Laughing Jack-Inspired Murder

Perhaps it is the ultimate Phantom Clown story. 

A correspondent tonight writes: "One of the more disturbing clown events to take place this year. Laughing Jack, a character brewed up on the same site The Slender Man was created. The 12 year old girl claims, Laughing Jack told her to fatally stab her stepmother to death."

~ Urban Dictionary

The New York Daily News captures the latest...

A 12-year-old Indiana girl who fatally stabbed her stepmother said an online horror story clown named “Laughing Jack” told her to do it, according to reports.
The Elkhart girl set her family’s apartment on fire and stabbed Maria Torres “at the direction of a fictional character found on the CreepyPasta website known as 'Laughing Jack,’” according to court documents filed Tuesday and cited by WSBT-TV.
The admission by the girl, who has been declared incompetent to stand trial in the July killing, comes after two Wisconsin girls said they tried to kill their friend in May 2014 to please a different character from the fan-created horror story collections named “Slender Man.”

* * * 

The unidentified Elkhart girl “heard voices and had an 'alter ego' months before the stabbing and begged her father for help,” the court documents said.
One website that posts readers’ own fictional horror stories, creepypasta.com, blocked the Daily News from accessing its site after an inquiry about the stabbings allegedly inspired by CreepyPasta characters. Another one, creepypasta.org, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Doctors have diagnosed the Indiana girl as suffering from post-traumatic stress and dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder, WSBT reported. She’s been living for months in a Goshen juvenile detention center, where she’s seeing a counselor and taking medication but still pleading staff for help. She won’t stand trial unless she’s deemed fit to understand the charges against her.
Her family’s main concern is getting her transferred to a state mental hospital after 16 psychiatric facilities have refused her, the girl’s lawyer, Elkhart public defender Holly Curtis, told the TV station.
“This little girl has been failed by everyone,” Curtis said. “The risk level for her is beyond anything I think anybody can imagine. For her not to be able to get the help she's crying out for is probably one of the biggest travesties I've seen so far with the system and with a state agency not willing to step up and do their job.”
State officials have promised to comply with a juvenile court order to move the girl into a mental institution.
“There is work being done to find the appropriate place for this young woman,” state Family and Social Services Administration spokeswoman Marni Lemons said, noting privacy concerns prohibited her from sharing more information about the case.

The overlap between the CreepyPasta clown, Laughing Jack, and Slenderman is, well, creepy, especially because of the recent history of violence with both. A judge ruled in August that the two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls would charged and put on trial as adults. The girls said Slenderman threatened them and their families, if they didn't do his bidding. Plus Slenderman told them he would invite them into his forest castle, if they just would kill one of their classmates.

Slender Man in Fortean Times

The August 2014 issue of Fortean Times (FT317) is out now in the UK, and will hit news stands in North America during the next month. It contains Ian "Cat" Vincent's first published Fortean Times article, a cover story on Slender Man.

The issue also includes another article on Slender Man, "Shadows of the Thin Man." That contribution to Fortean Times happens to be another first published article. The author? My wife, Jenny Coleman.

Congratulations to both of these writers.

Slender Man-related articles on the Twilight Language blog can be found here:

Slender Man Mayhem & Las Vegas Killings (9 June 2014)

Attempted Murder For Slender Man (3 June 2014)

The Grinning Man Returns (15 September 2013)

Art by Andy Finkle.

Slender Man Mayhem & Las Vegas Killings

The world appears to have become more unbalanced than usual.

There has been mayhem incarnate since May 31, 2014, when two 12-year-old southeastern Wisconsin girls stabbed a 12-year-old friend nearly to death in the woods to please Slender Man. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, held down and stabbed that friend 19 times, trying to commit murder to become "proxies" (acolytes) of the Slender Man. 

Since then, it has come out that another Slender Man attack happened right before this incident:

An Ohio woman, who was recently attacked by 13-year-old daughter with a knife, said she believes he daughter was inspired by internet horror meme Slenderman.
The woman, who asked to not be identified, told WLWT that she made the connection after seeing reports of the two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls who attempted to stab their friend to death, hoping to make the fictional Slenderman appear.
“I came home one night from work and she was in the kitchen waiting for me and she was wearing a mask — a white mask,” the woman said. “She had her hood up and had her hands covered with her sleeves and the mask.”
“She was someone else during that attack,” the mother added. Source.

Pictured above, Anissa Weier, on the left, dresses like The Joker from The Dark Knight. On the left, Jerad Miller plays The Joker, and his wife, Amanda, portrays Harley Quinn.

After the Slender Man attempted murder, the floodgates from Hell seemed to open.

