After years of intensive press coverage, (including in this magazine), a probing documentary, the general airing of both girls’ mental and psychiatric histories in open court, and many long months of incarceration, most of it with limited access to mental health care, can Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier receive a fair trail? Their defense teams aren’t so sure. Both sides are attempting to distance the case from its home base of Waukesha: Geyser’s lawyers want to move it out of Waukesha, and Weier’s attorneys want to take the Waukesha out of the case by using only jurors from outside of the county.
As expected, both girls have pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming they were unable to appreciate the seriousness of the near-fatal stabbing attack they carried out on their 12-year-old friend in 2014. Their trial, tentatively planned for next spring, will unfold in the full glare of adult court since an appeals court denied the girls’ emergency request to transfer their case to the juvenile system, an opinion that doesn’t bode well for an NGI defense. It cites the lower Waukesha court’s conclusion that the attack “was conceived months in advance, and Geyser and Weier had many opportunities to realize the magnitude of their choice and back out of the plan.” According to police reports, the girls did their best to keep the plot a secret, using code words to discuss it on the bus, and writing out strange, nonsensical plans in one of Morgan’s notebooks.
As time goes by, the case that Morgan suffers from a profoundly rare mental illness, some form of childhood-onset schizophrenia (before age 13), has grown stronger. This is a disorder so uncommon that it immediately raises red flags of misdiagnosis — in the past 25 years, the National Institute of Mental Health has reviewed 4,000 potential cases and only been able to confirm about 135. Unlike most victims of childhood-onset schizophrenia, Geyser functioned well at school prior to her incarceration and was able to maintain friendships with her peers. Other sufferers are generally more disabled by the condition and socially isolated. Like them, however, Geyser responded well to antipsychotic medication when it was provided to her earlier this year, and she began to express remorse for what had happened to her friend.
Geyser’s delusions have deep roots, but they reportedly intensified in the window of ages 11-12, leading up to the attack. She and Weier believed they needed to carry it out to either impress a horror character, Slender Man, or prevent him from attacking their families, after which they could go live with him in a mansion, in a variation of Hansel and Gretel where the kids never go home.
A well-respected psychologist hired by Weier’s defense, Michael Caldwell, concluded that she suffered from schizotypy, a milder delusional disorder than schizophrenia, and had bonded with Geyser in the form of Shared Delusional Disorder to carry out the murderous scheme. “Just looking at the story of the events,” Caldwell said in an interview, “it sounds crazy.”
He said NGI defenses often revolve around some kind of delusion. He once worked on a case where a man was arrested for theft after tearing aluminum siding off a building, claiming he was trying to protect the town from poltergeists hidden in the walls. “The person has to be in a state of mind where they don’t understand what they’re doing,” he says.
