A Missouri woman whose life was the subject of an HBO documentary and Hulu series is set to be released from prison today.
In July 2016, now-32-year-old Gypsy Rose Blanchard received a 10-year prison sentence for the killing of her abusive mother, Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard.
Dee Dee was originally from Louisiana and settled with her daughter in the Springfield area after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. For years, Dee Dee claimed Gypsy was afflicted by a slew of illnesses she did not actually have, including muscular dystrophy, severe asthma and epilepsy. Dee Dee used her daughter's faked disabilities to get attention for herself as well as free trips to Disney World and backstage passes to concerts.
An unwilling participant in the ruse, Gypsy suffered through having her saliva glands removed, teeth extracted and tubes put in her ears — all unnecessarily. Her mother forced her to use a wheelchair or walker.
In 2012, Gypsy met a Wisconsin man named Nicholas Godejohn online, and the two began a clandestine, long-distance relationship. Godejohn eventually traveled to the Springfield area, where he and Gypsy met at a movie theater and, after Gypsy was able to slip away from her mother, had sex in the theater’s bathroom.
The online relationship continued and, three years later, in the summer of 2015, Godejohn returned to Missouri and brutally killed Dee Dee, who was discovered in her home with 17 stab wounds. Godejohn and Gypsy fled to Wisconsin, where they were later arrested and charged with Dee Dee's murder.
The murder investigation revealed the years of abuse that Gypsy had suffered under the control of her mother, who experts have said likely had an extreme case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
Taking the abuse into account, prosecutors downgraded charges against Gypsy to second-degree murder, to which she pleaded guilty.
The case was a media sensation, spawning episodes of Dr. Phil and 20/20, a Lifetime film and a novel, in addition to HBO and Hulu projects.
“What I did was wrong. I’ll have to live with it,” Gypsy told reporter Michelle Dean, whose 2016 Buzzfeed story about the case became the basis for the Hulu series The Act.
Gypsy’s release comes after she completed 85 percent of her sentence, which is standard in Missouri for many criminal sentences.
The case against Godejohn, on the other hand, went to trial, and he was found guilty of first-degree murder in 2018 and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. He is incarcerated in Potosi.
Blanchard married a Louisiana man last year. According to TMZ, she has said that once free she hopes to meet Taylor Swift.
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