‘Freedom’: Gypsy Rose Blanchard posts selfie to Instagram after being released from prison
Released three years early from a second-degree murder charge, she’s now preparing to tell her story.
Gypsy-Rose Blanchard-Anderson has shared her first selfie after being released from prison, where she was serving a 10 year sentence for aiding in the murder of her abusive mother.
“First selfie of freedom!” she wrote, taking the photo with an iPhone beside two cases of her belongings.
Gypsy was released from the Chillicothe Correctional Center on December 28, after being granted parole three years early.
Now 32, Gypsy pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of her mother, Clauddine ‘Dee Dee’ Blanchard, in 2016.
She provided her boyfriend at the time, Nicholas Godejohn, with the tools he used to kill Dee Dee while she slept, stabbing her in the back with a knife.
“I talked him into it,” she said in the 2018 trial of Mr Godejohn. “I wanted to be free of her hold on me”.
Dee Dee Blanchard had Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome: a behavioural disorder in caretakers that involves exaggerating, or making up entirely, physical or mental symptoms in another person for the sake of attention and sympathy.
She made up a long list of illnesses for her daughter to make her appear disabled, such as “chromosomal defects, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, severe asthma, sleep apnea, eye problems” and even having leukaemia.
Gypsy was often confined to a wheelchair and feeding tube throughout her life. “The only thing I had wrong with me is I have a little bit of a lazy eye,” she later told ABC’s 20/20.
Charity organisations began to pay for expenses for the two, such as trips to concerts and Disney World, and even a new house when their previous one was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“People felt sorry for me,” she said, per KSDK. “They believed the lie, they believed the fraud.”
But she described her life with Dee Dee as like a prison, unable to do anything or go anywhere independently.
“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.
She met Nicholas on an online Christian dating site in 2012, and eventually spoke to him about realising she wasn’t really sick.
They met in-person in 2015, and committed the murder shortly after in June. Gypsy was 19, Nicholas was 26, and Dee-Dee was 48.
Police found the couple by tracking the IP address where the two had made a post on Dee Dee’s Facebook account, saying “That b*itch is dead!”.
Nicholas was found guilty of first degree murder and armed criminal action, is still serving a life sentence for his committing of the murder, without the possibility of parole.
“I was blindly in love,” Godejohn said of his motive during his sentencing, per The Springfield News-Leader. “That was always very much the case.”
Since her incarceration, Gypsy told PEOPLE that she regrets her mother’s murder.
“Nobody will ever hear me say I’m glad she’s dead or I’m proud of what I did,” she said. “I regret it every single day.”
When she was released, corrections department spokeswoman Karen Pojmann said media would not be able to cover her release in-person “in the interest of protecting safety, security and privacy”.
Gypsy is now married to Ryan Scott Anderson since June 2022.
Pre-orders for her book, Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom, are online, which she created with writers Melissa Moore and Michele Matrisciani.
Gypsy joined Instagram in August of 2023. Her first post from the account was on October 11, promoting World Mental Health day and encouraging those struggling to speak to a crisis hotline.
“Every life is precious and has meaning,” she said.
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