Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the main character in a bizarre tale of abuse and murder who was convicted of conspiring to kill her mother, was released early from prison Thursday.
Blanchard, now 32, served 85% of a 10-year sentence for second-degree murder and is on parole, as Karen Pojmann, a spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Corrections, stated to NBC 5 DFW.
In 2016, Blanchard pleaded guilty to playing a pivotal role with her then-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, in the slaying of her mother, Claudine “Dee Dee” Blanchard. Blanchard had met Godejohn on a Christian dating website and, after dating for two years, persuaded him to kill her mother.
“I wanted to be free of her hold on me,” Blanchard testified during Godejohn’s trial in 2018, which concluded with Godejohn being convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life behind bars.
Overall, the story of Blanchard and her mother provided considerable fodder for tabloid writers and television producers.
Blanchard’s defense attorney, Michael Stanfield, explained that Dee Dee suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy. She allegedly duped everyone — including doctors — into believing her daughter was seriously ill in a bid to earn attention and sympathy, as well as charitable gifts ranging from cash to a trip to Disney World.
Dee Dee’s physical abuse of her daughter was said to include manipulating physicians into performing unnecessary procedures on her, such as outfitting her with a feeding tube and removing her salivary glands, keeping her malnourished to appear frail, weak, and younger than her age, and chaining her to the bed once she began to act out, according to the allegations the defense made in court.
Blanchard began to suspect that she wasn’t as sick as her mother led others to believe, which set things in motion for her plot to have Godejohn kill her mother. Blanchard supplied the knife and waited in the bathroom of the house she shared with her mother as Godejohn stabbed Dee Dee to death, per the arrest records. The couple was later arrested in Wisconsin, Godejohn’s home state, and convicted of murder.
No longer an inmate at Chillicothe Correctional Center in Missouri, Blanchard joins her husband, Ryan Scott Anderson, a 37-year-old teacher from Louisiana, whom she married while in prison. Although her release was managed secretly to avoid a media frenzy, the public’s interest in Blanchard is not likely to wane since she will be the subject of an upcoming documentary series airing on Lifetime next year.
