Gypsy Rose Blanchard, just released from prison for her mother's murder, reveals in a new documentary that she once shot her dead in her home – before she even met the boyfriend with whom she conspired to kill her in 2015 fatally stabbing mother.
Years of abuse from her mother left Blanchard increasingly desperate to escape her household, she says in interviews filmed for the Lifetime docuseries “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.” It is believed that her mother was given a factitious disorder formerly known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. This was a rare mental illness that resulted in her subjecting her daughter to unnecessary and painful medical procedures for non-existent medical conditions.
Open Image ModalGypsy Rose Blanchard opened up about her mother's abuse and the role she played in her mother's murder on Lifetime's “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.”
Courtesy of the Blanchard family
As Blanchard grew up and sought independence, her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, became more and more tyrannical, she said.
Dee Dee said her daughter suffers from epilepsy, leukemia and muscular dystrophy, forcing her to use a feeding tube, shave her head and confine her to a wheelchair. Blanchard said she could walk without help, but publicly went along with her mother's ruse. When she ran away in 2011 to be with a man she met at a science fiction and fantasy convention, her mother took her home and chained her to the bed for two weeks, she said. And then Dee Dee bought a gun.
“That scared the hell out of me,” Blanchard says. “I was afraid she would kill me. … I was afraid she would do something worse than beat me or starve me.”
Blanchard decided to run away again, but her mother found her packed bag and confronted her. Blanchard grabbed the gun, she says, and threatened her mother with it.
“And before I knew it, I was pulling the trigger as many times as I could.”
Blanchard shot her ten times. It was only when she saw that her mother's wounds were superficial that she realized it was an air pistol and not a lethal handgun.
After the shooting, Dee Dee told another lie to garner more sympathy: She said she was shot by a robber who ambushed her in a Walmart parking lot.
Blanchard said she was relieved she didn't kill her mother, but also angry.
Open Image ModalGypsy Rose Blanchard says her mother Dee Dee forced her to use a wheelchair even though she could walk on her own.
Courtesy of the Blanchard family
“Why don’t you let me live a normal life? “Why is my life like this to begin with?” Blanchard said she asked her mother about the shooting. “She kept repeating that she cared for me and that I needed special care.”
Blanchard says she felt defeated.
“My mother was such a good manipulator that she managed to beat me right back into submission.”
When she met Nick Godejohn on a Christian dating website about a year later, Blanchard thought she had found her “Prince Charming.” Eventually, she came to the conclusion that her mother was the villain in their fairytale romance – and that the only way to escape her manipulation was to kill her.
Godejohn went to the Blanchards' home in Springfield, Missouri, on June 9, 2015, and stabbed Dee Dee. Gypsy Rose, who says she was cowering in a toilet during the murder, then went with him to his home in Wisconsin, where police found her.
Gypsy Rose pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2016. She was released early last month. Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder.
Blanchard says she knew asking for help would have made her mother's situation worse. And she was probably right: A manager at a movie theater the Blanchards frequented said she wasn't sure she believed Gypsy Rose because her mother had told people the girl was “mentally disabled.”
“It seemed real,” the manager said in an interview for Prison Confessions. “It seemed really real. So I don't know if I would have done it [believed her], and that hurts my heart. It really does.”
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