Hidden True Crime - GYPSY ROSE: Digging Deeper, Episode Two with Psychologist Dr John Matthias

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

In our second episode surrounding the case of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, Dr John takes us deeper into his analysis. Gypsy has recently been released from prison after serving an 8 year sentence for murdering her own mother. Gypsy Rose is the victim of Munchausen by proxy [Factitious disorder imposed on another]. Gypsy received a plea deal and lesser sentence than her co-conspirator Nick Godejohn, and since her release from prison she has done several media interviews and garnered millions of followers on Tiktok and Instagram. She is also the subject of the recent Lifetime Documentary: "Prison confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard". Dr John Matthias, criminal Psychologist, takes us further into the motive behind Gypsy Rose Blanchard's crime. This episode was originally livestreamed on our YouTube Channel on January 13, 2024. "A better understanding of crime is a better understanding of ourselves” – Dr. John Matthias Dr. John Matthias is a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist with over twenty-five years’ experience in both clinical and forensic work. He has performed over 500 forensic and psychological evaluations and risk assessments for the courts since 1996, assessing the risks for violent and sexual recidivism for both adults and juveniles. He serves as an expert witness for the federal government, and he has consulted on numerous high-profile cases for District Attorney’s offices and defense attorneys in several states. In the forensic area, Dr. Matthias has developed expertise in personality assessments, hidden behavioral motivations, complex trauma and criminal psychology. In the clinical realm, he has worked with numerous victims of abuse and trauma, including with survivors of the Las Vegas shooting massacre in 2017. He also received his Master’s degree in Marriage, Family and Child counseling from the University of Southern California and he has worked with hundreds of families, couples and children over the years. He supervises UNLV doctoral students on forensic assessments, clinical case formulation, and various therapeutic approaches to clinical work. Dr. Matthias graduated with honors in philosophy from Princeton University, and he won the prestigious McCosh Thesis prize while there. In high school he graduated valedictorian from a large public high school in Chicago where he was chosen to participate in a ground-breaking valedictory study that continues to this day. He received his doctorate from the University of Southern California. Dr. Matthias has been an adjunct assistant professor in the University of Nevada Las Vegas clinical psychology doctoral program since 2007 and he has trained over 25 doctoral students since that time. Contact them at [e-mail] Support them at Patreon.com/hiddentruecrime Our Sponsors:* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Armoire and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.armoire.style* Check out Effecty and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.effecty.com* Check out Happy Mammoth and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://happymammoth.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/hidden-a-true-crime-podcast1836/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I can't say he hasn't been stressed about tonight's episode. So I'm glad to see that you're smiling now, babe. He was actually, in the end, he was on time and I was a little bit late tonight. So clearly you are ready to go and we're grateful to have you here. Thank you, everyone, for being here again tonight. for those that want to support our work, it means so much. You can head to patreon.com slash hidden true crime, join with a monthly membership.

And we give back immensely with you'll find, I think over 100 now bonus episodes, as well as FOIA documents and court documents, thousands of pages on many cases. So thank you for those who support us there with your monthly donation. Last week, we covered Gypsy Rose Blanchard, Most of you know who she is.

For those of you that don't know who she is, you can do a quick Google search and you will find her everywhere because millions and millions of people are talking about her. You can even join her millions of followers online at TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or wherever you follow celebrities.

She has millions of them. She was just recently released from prison after serving eight years. Was it eight years total? A 10-year sentence, eight and a half years is what she served for second-degree murder. She was originally charged with first degree, plea deal, second-degree murder, of her own mother. Her own mother, who was never, while she was alive, diagnosed with Moonshausen by proxy, but post her murder. And after her death, some experts have stated that they believe that's what was going on,

and that she was making Gypsy Rose sick. I have a link in the description of this video to episode number one. It was a two-hour episode. You can also listen to that on our podcast stream. So anywhere you listen to podcasts, Spotify, Apple, wherever. But you can also watch that on YouTube. So from there, we are now on week two because John, I can't say that you didn't cause quite a bit of reaction,

good and bad and ugly and intense from many viewers. Over a thousand comments on our last video of people with very strong opinions about this case because it's an old case and people have already made up their minds about this case. And I would just want to say you're brave to take on an older case where people have already formed their opinions. But that's what you do. You're a criminal psychologist, a clinical psychologist as well, and you're a good one. And you also happen to be my husband, for those of you that are new here as well.

And I love him dearly. All right. Yeah. So how did we get here? Why are we doing another episode? And the reason is I didn't, I had not finished watching the prison confession series. So I finished that. And then there were, we talked to a few people that we, that know the family and know the case fairly well.

And that's been helpful. So we, and we keep digging a little deeper into this case. and it keeps getting more complex and more interesting. So I think we wanted to just really kind of dig a little deeper into this case. And just as a quick disclaimer here, I think this is going to be a pretty high-level discussion. It may be a little more philosophical and abstract at times than we normally are. Another disclaimer, some of the things we're going to talk about may not,

they may not fit the popular narrative. of Gypsy Rose. And we're going to talk about what that is exactly. I sometimes call that the standard story, or now I'm calling it the fairy tale version. It's the version that Gypsy Rose perpetuates. And having said that, I want to make it clear, I have a lot of empathy for Gypsy Rose.

