Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was He was just released from prison In her mother’s murder, she revealed in a new docu-series that she was once shot in their home — even before she met the boyfriend with whom she conspired to stab her mother to death in 2015.
Years of abuse from her mother It made Blanchard increasingly desperate to escape her home, she says in interviews filmed for the Lifetime documentary series “Confessions of a Gypsy Rose Blanchard.” Her mother is believed to have suffered from an artificial disorder imposed on another person, 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 non-existent illnesses.
Courtesy of the Blanchard family
As Blanchard grew older and sought independence, her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, became more domineering, she said.
Dee Dee said her daughter suffers from epilepsy, leukemia and muscular dystrophy, which forced her to use a feeding tube, shave her head and remain in a wheelchair. Blanchard said she could walk unaided but publicly approved of her mother’s stunt. She said that in 2011, when she ran away to be with a man she met at a science fiction and fantasy convention, her mother brought her home and tied her to a bed for two weeks. Then Dee Dee bought a gun.
“That one always scared 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 suitcase and confronted her. She says Blanchard grabbed the gun and threatened her mother with it.
“And before I knew it, I pulled the trigger as many times as I could.”
Blanchard shot her 10 times. It was only when she saw that her mother’s wounds were superficial that she realized it was a BB gun and not a lethal gun.
After the shooting, Dee Dee told another lie to gain more sympathy: she said she had been shot by a robber who was holding her captive. In the Walmart parking lot.
Blanchard said she was relieved she didn’t kill her mother, but she was also angry.
Courtesy of the Blanchard family
“Why won’t you let me live a normal life? Why is my life this way to begin with?” Blanchard said she asked her mother after the shooting. “She kept repeating that she was taking care of me and that I needed special care.”
Blanchard says she felt defeated.
“My mother was so manipulative that she was able to make me submissive again.”
When she met Nick Godejohn about a year later on a Christian dating site, Blanchard thought she had found her “Prince Charming.” Eventually, she comes to see her mother as the villain in their fairytale romance—and that the only way she can escape her manipulation is to kill her.
Godejohn went to Blanchard’s home in Springfield, Missouri, on June 9, 2015, and stabbed Dee Dee. Gypsy Rose, who says she cowered in the bathroom during the crime, 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 knew asking for help would have made things worse with her mother. And she may have been right: The manager of a movie theater frequented by the Blanchards said she wasn’t sure she would have believed Gypsy Rose because her mother told people the girl was “mentally disabled.”
“It felt real,” the director says in an interview with “Prison confessions.It seemed really real. So I don’t know if I should believe her, and it hurts my heart. really no.”