WAUKESHA, Wis — The day after their daughter's 12th birthday sleepover, Angie Geyser and her husband, Matt, found themselves in a police station here, hoping to pick her up and take her home.
Officers had shown up earlier at their house looking for their daughter, Morgan, who had gone with her friends to a park after breakfast.
"They wouldn't tell us anything," Geyser said, except that one of the girls was hurt, and Morgan and the other girl weren't with her. The parents were told to wait, and an officer stayed until they received notification that Morgan had been found, was OK, and that police just needed her to clear up some questions.
The Geysers headed to the station, assuming that whatever had happened, they probably would have to punish Morgan. Their thought was to cancel a trip to a Star Trek convention.
"That's how clueless we were," Angie Geyser said.
Finally, an officer came to the lobby and told the parents they could not take Morgan home. She was being charged with attempted homicide.
"I sobbed. I ran to the bathroom and threw up. It didn't seem possible," Geyser said.
The 36-year-old mother of two — she has a younger son — spoke with a reporter for the first time since Morgan and her friend Anissa Weier made international headlines in May 2014. The Waukesha sixth-graders were charged as adults with trying to kill their friend to impress or appease Slender Man, a fictional Internet character.
Suffering from 19 stab wounds, Payton Leutner crawled to the edge of some woods, where a passing bicyclist found her. The girls were arrested hours later, trying to walk to a northern Wisconsin forest where they believed Slender Man lived in a mansion.
Two years later, they remained at the Washington County Juvenile Detention Center in West Bend, Wis., on $500,000 bail.
But early this month, a judge returned Morgan to a state mental hospital where she had earlier received treatment for rare early onset schizophrenia, which had been diagnosed while she was in custody.
The Geysers still are waiting to find out what will happen to Morgan. The case has plodded along through competency evaluations, an extensive preliminary examination, hearings on whether the girls should be transferred to juvenile court, and now an appeal after Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Bohren denied that transfer.
The experience has galvanized Angie Geyser into something of an advocate for reforms in mental illness and juvenile crime laws and finally prompted her to share her perspective.
"I was shocked to learn 12-year-olds could be charged as adults," she said. "Some of the comments on stories say 'Adult crime, adult time.' That's BS," she said. "These are children."
She also was surprised at how hard it was to get psychiatric treatment for her daughter. A Pennsylvania congressman pushing a bill to revamp the nation's approach to mental illness recently mentioned her in a House floor speech.
'Where have you been?'
Geyser shared her thoughts at a picnic table in Frame Park, where she often took Morgan as a younger child.
"She was always the kid going up the slide," she said.
She said Morgan has changed a lot in the past two years. For one, she's grown into a teenager, taller and more mature at 14 than she appeared at 12, when the world first saw her, handcuffed, in court.
But the most dramatic shift came after Morgan's initial commitment to the state mental hospital, Geyser said. That began in December, more than a year after doctors had diagnosed Morgan with early onset schizophrenia, a condition experts say worsens faster without treatment.
"When the medication finally worked, it was like a switch went on, like, 'There you are! Where have you been?' "
Before, "we never knew which Morgan we'd get" during visits, Geyser said. "She was floridly psychotic for 19 months."
During that time, Morgan played with ants, talked to hallucinations, and watched the Weather Channel for hours. But after treatment, she began to show appropriate emotions like remorse and for the first time told her mother she missed her.
Morgan's condition was stabilized during her winter stay at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute near Oshkosh, Wis., and afterward she was returned to the juvenile detention center in West Bend. Because the facility is designed to hold juveniles only a few days, it has no windows and doesn't allow regular access to the outdoors.
"That's detrimental to any child," Geyser said.
Morgan's lawyer, Anthony Cotton, tried to persuade Bohren to modify her bail and release Morgan to live with her grandfather, a retired police chief in Manitowoc County. She could continue getting treatment and therapy in a better environment than the jail, while subject to GPS monitoring and around-the-clock supervision.
Bohren denied that request, and Morgan's condition began to deteriorate again, her mother said.
After she gouged her arm with a broken colored pencil in late May, jail policies required she be put on a suicide watch, kept alone for nearly a week wearing only a padded gown.
"She couldn't have books or drawing materials or even her glasses," Geyser said, or utensils to eat meals.
"I find the thought of her sitting in solitary, blind, eating with her hands like an animal extremely disturbing," Geyser said.
