The final straw that made Gypsy Rose Blanchard choose to have her mum killed has been revealed.
Gypsy Rose, 32, grew up with her mother Dee Dee Blanchard – who made false claims about her daughter’s health.
This included having sleep apnea as a baby, leukaemia and muscular dystrophy – which resulted in her being fed through a tube and requiring a wheelchair – asthma, hearing and visual impairments, as well as other false diagnoses.
With every aspect of her life being controlled by her mother, Gypsy Rose secretly met Nicholas Godejohn through a Christian dating site in 2012.
She would go on to tell him the truth about her experiences and eventually, she’d ask him to kill her mum.
So in June 2015, Godejohn travelled to the Blanchard family home and stabbed Dee Dee in her bedroom while Gypsy Rose waited in the bathroom, covering her ears.
After the killing, the couple ran away together to his home in Wisconsin. However, they were eventually found by police.
Gypsy Rose pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 2016 and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Godejohn was found guilty of first-degree murder in 2019 and was sentenced to life in prison.
Gypsy Rose would only serve 85 per cent of her sentence before being released on December 28, 2023, as per TMZ.
In an exclusive interview with People, the now 32-year-old has opened up about her mother’s murder and what was going through her mind at the time.
“It was panic, desperation,” she recalled. “Because I was facing yet another surgery pretty soon, and I really did not want to have the surgery.”
The surgery Gypsy Rose was set to undergo was on her neck, as there were concerns about why her voice was so high – doctors were apparently attributing it ‘to maybe a breathing issue’.
She said that at this point, she ‘was just not having it’.
However, there was ‘no debating’ with Dee Dee and after having enough, she considered all options of how she could escape – before deciding her only choice was murder.
Experts believe Dee Dee had a mental illness known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy – in which a person acts as if an individual he or she is caring for has a physical or mental illness when the person is not really sick, as per the Cleveland Clinic.
Biography reported that Dee Dee had had some nurse’s training, so she could accurately describe symptoms and give Gypsy Rose medication to mimic certain conditions – especially if doctors questioned her daughter’s supposed illnesses.
By all accounts, Dee Dee was also charming and seemed devoted to her daughter’s health, so no one suspected anything.
Dr Marc Feldman, an expert in Munchausen syndrome, claims that Gypsy Rose’s experiences and actions were similar to a hostage situation.
He explains: “The control was total in the same sense that the control of a kidnapped victim sometimes is total.
“Her daughter was, in essence, a hostage, and I think we can understand the crime that occurred subsequently in terms of a hostage trying to gain escape.”
Elsewhere in her interview with People, Gypsy Rose said she regrets her choice ‘every single day’.
She added that if she could go back in time, she would tell someone the truth about what was really happening to her.
“Nobody will ever hear me say I’m glad she’s dead or I’m proud of what I did,” she commented. “I regret it every single day.”
