Unspeakable Acts

by Sarah Weinman

  By late 2015, Morgan Geyser, diagnosed with schizophrenia, was still not being treated for her disease. She’d become attached to her visions and feared losing them, her only companions in her isolation. Alongside her “friends,” she wandered through the forest of her thoughts.

  CARL JUNG TOOK LONG WALKS THROUGH THE SPRAWLING Black Forest as a teenager, during which he improvised his own strain of Pagan mysticism, communing with the trees. He spoke of that same wilderness in a lecture in 1935, as the opening setting of the 15th-century romance Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The novella begins, “At length my ignorant sleepes, brought me into a thick wood,” and then descends, as Jung describes it, “into the underworld of the psyche.” Jung said that forests, as dream imagery, were “symbols for secret depths where unknown beings live.” (His mentor, Sigmund Freud, wrote of his own method of analysis as a walk through “a dark forest.”) In Jung’s Liber Novus (also known as The Red Book), completed around 1930, he wrote of the nature of the human imagination: “Thoughts are natural events that you do not possess, and whose meaning you only imperfectly recognize . . . [T]houghts grow in me like a forest, populated by different animals.”

  Morgan’s hallucinations—magical characters speaking to her, imaginary friends, lifted from the pages of books or the internet—are grounded in something more specific: her genetic inheritance. Her father, Matt, began his lifelong struggle with schizophrenia at 14 years old (he receives government assistance due to his illness). In a recent documentary, Beware the Slenderman, he talks about his coping mechanisms for living with schizophrenia: He runs numbers in his head and tries to “put up static” to block out his visual and auditory hallucinations. Matt and his wife, Angie, decided early on to delay sharing the fact of Matt’s illness with their daughter until she grew older—why make her fearful of a genetically inherited disease that she might never have to face? She’d shown no clear warning signs.

  In the film, Matt Geyser describes a life in which the boundaries between the real and the unreal are painfully blurred and an intellectual understanding of the difference is not enough to protect you. If, earlier on, he had decided to share his burden with Morgan, this is the picture he might have drawn for her: “Right now there’s, like, patterns of, like, light and, like, geometric shapes that’s like, always racing—like always, like right now. Everything seems normal to me ’cause this is my everything; this is how I’ve always seen things.” But the more threatening hallucinations—including, he says, a “glaring demon-devil”—are more complicated. “You can, like, see it, and, like, you know it’s not real. But it totally doesn’t matter because you’re, like, terrified of it,” he says, becoming emotional. “I know the devil’s not in the backseat, but—the devil is in the backseat. You know?”

  In January 2016, after 19 months without treatment, Morgan was finally committed to a state mental hospital and put on antipsychotics. By spring, her attorney claimed that her hallucinations were receding and her condition was improving rapidly. But in May of that year, after two years of incarceration, Morgan attempted to cut her arm with a broken pencil and was placed on suicide watch.

  Late this September, Morgan accepted a plea bargain, agreeing to be placed in a mental institution indefinitely and thus avoiding the possibility of prison. Just weeks earlier, Anissa had also accepted a deal, pleading guilty to the lesser charge of attempted second-degree homicide. A jury recommended she be sent to a mental hospital for at least three years.

  THE JOINT TRIAL OF PAULINE PARKER AND JULIET HULME also hinged on the question of their mental health. Were the girls delusional? Clinically paranoid? Or had they been completely aware of the consequences of their actions and chosen to go ahead with their plan regardless? The defense argued that the girls had been swept up in a folie à deux, or “madness between two”—a rarely cited, now-questionable diagnosis of a psychosis developed by two individuals socially isolated together. The crime was too sensational and the defense too exotic for the jury to be persuaded. They deliberated for a little over two hours before finding the girls guilty.

