GUILTY WI - 12-Year-Old Girls Stab Friend 19 Times for Slenderman, Waukesha, 31 May 2014 #2

I have a 12 year old daughter. I don't know if she is one of a kind or what but she clearly knows what is real and what is not. She does well in school (A-B honor roll for the entire school year), has plenty of friends, behaves well for others, definitely knows right from wrong. And so do her friends. Maybe there is something in the water here that has our 12 year old girls behaving in the proper way, at home and away from home, or perhaps they were raised properly. I can not accept that two 12 year old girls truly believed in "slenderman" and attempted to kill in his name.

My prayers, well wishes and loving thoughts go to the victim that has a long painful road ahead of her. I hope and pray that she can completely heal from this, both physically and mentally. I also hope and pray that true justice is served for her.

MOO

TorisMom003 said:

I have a 12 year old daughter. I don't know if she is one of a kind or what but she clearly knows what is real and what is not. She does well in school (A-B honor roll for the entire school year), has plenty of friends, behaves well for others, definitely knows right from wrong. And so do her friends. Maybe there is something in the water here that has our 12 year old girls behaving in the proper way, at home and away from home, or perhaps they were raised properly. I can not accept that two 12 year old girls truly believed in "slenderman" and attempted to kill in his name.

My prayers, well wishes and loving thoughts go to the victim that has a long painful road ahead of her. I hope and pray that she can completely heal from this, both physically and mentally. I also hope and pray that true justice is served for her.

MOO

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You are sort of saying things that have been on my mind since this happened. I have never actually known a 12 year old child (or even 9-10) that could not discern reality from fiction. I don't mean believing in Santa or the Easter bunny, because you can get some cool things. I mean truly believing a character in a story is so real, and you commit crimes for them. Especially, when everyone else knows this is not real. I have worked with a lot of kids. A lot of kids from horrific homes that have suffered terrible abuse, that have no education, poor health or nutrition, that are extremely poor. I've simply never seen it. Not even in the most at risk of youth.

Unless a forensic psychologist testifies that these girls are legally insane and could not set this apart from reality...I will never believe that TWO 12 year olds did not know this wasn't real. I will just never buy it.

BetteDavisEyes said:

Slender Man's Seductive Power for Kids: It's in the Brain



By Dr. Steven C. Schlozman



The stabbing of a 12-year-old girl in Milwaukee was horrific. But in looking for an explanation for the attempted murder by two other adolescent girls, there have been attempts to vilify Internet memes such as “Slender Man” as putative causes for this kind, or any kind, of violence.



We have to remember that the boogeyman will always play a pivotal role in the normal development of children and adolescents — and neurobiology can help us understand why.



He’s present in the myth of the Golem and the French folk tale “Bluebeard.” Many of the novels of Neil Gaiman ("The Graveyard Book," "Coraline") or Stephen King’s horror tales such as "It" are aimed squarely at either 11-year-olds who feel vulnerable to the dark and terrifying supernatural, or those of us who remember what it was like to be 11. Re-read Ray Bradbury’s “The Halloween Tree.” You’ll remember the fun of a good scare.



The preadolescent’s love for the macabre is tied to a higher-order contemplation of what it means to be frightened in the first place. Those of us who enjoy scary stories and scary movies don’t just enjoy being scared. We enjoy asking ourselves why we’re scared...



http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/sl...r-mans-seductive-power-kids-its-brain-n124401

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Ohhh I adored the halloween tree!! Still do, and have given it to my older kids to read as well!


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it brings to mind the film "heavenly creatures" and that phenomena of the "madness of two"

as with the film was based on the parker-hulme case in NZ two young girls wrapped in their own, private fantasy world, they killed parker's mother

juliet hulme became the crime writer ann perry




lupus est homini *advertiser censored*, non *advertiser censored*, non quom qualis sit novit

blue22 said:

You are sort of saying things that have been on my mind since this happened. I have never actually known a 12 year old child (or even 9-10) that could not discern reality from fiction. I don't mean believing in Santa or the Easter bunny, because you can get some cool things. I mean truly believing a character in a story is so real, and you commit crimes for them. Especially, when everyone else knows this is not real. I have worked with a lot of kids. A lot of kids from horrific homes that have suffered terrible abuse, that have no education, poor health or nutrition, that are extremely poor. I've simply never seen it. Not even in the most at risk of youth.

Unless a forensic psychologist testifies that these girls are legally insane and could not set this apart from reality...I will never believe that TWO 12 year olds did not know this wasn't real. I will just never buy it.

