more was going on here than initially meets the eye. Hale's writing is very clear and straightforward, simple in a way that belies the effort and research that went into the book. It doesn't lessen the horror of what she describes, but it does remind us that we are always talking about human beings in these cases.

I give this book...

4 Universes!

Slenderman is a necessary read for any True Crime reader. Hale demonstrates the way in which we should be writing about some of these cases, especially high profile ones which come to be twisted in our perception.