Gypsy Rose Blanchard Shares Her Story in a New E-book ‘Released’
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1991-present
Latest News: Gypsy Rose Blanchard Releases E-book
Gypsy Rose Blanchard has served her time for planning her mother Dee Dee’s murder in 2015. In the two weeks since she left prison, the 32-year-old has been busy. Blanchard appeared on The View, attended the red carpet event for Lifetime’s new documentary The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, and has amassed quite the following on her social media accounts.
On January 9, her e-book Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom arrived. Blanchard collaborated with co-authors Melissa Moore and Michele Matrisciani on the book. “I’m so excited to finally share some big news, which is that a special ebook about my experiences will be published,” Blanchard shared on social media in December. She describes the book as “a collection of interview transcripts, journal entries, illustrations, and photos.”
Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom
amazon.com
$9.99
[table-of-contents] stripped
Who Is Gypsy Rose Blanchard?
Gypsy Rose Blanchard is a convicted murderer and victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy who enlisted her then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn to kill her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. Although Gypsy was in good health, Dee Dee had everyone convinced her daughter had a number of illnesses, including leukemia, from a young age. In June 2015, then-24-year-old Gypsy helped Godejohn sneak into her Springfield home to stab her mother to death. Gypsy and Godejohn’s arrest shocked the nation, as it revealed that the Make-A-Wish and Habitat for Humanity recipient had never been sick at all. The ensuing trial fascinated the country and has inspired a number of documentaries and a scripted series. After being convicted of second-degree murder and serving more than eight years in prison, Gypsy was released in December 2023 and is now married to Ryan Scott Anderson.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Gypsy Rose Blanchard
BORN: July 27, 1991
BIRTHPLACE: Golden Meadow, Louisiana
SPOUSE: Ryan Scott Anderson (2022-present)
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo
Early Life
Gypsy Rose Blanchard was born in Golden Meadow, Louisiana, on July 27, 1991. By the time she was born, her parents Clauddine “Dee Dee” and Rod had already separated, with the latter saying he realized he “got married for the wrong reasons.” Rod tried to stay in communication with his daughter and saw her fairly regularly up until 2004 when Dee Dee and Gypsy moved.
Gypsy was 3 months old when her first alleged health problems surfaced, leading to multiple overnight hospital stays for sleep apnea. Although tests returned no positive results, Dee Dee continued seeking treatment for a myriad of medical issues, which would go on to include leukemia, muscular dystrophy, asthma, vision and hearing impairment, seizures, and an unspecified chromosomal disorder. Gypsy was also made to use a wheelchair, feeding tube, and breathing machine. Her mother pulled her out of school before she even hit the third grade, citing the severity of her health issues.
Gypsy spent her childhood undergoing a host of surgeries, one to remove her salivary glands. She had her teeth pulled when they started to rot, perhaps due to all of the medications she was on, or her lack of salivary glands. By 2008, when they lived in Missouri, Dee Dee had a locked closet at their home filled from top to bottom with organized medications for Gypsy.
Dee Dee Blanchard’s Long Con
In reality, Gypsy could walk, didn’t have leukemia, and certainly didn’t need any of those surgeries. In fact, some of her issues were likely due to the amount of unnecessary medications Gypsy was on. She also wasn’t actually bald; her mother was just shaving her head to keep up the ruse that she had cancer. Experts believe Dee Dee’s behavior is evidence of a mental illness called Factitious disorder imposed on another. More commonly known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy, it likely led her to fake—or even cause—her daughter’s poor health so she could receive sympathy and praise from others for being a caregiver to a sick child.
Medical tests often proved inconclusive, if not negative, but any time a doctor questioned Gypsy’s diagnoses, Dee Dee simply found a new provider. Due to her past experiences as a nurse’s aide, she knew how to speak to medical professionals and how to accurately describe the symptoms of each condition. She also knew what medications could mimic the symptoms of certain illnesses she claimed Gypsy had. Dee Dee was always the one to speak during hospital visits, while Gypsy was meant to sit quietly, holding a toy or stuffed animal.
Dee Dee was charming and so devoted to her daughter that most people didn’t want to question her. If they did, Dee Dee would just pick up and move. When she took Gypsy to live with her own father and stepmother, Dee Dee told people Rod was a drug addict who had abandoned her. Keeping Rod at arm’s length meant he wouldn’t interfere with her medical con.
Later, Dee Dee and Gypsy moved to Slidell, closer to New Orleans, after Gypsy’s grandparents began to question her need for a wheelchair. There, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina proved advantageous for Dee Dee. She said all of Gypsy’s medical records and birth certificate had been destroyed, making her the sole expert on Gypsy’s medical history.
