(door buzzing)
- [Interviewer] Have a seat.
Grab the mic.
Do you know, you know how to do it.
- Yes. - All right.
- I'm just gonna set that- How are you guys?
- [Interviewer] Good, good.
How are you feeling today?
- Nervous.
Okay.
I'm ready.
I remember my mom said,
"Happy endings are not just in fairy tales, they're real."
My mother controlled everything I did.
I was forced to use a wheelchair.
She started telling people that I had cancer.
But none of it was true.
There was also lot of emotional and physical abuse.
I started to feel like it was either her or me.
- [Reporter] Dee Dee Blanchard's death was violent.
- And that's when I hear her calling my name.
"Gypsy, help me."
- [Reporter] Her daughter, Gypsy Blanchard,
and her boyfriend are now jailed on first degree murder.
- I played a part in asking him
to commit the murder, that is why I'm in prison.
I've had six years to feel those emotions,
and there's things that I've kept so private.
The reason why I wanna talk about it now
is because I want to be free
of all these disturbing secrets.
The first time I tried to run away,
she chained me to the bed.
And before I knew it, I pulled the trigger.
She never wanted me to find love or be happy.
I'm sorry. (sniffles)
But I am engaged.
(moody rock music)
Today is the day before my parole hearing,
and I will finally share my story
the way that it should be shared.
♪ No, you can never take my soul ♪
(birds chirping)
(door buzzing)
- [Interviewer] Your hair's getting longer.
- I know. (laughs)
I didn't know how I was gonna wear it today, so.
Okay.
- [Interviewer] I'll let you settle in.
- [Gypsy] Okay.
- [Interviewer] It's good to see you.
- And please get some flattering angles.
I have gained some weight, so. (laughs)
I have a little double chin going on.
(gentle music)
Well, ever since I came to prison, the end goal,
the goal of everything that I have done
within this facility was to get paroled.
(tense music)
Today is the day before my parole hearing
and I'm feeling anxious.
I'm feeling nervous.
I don't have another shot after this.
I don't have multiple parole hearings.
It's the one and done.
It is very scary.
It's very frightening. (laughs)
Tomorrow's parole hearing is a big deal
because it determines my fate.
If I get paroled,
the parole date would be at the end of 2023.
If I don't get paroled, then I will be released
at the end of my 10 years, in 2025.
Not getting paroled,
it would take a toll on my emotions.
I'll be crushed.
To be quite honest, I'm preparing for the worst,
but I'm hoping for the best.
As I understand it,
the parole board is going to ask me questions,
certain questions about my crime.
- [Reporter] 48 year old Dee Dee Blanchard's body
was found in her house late Sunday night.
The sheriff isn't saying how she died,
but has said her death was violent.
- [Reporter] Her daughter, 23-year-old Gypsy Blanchard,
was located during a police standoff.
- [Officer] Your mom's dead, okay?
What I want to ask you- - [Gypsy] Wait, what?
- [Officer] Listen to me before you say a whole lot.
Do not dig yourself in a bunch of lies.
So, I want to know, okay, why?
- [Gypsy] Oh God. (whispering)
- I'm sorry that I lied to you from the beginning.
I'll tell you the truth.
I feel worried because there are things
that the board will ask me,
and I want to give genuine answers,
but they might not particularly care
for the fact that I will mention
the abuse that I suffered at the hands of my mother.
(tense music)
- [Producer] Kristy interview, take one, mark.
(clapperboard clicks)
- My name is Kristy Blanchard.
I am the stepmother of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.
Gypsy probably doesn't even remember
hardly a time where she wasn't under lock and key,
I'll say, like a prison.
Gypsy was Dee Dee's daughter, but also her prisoner.
- [Interviewer] Before you were in jail,
had you ever heard the term, "Munchausen by proxy" before?
- No, I had never heard of Munchausen by proxy before.
(tense music)
From a very young age,
my mother had claimed that I had
seizure disorders, hearing impairment.