On June 4th, Justin Bourque, dressed in paramilitary gear, armed heavily, terrorized Moncton, New Brunswick, killing 3 Mounties and others. 

On June 5th, Aaron Ybarra, wearing a black, hooded sweatshirt, skater sneakers and jeans, shoot three, killing one, at Seattle Pacific University. 

On June 6th, D-Day, Dennis Marx, wearing paramilitary gear, including a gas mask (like The Dark Knight Rise's Bane) and a bulletproof vest, armed with explosives and an assault rifle, undertook a "frontal assault" on a Georgia courthouse, shooting a sheriff's deputy in the leg.

"The dawn of a new day. May all of our coming sacrifices be worth it," Jerad Miller wrote in a Facebook post on June 7, a day before the Las Vegas killings.

Dawn? Aurora. That is a powerful word to use.

Then on June 8th, Jerad and Amanda Miller opened fire, pointblank, on two policeman eating at a pizza parlor, killing them. Taking their badges and guns, going to a Wal-Mart where they killed a man*, the pair went to the back of the store and took their own lives.

The bizarre couple, who committed the Las Vegas killings, lived at an apartment at the Oak Tree Apartments, on Bruce Street, near Fremont Street, in downtown Las Vegas. 

Photo of Jerad Miller: Provided by the Tippecanoe County Jail, Lafayette, Indiana.

The Millers married Sept. 22, 2012, and lived in the 1200 block of Weaver Street in Lafayette [Indiana]. They also were evicted from an apartment in the 1500 block of Greenbush St., according to court records.
A Facebook photo posted by Amanda, whose maiden name is Woodruff, on Jan. 4, indicated they were leaving Lafayette. Source.

The pair having previously lived in Lafayette, Indiana, therefore also links to the Fayette Factor.

The name Jerad Miller, of course, reminds many of Jared Loughner.

James Holmes.

A police search of the Millers' apartment began shortly before 9 p.m. June 8, 2014, at that location. White supremacy material was apparently found, including swastikas. What other weirdness was there?

See also: Photo of Las Vegas Killers: Jokers and Cop-Hating Idiots?

What was learned from the couple's neighbors is that the Millers wanted to cause a Columbine-type situation, and lived in a world involving, yes, Slender Man, The Joker, and other evil fantasy figures.

Krista Koch, who lives near the apartment that was searched, told [KTNV] Action News the apartment was occupied by the couple who is accused of shooting two Las Vegas police officers and another person on Sunday morning.
According to Koch, the couple would often talk about killing police officers and were very anti-government.

 Slender Man: Art by Andy Finkle.

The neighbor also told Action News the man would often dress up as the "Joker" and "Slender Man" and the woman would dress up as "Harley Quinn."

 Harley Quinn: Art by Comic Vine.

In addition, Koch says that the neighbor told her that they were going "underground" before carrying out an attack. Koch identified the man as "Jared" and told Channel 13 that she just thought the couple was "crazy" and did not realize their intentions were serious.

 From Amanda Miller's Facebook page.

The "Joker" is a comic book super villain, who is portrayed as a criminal mastermind. He was the arch enemy of "Batman." James [Eagen] Holmes, the man who shot and killed 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, dressed up as the "Joker" during that shooting.
"Slender Man" has most recently been associated with the stabbing of a 12-year-old girl by her 12-year-old friends in Wisconsin. The girls allegedly stabbed the girl because they wanted to meet the fictional character made popular by the website Creepypasta.com.
"Harley Quinn" is also a fictional character in the "Batman" comic book series. She is the girlfriend of the "Joker." - KTNV

*Name Game

The Clark County Coroner's Office on June 9th, identified the armed bystander who tried to return fire, killed at Wal-Mart as Joseph Robert Wilcox, 31, of Las Vegas. The Wilcox surname is of early medieval English origin. It derives from the elements "Will," a short form of William, with the addition of the hypocoristic suffix "cock or cockes," meaning "son of," and later transposed to "cox." William was the Norman form of the personal name Wilhem composed of the Germanic elements "wil," meaning "will or desire," and "helm," meaning "protection" (Source).

Jerad is an English name, the meaning being "rules by the spear."
Amanda is a Latin name meaning "having to be loved," "deserving to be loved," or, simply, "worthy of love."
Miller means "a person who owns or works in a grain mill."  

Amanda's maiden name was Woodruff, of Anglo-Saxon origin, which can be either a topographical name for someone who lived on a patch or land thickly grown with woodruff, deriving from the Olde English pre 7th Century "wudurofe" meaning "woodruff," or, it may be a nickname for one who used woodruff as a perfume because of its strongly scented leaves.


For two different points of view on the killers, see Andrew West Griffin's "I will be doing something," and Michael Hoffman's "Demon-possessed 'Joker' cop killers strike in Las Vegas."

