I sometimes like to joke that Friday and Saturday night long-running American television network news documentary-type shows like ABC 20/20, Dateline NBC and CBS 48 Hours are obsessed with Pentecostal pastors who kill their wives while having an affair as their subject matter, but truth be told they do some very good work (on that topic) and others.
Back on Sept. 26, ABC 20/20 did a piece called “Out of the Woods” on the stabbing to please the fantasy web bogeyman character Slender Man of 12-year-old Payton Leutner last May 31, where she was left for dead on a Saturday morning in a wooded park in Waukesha, Wisconsin. It was the Slender Man aspect of the case that caught my attention, as I must confess I had never heard of Slender Man back in late September. Either had most adults in Waukesha apparently. But when ABC correspondent David Muir went into the classroom and asked Leutner’s Grade 8 classmates how many of them heard of Slender Man, all, or virtually all, of their hands shot up in the air immediately.
Her two accused assailants, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, were also 12 at the time of the attack and yesterday Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Bohren found in separate rulings that both Geyser and Weier are competent to stand trial on charges of attempted first-degree intentional homicide. Wisconsin law requires suspects who are at least 10 years old to be charged as adults in serious criminal cases such as this.
Prosecutors allege the girls plotted for five months to kill Leutner, luring her to a wooded park after a sleepover and stabbing her 19 times in the chest, abdomen, legs and arms with a large kitchen knife. After her attackers left, Leutner crawled through the woods to a sidewalk where a bicyclist found her and called for help. She has since recovered from her injuries. Geyser and Weier were found a short time after the attack by police walking toward a national forest where they said they believed Slender Man lived in a mansion. They told investigators they believed killing Leutner would curry favour with the figure and that they wanted to be with Slender Man, a fictional horror character they had read stories about online. In the stories, Slender Man kidnaps and kills children. Not only did Geyser and Weier believe he was real, police said, they were convinced the only way win his approval was to kill someone too.
Bohren’s decision mean both Geyser and Weier will now face preliminary hearings, where a judge will decide whether there is enough evidence to send them onto trial.
How did Slender Man come to be?
In June 2009, an Adobe Photoshop contest for images that appeared to be paranormal was launched in a forum on the website Something Awful. According to Know Your Meme, a blog that chronicles World Wide Web (WWW) culture, the goal of the contest was to create the images and then use them to fool, or troll, other web users by submitting them to paranormal websites.
Something Awful site member Eric Knudsen (under the screen name “Victor Surge”) submitted two images to the contest, both black-and-white images of children, one of which appeared to show a largely undefined figure lurking in the background.
They were presented as being from 1984, and one included the text ” ‘We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time…’ – 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead.”
A day later, Knudsen added a third photo and a fictional doctor’s account of a mass killing.
From there the Slender Man meme permutated across the Internet in various iterations for the next five years, gaining a largely invisible young cult following, until the stabbing of Leutner last May 31 in Waukesha.
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