Gypsy Blanchard’s motive for convincing Godejohn – who she met online three years before the murder – to kill her mum was because she wanted “to escape her”.
Dee Dee Blanchard had abused her daughter for years by convincing Gypsy and the public that her daughter was extremely sick when she wasn’t.
It was this apparent case of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome, a rare form of abuse in which a guardian exaggerates or induces illness in a child for attention and sympathy, that also explains the interest and mixed emotions that continue to surround the sorry story almost 10 years on.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard served seven years for the second- degree murder of her abusive mother Dee Dee. Photo / Supplied
After leaving prison, Gypsy Blanchard – now 34 – was catapulted into instant influencer status, amassing tens of millions of followers across TikTok and Instagram.
Despite pulling back from social media, claiming the public scrutiny made her feel like she was in “a different form of prison”, discourse around the case is at an all-time high after new videos were released.
The clips, released on YouTube by the Into the Weeds Podcast, show alleged video messages exchanged between Gypsy Blanchard and Godejohn during the course of their online relationship.
In one newly released video, Blanchard appears to be on a couch wearing a red strappy dress, and a brown curly wig.
She can be seen talking directly to Godejohn about their fantasy life together in which she bizarrely describes him as a vampire, and her wedding hopes.
Blanchard also talks in great detail about how the pair are “intertwined” and makes graphic references to “making love as vampire and human” as well as “master and slave”.
But things take a turn when she mentions the kids they may one day go on to have together.
“The plan for if we have a boy first, we’re going to protect him and our children from the outside world, because they can’t know about you being a vampire,” she states, according to the video.
“If we have a girl, the way it has to be, she has to lose her virginity to you because you are the master of the household.
“I will have to explain that to her when she’s of an age where it’s time to explain it, like not when she’s 7, more like around 13.”
Other clips show Blanchard seemingly playing an array of characters, each differentiated by various wigs, and filmed in a number of locations in the house where the pair would later go on to murder her mother.
Social media has erupted at the clips, which have since flooded TikTok, with many describing the clips as “unseen evidence” from the case.
The “never before seen” videos, which according to the documents cost US$786 ($1362) to access, followed a lengthy FOIA process with Missouri officials.
Not all of the videos, of which there are more than 100, were released, with a records custodian stating “there are select videos that we are unable to release because of the “nonconsensual dissemination of private sexual images” that included imagery of “intimate parts”.
TikTok has exploded following the release of the footage, with many poring over the tiniest details, such as one noting Blanchard appeared to be wearing a hospital band in one clip.
Before plotting her mother’s death, Blanchard was confined to a wheelchair and survived on a feeding tube.
She also had a long list of medical conditions, including “chromosomal defects, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, severe asthma, sleep apnoea, eye problems”.
But during Gypsy’s court case, it emerged “Dee Dee forced her to take medication that she didn’t need and undergo medical procedures that were not necessary”.
The medication caused Blanchard’s teeth to fall out, while she did not go to school.
Prosecutor Dan Patterson acknowledged the abuse after offering Blanchard, then 24, a plea deal.
“When you look at this case, it’s a murder. And it’s a first-degree murder,” Patterson said at the time. “But it’s also one of the most extraordinary and unusual cases we have seen.”
Prior to her brutal death, Dee Dee, a single mum, appeared every part the doting mother.
As fulltime carer to Gypsy, her only child with her ex, Rod Blanchard, she seemingly did everything for her.
Friends described their bond as “perfect”. Gypsy herself even once compared their relationship to “a pair of shoes” because they were “never good without the other”.
Between hospital visits, Gypsy and Dee Dee would fly across the country to concerts, galas, celebrity meet-and-greets, and even to Disney World with expenses paid by charity organisations.
But Dee Dee had fabricated all of her daughter’s medical issues.
In fact, Gypsy later revealed “the only thing I had wrong with me is I have a little bit of a lazy eye”, during an interview with ABC’s 20/20 in 2018.
As a baby, Gypsy led a relatively normal existence. But despite being a “vibrant toddler who was full of energy”, Dee Dee soon began “saying that [Gypsy] was sick and had problems sleeping”, Rod Blanchard told 20/20.
“It just progressed from there.”
After the couple split, Rod Blanchard said he continued to visit Gypsy but was never able to spend time alone with his daughter.
“All the visits, Dee Dee had to be there the whole time,” he recalled. “Something never felt right about it. Dee Dee was so controlling.”
By the time Gypsy was 8, Rod Blanchard had been told she was suffering with “leukaemia and muscular dystrophy”. The conditions were supposed to have left the little girl “paralysed” and requiring a wheelchair and a feeding tube.
Gypsy Blanchard said she had plotted to have her mother killed because she ‘wanted to escape’. Photo / Supplied
Within a few years the “lie” had ballooned, so much so, that when their home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Dee Dee and Gypsy had a new house built for them by Habitat for Humanity that came complete with a wheelchair ramp.
“People felt sorry for me,” Gypsy Blanchard told KSDK. “They believed the lie, they believed the fraud.”
But Blanchard said the false life her mother had created left her feeling “like a prisoner”.
“The prison that I was living in before, with my mum, 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,” she said, according to Fox News.
Things only changed when she met Godejohn on a Christian dating website in 2012 and began opening up about realising she wasn’t really sick.
“It was almost like love at first sight,” Nicholas would later say of Gypsy in a chat with ABC News. “I just connected instantly with [her].”
Gypsy reportedly was keen for her mother to “approve” of her new love, and after three years of them talking online, arranged for a meeting in March 2015 at the movies.
Dee Dee didn’t like Gypsy’s new boyfriend, but that didn’t stop the pair from sneaking off during the film to have sex, according to a report by Refinery29.
For a few days, Gypsy, then 19, and Godejohn, 26, spent time together doing normal things, including a shopping trip to Walmart where the murder weapon was reportedly stolen.
But the tensions proved too much for Blanchard who admitted she “talked [Godejohn] into it [the murder plot]”.
On the fateful night, Blanchard let Godejohn in their Missouri home and gave him duct tape, gloves and the knife.
She hid in the bathroom while Godejohn stabbed her mum in the back as she slept.
The pair then had sex, stole US$4000 in cash and fled to a motel nearby.
After the murder was exposed, the community was left reeling, but one of Blanchard’s former neurologists testified he was suspicious of Dee Dee, and lodged an official concern which stated: “I believe that the mother suffers from Munchausen by proxy”, E! News reported.
In addition, a 2009 police report obtained by 20/20 showed that another doctor alerted authorities when he “could not find any symptoms that support what Dee Dee alleges to be wrong with her daughter”.
Despite being locked up, Blanchard’s stepmother told media in 2018 she was happier than ever behind bars.
While behind bars, she got married but following her release the pair separated and she went on to have a daughter named Aurora Urker, with her now-boyfriend, Ken Urker.
While Blanchard begins her new life, Godejohn – who has autism – is still serving out a life sentence after being found guilty, the Springfield News-Leader reported.
He was also sentenced to an additional 25 years for armed criminal action and is not eligible for parole.
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