  Juliet got the worst of it. She was sent to Mount Eden Prison in Auckland, notorious for its infestation of rats and its damp, cold cells (particularly bad for an inmate who’d recently suffered from TB). There Juliet slept on a straw mattress and had one small window she could not see out of; the bathrooms had no doors, and sanitary napkins were made from strips of cloth. She split her time between prison work (scrubbing floors, making uniforms in the sewing room) and writing material the superintendent called “sexy stuff.” She gorged herself on poetry: Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Omar Khayyam. She taught herself Italian—she dreamed of making a living as either a writer or a diva of the Italian opera—and she bragged in a letter that she and Pauline were exquisite singers. She also bragged about her studies, even her talent in knitting—she bragged incessantly. In a letter to a friend, Juliet’s father worried that she was “still up in the clouds . . . completely removed and occupied with herself and her grandiose ideas about poetry and writing.” Five months after the crime, Juliet was “still much the same as she was immediately after the event. She feels that she is right and others are wrong.” She remained unbowed, still immersed in literature and a vision of the great artist she could become. These were “delusions” she was not willing to let go of.

  In spite of the harsh conditions of Juliet’s incarceration, the girls’ sentences were ultimately lenient. After five and a half years, both were released by order of the executive council, and each was able to start her life over under an alias.

  Juliet Hulme, now Anne Perry, moved to England; using the shorthand she learned in prison, she got a job as a secretary. But she hadn’t lost sight of her and Pauline’s plan to one day move to California. When she was turned down for a visa (her criminal history was hard to overlook), she began working as a stewardess for an airline that often flew to the United States. One day, upon arriving in Los Angeles, she disembarked and never got back on the plane. She rented a lousy apartment, took on odd jobs, and wrote regularly. By her 30s, back in England, she’d launched a career as a crime novelist. She has since published more than 50 novels, selling over 25 million books worldwide.

  In one of her earlier novels, the lead murder suspects seem inspired by Pauline and Juliet: a slightly androgynous suffragette and the taller, radiant, protective woman with whom she lives. They are brilliant and fearless; the suffragette’s partner is exalted as having “a dreamer’s face, the face of one who would follow her vision and die for it.” In a later book, the detective-protagonist seems to speak for the unconventional mores of the author herself when he states that “to care for any person or issue enough to sacrifice greatly for it was the surest sign of being wholly alive. What a waste of the essence of a man that he should never give enough of himself to any cause, that he should always hear the passive, cowardly voice uppermost which counts the cost and puts caution first. One would grow old with the power of one’s soul untested . . .”

  The next chapter of Pauline’s life was not marked by such bravado. She became Hilary Nathan and eventually moved to a small village in South East England. There she purchased a farmworker’s cottage and stables, and taught mentally disabled children at a nearby school; she attended daily mass at the local Catholic church. After retiring, she gave riding lessons at her home. When her identity and location were revealed in the press in 1997, Pauline, then 59, quickly sold her property and disappeared.

  She left behind an elaborate mural, on the wall of her bedroom, that the buyers believed she had painted herself—a collection of scenes that are part fairy-tale illustration, part religious allegory. Near the bottom, there is an image of a girl with dark, wavy hair (like her own) diving underwater to grasp an icon of the Virgin Mary; in another, the same girl—as a winged angel, naked and ragged—is locked in a birdcage. At the mural’s peak, a beautiful blonde (a girl who resembles Juliet) sits astride a Pegasus—glowing, exuberant, arms outstretched. And the blonde appears a
gain, on horseback, seemingly about to take flight, as the Pauline figure tries to bridle the animal.

  On display in these images is both the narcissism of adolescence and the remorse of adulthood, the penance of a woman who has resolved to receive the sacrament every single day. And what bridges these two elements is an image at the mural’s center: the Pauline girl seated, head bowed, under a dying tree against a dying landscape. The occult language of nature—those late nights in the garden, those dark plans in the woods—had nothing left to give her. It had lost its Pagan power.

