Payton Leutner has recalled the moment she was violently attacked at the hand of her best friend and another classmate.
Leutner was stabbed 19 times in a plot created by Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, who claimed they did it to please the fictional character Slenderman. All three were 12-years-old at the time.
Leutner became friends with Geyser in fourth grade as she struggled to make friends herself. They would spend time together playing outside and having sleepovers.
It was in sixth grade that she also met Weier and she was first told about Slenderman, a faceless, fictional creature in a suit that could grow tendrils from his back.
Despite wanting to end their friendship, Leutner felt bad for Geyser and they remained close.
On the day after a sleepover for Geyser’s birthday party, things took a horrifying turn which became the subject of true crime film Beware The Slenderman.
Heading to the park with the two girls, at Weier’s suggestion, they started to play what Leutner thought would be a game of hide and seek. Weier told Leutner to lie down and cover herself with leaves so she would be disguised.
Then with a kitchen knife Weier later told police that Geyser had brought from her home, Geyser stabbed her multiple times in her chest, arms and legs and left her bleeding in the woods.
‘I got up, grabbed a couple trees for support, I think,’ Leutner, now 17, told ABC News. ‘And then just walked until I hit a patch of grass where I could lay down.’
A cyclist found her and called 911.
In the ambulance, she says she ‘couldn’t focus much because my body was working so hard to keep itself alive. It was probably like, “Vision isn’t really a priority right now.”‘
She underwent emergency surgery at ProHealth Waukesha Memorial Hospital. One stab wound had cut through her diaphragm, while another narrowly missed her heart by less than a millimetre. The operation took six hours in total. She was left unable to communicate much in recovery and couldn’t breathe on her own for some time.
It also had last effects on her mentally, and to this day Leutner sleeps with a pair of broken scissors under the pillow next to her ‘just in case’.
‘It was a little shocking to me to see that they had this big, huge plan that they had been working on for months,’ she added.
Geyser and Weier were charged in adult court with first-degree attempted intentional homicide after the attack.
Weier pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was found by a jury to be not guilty by mental disease or defect in 2017.
Geyser pleaded guilty to the first-degree charges against her. In 2018, as a part of her plea agreement with prosecutors, Geyser was convicted but found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
Weier was sentenced to up to 25 years and Geyser up to 40 years in a mental health institution. However Geyser is potentially petitioning for release soon.
Meanwhile Leutner plans to go to university next year and embark on a career in a medical field, which she feels was inspired by what happened to her.
The Sky Atlantic documentary Beware The Slenderman explores how the legend of the Slenderman, born from online memes became the focal point of the investigation into what happened to Leutner.
Directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky, it explores the psychology that led to the horrific attack, and the rise of the Slenderman myth on the internet.
The parents of Geyser and Weier appear in the film narrating about the girls’ childhoods, and features home videos of Geyser taken by her mother.
Beware The Slenderman is available to watch on Sky Atlantic and to quench your thirst for all things true crime head to Sky Crime
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