The Slender Man stabber will be released from a mental hospital more than a decade after trying to kill her friend as a sacrifice to the eerie fictional character.
Morgan Geyser, 22, of Wisconsin, was granted conditional release from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute, where she has spent the past seven years, on Thursday.
Geyser was arrested after she and her classmate Anissa Weier lured Peyton Leutner to the woods after a sleepover in 2014. They were all 12 years old at the time.
Weier and Geyser had conspired for months to slaughter Leutner in the name of the horror character Slender Man.
During the vicious attack, Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times while Weier cheered on the cold-hearted act of violence before leaving the helpless victim to die.
Leutner miraculously survived, and Geyser and Weier were charged in adult court with first-degree attempted intentional homicide.
Weier had pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of attempted second-degree intentional homicide as a party to a crime, but the jury found her to be not guilty by mental disease or defect in 2017.
She was sentenced to 25 years in a mental hospital but was granted release in 2021 after agreeing to live with her father and to wear a GPS monitor.
Morgan Geyser (pictured in court on Thursday), 22, was granted conditional release from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute, where she has spent the past seven years
Geyser was arrested after she and her classmate Anissa Weier lured Peyton Leutner (pictured) to the woods after a sleepover in 2014
Geyser, who has schizophrenia, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, but as part of her plea deal, was convicted but found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect in 2018.
Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Bohren, who has since retired, had committed her to a psychiatric hospital for 40 years – a sentence she only served about 25 percent of.
Circuit Judge Scott Wagner, who made the Thursday ruling, did not release any further details about the decision to let Geyser go.
In January, Bohren said Geyser could be released after three experts testified that she was making progress battling her mental illness.
During the same hearing, Geyser also came out as transgender, but female pronouns have continued to be used for court consistency, Dr. Brooke Lundbohm, who psych evaluated Geyser, explained.
‘In her treatment records, she’s now identified with male pronouns and a separate name,’ Lundbohm continued, adding that Geyser’s new name is Ethan.
At the time, Dr. Kenneth Robbins claimed the Geyser no longer has psychosis, symptoms experts who have worked with her generally agree played a major role in the violent assault she committed.
Lundbohm’s treatment team came to the same conclusion.
Nicole Whiteaker claimed Geyser drew a concerning image of a decapitated man that she set to Jeffery (pictured)
Geyser, left, stabbed Payton Leutner across her arms, legs and torso, hitting major arteries and severing her diaphragm. Geyser did this while Anissa Weier, right, egged her on
When the judge asked Robbins if she was ‘faking’ her psychotic symptoms back in 2014 when the stabbing occurred, he quickly responded ‘no.’
‘I think either she was experiencing transient psychotic symptoms, which is to say psychotic symptoms that didn’t persist and gradually went away,’ Robbins explained.
‘Or the intensity of her fantasies based on some of the trauma she had experienced were so intense that she believed them to be true.’
The trauma Robbins was referring to was Geyser’s claims of sexual abuse by her father, who died in 2023.
Geyser’s father had also reportedly been diagnosed with schizophrenia, Stacie Leutner told ABC.
Geyser’s symptoms more closely align with post traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and autism, Robbins added.
While Bohren agreed to Geyser’s release – effectively slashing her sentence by about three decades – the original plan had to be reworked.
In March, prosecutors rejected the proposal to integrate Geyser back into society after Leutner’s mother, Stacie, expressed concern that Geyser’s group home was set to be just eight miles away from her daughter.
Geyser (pictured in March) arrived in court to fight for her release from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute
The judge then ordered the Department of Health Services to draft a new plan, which was ultimately okayed on Thursday.
While the judge was onboard with Geyser walking free, claims of her disturbing habits inside the mental facility have sparked concern.
In March, Wisconsin health officials argued Geyser was in no condition to walk free from the institution after evidence emerged of an unsettling correspondence she was having with an ‘older man’ called Jeffrey who sold murder memorabilia.
‘I asked Ms. Geyser who are the people she’s communicating with on the outside, and his name came up,’ Nicole Whiteaker, he conditional release program supervisor, testified in March.
Jeffery, who first visited her in person in June 2023, sent her a letter after she was granted conditional release in January 2025. Geyser reportedly ripped it up and threw it away, Whiteaker said.
‘After the team became aware of him, it was during that meeting that Ms. Geyer asked for a no contact order,’ Whiteaker said, adding that she found details about Geyser on the man’s Facebook that were ‘concerning’.
She had sent him her own sketch of a decapitated body and a postcard saying she wants to be intimate with him.
Geyser (pictured with blood on her clothes from the attack) told detectives at the time that she was ‘forced to stab her best friend to death’
Geyser (pictured in court in January) now identifies as transgender and is named Ethan on medical records
‘We found that there were letters and drawing that she had sent him. A postcard,’ Whiteaker said. ‘And he was selling them.’
The drawings were described as ‘horror’ art, which concerned Whiteaker and her team.
The pieces of art were labeled with Geyser’s name, so potential buyers knew what they were getting, according to Whiteaker’s testimony.
One of the drawings, shown in court, depicted a unearthly creature with the message ‘they crumble as they crawl.’
Geyser also ‘recalled that [Jeffery] would get sexual gratification from her index offense and I believe there was letters written back and forth’ about that, Whiteaker said.
Geyser also did not reveal to her therapists that she had been reading a novel with violent themes about murder and black market organ sales called Rent Boy.
But her lawyer, Tony Cotton, pushed back, saying Geyser only read what the facility allowed, and staff knew she had been communicating with the collector.
He also pointed out that Geyser was the one who asked for the no contact order, something she requested when she found out thdat Jeffery was sexually interested in her crime.
Leutner (pictured) miraculously survived the heinous attack, crawling her way out of the woods to be found
Geyser (pictured in 2017) pleaded guilty, but was found not guilty by reason of mental illness
Cotton said that she stopped talking to the man in 2024 after she discovered he was selling things she sent him.
Bohren, who has since retired and passed the case along to Wagner, agreed with Cotton’s points.
In 2014, Geyser stabbed Leutner across her arms, legs and torso, hitting major arteries and severing her diaphragm. Geyser did this while Weier egged her on.
Weier ordered Leutner lay down and cover herself in leaves during a game of hide and seek before Geyser started attacking her.
Leutner’s near death experience came a day after they all celebrated Geyser’s birthday.
After the young assailants fled, Geyser mustered up the strength to crawl out of the woods and was found by a cyclist.
The girls claimed they were motivated by the fictional Slender Man, sparking a moral panic over potential copycat attacks as the character swept the internet.
Both Geyser and Weier told detectives they felt they had to kill Leutner to become Slender Man’s ‘proxies,’ or servants, and that the character would kill their families if they didn’t follow through.
