Woman who killed her abusive mother now planning perfect Disney wedding
A million Disney-style fantasies will come true this summer when Gypsy Rose Blanchard finally gets the fairy tale wedding she’s always dreamed of - breaking the hex her mum put on her to stop her finding love.
It will be a “re-do” wedding for Gypsy, 32, and teacher Ryan Scott Anderson, 37, whose legal ceremony was a totally private affair on July 20, 2022, inside the walls of Chillicothe Correctional Centre in Missouri. Gypsy was in prison for second degree murder, after she hid in the bathroom while her internet boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn stabbed her mother, Dee Dee, 17 times in their Missouri home with a knife she stole from Walmart.
Released on December 28, eight-and-a-half years into a 10 year sentence, Gypsy has come a long way since June 9, 2015, when, high on painkillers, she ignored her mum’s cries for help as Godejohn, who is serving life without parole, killed her, before they fled to a hotel and made a porn video while eating pizza, which she dubbed “pizza porn.”
Gypsy with mother Dee Dee (Crime+Investigation)Now she regrets the fact she regarded ending Dee Dee’s life as her only escape from a living hell, during which her mum - who had Munchausen syndrome by proxy - put her through 30 operations and made her feign being wheelchair bound with muscular dystrophy and leukaemia … even shaving her head to make it look genuine.
Expressing childlike joy for all the wonders a life of freedom holds, in her first UK interview since her release, she says: “A re-do wedding with all our family there would be amazing. I want the classy, fairy tale wedding that I always dreamed of as a child. I think that Ryan and I deserve that for each other. I want a white dress that’s a bit form-fitting, that flares at the bottom and has capped sleeves.”
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Gypsy had thirty unnecessary operationsShe even spares a thought for Dee Dee, 49, who after being dumped by her dad Rod when she was a baby, had Gypsy’s saliva glands removed and a feeding tube put in her stomach when nothing was wrong. She says: “I do think, ‘well what if she was here?’ I hope that she would be proud of the woman I am becoming, I regret the fact I made the decision to end her life as a way out. I’ve come to a place where I feel more sympathy towards my mother, more forgiveness and more self-forgiveness.”
Gypsy is the only known victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy - where most commonly a mother makes up fake symptoms or causes symptoms to make a child look sick - known to have killed their perpetrator to escape the situation. It was her idea, although she enlisted the help of Godejohn, after he said he would protect her from anyone and she said: “Even my mother,” before he revealed that his alter-ego, a 500 year-old vampire called Victor, loved to kill and would even kill Dee Dee.
Gypsy today
With husband RyanBut Gypsy, who lost her virginity to Godejohn in a cinema toilet at a screening of Cinderella, where they arranged to meet, but he pretended to Dee Dee to be a friendly stranger, has found a very different, loving relationship with Ryan. Denied conjugal visits in jail, where she first read letters from Ryan in 2019 and fell in love, she is now enjoying a far healthier relationship with him and has stopped feeling she is “undeserving of happiness.”
Gypsy was speaking ahead of the UK release of a six-part documentary series, The Prison Confessions Of Gypsy Rose Blanchard - to be screened here exclusively by Crime+Investigation from January 15. In one episode before her prison wedding to Ryan, she says: “Getting married is something that my mom told me I'd never be able to do.”
A scene from The Prison Confessions Of Gypsy Rose Blanchard (Crime+Investigation)Now Gypsy - who was handcuffed to a bed by Dee Dee for two weeks after she ran away with a boy - has also won the love and support of her dad, Rod, stepmum, Kristy and their daughter Mia, 22, as well as Ryan’s family.
Gypsy, who suffered sexual abuse as a child, says: “Ryan and I had a discussion when we were driving home to his apartment in Louisiana after I was released about ‘that topic.’.
“I was very vulnerable, telling him, ‘I have not had good sexual experiences in my life.’ And so, the first time Ryan and I were intimate I felt safe, I felt loveable. I felt like I was in a good, loving relationship that I never thought existed, because for me, I always thought that because of the sexual abuse that I had gone through that I would never want to be touched, or hugged, or anything. I think am establishing my comfortability in intimacy.”
Gypsy and Ryan (Getty Images)While Gypsy is processing all that happened to her - from feeling let down by doctors and social workers who failed to effectively raise the alarm when tests put Dee Dee’s claims about her illnesses in doubt, to her own abuse and her sentence for second degree murder - she is happy to have Ryan by her side.
As well as processing her own complex feelings for Dee Dee, she is dealing with the fallout from people who befriended them when they fled the 2005 Hurricane Katrina and moved to Missouri, where a charity even adapted their house for wheelchairs.
People who contact her from that time are “grieving for the idea that was this mother and daughter dynamic, with this sick child,” says Gypsy. But, of course, she doesn’t exist.
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Gypsy in prisonCurrently redecorating their apartment, Gypsy, who is keen to become an advocate for Munchausen syndrome by proxy, says: “I’m starting to get acclimatised to married life and all it entails. We created our emotional bond while I was in prison. Now we have hit the next level of our relationship.”
Eager to prove she is more than the woman who saw no option but to help kill her own mother, she is determined to move forwards, seeing her prison term as a period of growth. She says: “I don’t see myself as a murderer. I committed a crime, but that doesn’t define who I am. I accept what I’ve done. I paid my dues. Now it’s about reshaping myself as a person. So far, I have enjoyed every single moment of every day I have been free.”
- The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a brand new 6 part exclusive series starts Monday 15th January at 9pm on Crime+Investigation (Sky channel 156 and Virgin Media 133) or stream from 16th January on Crime+Investigation PLAY.
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