That led the judge hearing the parents' request for a civil commitment — separate from Bohren's handling of the criminal case — to order her back to Winnebago on June 3.
"My preference is that she stay up there," Geyser said. "It's the best place for her. She's a mentally ill child."
Today, Morgan can sit with her extended family from 5 to 7 p.m., and Geyser said someone visits her about every other day.
But with her daughter's regained insight and emotional connection comes a downside, Geyser said.
"With lucidity comes awareness of the gravity of the situation," she said. "I try to help her be hopeful, saying: 'When you come home, when you go to college.' She responds: If she does those things."
The whole process to get Morgan committed took six months, time she went untreated. Geyser thinks that process — designed to protect patients' rights — also needs reform.
She doesn't know how long Morgan will stay at the mental hospital. It will depend on when doctors feel she's stable enough to return to the least restrictive setting, which in her case is the juvenile jail.
Her mother fears a return to West Bend will just start the cycle of deterioration over again.
Adult or juvenile?
Meanwhile, Geyser waits on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals to determine whether Morgan's case will remain in adult court. She has the court's docket bookmarked on her smartphone and checks it several times a day.
Robert Henak, an appellate lawyer, said it's not unusual for a case to take this long — nine months — or much longer to be decided.
But he, too, said he assumed the court would try to move more quickly since the criminal case is on hold pending the decision and because of the nature of the relief sought.
The District 2 Court of Appeals panel in Waukesha is deciding the appeal. Judge Mark Gundrum recused himself from even considering whether the panel should accept the appeal. He has not said why.
An appeals judge from Wausau, Wis., Lisa Stark, will replace him on a panel with judges Paul Reilly and Lisa Neubauer.
More than 70 people have written to the court urging the case be transferred to juvenile court, mostly via form letters at Slender Chance, a website that a friend of Geyser set up.
State law required the girls be charged as adults because of the crime: attempted first-degree intentional homicide. If the court were to reverse Bohren and transfer the case to juvenile court, the girls likely would enter negotiated pleas quickly and start sentences within the juvenile system.
They would face up to three years in the state's troubled juvenile prison followed by close community supervision until age 18.
If they remain in adult court, they would face trial and possible sentences of up to 45 years in prison plus many more years of extended supervision.
Either might raise an insanity defense, which if successful would land them in Winnebago hospital for treatment for an indefinite number of years.
Geyser said she dreads a trial and just focuses on the appeals court for now.
'How didn't I know?'
She decided to talk with a reporter to let the world know Morgan is not a monster. She said she wanted to from the beginning when TV crews were camped outside their home.
"I wanted to defend my daughter, tell them about the Morgan we knew" who loved animals, reading and performing in front of her parents' video camera, but lawyers advised them to stay silent, she said.
She later did speak at length on camera for a documentary, Beware the Slenderman, which has been screened only at a festival but is planned for release on HBO next year.
Early on, the family was subjected to hateful online comments, calls and letters — especially after an ABC 20/20 episode about the victim's recovery, she said.
"Like, 'You should rot in hell,' and that kind of thing," she said.
That vitriol largely has subsided.
She admitted she and Morgan's father did engage in some second-guessing.
"A big part of parenting in general is second-guessing: 'How didn't I know she was sick?' " Geyser said.
In hindsight, they attributed behavior that may have been symptomatic of problems to puberty, middle-school goofiness and Morgan's quirky personality.
"There were no glaring, obvious signs she was ill," Geyser said. And while they were aware that Morgan's father's own schizophrenia increased her chances of affliction, they weren't expecting to start looking for signs for another five or six years when the disease more typically begins to manifest.
She also disputes that Morgan ever refused treatment and medication after her arrest, saying it never really was offered, only discussed. Morgan's comments to psychologists during competency reviews that she didn't want to lose "friends" she hallucinated was not the same as refusing treatment, her mother said.
She also thinks many people support the idea that Morgan and Anissa should be moved to juvenile court but are afraid to say so.
"There's some feeling that if you show compassion for the girls, you're somehow lessening what happened to Bella," using Payton's nickname.
Geyser has not met with the victim or her family.
Still, she said, "We love Bella and feel horrible about what happened to her. I can't imagine. ...
"When it comes down to it, they're all children."
Follow Bruce Vielmetti on Twitter: @ProofHearsay