Several h/ts to Cory, SMiles, Theo, Enki, Robert, and others who wish to not be identified. 

Attempted Murder For Slender Man

A murder based on a myth? It nearly happened. A stabbing's motive laid at the feet of a character created on the Internet? It did happen.

The Mythos

In an as-yet-unpublished article written in January 2014, my wife Jenny penned this beginning to her historical overview:

Slender Man is the hipster monster in the black suit waving his multiple appendages outside Generation Y’s bedroom window. 

Slender Man is not a new and trendy entity; it is simply the reborn face of an ancient evil, resurrected from the ashes by ever-increasing access to media, technical advances, and the bleak corners of the human mind: evil as timeless and as ubiquitous as thought itself, pre-dating language, its true origins in death, the dark, and the rolling eyeball of primal fear.

At top: Slender Man on granite, by Andy Finkle.

The Slender Man was first created on a thread in the Something Awful forum on June 8, 2009, with the objective of editing photographs to contain supernatural entities. On June 10, a forum poster with the user name "Victor Surge" contributed two black and white images of groups of children, to which he added a tall, thin spectral figure wearing a black suit. The Slender Man (sometimes written Slenderman) is described as very tall and thin with unnaturally long, tentacle-like arms (or merely tentacles), which it can extend to intimidate or capture prey.

The Attempted Murder

On May 31, 2014, two 12-year-old southeastern Wisconsin girls stabbed their 12-year-old friend nearly to death in the woods to please Slender Man, which they had learned about online. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, held down and stabbed a 12-year-old friend 19 times.

The two girls claimed that they wished to commit a murder as a first step to becoming "proxies" (acolytes) of the Slender Man. They had planned it for months, and finally made the attempt in a park on Saturday morning, after a slumber party. They said they learned about Slender Man on Creepy Pasta, a website about horror stories and legends. They planned to run away to the demon's forest mansion (in the Nicolet National Forest) after the slaying, the police complaint said.

The girls invited their friend to a slumber party on Friday evening, the complaint said. They planned to kill her during the night so they wouldn't have to look into her eyes, one girl told police, and then run away. They decided to put it off, but the next day, during a hide-and-seek game in a wooded park, they attacked their friend with a knife. One girl told the other to "go ballistic, go crazy," according to the court documents.

The victim began to scream that she hated them and started stumbling away, one of the girls told police.

The girls left the victim lying in the woods. She crawled to a road where a bicyclist found her lying on the sidewalk. Police arrived and she gave them the name of one of the girls who attacked her.

She was rushed into surgery, police said.

The two girls have been charged with attempted murder, and each could be sentenced to 65 years in prison each.

Name Game

Waukesha: Over the years, many believed, incorrectly, that the origin of the name of the city was an Algonquian word meaning "fox" or "little foxes," though it is actually an Anglicization of the Ojibwe proper name Waagoshag or the Potawatomi name Wau-tsha. Wau-tsha (sometimes written as Wauk-tsha or Wauke-tsha) was the leader of the local tribe at the time of the first European settlement of the area. This is confirmed by accounts of Increase A. Lapham, an early settler and historian of the region. According to Lapham, the word for "fox" was pishtaka. Cutler also told visitors about Wau-tsha, who was described as "tall and athletic, proud in his bearing, dignified and friendly."

(In appearance, Wau-tsha - without tentacles - sounds like Slender Man.)

Waukesha, Wisconsin has a long history of poltergeist, hauntings, and related stories. Also, the town was the epicenter for "phantom kangaroo" sightings in 1978, in Wisconsin.)

Nicolet National Forest: The national forest was named after Jean Nicolet (Nicollet) de Belleborne (ca. 1598 – 1 November 1642) was a French coureur des bois noted for exploring Green Bay of Lake Michigan, in what is now the U.S. state of Wisconsin. He was a known friend of Samuel De Champlain and Etienne Brule. He was attracted to Canada to participate in Samuel Champlain's plan to train young French men as explorers and traders by having them live among native Americans.

Jean Nicolet, landing at the Bay of Green Bay. 

Painted by Gavin Doyle (1852-1919) in 1910.

Morgan Geyser: Morgan is a Celtic/Irish/Welsh name meaning "dweller by the sea" and/or "fighter of the sea." Geyser literally means "a spring that throws forth intermittent jets of heated water and steam."

Anissa Weier: Anissa as a girl's name has the meaning "pure, holy; satisfaction" and is a variant of Agnes (Greek): Latin form of the Greek name Hagnes, from the feminine form of "hagnos." Weier means "dweller at the sign of the kite (a bird of prey)" and/or "dweller by a fish pond."