Judge reviews mental state of 12-year-old 'Slender Man' stabbing suspect

A Wisconsin judge is expected to decide Wednesday whether the second of two 12-year-old girls charged with stabbing a classmate to please the fictional horror character Slender Man is fit to stand trial.

Prosecutors say the two girls plotted for months to kill their classmate before luring the child to a wooded park after a sleepover in Waukesha, west of Milwaukee, and stabbing her 19 times. Payton Leutner survived by crawling from the woods to a sidewalk where a bicyclist found her and called 911.

Wisconsin law requires suspects who are at least 10 years old to be charged as adults in severe crimes. Attorneys for the girls arrested in the stabbing have said they will try to get their clients' cases moved back to juvenile court. The Associated Press is not naming the girls while their cases could still be moved.

Waukesha County Judge Michael Bohren ordered one of the girls to receive mental health treatment after a court-appointed psychologist testified in August that the girl claims to see and hear things that others cannot -- including unicorns, Slender Man and Voldemort, an antagonist in the Harry Potter series. A hearing on her condition is set for Nov. 12.

The other girl's public defender told Bohren last month that a psychologist hired by her defense questioned the girl's competency, raising concerns about whether she would be able to help with her defense. Bohren ordered a second exam to be done by a court-appointed psychologist. The results of that could be discussed Wednesday.

Both girls' attorneys have questioned whether they would receive appropriate care in the adult system, which is not designed for 12-year-olds.

But Tina Freiburger, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor who has studied the juvenile system, said it might not be much better. Most children who end up in the juvenile court system have been truant, missed a curfew or were involved in a minor crime. The Slender Man case is rare in its violence, she said.

"Luckily, we don't have a lot of 12-year-olds going out and committing crimes like this," Freiburger said. "That's a good thing. But then the bad thing is that when we have it happen, we don't have a system in place to really deal with their needs."

Studies done in multiple states have found more than half of the children charged as adults have some type of mental illness, she said. But she wasn't aware of any research that compared the mental health care provided to children in the adult system to that in the juvenile system to see which was more effective.

Some criminal justice experts have called for programs specifically for children charged as adults because of the mental illness, levels of violence and long criminal histories that often mark those cases, Freiburger said.