WAUKESHA, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Details about the conditional release plan for and placement of Morgan Geyser are now being kept secret.
It comes after public backlash regarding Geyser’s planned release to a Sun Prairie group home led to the facility declining her as a patient.
Geyser, 23, was convicted in the 2014 Slender Man stabbing of Payton Leutner in Waukesha. In 2018, she pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree intentional homicide and was sentenced to 40 years in a psychiatric hospital.
For the past seven years, Geyser has been held at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute near Oshkosh, but in July, a Waukesha County judge signed off on a conditional release plan. A different judge ruled in January that Geyser could be released, after three experts testified she had made progress battling her mental illness.
The plan initially approved by the Waukesha County judge called for Geyser to be placed in a facility in Sun Prairie.
“Morgan is very excited about being in a place where she would be able to grow as an individual — more than the other facility, which was really very dystopian,” said Anthony Cotton, Geyser’s defense attorney. “So this facility really will allow her to grow in person and I think be a safer and better member of the community.”
But Leutner’s family objected to the Sun Prairie placement because the group home is located about eight miles from them, and Sun Prairie community members also expressed concerns about Geyser living in their city.
Records show Sun Prairie’s city attorney filed an objection, and days later, Geyser’s attorney said the group home revoked Geyser’s acceptance due to the “publicity surrounding the placement.”
Geyser’s attorney and Waukesha County District Attorney Leslie Boese agreed last month that once the Wisconsin Department of Health Services finds a suitable alternative facility for Geyser, they would move forward with placement and avoid a public court hearing.
Geyser and her friend, Anissa Weier, lured their classmate, Payton Leutner, to a wooded park area in Waukesha during a sleepover in 2014, where Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times while Weier urged her on. Weier and Geyser claimed they attacked Leutner in order to appease Slender Man — a fictional horror character — and prevent him from killing their families.
All three girls were 12 years old and in sixth grade at the time. Despite being left for dead, Leutner managed to survive by crawling out of the woods, where she was discovered by a bicyclist.
Weier was released in 2021 to live with her father. She was freed from GPS monitoring in 2023.
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