Gypsy Rose Blanchard, whose plot to kill her own mother spawned multiple true-crime series, has been released from prison in the US. After years of psychological and physical abuse, Blanchard convinced her boyfriend to stab her mother to death.
Blanchard walked out of Chillicothe Correctional Center in Missouri in the early hours of Thursday morning, having served seven years of a ten-year sentence for second-degree murder.
Blanchard pleaded guilty to the second-degree charge in 2015, admitting that she persuaded her boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, to kill her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. The then-23-year-old provided Godejohn with the knife used in the crime, before the pair fled Missouri to Wisconsin.
While Godejohn was charged with first-degree murder, prosecutors declined to pin this more serious charge on Blanchard, after it emerged during an investigation that she had suffered years of abuse at the hands of her mother.
Dee Dee Blanchard, it came out, had falsified her daughter’s birth certificate to make it seem that she was younger than she was, falsely claimed that Gypsy Rose had the mental age of a seven-year-old, and falsely claimed that she suffered from a litany of ailments, including muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, cancer, and vision impairment.
It is widely believed that Dee Dee Blanchard suffered from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a mental-health disorder in which a caregiver – typically a parent – creates the appearance of health problems in another person.
Dee Dee kept Gypsy Rose underfed and hooked up to oxygen and a feeding tube, while running crowdfunding campaigns to raise money for her daughter’s unnecessary treatments. Gypsy Rose Blanchard was subjected to several of these surgeries, which included the removal of her salivary glands.
“I feel like I’m more free in prison than living with my mom,” Blanchard said in a 2018 interview, “because now I’m allowed to just live like a normal woman.”
Blanchard’s story drew international attention after BuzzFeed published a long-form feature on the case in 2016. A HBO documentary was released in 2017, which was followed by a feature-length dramatization on Lifetime and an eight-episode miniseries on Hulu in 2019. Another series, ‘The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard’ will air on Lifetime in January.
Godejohn was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2018. Speaking at her former lover’s trial, Blanchard told the court that she “talked him into it.”