There's no question there was child maltreatment in her past. I think there are questions about the extent of the maltreatment. There's questions now about some of the, of the surgical procedures that she underwent, the medication she took. There's a lot of questions about a lot of things here. But in terms of abuse and maltreatment, I think we can all agree on that. I think most of us can agree that D.D. was abusive and she was overbearing and she was controlling and she was not an ideal parent. So try to find some common ground before we start here. I think that was a great trigger warning. I already hear people.

people in comments, one of our dear listeners is saying, you know what, they can't read or hear anything that might be negative about Gypsy. That's okay. But there is going to be a lot of nuance in this conversation and a lot of gray. So if that is how you feel, please understand and be ready for some things that you might not always agree on here. We received a lot of emails that they were kind. Thank you for being kind. They disagreed with us. That's fine. I, you know, I encouraged disagreement. That's part of our goal here is to really have conversations. So I appreciate some were not kind. Some were, you know, we're fairly brutal. But, you know, that's part of this too. One of the emails that someone sent who she was very kind about it and she's a long time listener

and she questioned a lot of our analysis. But one of the things she said was, Dr. John, you're not saying she should have done more time or she should be punished more. You're not saying she's a risk to re-offend or murder again, you know, and you're talking a lot about her dark side. So she said, I don't really get the purpose. What's your point here? What's your end game? It's an interesting question because I think my answer to that is there really is no endgame here in the sense that I'm not trying to develop an opinion.

I'm not trying to provide a perfect explanation. I'm not trying to develop the true reasons or causes for. these crimes. I think what I'm trying to do here is to explore. And I'm trying to provide an honest assessment of this situation. And I'm trying to, in that sense, I'm trying to open a dialogue about what's going on. So my goal, my end game here is to provide some depth and complexity to this case and to develop a meaningful conversation about what's going on. And tonight, I've got two questions I want to look at tonight. Number one, what are the competing narratives related to Gypsy Rose and why she did what she did. What are the competing

narratives? So when we start getting into this issue of competing narratives, I think we'll all see that this is extremely complex. And so my goal here is, again, my goal here, my end game is to illuminate and to explore. It's not to provide with any certainty an opinion about Chipsy Rose or what really happened are the true motivations. And we're going to get into that. And that's where our high level of discussion is going to start. Because there's really no clear cause. There's no causality here.

There's no clear reasons for these murders. Although many of the, you know, many of the people that disagreed with us, I think that's the reason why, because they want something that's succinct. And it's an opinion and it makes sense. and it explains this whole situation. And I think one of my points here tonight is if you want that simple narrative that's fully explanatory, you're not going to get that tonight. That's not my goal.

My goal here is to really dig a little deeper into this discussion. And if we're lucky, if I'm lucky, hopefully we'll illuminate some of the complexity here, but we're certainly not going to solve it. So one of the things I really appreciate about our community and our gems is that this, they, you know, they're, they understand this. They understand that a lot of the crimes we cover involve a certain level of uncertainty in complexity. And oftentimes certain crimes might have what I would call a more coherent narrative thread. And in that sense, I feel like most of the evidence will point to one or two kind of narrative. narratives. But here, there's no one or two narratives that dominate this conversation. I think that's

part of the issue. For those people who have followed this case from the beginning, they probably have very strong opinions. And in that sense, they're probably wedded to those opinions to some degree. And there's probably some degree of confirmation bias in that sense. So I would just ask people to be open. You know, let's have this conversation together. We can certainly agree to disagree, you know, for those people that were less kind. I mean, that that's fine, too. You know, I understand that there can be a certain amount of anger here because this is such a sensitive topic. You know, we've all seen the pictures of Gypsy. The pictures are all horrifying. I think the pictures speak for themselves in many cases. But the people,

Pictures are not the full story either. So I would just ask that we kind of keep an open mind here and we'll see where we go. You know, I want to get into a really meaningful Q&A towards the end and we'll, you know, have a discussion. So hopefully we have we have a lot of material to cover tonight. So in that sense, we'll see how far we can go with it. but hopefully we can cover most of what I can cover most of what I want to cover, and then we can get into the Q&A. So let me reiterate that two questions I really want to look at tonight are,

what are the competing narratives to explain this crime? And I pointed out in our last show that there's really two versions of Gypsy Rose. There's the version of Gypsy Rose that's the victim. and I think most of us agree upon the fact that there was maltreatment. And then there's Gypsy Rose, the murderer. And I think in some ways those are quite different people or they can be quite different people. There is a tie. We'll talk about that.