I was forced to use a wheelchair.
And as I got older, she started shaving my hair off
and telling people that I had cancer.
And with all these assumed illnesses,
doctors is what I knew,
hospitals is what I knew, surgeries is what I knew.
There was no end in sight.
- As far as we know,
Gypsy Blanchard is the only documented case
of a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy
who has killed their perpetrator to get out.
That should tell all of us
how desperate Gypsy was to escape her mother.
- [Dee Dee] You wanna blow me a kiss?
I love you.
- [Producer] Okay, Rod interview.
Take one, mark. (clapperboard clicks)
- [Rod] My name is Rod Blanchard.
As Gypsy's father, one of the bigger regrets I have
is not making her feel that
she could come to me with a problem.
- [Clerk] State of Wisconsin versus Gypsy Blanchard.
Case number 50-
- I definitely failed in that department.
Felt terribly sad, you know,
for what she had been through, what she had to face.
Couldn't imagine how she felt being so alone.
(tense music)
There you go.
- Thank you.
This was Gypsy in 2005,
and you know, she could have been running
and having this and doing this,
and no, she was in a wheelchair.
- Now that Dee Dee's gone,
I have a completely fresh start with Gypsy.
If, you know, if she makes parole and she's released,
I think that's important that, you know,
she can have some level of trust when she gets out.
She knows she can talk to me.
- How did you plead to the class A felony
of murder in the second degree?
- A lot of people will argue that
Gypsy is in prison because of what she did.
To me, that's a very narrow view of what happened.
I'm Mike Stanfield and I was the lead counsel
on the Gypsy Blanchard case.
- Be the judgment and sentence of the court
that you be sentenced to 10 years
in the Missouri Department of Corrections.
- It's important for people to realize
Gypsy didn't choose to be abused.
She didn't choose to be somebody else's pawn.
And while yes, she was involved in the murder,
she just went from one prison to another.
- The parole board doesn't know me on a personal level.
They just know what they've read about my case.
- We have unearthed the appearance
of a long financial fraud scheme,
along with this tragic event.
- [Reporter] Deception down to Dee Dee
and Gypsy's last name.
- [Interviewee] Her last name is not Blancharde.
It's Blanchard with no E.
- I'm going to feel pressure
to give them what they want to hear.
My mother taught me how to lie and manipulate,
but that doesn't make me who I am,
and I can learn to tell the truth.
I'm just as flawed as the next person.
I've made mistakes in my life.
I've made bad choices.
But once the parole board knows the things that they don't know,
it'll make them understand a little bit better
who I am and why I did what I did.
(tense music)
- [Gypsy] When I first got arrested,
I will admit that I had a lack of remorse.
It wasn't until even years later that I began to miss my mother
and begin to understand that she's not coming back.
- I think that she loved me in her own way.
I think when she had me, she loved me
and I think as a child, she loved me,
but I don't think that she too much cared
for whenever I'd grow up.
(tense music)
- Here's Gypsy and her mom.
I find she looks like Rod,
especially when she was a little blonde.
This is one of their wedding photos.
- Wow, that's a long time ago.
I started getting emotional and just going down
this emotional rollercoaster and just,
I wish it would've been different.
You know, we were only dating three months
when Dee Dee told me she was pregnant.
I was 17 years old,
and I think she told me she was 21.
She was actually 23.
I felt that it was important to get married,
but I woke up three months later on my 18th birthday,
and it just kind of hit me like, you know,
you're married here to a woman you're not in love with.
I said, "Dee Dee, I'm sorry.
I'll always try to be there as a father,
but as a husband," I said, "I don't feel that."
She grabbed our marriage license,
it was in a frame, and threw it on the ground.
- I know that the most devastating
failure to her was losing my father.
My mother blamed me for them getting a divorce
because I wasn't the son that he wanted.
I'm like, thinking in my mind,
how are you blaming me for something
that happened before I was born?
