Gypsy Rose Blanchard: Abuse victim who plotted mum’s murder released
When a mum who seemed to care for her child was killed, the world was horrified. No one could imagine what led to the death.
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Gypsy Rose Blanchard has been released from prison after serving seven years behind bars for her role in her mother’s murder.
The now 32-year-old pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 2016 for assisting her then-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, to stab her mum Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard to death.
She was sentenced to 10 years in prison, which she’s served 85 per cent of, including time served for the year she spent in a county jail before entering her plea.
The case garnered worldwide attention, not purely down to the shocking fact a daughter plotted in her own mother’s brutal demise, but due to the truly bizarre details that emerged after the arrests.
It was the murder nobody saw coming.
Gypsy was confined to a wheelchair and survived on a feeding tube, at the time of the killing.
She also had a long-list of medical conditions, including “ ... chromosomal defects, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, severe asthma, sleep apnoea, eye problems”.
Dee Dee, a single mum, was her full-time carer, who on the surface was every part the doting mother.
Friends described their bond as “perfect”. Gypsy herself even once compared their relationship to “a pair of shoes” because they were “never good without the other”.
But when 48-year-old Dee Dee was found dead inside her home in Springfield, Missouri, in June 2015 the shocking truth came out.
Dee Dee had fabricated all of her daughter’s medical issues, making Gypsy a victim of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome – a rare form of abuse in which a guardian exaggerates or induces illness in a child for attention and sympathy, People reported recently.
In fact, Gypsy later revealed “the only thing I had wrong with me is I have a little bit of a lazy eye,” during an interview with ABC’s 20/20 in 2018.
After if was announced in September that Gypsy would be set free by the Missouri Department of Corrections in December 2023, three years earlier than her 2026 release date, there’s now a new-found interest in Gypsy’s story.
The young woman has even penned an ebook titled Released which she’s been teasing on TikTok.
But the self-titled “public speaker”, who says she’s “advocating awareness of munchausen by proxy”, had a complicated pathway to her new life.
As a baby, Gypsy led a relatively normal existence. But despite being a “vibrant toddler who was full of energy”, Dee Dee soon began to claim her daughter was ill.
The former nurse’s aide began “saying that [Gypsy] was sick and had problems sleeping”, Gypsy’s dad Rod Blanchard told 20/20.
“It just progressed from there.”
After the couple split, Rod said he continued to visit Gypsy, but was never able to spend time alone with his daughter.
“All the visits, Dee Dee had to be there the whole time,” he recalled. “Something never felt right about it. Dee Dee was so controlling.”
By the time Gypsy was eight years old, Rod had been told Gypsy was suffering with “leukaemia and muscular dystrophy”. The conditions were supposed to have left the little girl “paralysed” and requiring a wheelchair and a feeding tube.
Within a few years the “lie” had ballooned, so much so, that when their home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Dee Dee and Gypsy had a new house built for them by Habitat for Humanity that came complete with a wheelchair ramp.
In between hospital stays, Gypsy and Dee Dee would fly across the country to concerts, galas celebrity meet-and-greets, and even to Disney World with expenses paid by charity organisations.
“People felt sorry for me,” she told KSDK. “They believed the lie, they believed the fraud.”
But Gypsy said the false life her mother had created left her feeling “like a prisoner”.
“The prison that I was living in before, with my mum, it’s, like, I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t have friends. I couldn’t go outside, you know, and play with friends or anything,” she said, according to Fox News.
She elaborated on this further during the 2018 Investigation Discovery documentary Gypsy’s Revenge, stating: “I couldn’t just jump out of the wheelchair because I was afraid and I didn’t know what my mother would do. I didn’t have anyone to trust.”
That changed when she met Nicholas Godejohn on a Christian dating website in 2012 and began opening up about realising she wasn’t really sick.
“It was almost like love at first sight,” Nicholas would later say of Gypsy in a chat with ABC News. “I just connected instantly with [her].”
Gypsy reportedly was keen for her mother to “approve” of her new love, and after three years of them talking online, arranged for a meeting in March 2015 at the movies.
Dee Dee didn’t like Gypsy’s new boyfriend, but that didn’t stop the loved-up pair from sneaking off during the film to have sex, according to a report by Refinery29.
For a few days, Gypsy, then 19, and Nicholas, 26, spent time together doing normal things, including a shopping trip to Walmart where the murder weapon was reportedly stolen.
But the tensions proved too much for Gypsy who admitted said she “talked [Nicholas] into it [the murder plot]”.
“It was not because I hated her. It was because I wanted to escape her,” Gypsy told ABC News.
On the fateful night, Gypsy let Nicholas in their home and gave him duct tape, gloves and the knife.
She hid in the bathroom while Nicholas stabbed her mum in the back as she slept.
The pair then had sex, stole $4000 in cash and fled to a motel nearby.
They then took off on the eight-hour drive to Nicholas’ home but after a few days, Gypsy became concerned her mother’s body hadn’t been found.
She then urged Nicholas to post from Dee Dee’s Facebook account about her death to alert people.
Their initial “That b*tch is dead!” post was followed 17 minutes later by a longer comment suggesting someone had violently killed Dee Dee and raped Gypsy.
After discovering her body, police traced the IP address where the posts were made, leading them to Nicholas and Gypsy.
Initially, the community in Gypsy’s home town were relieved of her safe return, but that quickly shifted to shock as the truth was exposed.
While some doubted Gypsy’s version of events, one of Gypsy’s former neurologists testified he was suspicious of Dee Dee, and lodged an official concern which stated: “I believe that the mother suffers from Munchausen by proxy”, E! News reported.
In addition, a 2009 police report obtained by 20/20 showed that another doctor alerted authorities when he “could not find any symptoms that support what Dee Dee alleges to be wrong with her daughter”.
Despite being locked up, Gypsy’s stepmother told media in 2018 she was happier than ever behind bars.
“Despite everything, she still tells me that she’s happier now than with her mum. And that if she had a choice to either be in jail, or back with her mum, she would rather be in jail,” Kristy Blanchard said.
While Gypsy begins her new life, Nicholas – who has autism – is still serving out a life sentence after being found guilty, Springfield News-Leader reported last year.
He was also sentenced to an additional 25 years for armed criminal action and is not eligible for parole.
During her time in prison, Gypsy met another man, Ryan Scott Anderson, who she married in June 2022.
Originally published as Gypsy Rose Blanchard: Abuse victim who plotted mum’s murder released
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