‘Slender Man’ attacker Morgan Geyser waives extradition after fleeing group home. What to know about the case and what happens next.

A woman who stabbed her friend to appease a fictional internet character named “Slender Man” more than a decade ago waived her right to an extradition hearing on Tuesday after she fled a group home in Madison, Wis., and was found by police outside a truck stop south of Chicago.

Morgan Geyser, 23, was taken into custody by police in Posen, Ill., on Sunday night, a day after cutting off her GPS monitoring bracelet and leaving her group home in Madison, where she had been living since a judge granted her conditional release from a state mental health facility earlier this year.

Appearing before a judge in handcuffs and a blue prison jumpsuit in Cook County, Ill., Geyser signed a waiver allowing for her extradition to Wisconsin, where authorities may revoke her conditional release and request that she be returned to a psychiatric institution. Waukesha County District Attorney Lesli Boese said Monday that she would support such a move.

The Illinois judge said Tuesday that Geyser’s extradition to Wisconsin could take up to 30 days, but hoped she would be transported much sooner than that.

What happened?

According to police, Geyser cut off her Department of Corrections monitoring bracelet and left the group home in Madison on Saturday night. She was last seen around 8 p.m. on Saturday with an adult acquaintance, police said.

After she was reported missing, Geyser’s family urged her to turn herself in.

“If you see Morgan, please call the police,” her mother, Angie Geyser, said in a statement prior to her arrest. “Morgan, if you can see this, we love you and just want to know you are safe.”

“We worked too hard to secure her freedom for her to continue on this path,” Geyser’s attorney, Tony Cotton, said in a video statement following her disappearance.

On Sunday night, police in Posen were dispatched to a truck stop on a report of a man and a woman loitering. When officers arrived, they found Geyser and a man, identified by local news outlets as 43-year-old Chad Mecca, sleeping on the sidewalk behind the building.

​“The female repeatedly refused to provide her real name and initially gave a false one,” Posen police said in a statement. “After continued attempts to identify her, she finally stated that she didn’t want to tell officers who she was because she had ‘done something really bad,’ and suggested that officers could ‘just Google’ her name.”

According to police, Geyser and Mecca had traveled by bus from Wisconsin to the Chicago area. They were taken into custody without incident. Body camera footage released by police showed officers questioning Geyser and Mecca for nearly 15 minutes before taking them into custody.

Mecca was charged with criminal trespassing and obstructing identification, police said. He has since been released.

Geyser told police that she met Mecca a couple of months earlier at a church, and that the group home would not allow Mecca to visit her. She said the pair had talked about fleeing to Nashville.

Mecca, who goes by the name Charly, told WKOW-TV in Madison that Geyser “ran because of me.”

The ‘Slender Man’ case

In 2014, Geyser and Anissa Weier lured their classmate, Payton Leutner, into the woods in Waukesha, Wis., after a sleepover. Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times as Weier cheered her on. Leutner survived. All three girls were 12 years old.

Geyser and Weier admitted to the attack, saying they were inspired by “Slender Man,” a faceless, fictional internet character with a cult following.

They were charged as adults and pleaded guilty, but those pleas were later vacated when they were found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. Both were sentenced to psychiatric facilities instead of jail.

In 2021, Weier was granted supervised release to live with her father.

In March, a judge ordered Geyser to be transferred from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute to a group home, where she was subject to GPS monitoring.

According to ABC News, Geyser was granted conditional release despite concerns raised by prosecutors, who alleged she had “violent” communication with a man outside the facility.