Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was just released from prison in the killing of her mother, revealed in a new docuseries that she once shot her at their home — before she had even met the boyfriend with whom she conspired to fatally stab her mom in 2015.
Years of abuse from her mother made Blanchard increasingly desperate to escape her household, she says in interviews filmed for the Lifetime docuseries “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.” Her mother is believed to have had factitious disorder imposed on another, formerly known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a rare mental condition that led her to subject her daughter to unnecessary and painful medical procedures for nonexistent illnesses.
Courtesy of the Blanchard Family
As Blanchard grew up and sought independence, she said, her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, became more tyrannical.
Dee Dee said her daughter suffered from epilepsy, leukemia and muscular dystrophy, forcing her to use a feeding tube, shaving her head and confining her to a wheelchair. Blanchard said she could walk unassisted but went along with her mother’s ruse in public. In 2011, when she ran away to be with a man she’d met at a science fiction and fantasy convention, her mother brought her home and chained her to the bed for two weeks, she said. And then Dee Dee bought a gun.
“That scared the ever-living ‘f’ out of me,” Blanchard says. “I was afraid that she would kill me. … I was afraid she would do something worse than hitting me or starving 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 pulled the trigger as many times as I could.”
Blanchard shot at her 10 times. Only when she saw that her mother’s wounds were superficial did she realize it was a BB gun and not a deadly handgun.
After the shooting, Dee Dee told another lie to garner more sympathy: She said she’d been shot by a robber who’d held them up in a Walmart parking lot.
Blanchard said she was relieved she hadn’t killed her mother but was also angry.
Courtesy of the Blanchard Family
“Why won’t you let me have a normal life? Why is my life this way to begin with?” Blanchard said she asked her mother after the shooting. “She kept reiterating that she takes care of me and I need special care.”
Blanchard says she felt defeated.
“My mom was such a good master manipulator that she was able to slip me right back into submission again.”
When she met Nick Godejohn about a year later on a Christian dating site, Blanchard thought she’d found her “Prince Charming.” Eventually, she came to see her mother as the villain in their fairy-tale romance — and that the only way she could escape her manipulation would be to kill her.
Godejohn went to the Blanchards’ house in Springfield, Missouri, on June 9, 2015, and stabbed Dee Dee. Gypsy Rose, who says she cowered in a bathroom as the killing took place, then went with him to his home in Wisconsin, where police found them.
Gypsy Rose pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced in 2016 to 10 years in prison. She was released early last month. Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder.
Blanchard says she’d known that asking for help would have made things worse with her mother. And she was probably right: A manager at a movie theater the Blanchards frequented said she wasn’t sure she would have believed Gypsy Rose because her mother had told people the girl was “mentally challenged.”
“It seemed genuine,” the manager says in an interview for “Prison Confessions.” “It really seemed for real. So I don’t know if I would have [believed her]and that hurts my heart. It really does.”
