Dear Vanessa
There’s no excuse for taking a life. But it seems there are many, many reasons. And for this ruthless bunch, it was R-E-V-E-N-G-E…
‘Mummy’s little invalid’
Gypsy Rose Blanchard smiled in her wheelchair. Bald and painfully thin, the youngster looked deathly ill. Beside her was her everloving mother, Clauddine ‘Dee Dee’ Blanchard.
Her full face and thick, dark hair belied the endless sleepless nights she must have with a daughter so unwell.
Gypsy had cancer, muscular dystrophy and a host of other ailments. As if life hadn’t been cruel enough, the family had lost everything in Hurricane Katrina.
Moving to Aurora, Missouri, the pair became local celebrities. A charity built them a house with a wheelchair ramp and a hot tub. Others sent them on trips to Disney and medical specialists reached out to help.
When one ran tests, he found no reason she couldn’t walk.
By 2010, Gypsy finally knew the dark truth too. Her conditions were all her mother’s elaborate fake to get money and attention. Dee Dee had convinced the world – and her own daughter – that Gypsy was sick by tricking doctors into performing unnecessary surgeries, prescribing medicine and installing a feeding tube.
She’d also insisted Gypsy sit in a wheelchair and told her she was shaving her head as her hair would fall out anyway.
Gypsy’s mother told everyone that she was 14 but had the mental age of seven. In reality, Gypsy was 19 and perfectly fine.
Gypsy tried to run away, but her mother found her. Then she found the internet, a way to escape her twisted existence…
In 2012 she met 23-year-old Nicholas Godejohn online. Through Facebook messages, the two planned how Gypsy would free herself for good. In June 2015 Gypsy Rose Blanchard let her boyfriend into the house while her mother was asleep, handing him duct tape, gloves and a knife.
Blanchard hid in the bathroom as Godejohn stabbed Dee Dee, 48, as she slept. The two then had sex, stole $4,000 (£3,200) of Dee Dee’s cash and fled.
Initially investigators worried Gypsy had been taken by the murderer. When police tracked the couple, though, it was clear she was in on the killing.
But, after medical records proved the lifelong ordeal she’d endured, the court offered a deal. Blanchard was sentenced to 10 years in prison for second-
degree murder in June 2015.
In February 2019, Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder.
Still behind bars, Blanchard has been pictured happy and smiling, with long hair flowing. Of her mother, Gypsy says: ‘I trusted her so much. She told me that she loved me, that she was trying to protect me. The only person I needed protection from was her.’