(gentle music)
- Gypsy was born, she was a cute little baby, you know.
She was tiny, but healthy and happy.
She really looked like me.
I thought, well, you know, that's my child.
After Gypsy was born, to make ends meet,
I was gone a lot, working.
So there wasn't much room for anybody else.
I remember when Gypsy was three or four months old,
Dee Dee told me she would like stop breathing in her sleep.
She had her tested and she had sleep apnea.
(tool whirring)
- Gypsy was six months old when I started dating her dad
and by the time Gypsy was around a year old,
she had sleep apnea and then her eyesight,
which she did have an extremely lazy eye.
(tense music)
- Okay. Wow.
Endocrine, neurology.
Ophthalmology, allergy, immunology.
I've never seen any of this information,
and I saw her a lot.
(tense music)
I'm Dr. Rob Steele,
and I became Gypsy's pediatrician back in 2005.
She was 14 at the time,
but Dee Dee never had or could show me
any of Gypsy's previous medical records.
If I had seen any of this earlier on,
I just think a lot of things would've been different.
I've only had a little opportunity
to kind of run through them,
but when I looked in her earlier medical records,
Gypsy had strabismus as an infant,
which is when one eye or both wander,
and over time you go blind.
So you have to have surgery to correct the problem.
- [Producer] So we don't have all of your medical documents,
Gypsy, but the ones that we do have
show that your first surgery
was before you were even a year old.
- [Gypsy] I didn't even know that
I had a surgery before I was even one.
But there's a lot of things that
I don't know about my medical history at all.
I've had issues with my right eye
throughout the course of my life,
and so I do know there's a real problem.
- When you look at Munchausen by proxy,
you often see that there was an encounter
to address a real need with the child.
But in doing so, Dee Dee gained attention
from having a child that could go blind.
That could have been the start
of Dee Dee's Munchausen by proxy.
- My name's Evans Pitre and I am Gypsy's uncle,
which Dee Dee was my younger sister.
Dee Dee was smart.
She was the nurse's assistant,
and she would look up the disease
and kind of say, "Hey, maybe Gypsy does have that."
But it's like, we would never see it.
We would only hear it about
through what Dee Dee was telling us, you know.
- Dee Dee suggested that Gypsy had muscular dystrophy
and that she had a seizure disorder,
and was on a medication for that seizure disorder.
- [Dee Dee] Hey, Gypsy.
Are you ready to go to school?
- When Gypsy was old enough to attend school,
she was excited.
- [Dee Dee] Ready to go, okay?
Wave bye-bye to me.
- I don't even think she went the whole year.
And Dee Dee had told me the reason
why she pulled her out
was because she was scared
they wouldn't give her her medication, right?
- She was supposedly being taught by her mom,
the homeschooling, which was never the case.
Then one day, my mother walked into the room
and she had a wheelchair with her,
and very bluntly told me
to use the wheelchair.
I didn't understand her reasonings,
but I trusted her.
She was my best friend, and I loved her,
and I never questioned as a child.
Now looking back on it,
I wish that I stood up for myself more.
But people don't know that
there was a lot of emotional abuse
attached with the medical abuse,
and they don't know how far back she was doing this to me.
- [Gypsy] Since walking into Chillicothe prison,
I think my biggest changes as a person
has been my maturity level. (laughs)
I thought everything was just fun,
and I think that was part of experiencing
more freedom than I ever had before.
I understand how ironic that is,
but from the time that I was born,
my mother controlled everything I did.
(tense music)
(gentle upbeat music)
- My name is Bobby Pitre.
My cousin is Gypsy Rose Blanchard,
and my aunt was Dee Dee Blanchard.
For Dee Dee, Gypsy getting into the wheelchair
was a graduation from like,
wrapping her knee with a bandage for a basic scrape
to let's see how far I could take this.
And we all would knew
it was a bunch of bull (beep), you know?
If there was things that
I would do that she wouldn't like,
she would favor the cat over me.
