Slender Man Case

News Story Midterm:

Girl's insanity defense in Slender Man stabbing goes to jury Friday

In 2014 Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser attempted to murder their classmate due to their shared delusion of Slender Man. Slender Man was a well-known internet boogeyman to younger people. The girls wanted to satisfy him by killing their classmate out of fear that he would hurt their families if they didn’t become his proxies. They were 12-years-old at the time. Weier and Geyser lured Payton Leutner into the woods after a slumber party and stabbed her 19 times with a 5-inch blade. Weir denied physically attacking her classmate but she did admit to encouraging Geyser. Both girls pleaded not guilty due to insanity. They were denied juvenile sentencing and were

The biological theory of crime attempts to explain criminal behavior as something that is physiological and unavoidable. One physiological factor would be the underdeveloped prefrontal brain region. It has been shown to cause people to lack the ability to control impulses and reason effectively and the human prefrontal brain region does not fully develop until the mid-20’s. This is especially relevant to this case because, as Van Ryebroek mentioned, 12-year-old girls lacked impulse control. In addition to the biological causes attributing to this crime, these girls are psychologically ill. Anissa Weir was diagnosed with persistent depressive disorder and schizotypy disorder. Morgan Geyser was diagnosed with early-onset schizophrenia. Those with psychotic disorders on the spectrum of schizophrenia show symptoms such as having lost touch with reality. They are delusional and disoriented. They may also hear and see things that are not real. The thing with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders is when they go untreated, the people with this illness can become dangerous to themselves and others. The Slender Man was part of their reality even though we know it was a fictional

One limitation of this theory is that, the Slender Man was a well-known online fictional character to the children in Morgan and Anissa’s school. If the biological theory was applicable to the general population then we would’ve seen more cases like this one. The biological theory also explains that biology is mutually exclusive with the social environment. If this were true then all the impulsive teenagers who knew about Slender Man would’ve participated in criminal behavior. This clearly isn’t the case with credit to the social