Trial begins in Slender Man case
Proceedings determine whether girl goes to prison or state mental hospital
WAUKESHA - A girl who helped a friend try to kill their classmate shouldn’t be held criminally responsible for the crime because she believed at the time that she and or her family would be killed
by the internet character Slender Man if she didn’t act, her lawyer told a jury Tuesday.
“How could she have believed this?” Joseph Smith Jr. asked rhetorically. He said three psychological experts would explain how his client, Anissa Weier, and her co-defendant, Morgan Geyser, shared a delusion and lost touch with reality.
During his opening statement, Smith played segments of Weier’s disturbing interrogation during which she described Slender Man and his purported powers to a police detective who had never heard of the character.
“He could easily kill my whole family in three seconds,” she tells the detective.
A prosecutor said the state won’t dispute the experts but said the real issue is why Weier went along with the attack.
“She wanted to preserve her one and only friendship” with Geyser, Assistant District Attorney Kevin Osborne said, and she knew the stabbing was wrong because she twice declined to do it herself as originally planned.
Instead, Osborne said, Weier told Geyser to do it. “Go berserk,” was the command, he said.
The opening statements began what is expected to be a weeklong trial on whether Weier should be sent to prison or committed to a state mental hospital.
Weier, 15, was 12 in May 2014 when she and Geyser carried out a plan to kill their sixth-grade classmate, Payton Leutner, after a sleepover. The victim survived multiple stabbings, and Weier and Geyser were charged as adults with attempted first-degree intentional homicide.
Weier recently agreed to plead guilty to attempted second-degree intentional homicide, and stand trial only on whether she should be held criminally responsible. Both girls have pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
Sixteen jurors began hearing the case Tuesday after spending the night sequestered at a hotel. Weier’s attorneys have the burden of proving that at the time of the crime, she suffered from a mental disease or defect that prevented her from understanding her conduct was wrong or from conforming her actions to the law.
Civil court standards apply, so only 10 of the jurors must be persuaded to a reasonable certainty, as opposed to the criminal standard of unanimity that the evidence is beyond a reasonable doubt.
Father testifies
The defense’s first witness was Weier’s father, William Weier. He described her time in school and the trying situations in their home life in 2013 and 2014. But through all that, he said, he never saw anything to suggest she needed mental health care.
“In my opinion, she was a normal child,” he said.
He said his feedback about his daughter in fourth and fifth grade was that she was a good student, not disruptive, and very interested in reading nonfiction, mostly about animals.
At the same time, he and Weier’s mother were going through a divorce. He said they told Anissa and her younger brother that they were in no way a cause of the split and that they could talk with counselors at school or elsewhere if they wanted to.
William Weier said Anissa had attended Prairie Elementary School, not her zoned school, and she was upset she would be going to a different middle school than her classmates.
But he said she liked the Flight Academy program for advanced students at Hornung Middle School, where students from all three grades could work independently or in groups for more specialized learning and seemed to settle in there.
She used to ride the bus with three other girls until he texted them back on her phone to stop bothering Anissa while she was doing her homework. After that, he said, they seemed to shun her. Soon after, she met Geyser on the same bus.
He said Geyser did
some unusual things, like come to the bus stop wearing a mask, or Vulcan ears, but he thought it more goofy than disturbing.
Weier said his attention during Anissa’s year in sixth grade was largely focused on supporting her older step-siblings because their mother was seriously ill and died in February 2014. He was helping those children move from Milwaukee to his home in Waukesha the day of the stabbing.
A former Flight Academy classmate of Weier’s who shared an interest in Slender Man said one day Weier told her she’d discovered how to become a proxy — kill a friend.
“Don’t worry, it’s not you,” the girl, identified in court by her initials, K.N., testified Weier told her.
K.N. said she told her mother and twin what Weier had said. The twin testified that she then told a counselor at school about Weier’s remark.
Waukesha police Det. Thomas Casey, the lead investigator in the case and the person who interrogated Geyser, testified most of the afternoon. Defense attorney Maura McMahon used Casey to introduce disturbing drawings and slogans found in Geyser’s school notebooks.
The testimony seemed aimed at suggesting Geyser, who has been diagnosed with and is being treated for schizophrenia, was the catalyst that set off Weier’s lesser condition, and caused the two to take such extreme action in furtherance of their shared delusion.
The defense also introduced pictures of the bag the girls had when arrested and the ridiculously inadequate provisions they had packed for an expected 330-mile walk to Slender Man’s mansion in the Nicolet National Forest.
On cross-examination, prosecutors introduced a note Weier wrote on her phone to her family, that reads like a last will and
testament, and a goodbye. Deputy District Attorney Ted Szczupakiewicz also had Casey talk about email
exchanges between Weier and Geyser that showed the secretive nature of their plot.