» Slender Man case:
One of two girls charged in the Slender Man stabbing case will stand trial starting Sept. 11, and her bids to have her statements to police thrown out and a jury to be called from outside of Waukesha County are denied.
WAUKESHA - Anissa Weier, one of two girls charged in the Slender Man stabbing case, will stand trial starting Sept. 11, and her bids to have her statements to police blocked from the trial and a jury to be called from outside of Waukesha County were denied Monday.
Last week, Circuit Judge Michael Bohren made similar rulings against Morgan Geyser, 14, and set her trial for October.
Both girls were 12 when they were charged as adults in June 2014 with the attempted first-degree intentional homicide of a sixth-grade classmate to please Slender Man, an internet boogeyman. Geyser and Weier told police they believed Slender Man would kill them or their families if they didn’t kill Payton Leutner, who had to have several surgeries to survive 19 stab wounds.
For years, the case against both girls proceeded mostly on the same schedule, but in December Bohren granted the defense its only pretrial wins, ordering that Geyser and Weier be tried separately.
Since their arrests May 31, 2014, Weier has been held on $500,000 bail at a juvenile detention center in West Bend where most juveniles spent less than a week. Both she and Geyser spent some time in 2014 at Winnebago Mental Health Institution while experts assessed their competence to understand the charges and assist in their own defense.
During those sessions, Geyser was diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia but didn’t get any treatment until she was civilly committed by a different judge more than a year ago. Since then, she stayed on and off at the Winnebago facility but has remained there since last summer.
Both girls have entered pleas of not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. Weier’s attorneys had challenged the constitutionality of the state’s standard for the defense, as applied to a 12-year-old girl. Bohren denied that motion Monday.
Much of the delay in the case came from efforts to have their cases transferred to juvenile court, which were ultimately unsuccessful.
If convicted, they face up to 45 years in prison. Had they been adjudicated delinquent, they would have been held up to two years at Wisconsin’s juvenile prison for girls, and then put on a more intensive community supervision than adults typically face after their prison terms.