  A POWERFUL NARCISSISM IS IN FULL VIEW DURING THE interrogation of Anissa Weier. After being arrested for the stabbing of Bella Leutner, the first question Anissa asks the detective is not about her friend’s condition (that would not happen until two and a half hours later) but about how far she and Morgan had walked that day—“’Cause I’m not usually very athletic and I just wanna know.” She seems very impressed by the challenges they faced on their long walk after leaving Bella, harping on the distance, the threat of heat exhaustion and mosquitoes, going without an allergy pill all day (“Is it bad?”), and the limited snacks (the granola bar she’d packed was “disgusting”; the Kudos bar was much better). She recounts with incredible precision everything she and Morgan ate that day, including free treats at a furniture store (a glass of lemonade and two cookies each). Near the end of her interview, she seems about to share a revelation with the detective:

  ANISSA: I just realized something.

  DETECTIVE: What’s that?

  ANISSA: If I don’t go to school on Monday, that’ll be the first day that I miss of school.

  Anissa was later diagnosed with a “shared delusional belief”—a condition that faded the longer she was separated from Morgan. Her parents had gotten divorced just the year before and, along with the bullying at her new school, she’d been upset, unmoored—but otherwise mentally stable. While it is fairly easy, based on the video footage, to believe that something is wrong with Morgan—she is detached, spaced-out—it seems quite clear that Anissa is not ill. She appears more frightened than Morgan, more in touch with the reality of the situation, crying occasionally throughout. She doesn’t read as flighty; she doesn’t speak in a distant, spooky voice; she seems upset, but grounded. She answers questions with the eagerness and precision of a girl who wants to be the best student in class. And this is precisely why it’s so upsetting to watch footage of the following exchange, about the immediate aftermath of the stabbing:

  DETECTIVE: So [Bella] was screaming?

  ANISSA: Mm-hmm. And then, um, afterwards, to try to keep her quiet, I said, “Sit down, lay down, stop screaming—you’ll lose blood slower.” And she tried complaining that she couldn’t breathe and that she couldn’t see.

  DETECTIVE: So she started screaming, “I hate you, I trusted you”?

  ANISSA: Mm-hmm.

  DETECTIVE: She got up?

  ANISSA: Yeah. She got up and tried to walk towards the street . . . It led to the other side of Big Ben Road.

  DETECTIVE: So she tried to walk towards the street and what happened?

  ANISSA: And then she collapsed and said that she couldn’t see and she couldn’t breathe and also that she couldn’t walk. And so then Morgan and I kind of directed her away from the road and said that home was this way—and we were going deeper into the forest area.

  DETECTIVE: So she said—she fell down and said she couldn’t breathe or see.

  ANISSA: Mm-hmm. Or walk.

  DETECTIVE: Or walk. And you had told her to—

  ANISSA: To “lay down and be quiet—you’ll lose blood slower.” And that we’re going to get help.

  DETECTIVE: But you really weren’t going to get her help, right?

  ANISSA: Mm, no.

  At this point in the interview, Anissa is wrapped in a large wool blanket. The detective handed it to her because the space is chilly. Perhaps she was trying to gain Anissa’s confidence, or perhaps it was simply instinctive, offering comfort to a young girl being held in a concrete room. Anissa has been crying—but whether this is from genuine remorse or a kid’s fear of getting into trouble is anyone’s guess. The look on her face does not tell us enough. And now the detective reads it back to her, the story of two girls who led their friend into the woods.

  Originally published by the Virginia Quarterly Review, fall 2017

  The End of Evil

  By Sarah Marshall

  The crowd was growing. Hundreds had gathered across the road from the prison, bundled against the midwinter chill and warming themselves with a clever vendor’s coffee and doughnuts. Though dawn had not yet broken, the ground was littered with beer cans. Celebrants lit sparklers, strangers joined in song, and children did their best to stay awake. One family, the Cochrans, told reporters they had left their home in Orlando, Florida, at two o’clock in the morning so they could be sure not to miss the festivities. They had brought their six-year-old twins, Jennifer and May Nicole, because, Mrs. Cochran said, “I thought it would be educational for them, kind of like a field trip.”