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I don't know, Blue - I know a lot of adults who believe crazy stuff that can't possibly be true, but they fully believe it. Big Foot, George Norry stuff, we didn't land on the moon, the Holocaust didn't exist, etc. These are people that function well in society and can put together graphs and charts that show their point - they are just way way out in left field and don't have the ability somehow to process what the rest of us process when we look around at the world. And actually, when I was 12 there was this reclusive old man who lived in a large house down a deserted road. We only saw him occasionally and he had a long beard and looked like a hermit but he lived in this big huge unkempt house. His mailbox said "Howard Hughes" and all the kids thought - honestly we really thought it - that was the REAL Howard Hughes.

I'm not surprised two girls can believe this. Look at the sales success of the Enquirer and the Globe and Professional Wrestling. People can be incredibly gullible and believe stuff that is baffling to the rest of us.

pukasonqo2 said:

it brings to mind the film "heavenly creatures" and that phenomena of the "madness of two"

as with the film was based on the parker-hulme case in NZ two young girls wrapped in their own, private fantasy world, they killed parker's mother

juliet hulme became the crime writer ann perry




lupus est homini *advertiser censored*, non *advertiser censored*, non quom qualis sit novit

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They both had very difficult, unhealthy, and isolated childhoods. They also had an obsessive relationship and killed, because they thought the mother was going to separate them. They did not kill in the name of anything, or because of their fantasy world. They got rid of the mom, so they would be together. The murder itself had nothing to with the stories and such they were creating.

These girls are claiming (essentially) the boogeyman made them do it. I don't think it has anything to do with that. I think it's a well thought out guise. The relationship with the third girl, will factor in here. There wasn't room for her anymore, for whatever reason they had.

JMO, of course.

JeannaT said:

I don't know, Blue - I know a lot of adults who believe crazy stuff that can't possibly be true, but they fully believe it. Big Foot, George Norry stuff, we didn't land on the moon, the Holocaust didn't exist, etc. These are people that function well in society and can put together graphs and charts that show their point - they are just way way out in left field and don't have the ability somehow to process what the rest of us process when we look around at the world. And actually, when I was 12 there was this reclusive old man who lived in a large house down a deserted road. We only saw him occasionally and he had a long beard and looked like a hermit but he lived in this big huge unkempt house. His mailbox said "Howard Hughes" and all the kids thought - honestly we really thought it - that was the REAL Howard Hughes.

I'm not surprised two girls can believe this. Look at the sales success of the Enquirer and the Globe and Professional Wrestling. People can be incredibly gullible and believe stuff that is baffling to the rest of us.

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Do you not think there is a difference between gullible, and criminal? People believe in lots of things that are nuts. But that's usually the extent. They don't usually use those things to harm others.

Ausgirl said:

And this is why I have to wonder if some older, sociopathic so-and-so egged the girls' fantasy on in one of those many chatrooms out there for Slenderman fans.

When I speak about trolls, I'm in NO doubt that some of them are very capable of a sustained, long-term bout of messing with younger kids' heads.

Think about those sods on 4chan planning to troll the victim's family with messages from a 'Slenderman cult'. Is this something? Is there a 'troll' cult, making fun of kids who want to believe?

Think about the mind of a person capable of the words below, tweeted to one of the attacker's accounts. And imagine them in a chatroom with 12 year olds..

[modsnip]

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Here's the letter as created .. Here: http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?mode=attach&id=30120

Seriously Guys? You all know the rules. Knock it off.

Things aren't bad enough, you have to stir up the chit in topics that have no business on this thread?

Stop now.

Salem

I have to wonder if we just haven't seen the full effect of social media on our youngest generation. There has to be something to it that we don't fully understand. Maybe they are becoming desensitized to the humanness of things and human interaction because they are more often than not interacting and "playing" with a freakin' profile picture, twitter account, avatar, or internet meme. There is a certain amount of reliance on it as well.

I'm not blaming the internet, I'm just really wondering what effect all of this may have on developing minds and social skills. Their generation will be the first to TRULY grow up weened on social media and the internet the way we know it today. We have gone so beyond chat rooms and the internet being a source of information.

For the generations before them, it is more than ever, the way we socialize and we weren't weened on it, we watched it evolve.

We went from chat rooms, to Myspace, to Facebook, to Twitter, now Instagram, Tumblr, even the creepiest dating app EVER, Tinder that reduces people to a profile picture that you swipe through like a deck of cards. No info about them, just the image. I mean, what is less personal and kind of debasing than that?