She would love on the cat
and then she would just like look at me with this snarl.
(gentle music)
- This one time we was having like, a birthday party,
and Dee Dee had went to the store
and all the kids was, you know,
jumping on the trampoline and Gypsy said,
"Can I go jump on the trampoline?"
We said, "Sure."
So she was jumping with all the other kids.
But when her mom pulled up,
she dropped like a wet rag,
and it's like, what happened?
- It's not uncommon to see a child
who's in a Munchausen abuse situation
to just flip on a dime.
When they're with their mother,
they look really sick, they play the part,
but then as soon as mother leaves,
all of a sudden the kid is perfectly normal.
- Dee Dee came out and was pissed.
She was screaming, "Don't you know she's crippled?"
And I said, "We all seen different."
Dee Dee pulled her off of the trampoline,
put her in her wheelchair and rolled her in the house
for the rest of the day, you know.
- We had heard from some of her family
that Gypsy could walk.
I was confused.
But the relationship that Dee Dee allowed
Gypsy and I to have was so fragile that,
you know, I didn't do my due diligence like I should have.
- We tried and tried and tried, you know, to be more involved.
We would call her and ask her what you want for Christmas,
what you want for your birthday.
Gypsy would say, "Nothing but love."
Then, you know, Dee Dee would get on the phone
and she would say, "Oh, Disney this, Disney that.
Princess this, princess that."
(swelling orchestral music)
- I grew up on this Disney fairytale,
love at first sight notion.
I remember many times hoping
for like, a knight in shining armor
to make me feel like I was special.
(gentle music)
- During that time, Gypsy's grandma,
who was also my mom,
was a very sickly person
and after my mom passed,
Dee Dee's world came crumbling down.
- Dee Dee moved out of my grandmother's house
and into projects all over the place,
and we didn't know if she was here or there,
or where she was.
She just seemed to bounce, you know.
- There was a active warrant out for her arrest
in Lafourche Parish for writing bad checks.
- She had maxed out two of my mom's credit cards
after my mom had been dead for over a year.
So Dee Dee was devious,
and she knew how to get away with things.
But if she done got caught,
she knew she had to run away.
- When Gypsy and Dee Dee started moving,
I was visiting, you know, three or four times a year.
But the further away they moved
from Bayou Lafourche where we live,
the visit intervals got further apart as well.
- At that age, I really didn't understand
why my mother was moving us
from place to place to place,
or why at certain times we didn't have a place to live.
But it really kind of showed me
that all I really had in my life was my mother.
(soft tense music)
Since my incarceration, I am finally free
to build relationships and friendships.
The best memory that I have in my entire life
is the day that I got to prison,
and I got to go out to the picnic tables,
and I'm like, I'm free.
I'm free to have friends.
I'm free to do what I want.
It might be in a controlled environment,
but this is nice. (laughs)
- [Interviewer] You're making me cry.
- It's the truth.
It's such a good memory. (laughs)
- [Interviewer] Wow, wait.
(gentle music)
- When Gypsy was around eight,
Dee Dee had called Wendy and said
they were in New Orleans.
But that she had some news to tell us,
and I remember my heart sinking.
(tense music)
- [Gypsy] If I get paroled, when I leave this prison,
I don't expect it to be easy,
but I think that's part of the experience
is feeling the hard times,
learning by trial and error.
It's how I learn.
It's how I grow, it's how I evolved.
(gentle whistling)
- When Gypsy was around eight, Dee Dee had called one day
and said she was diagnosed with leukemia.
Like, this poor girl.
She has all of these illnesses and then has this.
- Honestly, I really didn't know what cancer was,
but I was going through so many medications
and surgeries that I didn't question it.
- Most of the family felt that it was not real.
You know, it's kind of like the wheelchair.
But then Dee Dee was shaving Gypsy's head,
and seeing that the medicine is making her hair fall out,
so you really didn't know what was going on.