  The throng had appeared as if from nowhere: the day before, there was only one man waiting outside Florida State Prison. His name was George Johnson, and when the camera crews found him, he was standing beside the trunk of his car, selling T-shirts for ten dollars apiece. “Do you think it’s appropriate,” a reporter asked him, “to be making money off some man’s execution?”

  “I don’t see why not,” George said. “He—”

  The broadcast cut him off. Everyone already knew what he did.

  Within hours, George was doing a brisk business. Printed in the bright red of cartoon blood, his T-shirts showed a sweating, wide-eyed man strapped into an electric chair, staring out at the viewer with an expression that managed to seem both helpless and imperious. The words splashed above him read BURN BUNDY BURN. The shirts were selling particularly well, George said, among women.

  Ted Bundy had been on Florida’s death row for nearly a decade, after receiving three death sentences in two separate trials, for the 1978 murders of three victims who could be called young women but could also just as fairly be called girls: 20-year-old Lisa Levy, 21-year-old Margaret Bowman, and 12-year-old Kimberly Leach. Now, in the early hours of January 24, 1989, it seemed Bundy’s time was finally about to run out.

  When Ted Bundy was apprehended in Pensacola in the early hours of February 15, 1978, six weeks after he escaped from a Colorado jail, the FBI had already publicly linked him to thirty-six murders across five states. In the ensuing decade, both the random speculations of onlookers and the educated guesses of law enforcement often pushed the number far higher. Many said it had to be a hundred or more, and cited Bundy’s own enigmatic statement to the Pensacola detectives who had questioned him about the FBI’s claim. “He said the figure probably would be more correct in the three digits,” Deputy Sheriff Jack Poitinger said.

  Ron Holmes, a criminal justice professor who interviewed Bundy on two occasions, claimed that the total was 365, and that Bundy had raped and killed his first victim at the age of eleven. “Ted Bundy is not insane,” Holmes told the press. “Ted Bundy knows the difference between right and wrong. But Ted Bundy does what he wants to do when he wants to do it.” Holmes hadn’t taped either of his interviews with Bundy, but he didn’t need that kind of proof to convince people of what they already wanted to believe.

  Ted Bundy was everywhere and nowhere, guilty of everything because he had admitted to nothing—nothing, that is, until the last few days before his scheduled execution. Then, as Florida restaurants put up signs advertising Bundy fries and Bundy barbecues and vendors stocked up on electric chair–shaped lapel pins, Bundy said he was ready to confess—for a price. He would describe every murder he had committed, but only in exchange for a stay of execution. He needed a few more months to tell the whole story, he said, but he was willing to meet with investigators from around the country to show that he was serious. He would answer their questions if they would advocate f
or his life.

  Florida governor Bob Martinez remained unmoved. “Justice has been on hold for a decade,” he announced, “and it’s about time that Ted Bundy paid for his crimes.” To the viewers across the country who tuned in to watch the countdown to Bundy’s execution, it was hard to imagine that the man whose name had become synonymous with the term “psychopath” deserved to draw another breath.

  “‘Ted Bundy’ is to serial killers,” Bundy’s postconviction lawyer Polly Nelson once wrote, “as ‘Kleenex’ is to disposable handkerchiefs: The brand name that stands for all others.” In America, in the decades since Ted Bundy’s crimes, captures, trials, and resulting infamy, the term “serial killer” has itself become a kind of brand name for evil, one promising an ever-familiar fable about inhuman darkness disguised in human form, appearing out of nowhere, and terrorizing humanity until humanity can destroy it.

  “If it should ever occur to you to relate this to anybody,” Ted Bundy told one of the detectives he confessed to in the hours before his death, “you can tell them that I get no secret joy or pleasure out of it. That my own special kind of hell and madness that I lived in ten, twenty years ago was as wrong and as terrible as it could be. And I’m sorry.”