Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was sentenced to ten years in prison in 2016 for her role in her mother’s murder, was released from prison in Missouri on Thursday and took to social media to celebrate her freedom.
Gypsy initially made headlines after her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, was found stabbed to death in her Springfield, Missouri home in June 2015.
What started as a case of a young girl plotting to kill her mother unraveled when it was revealed that Dee Dee had been lying about her daughter’s medical conditions, which according to Gypsy included leukemia and muscular dystrophy among other ailments.
Experts believe that Dee Dee suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy (now known as Factitious disorder imposed on another), which is when a caregiver falsifies the appearance of health problems in a person under their care, most typically their child.
Years of psychological and physical abuse, as well as being subjected to numerous unnecessary surgeries and medical tests, are said to be what drove Gypsy to want to kill her mother.
She used money stolen from her mother to buy a bus ticket for a man she had met on an online dating platform, Nicholas Godejohn, so he could help her carry out Dee Dee’s murder.
After Godejohn fatally stabbed Dee Dee, he and Gypsy traveled to his home in Wisconsin, where they were located days later and arrested.
Blanchard and Godejohn’s trials made headlines across America due to the circumstances surrounding the murder. During the trial, Gypsy claimed that the only way to escape her mother’s abuse was to murder her but that she was too “squeamish” to do it herself.
“Prosecutors say the murder was Gypsy Blanchard’s idea, but Godejohn carried it out,” the Springfield News-Leader said in 2019.
Godejohn was found guilty of first-degree murder in November 2018 and was sentenced to life in prison the following April.
While Gypsy could have also been charged with first-degree murder, Greene County, Missouri County Prosecutor Dan Patterson told the Springfield News-Leader at the time that while the case “[is] a first-degree murder,” he did not think Gypsy should spend the rest of her life in jail due to her situation being “…one of the most extraordinary and unusual cases we have seen.”
Gypsy ended up pleading guilty to second-degree murder in 2016 and received a sentence of ten years, the minimum sentence for that crime.
She was granted parole in September and officially released from the Chillicothe Correctional Center on Thursday after serving 85 percent of her sentence.
Now 32, Gypsy posted her “first selfie of freedom” on Friday; as of Saturday morning, the post had racked up more than 5.5 million likes and 223,000 comments.
Earlier this month, she announced that an eBook chronicling her experiences titled Released: Conversations on the Eve of Freedom will be published on Jan. 9.
Gypsy has already been the subject of a documentary film titled “Mommy Dead and Dearest” which debuted on HBO in 2017, and a 2019 TV mini-series on Hulu called “The Act” was also based on her experiences.