DETECTIVE: So did you think that you actually had to kill someone to do it?
ANISSA: Yeah.
DETECTIVE: Like, for real?
ANISSA: Mm-hmm.
About an hour into the interrogation, the detective asks Anissa, “When Morgan said to you, ‘If we don’t do this for Slender, our families and loved ones will be killed,’ do you honestly believe that?” Anissa, crying, answers in an astonished-kid voice: “Well, yeah.” More specifically, she believes that Slender Man “can easily kill my whole family in three seconds.” Just hours earlier, during their long trek to the Nicolet National Forest, the girls had announced each time they’d caught a glimpse of him along the way—in the suburban woods, among the trees by the highway. They could hear the rustling of him following close by.
MORGAN GEYSER’S DRAWINGS OF SLENDER MAN VEER from stark, repetitive images evoking a phantom—a page covered in his symbol (“X”), a blank face with “Xs” for eyes—to the increasingly particular. In one pencil sketch, a girl with kitty-cat ears and tail lies on the ground, eyes closed, a skull floating above her head; looming over her is another humanoid kitty girl, who looks straight at the viewer, a scythe in one hand. The speech bubble above her head reads: I LOVE KILLING PEOPLE! And in the most elaborate image, a slim, bald, and faceless figure towers over a row of children; enormous, octopoid tentacles emerge from his back, like long black fingers. Above this Slender creature’s head is written a message, as if to the artist herself: YOU ARE STRANGE CHILD . . . IT WILL BE OF MY USE.
In that inscription, an adolescent girl, channeling the voice of a monster, exiles herself—she is “strange” and warped—only to accept herself again. The monster tells her, Here in the Slenderverse, your strangeness is unique; your loneliness has a purpose; I am calling you to your destiny. Just as in the 4th World, Pauline and Juliet’s weirdness, their “madness,” gives them psychic powers and untouchable brilliance. By some Brothers Grimm logic, a dark trial, a call to murder, becomes the girls’ only prospect. On ten separate occasions in her interrogation, Morgan calls the stabbing “necessary.”
In another sketch, a long-haired kid in a bloody sweatshirt looks as if she has thrown her arms around the neck of Slender Man, who embraces her in return. She is crying; his reddened cheeks are either bloodied or blushing. The two appear to be close, intimate; they are, perhaps, comforting each other. Here the meaning of that earlier inscription—HE STILL SEES YOU—seems to change. As if following the plotline of a teen romance, perhaps Slender’s message has become, instead, I SEE WHO YOU REALLY ARE. Slender Man has inspired reams of online fan fiction, some of it romantic or even erotic, about teenage girls involved with the monster. Titles include “My Dear Slenderman,” “Into the Darkness,” “Love Is All I Want,” “To Love a Monster,” “I Slept with Slender Man,” and “Slenderman’s Loving Arms.” A few of these stories have some 150,000 reads.
The occult is orphic, a word meant to evoke Orpheus and his dark romance. An ancient Greek myth tells of how, after the death of the musician’s wife, he followed her into the underworld—only to fail at his one chance to bring her back to life. To build a private, occult world with someone is to travel with them into the dark—and the danger inherent in that is, inevitably, erotic.
Months before her mother’s murder, Pauline Parker was sent to see a doctor at the suggestion of Juliet Hulme’s father: he was concerned that his daughter’s friend might be a lesbian. At their trial, there was much speculation about a possible sexual relationship between the two—a romance perhaps born out of their shared writings and nighttime escapades in the garden. Even putting aside the possibility of a lesbian romance, any sexuality for an unmarried woman, never mind a girl, was liability enough in the 1950s. When the case went to trial, the Crown prosecutor asked his witnesses leading questions about “orgies” and “sexual passion.”
And what of the girls of Salem, and what they claimed to have seen of the dark? Abigail Williams was made notorious by Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible (which premiered, incidentally, the same year Pauline and Juliet met); she became the lead harpy, the great finger pointer, a 17-year-old girl capable of sending men and women to their deaths, embittered by her affair with local farmer John Proctor. But, in reality, Abigail was only 11 in 1692, and Proctor was 60. Miller made large assumptions about what shaped her; he spun her story into one of young female sexuality as a corrupting force. In Miller’s play, she has suddenly come into the sexuality of an adult, but with an adolescent’s inability to control her impulses. A new darkness—a dark eroticism and sexual envy—infuses his character’s thoughts, has lured her out into the woods, out past the borders of good society, in search of a hex. And when she levels her accusations, her conviction is as compelling, as unassailable, as that of a child.
At the same time, in both Christchurch and Waukesha, the attacks were striking in their childishness. In spite of the girls’ months of secret talks and journaling and to-do lists, when carried out, the attacks were stupid and clumsy; they had no idea what they were doing. Some of the details they had thought through were fairy-tale-specific: Juliet’s idea to distract Honorah Parker with a pink gemstone she placed on the park path; Anissa’s idea to lead Bella into the woods through the offer of a game of hide-and-seek. Think of the fact that Morgan and Anissa could still lure their friend into the woods through such a simple game; the bursts of energy with which that game is played; and Bella “hiding” from people she should truly have hidden from. Picture her attackers out there in the suburban woods, playing in high spirits—and then turning to another game, a dare, passing the knife back and forth between themselves until Anissa gives an order clear enough to bring their play to an end. That morning, Morgan brought the knife with her in the way that she might have brought a wand to a Harry Potter movie screening. And perhaps she believed that she could perform magic with a toy—but that idea brought with it no real-world consequences. Playing with a knife, of course, did.
Their childish incomprehension of the gravity of violence, and the callousness that comes with that, is painfully evident in the girls’ interviews while in custody. When Anissa describes her nervousness as they approached the playground that morning, the detective asks what she was most nervous about. She answers, “Seeing a dead person. ’Cause the last time I saw a dead person it was at a funeral and it was my uncle.” When asked what Morgan was upset about in the park, Anissa says, “Killing. She had never done that before. She’d stabbed apples before—with, like, chopsticks—but she’d never actually cut a flesh wound into somebody.”
Pauline and Juliet continued to behave like immature girls, unaware of what was at stake, even after their arrest. When Pauline was taken into custody alone—at first, police believed Juliet was not directly involved—she didn’t want to break her habit of journaling, and so she wrote a new entry, stating that she’d managed to pull off the “moider” and was “taking the blame for everything.” (A detective on the case quickly seized it as evidence.) Once both girls were at the station, sharing a cell, they were placed on suicide watch—but they spent their first night (a police officer would later report) gossiping in their bunk beds, unconcerned about their new environment. During the trial, about a dozen foreign publications were represented in the courtroom, with most British newspapers printing a half column daily, often on their front page—rare attention for a New Zealand case. In a courtroom packed with spectators, Pauline and Juliet were out of sync with the tone of the proceedings. Seated together in the dock, they appeared relaxed and indifferent, often whispering excitedly to each other and smiling. One journalist described their attitude throughout as one of “contemptuous amusement.”