Exactly one year after being released from prison for the murder of her mother, Gypsy Rose Blanchard begins a new life: herself as a mother.
Blanchard, 33, and her partner Ken Urker, 31, named their baby girl, born on December 28 and revealed to the world on January 1, Aurora.
Surely Blanchard must hope that this new chapter will help him leave his dark past behind. But sadly, it’s likely to raise more questions, including one that will inevitably haunt her for the rest of her life: How could she have decided to kill her own mother?
‘People really want to know: What was the straw that broke the camel’s back? When was the moment I decided it was her or me? Blanchard, 33, writes in her memoir, ‘My Time To Stand.’
‘A month before the murder, my mother tried to slit my throat. At least that’s how I saw it,” he says.
Blanchard was 24 when she and a man she met on a Christian dating website conspired to kill her mother Claudine ‘Dee Dee’ Blanchard, 48, in June 2015.
At the time of the murder, those who knew her believed that Gypsy Rose was a young woman with a severe disability and developmental disorder who was confined to a wheelchair and dependent on her mother for care.
So when police found Dee Dee dead in her Springfield, Missouri, home with 17 stab wounds to her neck and back and Gypsy missing, they assumed she was a victim too.
Blanchard, 33, and her partner Ken Urker, 31, named their baby girl, born on December 28 and revealed to the world on January 1, Aurora.
Surely Blanchard must hope that this new chapter will help him leave his dark past behind. But sadly, it’s likely to raise more questions, including one that will inevitably haunt her for the rest of her life: How could she have decided to kill her own mother? (Gypsy is pictured with her mother Dee Dee.)
‘People really want to know: What was the straw that broke the camel’s back? When was the moment I decided it was her or me? Blanchard, 33, writes in her memoir, ‘My Time To Stand.’ (Pictured here in May 2024.)
But then authorities traced a suspicious message posted on Dee Dee’s Facebook page after the murder to the IP address of a computer and a home 575 miles away in Big Bend, Wisconsin. There they found Blanchard and Nicholas Godejohn, 29, his accomplice.
They discovered that Blanchard was not sick or disabled. In fact, he was an accessory to a cold-blooded crime.
The shocking realization triggered the unveiling of the mystery of her mother’s twisted lies.
From Blanchard’s earliest childhood, Dee Dee had told everyone that her daughter suffered from a litany of ailments ranging from leukemia to epilepsy.
He convinced surgeons to perform unnecessary procedures on Blanchard. There was surgery to remove his salivary gland. Doctors surgically inserted a feeding tube into her stomach, reducing her diet to a measly squirt of Pedialyte that Dee Dee rationed herself. And Dee Dee even regularly shaved Gypsy Rose’s head to mimic the look of chemotherapy patients.
Perhaps Dee Dee’s cruelest ruse was convincing people that Blanchard was a quadriplegic by forcing her daughter to use a wheelchair at all times, even when they were home alone.
Privately, he would hit Blanchard with his hands or a coat hanger for minor infractions such as getting out of his wheelchair in the bathroom or for speaking directly to a doctor.
Having no reason to distrust her mother, Blanchard also believed that she was not well. She went along with many of the false diagnoses and operations, gratefully receiving local media attention and even gifts from charities.
Habitat for Humanity built them a custom home in Springfield, complete with a wheelchair ramp, after their home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
But as the years passed, a nagging fear gripped Blanchard: She didn’t actually feel sick.
She is now one of the best-known victims of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a rare psychological disorder in which a caregiver creates the illusion of illness in another person.
From Blanchard’s earliest childhood, Dee Dee had told everyone that her daughter suffered from a litany of ailments ranging from leukemia to epilepsy.
Dee Dee convinced surgeons to perform unnecessary procedures on Blanchard. There was surgery to remove his salivary gland. Doctors surgically inserted a feeding tube into her stomach, reducing her diet to a measly squirt of Pedialyte that Dee Dee rationed herself.
They discovered that Blanchard was not sick or disabled. In fact, he was an accessory to a cold-blooded crime. (He appears here in his 2015 mugshot.)
After enduring up to 30 surgeries, Blanchard says she became suspicious of her mother.
On one occasion, when he was two years old, he tried to sneak out in the middle of the night to be with Godejohn. But Dee Dee tracked them down and dragged Blanchard home, chaining her to the bed for two weeks.
But as Blanchard got older, she became harder to control, and after Dee Dee planned another particularly invasive exploratory procedure on Blanchard’s throat in May 2015, she says, something inside her broke.
“I had had previous neck surgeries and the scars brutalized me,” he writes. ‘But there was something about this particular surgery that seemed more threatening than the others. Even more than all the other parts of the body that had been constantly searched, explored, against my will, without my consent.
‘The way I saw it, my literal voice… they could take me away. His last play. Any slip of my hand could leave me voiceless, mute, forever. This is what I believed. That’s when the thought finally came to me: It’s her or me.
After pleading with her mother to cancel the surgery, Gypsy fell into a state of desperation and took three of her mother’s oxycodone pills (to which she was by then addicted) to numb her feelings.
Then he turned to Godejohn.
They had met three years earlier on the website christiandatingforfree.com.
Godejohn, 35, was a disturbed man who played out his depraved sexual fantasies online with Gypsy. He told her that he had an alter ego, a 500-year-old vampire named Victor who could carry out the murder.
“Victor,” Godejohn claimed, wanted to rape Dee Dee before violently murdering her, but Blanchard rejected that scenario and proposed another.
“He could rape me when he was done,” Blanchard writes of her plan. ‘He would leave her body in his bed. Then we would sneak off to Wisconsin to live a quiet life,” Blanchard writes.
And they agreed on the night it should happen: June 9, 2015.
When Dee Dee fell asleep at 1:30 a.m., Blanchard texted Godejohn and he took a cab home, putting on a pair of surgical gloves she had left by the back door.
Nicholas Godejohn (pictured in his 2015 mugshot) was a disturbed man who played out his depraved sexual fantasies online with Gypsy. He told her that he had an alter ego, a 500-year-old vampire named Victor who could carry out the murder.
Once inside, Blanchard handed her a knife and then took three Vicodins, went to the bathroom and covered her ears while Godejohn stabbed Dee Dee while she slept in her bed.
Some of the cuts were so deep they nearly decapitated her.
“I just heard the screams,” Gypsy writes, “I lay down in the fetal position with my hands pressed tightly over my ears.” But I could still hear things. “Arrest!” I heard her say. “Enough, enough, please. Enough.”‘
‘There was a pause in the stabbing. And then it sounded like she had blood pooling in her mouth because I heard her gargle and say, “Gypsy. Gypsy.”‘
‘Completely naked, I opened the (bathroom) door for him. And he was standing there with the knife in his hand. “It was wrapped in a paper towel,” Blanchard writes.
Godejohn ordered him to go to his bedroom where Blanchard says he raped her. Although Godejohn was never charged with rape, Blanchard testified at trial that it was consensual sex.
Godejohn was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Blanchard pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, serving more than seven years before being released on parole late last December.
“No one will ever hear me say that I’m glad she’s dead or that I’m proud of what I did,” Blanchard told People shortly before her release. ‘I regret it every day.
‘She didn’t deserve that. She was a sick woman and, unfortunately, I was not educated enough to see it. She deserved to be where I am, in prison serving time for criminal conduct.