Morgan Geyser is led out of Waukesha County Circuit Court after her petition for conditional release was denied on Thursday, April 11, 2024.
Madison police released this image of Morgan Geyser, which was captured on security video in November 2025. The department was notified of her disappearance from a group home on Sunday morning, Nov. 23, and immediately alerted the public. Geyser was arrested late on Nov. 23 in Illinois.

A Wisconsin woman's brief disappearance from a group home has reignited public interest in the so-called Slender Man stabbing case of which she was a perpetrator.

Morgan Geyser was taken into custody in Illinois on Nov. 23 after escaping a group home a day prior. She went missing after cutting off her Department of Corrections monitoring bracelet, according to police in Madison, Wisconsin.

Geyser, who is now 23, was charged with attempted homicide at age 12 after stabbing her friend, Payton Leutner, and leaving her for dead in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Geyser and co-defendant Anissa Weier claimed they perpetrated the stabbing to appease the fictional Slender Man character.

They were both found not guilty by reason of mental defect in 2017 and sentenced to mental confinement.

Who is Morgan Geyser?

Geyser is one of two perpetrators in the 2014 attempted murder stabbing of Leutner. Geyser and Weier admitted to the crime but told police they believed they were doing the bidding of Slender Man.

Both Geyser and Weier were found not guilty by reason of mental defect in 2017. Geyser, who was diagnosed with early-onset schizophrenia after her arrest, was sentenced to 40 years of mental confinement.

She was granted conditional release earlier this year after a judge said he saw no risk to the public or to her, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, part of the USA TODAY Network. Before that, she had unsuccessfully petitioned for conditional release three times.

Geyser was placed in a group home in October, though the exact location of the facility was sealed by the court, per the Journal Sentinel.

How did Morgan Geyser escape her group home? Has she been found?

Geyser was last seen with an adult acquaintance near Kroncke Drive in Madison, Wisconsin at about 8 p.m. local time on Nov. 22, according to the Madison Police Department.

Later that night, the Department of Corrections received an alert that Geyser’s GPS monitoring bracelet was malfunctioning. After officials contacted the group home she was staying at, the facility's staff confirmed her GPS bracelet had been removed.

By 8 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 23, the Madison police was notified of Geyser's disappearance and issued an alert to the public.

At around 10:30 p.m., Geyser was found and taken into custody in Illinois, police said.

What happened in the Slender Man stabbing case?

After a sleepover on May 31, 2014, Geyser and Weier lured Leutner into the woods and stabbed her 19 times with a 5-inch blade.

Leutner survived the attack after crawling to a trail where she was found by a passing bicyclist.

Geyser and Weier were found by police on the side of the road. They told investigators they were on their way to live with the fictional Slender Man character and were charged with attempted murder the next day.

The two teenagers were later tried as adults and found not guilty by reason of mental defect in 2017.

What is Slender Man?

Slender Man is a fictional bogeyman-like character that resembles a skinny, tall man in a suit who has no face.

The character was created on an internet forum website in 2009, when a man named Eric Knudsen posted several black and white photographs of children playing with a long-limbed figure in the background, according to the University of California, Berkeley.

False but realistic stories about Slender Man targeting or attacking children began to spread online after that, and sometimes, children were the ones creating such stories, Lynne McNeill, an associate professor of folklore at Utah State University, told UC Berkeley's California Magazine.

Over time, the fictional aspects of the story of Slender Man became blurred with reality for some people, Jeffrey Tolbert, assistant professor of American studies and folklore at Penn State University, said in a 2021 research article.

The 2014 stabbing heightened public awareness about the Slender Man character.

Melina Khan is a national trending reporter for USA TODAY. She can be reached at melina.khan@usatoday.com.

Contributing: Anna Kleiber, Christopher Kuhagen and Jim Riccioli, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, USA TODAY Network

This story has been updated with additional information.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Morgan Geyser found. What happened in Slender Man stabbing case?

Reporting by Melina Khan, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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