After making international headlines when she and her boyfriend Nick Godejohn murdered her mother Dee Dee Blanchard, Gypsy Rose Blanchard will be getting out of prison early. Gypsy was charged with second-degree murder after pleading guilty to the crime. Godejohn is currently serving a life sentence for the murder.
TMZ is reporting that Blanchard, 32, will be released on Dec. 28 – a full three years before her original sentencing date. Blanchard is about seven years in to a 10-year-sentence.
The story behind the killing was so bizarre that it spawned not only a HBO documentary called Mommy Dead and Dearest but also a scripted show called The Act starring Joey King as Gypsy and Patricia Arquette as the mother Dee Dee.
Why the murder? Since Gypsy was a baby, Dee Dee continuously claimed that her daughter had a number of ailments. Those ailments included sleep apnea, seizures, visual problems, hearing issues and more. Gypsy was subjected to numerous surgeries that included removing her salivary glands and an operation on her eyes.
Her teeth rotted and they were removed. Gypsy was presented as a sickly, bald child who couldn’t walk, needed a feeding tube, and had cancer. The truth was that Gypsy was only bald because her mother shaved her head.
She didn’t need a feeding tube or a wheelchair. Her mother may have been suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a disorder where someone fakes ill health for attention – in this case it was her daughter.
When they saw a doctor that disagreed with Dee Dee or showed contradictory results, Dee Dee would find a new doctor. As Gypsy got older, it became harder and harder to control her.
Dee Dee accepted all kinds of gifts and perks for her daughter, like trips to Disney World and a fully furnished house from Habitat for Humanity. Gypsy ran away in 2011 after she met a man online, but her mother tracked her down and convinced the man she was a minor, even though her real age was 19.
She eventually met Godejohn on a Christian dating site. She asked him to kill her mother and he came to her house in June 2015 and stabbed Dee Dee to death. Gypsy waited in her room with her ears covered.
In an interview on the Dr. Phil show, Gypsy revealed that she prefers prison to living with her mother. She’ll soon get to experience an all new type of freedom altogether.
