Slender Man Stabber Was Free for 24 Hours After Cutting Ankle Monitor, Fleeing Group Home

An early morning call for assistance from the Madison Police Department in Wisconsin was called off late that same night when authorities in Illinois confirmed that they had apprehended Morgan Geyser, now 23, after her escape.

According to the initial statement, Geyser had last been seen around 8:15 p.m. on Saturday night near the group home facility "with an adult acquaintance" after she had apparently "cut off her Department of Corrections monitoring bracelet" and met up with this individual on a residential street nearby, per CNN.

MPD said their department had not been contacted about the disappearance until Sunday morning.

Sunday's statement on the MPD website also revealed a timeline of the official response to her disappearance, breaking down what happened and revealing an unexpected communications delay with law enforcement. According to the timeline, the DOC received an alert from Geyser's ankle bracelet that it was malfunctioning.

Two hours later, they made contact with the group home where she was living. Five minutes after that, at approximately 11:35 p.m., per the release, staffers there informed the DOC that Geyser appeared to have removed her bracelet and she was no longer at the home.

Around midnight, the DOC issued an apprehension request for the missing Geyser, but MPD says that no one alerted the department until around 7:46 a.m. on Sunday morning, nearly eight hours after the initial DOC apprehension request. It was someone from the group home how finally called 911 to report her missing, the MPD said in its statement.

By 7:58 a.m., MPD was assigned the call and sprung into action, again reafirrming, "this was the first time the Madison Police Department was made aware that Geyser was missing."

In an update to that initial statement, it was confirmed that Geyser had been taken into custody in Illinois, with MPD being advised at approximately 10:34 p.m. that she'd been found sleeping near a truck stop approximately 170 miles away in Posen, IL.

Police there told CNN and CBS News Chicago that she was with another individual and that both of them were taken into custody after officers responded to a call of two people seen loitering behind the building. They arrived to find Geyser and her friend sleeping on the sidewalk.

According to the news outlet, crediting the Associated Press, the man was charged with criminal trespassing and obstructing identification by Posen Police. He has since been released from custody.

Geyser initially gave Posen police a false name, according to CBS News, allegedly telling police she didn't want to tell them who she was because she had "done something really bad," suggesting they could "just Google" her.

After their release, the news outlet spoke with the other individual apprehended alongside Geyser, who said that they and Geyser are best friends. They said they didn't want Geyser to be alone after her escape from the group home, so they'd joined her on the bus ride to Chicago before walking the approximately 20 miles to Posen.

Prior to her placement in an unspecified group home, Geyser had been in a psychiatric care facility. She and fellow classmate Anissa Weier had been just 12 years old when they lured another student, Payton Leutner, also 12, into the woods for a game of hide-and-seek during a birthday sleepover.

The girls allegedly asked her to lie down and hide under leaves and sticks as part of the game. Geyser than allegedly stabbed Leutner 19 times with Weier cheering her on, per People, before both girls abandoned her there. The victim survived the attack, managing to crawl to a nearby bike path were they were found and rescued by a passing cyclist.

The girls admitted to the stabbing, which they had purportedly been planning for five months. They told authorities they were doing it to appease the viral "slender man" online meme character said to attack children with long tendrils sprouting from his back, which they said they believed was real.

Initially tried as adults on charges of first-degree intentional homicide, both girls pleaded guilty in 2017, but saw those please vacated when they were found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. As a result, they both wound up in psychiatric facilities. Weier was granted supervised release at the age of 19 in 2021 into the custody of her father; she, too, was ordered to wear a GPS monitor.

In January, after seven years in the Winnebago Mental Health Institute, a judge deemed that Geyser was no longer a safety risk and ordered that she be released from the psychiatric hospital and moved into a group home for supervised release. That move happened two months later.

Geyser had initially been sentenced to 40 years in the psychiatric facility, but was permitted to ask the court to consider her conditional release every six months, per the New York Post. Geyser previously withdrew her request to be released twice, while a third request was denied in April 2024, before it was approved in January 2025.

"She's done what she’s supposed to do," Bohren reportedly said in his ruling, adding that while Geyser committed a "brutal, terrible offense," she appears to have a good attitude" and can only be considered rehabilitated if she re-enters society.

Geyser, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia after the stabbing, has been off anti-psychotic medication since 2023 with no side effects, one doctor testified, while another said the longer she remains at Winnebago, "the harder it’s going to be to re-integrate."

"At this point I am in favor, or in support, of her petition for release. Specifically, I don't think she currently poses a significant risk of substantial harm to herself, others or to property damage," psychologist Brooke Lundbohm testified over Zoom.

Conversely, ABC News notes that there were reservations from prosecutors who told the judge she had "violent" communications with a man outside the facility and had read a book while on the inside with "themes of sexual sadism and murder."