FATAL FAMILY SECRETS A doco explores how a girl everyone thought was disabled and dying plotted to kill her mother to escape a life of lies.
A documentary explores how a girl everyone thought was disabled and dying plotted to kill her mother to escape a life of lies
As police entered the pink-and-white threebedroom house shared by divorced woman Dee Dee Blanchard and her petite teenage daughter, Gypsy Rose, they had no idea what they might find. Dee Dee was known around their quiet suburb in Springfield, Missouri, as a caring, devoted mother to Gypsy—a frail but sweet toothless girl whose myriad health problems required her to use a wheelchair. Responding to calls on June 14, 2015, from concerned friends who had seen a foreboding Facebook post on a profile shared by the mother and daughter that read, “That Bitch is dead!” police found the body of Dee Dee face-down in a pool of blood on the bed she shared with her daughter. Gypsy was nowhere to be found, her two wheelchairs still at the house. An alert was dispatched to locate the girl. “We thought she was abducted,” says Greene County sheriff Jim Arnott. “But everything we had been told began to unravel.”
The truth would shock authorities—and the community that had embraced the Blanchards since they’d arrived claiming to be Hurricane Katrina victims who had lost everything. The twisted saga is laid bare in the documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest. For 18 months, director Erin Lee Carr immersed herself in the case and everything police uncovered: the day after Dee Dee’s body was found, Gypsy was located, safe, with her boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, more than 800km away at his home in Wisconsin. Relief soon gave way to shock: Gypsy, who Dee Dee had said was terminally ill, suffering from leukaemia, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, chromosomal defects and other ailments, could walk. Not only that, she was a 23-yearold and not the teenager Dee Dee claimed she was. Police also found the “little girl” everyone had been told had the mental capacity of a 7-year-old actually had the very adult brainpower to plot her mother’s murder with Godejohn, 26, a man she’d met and formed a romantic relationship with online. The two had even tried to cover their tracks by mailing
themselves the bloody knife used to kill Dee Dee, 48. “You think it’s about a girl who fell in love or a girl trapped in a wheelchair for 17 years,” Carr says. “I spent days looking through Gypsy’s medical records. All of it was bizarre.”
Even as Gypsy is serving the 10-year prison term she received after pleading guilty to second-degree murder, Godejohn is awaiting trial on murder charges of his own, arguing he killed Dee Dee to free Gypsy from being held captive by her mother, forced to go through needless painful medical procedures and trapped in a wheelchair though she could walk. It’s a defence that just might work. Experts say they believe Gypsy is a victim of Munchausen by Proxy, a form of child abuse occurring when a parent exaggerates or induces illness in a child for attention and sympathy. Authorities also believe fraud was a motive for Dee Dee’s torture of her daughter: she received a home built by Habitat for Humanity as well as trips to Disney World paid for by nonprofit foundations.
Born healthy, Gypsy was a smiling, happy baby, says her father, Rod, who met Dee Dee in high school. The couple married but separated before Gypsy was born. Dee Dee claimed that by age 3 months, Gypsy had stopped breathing at night—and Gypsy’s lifelong trips to the hospital began. Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, but Dee Dee insisted. As new “medical issues” were discovered, she became more immersed in caring for Gypsy’s “special needs” and moved away, telling Rod he could only rarely see his daughter because he couldn’t care for a child with so many health complications. “It was a masterpiece of disguise,” says Rod, who is remarried, to wife of 18 years Kristy. “It was the perfect opportunity to control Gypsy.”
Key to Dee Dee’s deception was the well-known fact that many people lost medical records in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, something Dee Dee used to explain Gypsy’s lack of documentation. She also didn’t keep Gypsy under the care of one doctor for too long and gave her medications to mimic the symptoms of the diseases she claimed Gypsy had. She shaved Gypsy’s head to make it look as if chemo treatments were causing her hair to fall out. “With the internet you can become more knowledgeable than your doctor is,” says Munchausen by Proxy expert Dr Marc Feldman. “It may have seemed to Gypsy nothing short of death could help her escape.”
As she serves her prison time, Gypsy looks forward to living with her father, Rod, and stepmother, Kristy, in Louisiana and enjoying simple things like walking outside and lying in the grass. “Eventually she wants to help people who have been abused,” says Rod. “But right now, she would like to just get out ... and see what’s out there.”
‘I felt the excitement of being free, and of walking. I was free’ —Gypsy Blanchard