The long, unsettling shadow of the Slender Man case stretched into another day of confusion and fear after Morgan Geyser — once a 12-year-old who stabbed her friend to appease a fictional monster — slipped out of state supervision over the weekend. Authorities say the 23-year-old was taken into custody late Sunday night in Illinois, ending a frantic search that began when she vanished from a Wisconsin group home.

Geyser had been living at the facility under strict conditions following a judge’s decision to grant her conditional release from the Winnebago Mental Health Institute earlier this year. The order came nearly a decade after she and her classmate, Anissa Weier, lured their friend Payton Leutner into the Waukesha woods and stabbed her 19 times in a misguided attempt to win favor with the internet’s faceless boogeyman. All three girls were 12 at the time.

Police say Geyser cut off her Department of Corrections monitoring bracelet and walked out of the home Saturday night. Detectives believe she was last seen around 8 p.m. with another adult in a Madison residential neighborhood. Hours later, staff discovered she was gone.

By Sunday morning, Madison police began alerting other agencies. The next update wouldn’t come until late that night, when authorities confirmed Geyser had been located and taken into custody across state lines. Details about how she got there — and who the adult companion was — remain unaddressed.

The Slender Man stabbing remains one of the most disturbing cases of the digital age, a moment when online fantasy bled into real life with devastating consequences. Leutner survived the attack only by sheer will, crawling from the woods and flagging down a passing cyclist. She spent months in recovery.

Weier pleaded guilty in 2017 to attempted second-degree homicide and was committed to Winnebago for 25 years before receiving conditional release in 2021. Geyser, who pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree intentional homicide, received the same commitment sentence in 2018. She petitioned for release repeatedly, including as recently as last fall.

In January, Judge Michael O. Bohren determined she no longer posed a threat to herself or others and allowed her to transition back into the community.

She is back in custody — but the questions that have followed this case from the beginning continue to trail behind her.