Morgan’s hallucinations—magical characters speaking to her, imaginary friends, lifted from the pages of books or the internet—are grounded in something more specific: her genetic inheritance. Her father, Matt, began his lifelong struggle with schizophrenia at 14 years old (he receives government assistance due to his illness). In a recent documentary, Beware the Slenderman, he talks about his coping mechanisms for living with schizophrenia: He runs numbers in his head and tries to “put up static” to block out his visual and auditory hallucinations. Matt and his wife, Angie, decided early on to delay sharing the fact of Matt’s illness with their daughter until she grew older—why make her fearful of a genetically inherited disease that she might never have to face? She’d shown no clear warning signs.
In the film, Matt Geyser describes a life in which the boundaries between the real and the unreal are painfully blurred and an intellectual understanding of the difference is not enough to protect you. If, earlier on, he had decided to share his burden with Morgan, this is the picture he might have drawn for her: “Right now there’s, like, patterns of, like, light and, like, geometric shapes that’s like, always racing—like always, like right now. Everything seems normal to me ’cause this is my everything; this is how I’ve always seen things.” But the more threatening hallucinations—including, he says, a “glaring demon-devil”—are more complicated. “You can, like, see it, and, like, you know it’s not real. But it totally doesn’t matter because you’re, like, terrified of it,” he says, becoming emotional. “I know the devil’s not in the backseat, but—the devil is in the backseat. You know?”
In January 2016, after 19 months without treatment, Morgan was finally committed to a state mental hospital and put on antipsychotics. By spring, her attorney claimed that her hallucinations were receding and her condition was improving rapidly. But in May of that year, after two years of incarceration, Morgan attempted to cut her arm with a broken pencil and was placed on suicide watch.
Late this September, Morgan accepted a plea bargain, agreeing to be placed in a mental institution indefinitely and thus avoiding the possibility of prison. Just weeks earlier, Anissa had also accepted a deal, pleading guilty to the lesser charge of attempted second-degree homicide. A jury recommended she be sent to a mental hospital for at least three years.
THE JOINT TRIAL OF PAULINE PARKER AND JULIET HULME also hinged on the question of their mental health. Were the girls delusional? Clinically paranoid? Or had they been completely aware of the consequences of their actions and chosen to go ahead with their plan regardless? The defense argued that the girls had been swept up in a folie à deux, or “madness between two”—a rarely cited, now-questionable diagnosis of a psychosis developed by two individuals socially isolated together. The crime was too sensational and the defense too exotic for the jury to be persuaded. They deliberated for a little over two hours before finding the girls guilty.
Juliet got the worst of it. She was sent to Mount Eden Prison in Auckland, notorious for its infestation of rats and its damp, cold cells (particularly bad for an inmate who’d recently suffered from TB). There Juliet slept on a straw mattress and had one small window she could not see out of; the bathrooms had no doors, and sanitary napkins were made from strips of cloth. She split her time between prison work (scrubbing floors, making uniforms in the sewing room) and writing material the superintendent called “sexy stuff.” She gorged herself on poetry: Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Omar Khayyam. She taught herself Italian—she dreamed of making a living as either a writer or a diva of the Italian opera—and she bragged in a letter that she and Pauline were exquisite singers. She also bragged about her studies, even her talent in knitting—she bragged incessantly. In a letter to a friend, Juliet’s father worried that she was “still up in the clouds . . . completely removed and occupied with herself and her grandiose ideas about poetry and writing.” Five months after the crime, Juliet was “still much the same as she was immediately after the event. She feels that she is right and others are wrong.” She remained unbowed, still immersed in literature and a vision of the great artist she could become. These were “delusions” she was not willing to let go of.
In spite of the harsh conditions of Juliet’s incarceration, the girls’ sentences were ultimately lenient. After five and a half years, both were released by order of the executive council, and each was able to start her life over under an alias.
Juliet Hulme, now Anne Perry, moved to England; using the shorthand she learned in prison, she got a job as a secretary. But she hadn’t lost sight of her and Pauline’s plan to one day move to California. When she was turned down for a visa (her criminal history was hard to overlook), she began working as a stewardess for an airline that often flew to the United States. One day, upon arriving in Los Angeles, she disembarked and never got back on the plane. She rented a lousy apartment, took on odd jobs, and wrote regularly. By her 30s, back in England, she’d launched a career as a crime novelist. She has since published more than 50 novels, selling over 25 million books worldwide.
In one of her earlier novels, the lead murder suspects seem inspired by Pauline and Juliet: a slightly androgynous suffragette and the taller, radiant, protective woman with whom she lives. They are brilliant and fearless; the suffragette’s partner is exalted as having “a dreamer’s face, the face of one who would follow her vision and die for it.” In a later book, the detective-protagonist seems to speak for the unconventional mores of the author herself when he states that “to care for any person or issue enough to sacrifice greatly for it was the surest sign of being wholly alive. What a waste of the essence of a man that he should never give enough of himself to any cause, that he should always hear the passive, cowardly voice uppermost which counts the cost and puts caution first. One would grow old with the power of one’s soul untested . . .”
The next chapter of Pauline’s life was not marked by such bravado. She became Hilary Nathan and eventually moved to a small village in South East England. There she purchased a farmworker’s cottage and stables, and taught mentally disabled children at a nearby school; she attended daily mass at the local Catholic church. After retiring, she gave riding lessons at her home. When her identity and location were revealed in the press in 1997, Pauline, then 59, quickly sold her property and disappeared.
She left behind an elaborate mural, on the wall of her bedroom, that the buyers believed she had painted herself—a collection of scenes that are part fairy-tale illustration, part religious allegory. Near the bottom, there is an image of a girl with dark, wavy hair (like her own) diving underwater to grasp an icon of the Virgin Mary; in another, the same girl—as a winged angel, naked and ragged—is locked in a birdcage. At the mural’s peak, a beautiful blonde (a girl who resembles Juliet) sits astride a Pegasus—glowing, exuberant, arms outstretched. And the blonde appears again, on horseback, seemingly about to take flight, as the Pauline figure tries to bridle the animal.
On display in these images is both the narcissism of adolescence and the remorse of adulthood, the penance of a woman who has resolved to receive the sacrament every single day. And what bridges these two elements is an image at the mural’s center: the Pauline girl seated, head bowed, under a dying tree against a dying landscape. The occult language of nature—those late nights in the garden, those dark plans in the woods—had nothing left to give her. It had lost its Pagan power.