Gypsy’s mother used her made-up health issues and Hurricane Katrina to gain assistance so the two could move to Aurora, Missouri, in 2005. In 2008, Habitat for Humanity built them a special pink house with a wheelchair ramp and jacuzzi tub in Springfield, Missouri. Gypsy and Dee Dee also received charity-funded tickets to concerts, where she got to meet artists like Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton, and took a Make-A-Wish–sponsored trip to Walt DisneyWorld Resort. Footage of an American Cancer Society Relay For Life event shows Dee Dee smiling at Gypsy, while saying, “This is why I was born, to be your mama.”
Suspicions of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
When Gypsy was 14 years old, she saw a neurologist who suspected the girl was a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, but he never reported her case, because he didn’t think he had enough evidence. In 2009, two caseworkers visited Gypsy’s home after someone anonymously called in a report that the child’s health issues were fabricated. However, Dee Dee was able to use her charm to convince them nothing was wrong.
As Gypsy got older, Dee Dee began lying about her age to make her seem younger and younger, even going so far as to alter her birth certificate more than once. Dee Dee wouldn’t let Rod wish his daughter a happy 18th birthday in 2009, because she told him Gypsy thought she was only 14 years old. At this point, Gypsy wasn’t allowed to go to school or hang out with friends. Early childhood videos seem to show Gypsy as a bright, young girl. However, Dee Dee told everyone she had the mental age of 7. Gypsy couldn’t even leave the house, unless accompanied by her mother, who would hold her hand at all times and squeeze it if she wanted Gypsy to stop talking.
Despite what Dee Dee said, Gypsy knew she was physically able to walk, and in 2011, she tried to escape her mother by running away with a man she met at a science fiction convention. However, Dee Dee was able to track her down, then convince the man that Gypsy was underage—even though she was actually 19 at the time. Upon returning home, Gypsy said her mother smashed her computer, tied her to her bed, and threatened to crush her fingers if she tried to run away again. Gypsy also said her mother sometimes hit her, called her names, and denied her food. Although she was afraid, this incident only made Gypsy more determined to find connection with someone other than her mother.
Relationship with Ex-Boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn
In 2012, Gypsy was able to get back online, where she met Nicholas Godejohn on a Christian dating website. He lived 600 miles away from Gypsy in Wisconsin, but they continued communicating online for over two years. One year into their relationship, Gypsy came clean about her faux medical issues. “I just couldn’t lie to him anymore. And I just told him everything,” she said in the 2017 HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest. Their online relationship was centered around role-play, BDSM, and fairytale fantasies about the future, and they kept in touch via Gypsy’s various secret Facebook profiles.
In March 2015, they arranged to meet each other for the first time at a movie theater in Springfield, Missouri, to see Cinderella. The hope was that Dee Dee would like Godejohn after meeting him in person and that the theater run-in would erase any suspicions of how the pair had met. Instead, Dee Dee got “jealous” of the attention her daughter was paying to Godejohn. “That was a very long argument that lasted a couple weeks. Yelling, throwing things, calling me names, b––, s––, w––” Gypsy told ABC News. When that failed, Gypsy began talking to Godejohn about saving her by killing her abusive mother. They formulated a plan, and Gypsy paid for Godejohn to take a bus from Wisconsin to Missouri to commit the murder.
Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard
On June 14, 2015, disturbing posts on Dee Dee and Gypsy’s shared Facebook page, like, “That b–– is dead!” led concerned neighbors and friends to alert the cops. During a welness check, police found Dee Dee face down in her bedroom. She had been stabbed 17 times in the back and had reportedly been dead for days. Initially, cops worried Gypsy, who they thought was sickly, had either been killed or kidnapped by the killer.
It was at that point that Gypsy’s neighbor and confidante Aleah Woodmansee decided to tell police about Gypsy’s secret online boyfriend. Woodmansee had kept printouts of conversations Gypsy had given her, which helped the officers identify and quickly locate Godejohn. Less than forty-eight hours later, the cops arrested the pair at Godejohn’s home.
Revealing the truth was much more shocking and complex. Not only could Gypsy walk on her own, but she also had orchestrated her own mother’s murder to, in Gypsy’s words, “escape” her control and abuse. In police interviews, she seemed saddened to hear of her mother’s death, but her behavior immediately following the murder indicated otherwise.
Gypsy and Godejohn had sex in her bedroom, then fled the house, taking $4,000, mostly from Rod’s child support payments, with them. They hunkered down in a motel outside of Springfield for a few days and were caught on security cameras shopping at a local Walmart. Gypsy was spotted wearing a blonde wig and walking without assistance as they caught a Greyhound bus to Godejohn’s Wisconsin home, where they had shipped the murder weapon. They thought they had gotten away with the murder, and video footage Gypsy had taken in their motel room showed the pair acting very giggly and making sexual jokes.
Trial and Conviction
The horror at Dee Dee’s murder quickly changed to sympathy for Gypsy, who suffered years of abuse at the hands of her mother. In Missouri, a first-degree murder charge can carry the death penalty or a sentence of life in prison without parole, but prosecutor Dan Patterson opted not to seek it for what he dubbed an“extraordinary and unusual” case. Gypsy’s attorney was able to bring the charge down to second-degree murder after obtaining medical records that showed proof of the abuse. Gypsy was reportedly so malnourished that she gained 14 pounds in county jail, a situation in which most people lose weight.
