From the dust jacket- 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 seems 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 loved 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 way to stop home from killing her family was to bring him a sacrifice: Morgan's best friend, Payton "Bella" Leutner, whom she 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.
Review- This is a very sad story for all the parties involved. Hale starts with the girls parents, their home lives, their friends, and everything else to try and get the best look at the crime from all sides. Hale is interested the most in Morgan and her inner life. When with the focus on Morgan, the horror of what happens to Payton is not lessened. But Hale wants the reader to think about the state of mental illness and how it is treated or untreated in America. Morgan was not seen as sick until too late, the lust for revenge was stronger than the search for truth or justice, and there are no winners in this story. Everyone loses in this story but maybe with greater knowledge about laws, mental illness, and where they collide more can be done to help more children like Morgan and protect more children like Payton.
I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.
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