Teen in Slender Man Stabbing Case to Go Free

Anissa Weier, one of the two women convicted in the Wisconsin Slender Man stabbing case, will be released from a mental health institute soon, the judge in the case ruled Thursday. Weier has served over three years of her 25-year sentence at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. She was sentenced in December 2017. Weier, now 19, petitioned for a conditional release, arguing she is no longer a threat to anyone.

Weier will not be immediately released though. Waukesha County Judge Michael Bohren gave state officials two months to write the conditional release plan. Weier will remain at the mental hospital until another hearing on Sept. 10. As part of the conditions of her release, Wisconsin Department of Health Services case managers will continue tracking her progress until she is 37, reports NPR.

In May 2014, Weier and her friend, Morgan Geyser, lured classmate Payton Leutner into the woods at a Waukesha park, where Geyser stabbed Leutner multiple times in an attempt to please the fictional online horror character Slender Man. They left Lautner for dead, but she managed to crawl out of the woods and was rescued by a passing bicyclist. She was stabbed 19 times. The girls were 12 years old at the time.

In 2017, Weier was sentenced to 25 years at the state mental health institution, the maximum sentence. Her defense team tried and failed to get the case moved to juvenile court before she pleaded guilty to attempted second-degree intentional homicide. In March, she filed a petition for her release, reports the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Bohren, who has been the judge in both Weier and Geyser’s cases since the beginning, granted the conditional release and found there was no “clear and convincing evidence that the defendant poses a substantial risk of harm to others, herself, or serious property damage.”

“The State has not met its burden of proof. Court finds there is no clear and convincing evidence that the defendant poses a substantial risk of harm to others, herself, or serious property damage,” reads Bohren’s ruling, according to online court records. “For the reasons placed on the record. Therefore, under statute 971.17(4)(d) the Court orders a conditional release plan be prepared within 60 days of the order being signed.”

Geyser is serving a 40-year sentence at a mental health facility. She was sentenced in February 2018 after she agreed to plead guilty to attempted first-degree intentional homicide and her mental illness was the cause, reports the Journal-Sentinel. The plea deal also allows Geyser to petition for her conditional release every six months. She has not done so yet, but has filed appears to overturn Bohren’s rulings that kept the case in adult court.