In July 2016, Gypsy accepted a plea agreement, pleading guilty to second-degree murder with a sentence of 10 years in prison and the option to apply for parole after serving 8 years. The time Gypsy spent in the Greene County Jail prior to her prison sentence also counted toward her overall sentence.
Life in Prison
According to a Springfield News-Leader article, Gypsy spent her time in Missouri’s Chillicothe Correctional Center working on earning her GED; assisting screenwriter turned family friend Franchesca Macelli in research for By Proxy, a proposed scripted series about her case; and making friends through the prison pen pal program.
Her stepmother, Kristy Blanchard, told thepublication in 2018 that Gypsy was “thriving” in prison. “Despite everything, she still tells me that she’s happier now than with her mom. And that if she had a choice to either be in jail, or back with her mom, she would rather be in jail. For Gypsy, it’s a lot of freedom,” her stepmother said.
Husband
Gypsy has been married to Ryan Scott Anderson since June 27, 2022, though the marriage was officially recorded on July 21 of that year. The two met when Anderson reached out to share his sympathy with Gypsy after watching Mommy Dead and Dearest. “The emails turned into visits, which turned into a friendship, that later turned into more than a friendship,” family friend Franchesca Macelli said in an interview with In Touch. “At the beginning of this year, they decided to get engaged.”
Prior to meeting Anderson, Gypsy was briefly engaged to a man known only as Ken, who she met through her prison’s pen pal program. They got engaged in April 2019, though her stepmother confirmed Gypsy and Ken hadcalled off the engagement two months later.
Macelli said in a 2021 In Touch article that Gypsy had dated multiple men from behind bars. “I’m afraid she’ll meet someone and marry him. These are guys from the support groups, the Gypsy support groups. They attached themselves to Gypsy, and a lot of them just want fame. One of the guys was 20 years older; they’ve already broken up,” Macelli said.
Release Date
Gypsy’s father, stepmom, and a community of supporters, unsuccessfully pushed for Missouri’s governor to pardon Gypsy after she was sentenced to 10 years for second-degree murder.
In September 2023, the communications director for the Missouri Department of Corrections confirmed to In Touch that Gypsy had been granted parole and would be released early on December 28, 2023. After serving 85 percent of her 10-year sentence, Gypsy was released from Chillicothe Correctional Center around 3:30 that morning. Her husband, Ryan, picked her up from the facility.
Movies and TV Shows about Gypsy Rose
Gypsy’s case was thrust into the spotlight following a 2016 BuzzFeed News article titled “Dee Dee Wanted her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered” and quickly went on to inspire a number of documentaries and scripted series.
HBO’s documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest debuted in May 2017 and was followed by a 2017 Dr. Phil episode called “Mother Knows Best: A Story of Munchausen by Proxy and Murder,” both of which featured interviews with Gypsy.
Good Morning America and James Patterson’s Murder is Forever Investigation Discovery series released episodes about the case in 2018. That same year, ABC aired Gypsy’s first network interview from prison in a special episode of 20/20 called “The Story of Gypsy Blanchard.”
The Act, a Hulu series based on Michelle Dean’s BuzzFeed News article, first aired in March 2019 and earned actor Joey King an Emmy nod for her performance as Gypsy. Patricia Arquette took home an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Dee Dee. Although it was critically acclaimed, Gypsy dubbed the series“unfair” and “unprofessional” for using her real name and story without her consent. “There will be legal action taken against the show’s creators,” Gypsy told Bustle via email. No information is publicly available about whether Gypsy pursued legal action or the status of any resulting litigation.
Lifetime’s Love You to Death billed itself as “inspired by true events,” though used different character names. Sony Entertainment Television’s CID released an episode called “Death on Social Media,” which was inspired by the case, and Netflix’s The Politician also featured characters based on Gypsy, Godejohn, and Dee Dee.
Lifetime also released a 6-hour tell-all interview special called The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard on January 5, 2024. Gypsy is currently working with Macelli on a scripted series based on her life story, tentatively titled By Proxy.
Quotes
The prison that I was living in before, with my mom, 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. Over here, I feel like I’m freer in prison than with living with my mom. Because now, I’m allowed to… just live like a normal woman.
I was so young, so me looking up to her so much and just believing she knows best —I didn’t question it. It’s sad, because I think about all the times that I could have been walking around like a normal person, skating, riding bikes and stuff, and I’ve never done any of that.
All I could hope is that wherever she is, that she still loves me in some small way. And I want her to know that I am sorry. I am so sorry.
It was not because I hated her. It was because I wanted to escape her.
I believe firmly that, no matter what, murder is not okay. But at the same time, I don’t believe I deserve as many years as I got.
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