'Slender Man' stabber Morgan Geyser returned to institutionalized care

by · UPI

Dec. 23 (UPI) -- A Wisconsin judge on Tuesday revoked the conditional release of Morgan Geyser, 23, after she fled a Wisconsin group home in November and was caught a day later.

Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge K. Scott Wagner granted the Wisconsin Department of Health Services' request to revoke Geyser's conditional release during a 10-minute hearing.

Geyser had served seven years in a mental institution and attended Tuesday morning's hearing remotely via video, as did her attorney, NBC News reported.

She did not contest the state's petition to revoke her conditional release and waived her right to undergo a revocation hearing.

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When asked if she fully understood that she was voluntarily waiving her right to a hearing, she responded, "Yes, sir."

Geyser had pleaded guilty to first-degree attempted homicide in the 2014 stabbing attack of a classmate, but the then-12-year-old was found not guilty by reason of mental defect and was sentenced to a psychiatric hospital.

The hospital recently placed her in a group home, but she removed her GPS ankle monitor and boarded a Greyhound bus headed to Chicago to be with a friend.

Geyser was found with Chad Mecca, 43, at a truck stop in Posen, Ill., a day after she left the group home.

She met Mecca while attending a Wisconsin church a couple months earlier, Geyser told law enforcement.

She said that she left the home due to limited visitation rights, which restricted how often Mecca could visit her.

Slender Man is a fictional character that Geyser and one other classmate, Anissa Weier, said they were trying to appease by killing another girl, Payton Leutner.

Geyser lured Leutner to a suburban Milwaukee park where she stabbed her classmate more than 12 times with a kitchen knife while Weier helped to hold her down.

Leutner survived the attack and crawled to a nearby bicycle path, where she was found by a bicyclist.

Geyser's attorney at the time told the court that she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and said the fictional Slender Man character would harm her family if she did not kill Leutner.

A jury agreed that she was mentally ill, and Geyser agreed to serve up to 40 years in a mental institution for her crime.

She was sentenced when she was 15 and served seven years at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute before being released to the Madison group home.

Several group homes had declined to accept her due to the publicity surrounding her case.

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