Girl in Slender Man stabbing case had a ‘broken mind’: lawyer
Anissa Weier was 12 when she and a friend tried to stab to death a classmate, supposedly to become disciples of the horror character Slender Man
A Wisconsin girl who told investigators she helped stab a classmate was convinced the crime would protect her and her family from a horror character called the Slender Man who she thought was real, her lawyer told jurors Tuesday.
The defence is trying to convince jurors that Anissa Weier was suffering from a mental illness at the time of the stabbing at a Waukesha park in 2014 and therefore is not criminally responsible.
“Anissa’s broken mind caused her to lose touch with reality,” defence lawyer Joseph Smith told jurors. “Anissa was under the command and control of a delusional disorder.”
Weier, now 15, sat nearby while the snippets of the interview were played on a large screen for jurors.
Smith described Weier as a loner who struggled to fit in with her peers and who found a friend in Geyser. While Weier was dealing with her parents’ divorce, teachers began noticing symptoms of depression, he said. With Geyser, Weier developed a “delusional belief system” and together they made a plan to kill Leutner and become Slender Man’s proxies, Smith said. Although Weier did not physically stab Leutner, in her mind she knew it had to be done, Smith told jurors.
Waukesha County Assistant District Attorney Kevin Osborne told jurors that Weier may have believed Slender Man was real, but she had the mental capacity to know she was committing a crime. Osborne says the initial plan was for Weier to stab Leutner, but Weier couldn’t do it and instead directed Geyser to do the stabbing.
“They knew this was wrong. They understood what they were doing was wrong,” Osborne said.
Osborne said the police interviews show it wasn’t until after the attack had taken place that Geyser told Weier that Weier or her family could have been in danger.
“She goes along because she wants to preserve the one and only friendship” with Geyser, he said.
William Weier, the first defence witness, testified that his daughter went through trying times in grade school as her parents divorced but he never saw anything to suggest she needed mental health care.
“In my opinion, she was a normal child,” he said.
A former classmate of Weier’s who also was interested in Slender Man testified that Weier told her one day that she had discovered how to become a Slender Man servant: By killing a friend.
The girl, identified in court only by her initials, K.N., testified that Weier then told her: “Don’t worry, it’s not you.”
The lead investigator in the case, Waukesha police Detective Thomas Casey, also took the stand Tuesday.
Both Weier and Geyser were charged with being a party to attempted first-degree intentional homicide. Weier struck a deal with prosecutors in August in which she pleaded guilty to being a party to attempted second-degree intentional homicide, essentially acknowledging she committed all the elements of the offence. But she also pleaded not guilty due to mental illness of defect, setting up the trial on her mental status.
Judge Michael Bohren told jurors they must decide whether Weier had a mental illness at the time of the crime and if so, whether she lacked the capacity to understand her wrongful conduct.
Psychologists testified at a previous court hearing that Weier suffered from persistent depression and a delusional disorder linked to schizotypy, a diminished ability to separate reality from fantasy.
At least 10 of the 12 jurors must agree on a verdict.
Geyser has pleaded not guilty to being a party to first-degree attempted homicide. Her trial is set to begin October 9.