Today on TRC: “Slenderman” with Kathleen Hale
A deep dive into the 2014 case with the writer and journalist.
Many of us have a complicated relationship with true crime. The genre has been around since the dawn of the media itself; newspapers breathlessly tracked the footsteps of Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer, Ann Rule documented her work friendship with Ted Bundy in The Stranger Beside Me, and the 24/7 cable news cycle was practically built on the back of the O.J. Simpson trial.
In 2014, Serial ushered in the true crime podcast boom, and a quick scroll through your podcast app of choice will reveal hundreds if not thousands of true crime pods, from enormously successful shows like Crime Junkie to smaller pods between friends who love “wine and crime.” The era of My Favorite Murder fandom may have waned, but that doesn’t mean our obsession with true crime has. We feel a little guilty turning on Dateline on a weekend, listening to the aforementioned “makeup and murder” podcasts, or inhaling Hulu crime docs every weekend, but we can’t stop.
Kathleen Hale’s book Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls is a different kind of true crime story.
You may have heard about Morgan and Anissa, two young girls in Wisconsin who stabbed their friend in 2014, believing that if they did so, they could go live with the internet creepypasta character Slenderman in his “Slender Mansion.” The case immediately blew up due to the shock value — two 12-year-olds attempting to murder a classmate? — but the Wisconsin justice system completely ignored several important factors, most notably Morgan’s escalating schizophrenia, trying the girls as adults instead of juveniles.
Hale spent years researching the case, connecting deeply with the girls and their families, and Slenderman is the result — a book about a horrifying crime and its horrifying aftershocks.
Kathleen Hale joins Nora on the latest episode of The Terrible Reading Club, available wherever you get your pods. They discuss the case itself and the internet’s impact on it, the law-and-order justice system of Wisconsin and so much more. You will be riveted, and you will be furious.
-Team TRC