What is real? Who is real? What is fantasy? Are we just getting too far away from real human interaction and therefore empathy? I'm not saying I know, I'm just pondering.

I mean, Slenderman has a "twitter account".

Our childhood bogeymen lived in our imaginations, we couldn't interact with them or read their thoughts in real time on the internet. In fact, all of our interactions with others, positive or negative, were face to face. There is something to be said for that.

Just some thoughts.

you raise some good points spice, we really don't know the effects of all this exposure to social media and instant communication are on our kids.

When we were kids and you wanted to talk to someone you called a friend on the house phone, you knew them, you had their number, your mom knew who they were, etc.

with cell phones, games systems, tablets, pc's, laptops all offering immediate connection to the world at large it is a whole new ballgame today for our own kids.

Scarier to me is that even if, as a parent, you are really on top of what your kids are accessing through the devices at home and with reasonable confidence that school devices are properly limited and filtered, you still never know what your child's friends are able to access on THEIR devices or in THEIR homes.

Now more than ever I feel it is much harder to track your kids exposures to things you would prefer to be there to discuss with them as they occur.

I am still convinced these girl knew in their logical minds that slenderman was not real. I think for these two, it was simply preferable to pretend he was and this became like an escapist addiction for them, and both of them fed that addiction til it needed more and more "proof" to ensure their devotion to the idea.

Mrs G Norris said:

Here's the letter as created .. Here: http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?mode=attach&id=30120

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In this letter Slenderman is referred to as "Our Savior" "The Great One"and simply "He".

Certainly words one would use in reference to a deity or "Godlike" figure. He is all knowing and "walls of steel and rock" cannot stop him. And the whole tone of it, regarding her "efforts" being "rewarded" is a nod to sacrifice.

Interesting and of course ridiculous.

Where did this appear? Whoever wrote this is highly irresponsible. (Obviously). And so is the twitter account and whoever is manning that ship. In one tweet he takes responsibility and says that he was in involved in the Boston Marathon because a fan posted photos asking if "it was him" on top of a roof that day. I mean, seriously???

It came from 4 Chan where members were posting about sending it to the family of the attackers. See half way down this thread: http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/...start=90&sid=c500ac30f2a5abfd4b48d5781999748e

Slender Man Now Linked to 3 Violent Acts

http://abcnews.go.com/US/slender-man-now-linked-violent-acts/story?id=24058562

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I find it strange that all three incidents involved at least one female perp. Females commit a very small percentage of homicides, and in those rare cases the victims are usually intimate partners. In the cases of these three Slender Man related attacks, the victims were a girl, two police officers, and the perp's mother. Highly unusual. IMO

Mrs G Norris said:

It came from 4 Chan where members were posting about sending it to the family of the attackers. See half way down this thread: http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/...start=90&sid=c500ac30f2a5abfd4b48d5781999748e

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If that's what they're sending to one of the attackers, imagine what they planned on sending the family of the victim.

That would unnerve the crap outta me if it came in the mail. And I'm an adult.

As for 12 year olds believing this and that or not, I certainly believe the vast majority of kids know fact from fiction, and that they do so by about age 8 these days. By 12, I'd be asking what sort of cognitive issues they had, if they truly didn't understand.

But again, I raise the issue of how, then, otherwise sensible adult can believe in Xemu, or that if they kill themselves at the right moment wearing Nike tennis shoes, their souls will ascend into a comet which is taking them all to heaven. How do cognitively healthy adults come to *believe* the cray-cray stuff these cults have handed out, and hundreds of cults with stories just as crazy and obviously fictional?

They usually have help, is how. Cults are something I've studied for a long time, how they work. It doesn't take a sophisticated one, nor sophisticated tactics, to convince people to do some very strange and sometimes dangerous or harmful things.

Looking at the depths to which the crowd who penned that letter linked above will sink for kicks, I honestly believe there's a good chance someone or a group of someones was messing with their head over time, so perhaps the girls -did- believe that crapola they were spouting.

Of course it's just as likely the whole story is a bald-faced lie designed to deflect from a perfectly rational, selfish motive (ie, jealousy) but there is, to me, just TOO many factors in place that could allow for them to be influenced by scum like those letter-writers to simply write it off as a possibility.