- Of course, it was years before we found out that,
you know, she didn't have leukemia.
That it wasn't true.
That all of it was a lie.
- Munchausen by proxy perpetrators
go to the ends of the Earth to maintain
the charade of having a sick child.
(gentle music)
- Feeding tube. (sighs)
Wow.
After looking at the medical records,
apparently Dee Dee had suggested to different doctors that
Gypsy was not getting enough calories
to allow her to gain weight, meaning by mouth,
which is just wild because all of that was a lie.
- [Producer] The documents that we saw,
Gypsy, said that you have a fear of eating.
- [Gypsy] That's ridiculous.
Is that something like my mom said?
- [Producer] Yes.
- [Gypsy] Wow.
No, I never had a fear of eating.
- Regardless of what Dee Dee said,
it's a doctor's job to figure out
what's real and what's not,
and that was not done for Gypsy.
But unfortunately, the decision was made
to have a surgical procedure
to put a hole into her skin,
down to her stomach in order to feed.
- [Gypsy] My mom used to try to make things
that were being done to me fun,
and so like the feeding tube's name was Mickey Button,
and so she came up with a song.
It went like this.
♪ Mickey Button
♪ M-I-C-K-E-Y
♪ B-O-T-T-O-N
♪ Mickey button
- We find feeding tubes such a common aspect
of Munchhausen syndrome by proxy,
because a feeding tube gives a parent
almost unlimited control
to poison and medicate,
starve and feed their kid.
- I don't believe that
there is a single rational human being
on the planet that would not agree
that what Dee Dee did to Gypsy
was one of the most egregious forms
of parental abuse you can imagine.
(tense music)
- At one point, Gypsy and Dee Dee were in New Orleans
and they got in a car accident,
and Dee Dee's foot was almost severed off.
So while Dee Dee was recovering in the hospital,
Dee Dee's dad, Claude, brought Gypsy home to Golden Meadow.
- It was hard because I wanted to go to my mom in the hospital,
but I had a pretty close bond with my grandpa.
Then one day, it just seemed to change.
I didn't imagine that my life
was gonna get darker than what it already was.
(tense music)
- [Gypsy] Here in prison, I think I've only scratched
the surface of realizing
how much trauma I have been through,
and accepting the fact that it did happen.
I have taken a trauma therapy class.
However, I'm not getting
as much therapy as I would hope to have.
Therapy is something that
I find is essential to my betterment.
(gentle guitar music)
When I was living with my grandpa
and my step-grandmother, Laura,
things changed in my life forever.
I was being sexually abused, molested.
(tense music)
My grandpa would take me out of my wheelchair
and bring me into a closet
or the shack that was back behind their house
where he would do woodworking,
and he would perform sexual acts on me.
He would make me touch him.
He would touch me.
(crows cawing)
At nine, I don't think that I knew that it was wrong,
but then my grandfather told me not to tell anyone.
He's like, "You don't want papa to go to jail, do you?"
I didn't want him to get in trouble,
so I just kept quiet.
- Years later, after she got to prison,
Gypsy and I were on the phone and she said,
"My grandfather, Claude, molested me."
And I went to fall out my chair.
To take the innocence away from a child is horrible.
And I told her, I said, "I love you
and I'm always gonna love you.
I support you."
- Kristy has been the mom
that I always wanted to have,
and honestly, I can't imagine my life
without her now 'cause she's just been that supportive.
The abuse was not something that
I wanted to come forward with publicly, you know,
because I just wasn't ready for that.
But I feel like releasing
all of that out would be very therapeutic for me.
- [Interviewer] Gypsy told us that
there may have been some abuse that went on in this house.
- [Interviewer] With you and Gypsy.
- [Interviewer] Yeah.
- [Interviewer] So that's not true at all?
- [Interviewer] Why do you think Gypsy
would say that if it's-
- [Producer] So, we talked
to your grandpa Claude about this.
He said that he absolutely did not sexually abuse you.
