Illinois police captured Morgan Geyser, who was convicted in the 2014 stabbing of a classmate to appease Slender Man, an online character, after she fled a group home in neighbouring Wisconsin where she was being held.
Police said Geyser, 23, removed her bracelet monitoring device and fled the home in Madison on Saturday night and was on the run until her capture on Sunday.
Officers found her at a truck stop in Posen, Illinois, where they said Geyser told them to “just Google” her name and that she had “done something really bad”.
Geyser was 12 years old when she stabbed her classmate 19 times. She was sentenced to 40 years in a mental hospital in 2018 and granted conditional release in July.
Geyser was found with a man at the truck stop just outside of Chicago – and about 170 miles south of Madison – after police received reports of a man and woman loitering.
“When officers arrived, they located both subjects sleeping on the sidewalk,” Posen police said in a statement. “The female repeatedly refused to provide her real name and initially gave a false one.
“After continued attempts to identify her, she finally stated that she didn’t want to tell officers who she was because she had ‘done something really bad,’ and suggested that officers could ‘just Google’ her name.”
She and her companion were detained after police determined she was wanted in Wisconsin. CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, reported the 42-year-old companion was charged with trespassing and obstructing identification and later released.
The so-called “Slender Man stabbing” shocked Wisconsin and garnered national attention.
Geyser and her friend Anissa Weier, also 12 at the time of the attack, lured a classmate to a park after a sleepover and Geyser stabbed the classmate repeatedly while Weier encouraged her to continue.
The victim, 12-year-old Payton Leutner, survived the brutal attack and was found by a cyclist.
Geyser and Weier were tried as adults. Geyser pleaded guilty to first-degree intentional homicide and was sentenced to 40 years. A judge allowed her release under supervision at the group home in July.
Weier was charged with attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years in a psychiatric hospital but released in 2021.
Police handoutWho is Slender Man?
Geyser and Weier said they were inspired to attack their classmate after reading about Slender Man in a creepypasta, a short, online story designed to shock or scare the reader.
Slender Man is a skinny, shadowy figure who has appeared in photos, drawings and articles across the internet. Some claim he has tentacles emerging from his back, and most say he wears dark clothes and has a pale face.
The girls said they believed Slender Man would kill their relatives if they did not kill their friend to please him, an attorney for Geyser said in court. Authorities said the girls had hoped to live with Slender Man after the attack.
Slender Man first appeared on the internet in 2009.
The character was created by a Florida resident in response to a call for submissions from comedy website SomethingAwful. The character was pictured behind a crowd of people.
After the stabbing, the website released an article urging people not to kill anyone because of Slender Man.
