Two 12-year-old girls in America, currently on trial facing charges of first-degree attempted homicide, have said that they tried to kill their friend to please a mythological creature they had learned about online.
The children, who are being tried as adults due to the severity of the crime, and appeared in handcuffs and prison scrubs in the dock, lured the girl to a park in Waukesha, Wisconsin on Saturday where they then stabbed her 19 times.
A detective's statement, read out in court, said that one of the girls had claimed they were attempting to become 'proxies' of a mythological demon called Slender Man. They had learned about Slender Man on Creepypasta.wikia.com, which is a website dedicated to horror stories and legends (we'd link it but it's creepy).
The murder of their friend had been planned since December. They tried and failed to kill the girl at one of their houses after getting her round for a sleepover. So, the next morning, they took her into a park to play hide and seek. They ended up grabbing her, pinning her down and stabbing her with a kitchen knife, according to police.
Their next plan? To run away to Slender Man's mansion in the Nicolet National Forest. According to the Wikia page, Slender Man's appearance is recorded 'in sections of woods, and these generally tend to be suburban'.
The victim was left lying in the woods. She crawled to a road and was discovered by a cyclist later that morning. She was shortly taken to hospital, where, it was discovered, one of the stab wounds missed a major artery by a millimetre, a doctor said.
The girls were later arrested by a Waukesha County Sheriff's Deputy. Police described the girls' obsession with 'death and horror' in a press conference, saying that one girl had commanded the other to 'go ballistic, go crazy' in her attempts to kill their victim, according to the New York Daily News.
The victim is in a stable condition as the case continues. If convicted, the alleged perpetrators face up to 60 years in prison. Some news outlets are reporting their names, others aren't. We won't, as one of their lawyers is attempting to get their case transferred to juvenile prison, where they would be given the right to anonymity.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.