Ausgirl said:

As for 12 year olds believing this and that or not, I certainly believe the vast majority of kids know fact from fiction, and that they do so by about age 8 these days. By 12, I'd be asking what sort of cognitive issues they had, if they truly didn't understand.

But again, I raise the issue of how, then, otherwise sensible adult can believe in Xemu, or that if they kill themselves at the right moment wearing Nike tennis shoes, their souls will ascend into a comet which is taking them all to heaven. How do cognitively healthy adults come to *believe* the cray-cray stuff these cults have handed out, and hundreds of cults with stories just as crazy and obviously fictional?

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This is such an awesome point.

^ I'm not saying there's an *actual* cult, btw, in case I'm misunderstood.

Just that a group of heinous bullies on the net might have pretended to be one. Like they're doing in these sicko letters.

blue22 said:

Do you not think there is a difference between gullible, and criminal? People believe in lots of things that are nuts. But that's usually the extent. They don't usually use those things to harm others.

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ITA that this is not at all a scenario involving gullibility of two pre-teens believing in the fictional character, SlenderMan, and their being gullible enough to fall for his truly existing thus leading to their attempting to murder "a friend" to please him.

This goes so far beyond SlenderMan, or any other meme, or urban legend. While I am definitely one who strongly believes that unsupervised internet access is absolutely harmful in many ways, however, IMO, this is far exceeding unsupervised internet use being at the core of the problem in this case.

To give a couple examples, off the top of my head, that I find to be very telling as to the extreme level of cold, calculated actions are:

A) The statement made to LE that they had no feeling of remorse, sadness, or their being personally disturbed by their brutal actions.

B) The statement made to the VICTIM that she needed to lie down and be still as this would HELP her in lessening her blood loss(yet stating to LE they knew this was a lie and their reasoning for telling the victim to do this was so that she WOULD LIE THERE AND DIE, rather than being able to attempt to seek aid for herself once they'd fled the scene)

C) The VERY chilling statement Geyser made to LE, "people that trust you are the most gullible"!
(IMO, made even more chilling in that they told LE that after she had stabbed her "friend" multiple times, the victim screamed out that "she had trusted her!!")

IMO, there is very, very little, if any, gullibility at the crux of these girls' horrific actions. IMO, much different is there very cold, and calculated thoughts, behaviors, and actions, with ZERO remorse after having followed through with those cold, calculated actions.

Ausgirl said:

^ I'm not saying there's an *actual* cult, btw, in case I'm misunderstood.

Just that a group of heinous bullies on the net might have pretended to be one. Like they're doing in these sicko letters.

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No, I totally understood what you were saying. How seemingly sane people can come to believe in such fantastic things that can end up having such tragic results for themselves and sometimes for others. This motivation to commit acts that they may have never otherwise considered. The Cult analogy is a great point and speaks to how the human mind and how dark it can become, given "something to believe in".

Ausgirl said:

If that's what they're sending to one of the attackers, imagine what they planned on sending the family of the victim.

That would unnerve the crap outta me if it came in the mail. And I'm an adult.

As for 12 year olds believing this and that or not, I certainly believe the vast majority of kids know fact from fiction, and that they do so by about age 8 these days. By 12, I'd be asking what sort of cognitive issues they had, if they truly didn't understand.

But again, I raise the issue of how, then, otherwise sensible adult can believe in Xemu, or that if they kill themselves at the right moment wearing Nike tennis shoes, their souls will ascend into a comet which is taking them all to heaven. How do cognitively healthy adults come to *believe* the cray-cray stuff these cults have handed out, and hundreds of cults with stories just as crazy and obviously fictional?

They usually have help, is how. Cults are something I've studied for a long time, how they work. It doesn't take a sophisticated one, nor sophisticated tactics, to convince people to do some very strange and sometimes dangerous or harmful things.

Looking at the depths to which the crowd who penned that letter linked above will sink for kicks, I honestly believe there's a good chance someone or a group of someones was messing with their head over time, so perhaps the girls -did- believe that crapola they were spouting.

Of course it's just as likely the whole story is a bald-faced lie designed to deflect from a perfectly rational, selfish motive (ie, jealousy) but there is, to me, just TOO many factors in place that could allow for them to be influenced by scum like those letter-writers to simply write it off as a possibility.

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for what it's worth, I do think there has to be something major lacking in a person's life to join a cult. I am fascinated by cults and also do a lot of research on them. In all the people willing to be interviews about a cult they were in...I didn't really see one that didn't have really big gaps in their life. (I am talking about adults that join, not people indoctrinated from a young age.)