Morgan Geyser, the 'Slender Man stabber', escaped from police after cutting off her ankle tag.
In 2014, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier - both aged 12 at the time - were at a sleepover when they lured classmate Payton Leutner to a nearby park where Geyser stabbed the girl 19 times.
Leutner fortunately survived the stabbing, while Geyser and Weier said they had done it to win the approval of the fictional horror character Slender Man as they claimed they were afraid their families would be harmed otherwise.
Geyser pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree intentional homicide and in 2018, while Weier pleaded guilty to attempted second-degree intentional homicide. Both pleas were vacated and the girls were found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
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Geyser was sentenced to 40 years in a mental health institution, and Weier was sentenced to 25 years but released in 2021.
Earlier this year a judge ordered that Geyser could be released from the psychiatric hospital she was being kept at, and was given a conditional release from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute.
However, police in Madison, Wisconsin said yesterday (23 November) that she was at large after cutting off her ankle monitor and leaving a group home she had been placed in.
Police had asked people to call them if they saw the woman, while her lawyer urged her to 'turn herself in immediately and not continue with this course of action'.
She had last been seen near the group home where she lived, and had been in the company of an adult acquaintance, with police saying she had been seen at around 8.15pm local time on Saturday, and that around 9.30pm they had received an alert that her GPS monitor was malfunctioning.
Staff at the group home confirmed she wasn't there and the search was on, with the matter being resolved successfully after the Madison Police Department confirmed that at 10.34pm yesterday they had been told Geyser had been taken into custody in the neighbouring US state of Illinois.
"There is no longer a need to search for Morgan Geyser at this time," they said.
Speaking after she was stabbed in 2014, Leutner had said she 'shouldn't be alive after what happened'.
She told ABC that Geyser and Weier had 'wanted to go on a walk' and she didn't think there was much wrong with that, but then Weier asked her to lie down and cover herself with sticks and leaves.
The girl was then stabbed 19 times, and said that Geyser and Weier then ran off telling her they were going to get help, Leutner remembered she 'grabbed a couple trees for support' and then 'walked until I hit a patch of grass where I could lay down'.
Shortly afterwards a cyclist found her covered in blood and she was rushed to hospital, a surgeon said that if one of her chest wounds had been 'the width of a human hair' deeper then she wouldn't have survived.
After the stabbing, Geyser and Weier walked for five hours before they were stopped by authorities on the side of the road.
Topics: Crime, Mental Health, True Crime, US News
Joe Harker