- [Gypsy] Wooow.
- [Producer] He said, you as a really young girl,
would try and touch him,
and he would have to tell you no.
- [Gypsy] That just like confirms that like,
I want nothing to do with him.
Like, I would've had more forgiveness in my heart
had he just told the truth.
- No, I don't think that happened.
I think that was just probably taught to her
by her mom for the attention,
to throw the spotlight on somebody else besides her.
- [Gypsy] There is no part of me
that questions if this happened or not.
This 100% happened,
and he can take it to his grave if he wants to,
but the one person that is not gonna visit him
at his grave is me.
(gentle music)
- [Gypsy] When people tell me that,
"You're gonna need therapy the rest of your life,"
you know, I laugh it off,
but I really do understand what they mean.
I know that they're not calling me crazy,
but I understand that it's going to take
years to undo a lot of the psychological trauma.
♪ Hush-a-bye
♪ Don't you cry
♪ Go to sleep my little baby
- [Gypsy] When my mom came home from the hospital,
I wish that I could have been brave enough
to tell my mom what was going on
with my grandpa while it was going on,
but she was too badly injured
to physically protect me.
Instead, a good year later,
I finally started to tell my mom a little bit,
but she started to cry and blame herself.
So I just clammed up and nobody ever knew.
(gentle music)
- People come in here and inquire about Gypsy,
what's going on with her and when she's getting out
because a lot of people are on her side.
A lot of people feel like, you know,
she was wrongly done by her mom,
and I definitely feel that, you know, 100%.
Gypsy got robbed her whole life
by the one person she looked up to.
It was like the movie "Mommie Dearest" to the max.
A sick, I mean, "Mommie Dearest" was sick,
but Dee Dee was sicker.
(church bells ringing)
About a year after my grandmother died,
my grandfather got married to Laura May.
Dee Dee was very upset about that happening.
She felt like my grandmother was being replaced
by this woman that she probably hated.
- Dee Dee had a vengeful side.
If she wanted to do something to you,
she went for the jugular.
- So after Dee Dee got out the hospital,
her and Gypsy were staying at my grandfather's house,
and one day my grandfather and Gypsy were hanging out
and Gypsy sees the Roundup in the corner
and she tells my grandfather, "Oh, that's the vitamins
that mom gives to grandma Laura May."
And he's like, "What?"
- [Gypsy] I know that my mother has this hatred towards Laura,
so that is something that would be in her character to do.
I remember a very heated argument.
Laura was just like, "I don't want you here."
And my mother's like,
"Fine, we'll find another place to stay."
(tense music)
I was so happy.
I had been asking my mother over and over again
to leave my grandpa's house,
desperate to get away from my grandpa
and the abuse that was going on.
Let's just go anywhere,
anywhere but here, let's just go.
But by exiling us from our family,
it just gave her free reign
to create new illnesses for me,
to have me put on more medications
to make things worse.
- That put another nail in the coffin
for Gypsy and her freedom.
- Laura May ended up dying a slow, painful death,
and I guarantee you it had a lot to do
with the poisoning from that Roundup.
- And when we thought we heard it all, we didn't.
(tense music)
- Maybe Gypsy wasn't as childlike
or innocent as we thought she was.
- Gypsy's case was literally like peeling
the scariest onion you'll ever find.
- First time I tried to run away,
she chained me to the bed and said that
"You will never find love. You will never be happy."
I'm sorry. (sniffles)
- Gypsy was just trying to escape the devil.
- [Gypsy] I pulled the trigger as many times as I could.
- I wish she could have come to me.
- [Gypsy] Every time that I would take these pills,
all my problems went away.
- We should all feel that we failed Gypsy.
- We are leaving right now for Gypsy's parole hearing.
- I have been keeping a secret.
I am engaged.
- [Fiance] I didn't realize writing wedding vows
would be so difficult.
- I think that there is a possibility
of a happy ending for me.
(tense music)