THE INTERNET LED 12-YEAR-OLD GIRLS TO ATTEMPT MURDER

Two Wisconsin girls failed to differentiate between reality and make-believe

‘Slenderman’ is a make-believe character on several internet horror websites. One of those websites, Creepypasta Wiki, often uses Slenderman in horror fiction stories presented to look like news or true crime stories.

Two followers of Creepypasta, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, both 12, apparently failed to differentiate between reality and make-believe. The two Waukesha, Wisconsin girls wanted to join the realm of Slenderman and believed they had to kill someone in order to do so. They chose as their victim one of their middle school classmates. They had the 12-year-old victim over for a two-day sleepover and then lured her into some woods Saturday on the pretense of playing hide-and-seek. While one girl held the victim down, the other one stabbed her 19 tunes with a large kitchen knife.

From CNN:

According to the criminal complaint, the suspects had been planning the attack since February.

They first thought to kill the victim by placing duct tape over her mouth while she was sleeping and stabbing her in the neck, the complaint says.

Next, the plan was to kill her in a park bathroom where there was a floor drain that could make cleanup easier, it continued.

But, finally, the girls decided to carry out the attack in the park while playing a game of hide-and-seek, the complaint says.

It states: "As they left for the park ... (the victim) was walking in front of them and Geyser lifted up the left side of her white jacket and displayed the knife tucked in her waistband. Weier stated she gave Geyser a look with wide eyes and, when asked what that meant Weier stated, 'I thought, dear god, this was really happening.' "

The victim was stabbed near her heart, and she was "one millimeter away from certain death," the complaint says.

The victim somehow survived and managed to crawl out of the woods onto a sidewalk where a bicyclist found her and called 9-1-1. She is recovering in a hospital.

Geyser and Weier were arrested a few hours after the stabbing. They have been charged as adults - with attempted first-degree intentional homicide – and are being held in a juvenile detention facility on $500,000 bail.

The question now is, how do you punish two 12-year-old girls for attempted murder? This crime was not just some passing fancy. They started to plot the killing last February. I can already hear the psycho-babbling shrinks saying that these two little monsters were too young to realize what they were going to do was wrong. To that I say, bullshit! But for how long should they be locked up? I wish I had the answer.

One thing is clear though. While the internet has changed our world, mostly to the good, it also feeds out false and malicious materials, some of which, as in this case, can be downright dangerous. And this brings up another question. How can we prevent the dissemination of false, malicious and dangerous information on the internet without infringing on the First Amendment rights of creeps to do so? To say the parents in this case should have exercised control over how the girls used the internet is as much a fantasy as the fantasy those girls experienced by watching Creepypasta Wiki.