But I think it's important to make that distinction. And the question here, because this is a true crime channel, the question here, of course, is, were there crimes committed? in terms of D.D. Maltreating or abusing Gypsy Rose? Yes, of course. But we're not analyzing Didi necessarily. We're acknowledging that there was abuse,

but D.D. is not really the focus. The question is, how does Gypsy Rose go from being a victim of abuse to committing murder? Or does she? One of Gypsy's narratives now, by the way, is that she is not a murderer. So we'll consider that too. So Gypsy Rose, as of her release from prison, is now essentially saying that she was involved in the plot to murder her mother, but she doesn't see herself as being a murderer.

So that's an interesting evolution in her thought, and we need to really discuss that. So, again, the two questions are, what are the competing narratives in play to explain these crimes? And my second question is, who's to blame? So the second question I want to look at is who's to blame. By analyzing and considering these two questions, we're going to really develop a better understanding of this case, and we're probably going to come a long way, to go a long way towards really digging deeper and really understanding more about what's going on here. So let me start.

I'm going to start with, we're going to start with Shakespeare. I'm reading from the opening scene of Shakespeare. So this is Act 1, Scene 1 from Macbeth. The scene begins with thunder and lightning and enter the three witches. So I'm reading the last line, which is lines 12 and 13, Act one, scene one, the witches are together and they say together, quote, fair is fall and fall is fair, hover through the fog and filthy air. So let me read that again. Fair is fall and foul is fair.

Hover through the fog and filthy air. So I'm beginning with that quote from Shakespeare for a number of. reasons, but let's, let me just say that when I, when I, when I, when I picture the witches saying that, this idea of the fog and the filthy air, it kind of reminds me, I think it kind of sets the stage for our discussion, because it, it, it tends to remind me a little bit. Like, I think of kind of the Louisiana bayou and the mist and the fog, right? And that like it, there's, there's kind of this fog, I think, surrounding this case or there has been. And so I, you know, I, it kind of, me, this is evocative of kind of this whole setting for these, for this, you know, for Gypsy

Rose growing up in Louisiana and the bayou. And so I kind of, I think that's an interesting way to set this stage for this discussion. The other part, however, is more relevant. And that is that the idea of fair as fall and fall as fair suggests that nothing is as it seems, that this is the idea of reversal that Shakespeare is kind of saying that things are never quite what they seem. And so I think that's very accurate here in this case, that there's questions around everything. There's questions around who does what, when, whether there's complicity, There's questions about, you know, do any of these medical conditions really exist? There's just, there's so many questions.

What was, what was gypsy's level of involvement in the murders? But as long as we're, as long as we're talking about witchcraft, I'm going to promote, I'm going to talk about my first narrative to explain this case. And I promise you, this is a. narrative that nobody else has talked about. So you're only going to get this analysis on hidden true crime. So thanks for joining us tonight. But I think that the first narrative that I want to talk about is to explain this case is a narrative, a narrative that has to do with witchcraft. So the three witches from Macbeth are completely relevant because it turns out that Didi

Didi Blanchard has a real interest in voodoo and a real interest in witchcraft. And she actually has a tattoo on a right leg. You can see it in some of the crime scene photos that are quite gruesome. But you can see the tattoo. It's hard to make it out perfectly, but sort of looks like a wizard. It might be a witch.

It's something to do with witchcraft. And so, how is this an important narrative? Well, it's an important narrative because when when Gypsy runs away at age 19 and she returns and her mother chains her to the bad, several weeks later, Gypsy tells us that her mother puts a, quote, voodoo hacks on her.

Her mother gets a mason jar. Her mother gets a mason jar. I think I lost, I just lost Lauren. I'll keep going. I assume she'll be back. Anyway, so D.D. gets a mason jar. She puts a picture of Gypsy in it. She puts a picture of Dan in it.

Dan is the boyfriend with whom she has run away. She puts a cow's tongue in the mason jar, and she puts a little bit of menstrual blood, of gypsy's menstrual blood in the mason jar. She takes the mason jar. and she puts it out back of the house. This is, I presume this is the house in Missouri. So, you know, I was asking, Lauren,

do you think this mason jar is still there? I wonder if it is. Anyway, she goes out back. She performs this witchcraft ritual. She buries the mason jar. And before she does so, she puts a note in there. And the note says, you will never find love and you will never be happy.

And the reason I think this is an interesting narrative and it doesn't get enough attention is because it's similar to the witches in Macbeth in the sense that the witches in Macbeth have a prophecy for Macbeth, which is that he's going to murder the king and then he will become king and he will rule over Scotland. The prophecy that Dedy has for Gypsy is that she will never find love and she will never be happy. And the reason this is relevant is because if you watch the prison confessions, Gypsy talks about that hex more than anything else. Gypsy is, I don't want to say obsessed, but she's very, very influenced by this voodoo hex that Didi has put on her. So what you have here is largely, you know, I mean, I'm not, big, I don't really understand witchcraft and I don't necessarily, you know, believe in the

paranormal. But for our purpose tonight, you know, so I think you have something similar to placebo effect. That, that the important point here is that Gypsy Rose believes the hacks and it influences her life to a very large degree. She can't stop talking about this hacks. And in many ways, Gypsy wants to overcome this hacks. And she, wants to prove her mother wrong, right? And that's why she talks about it so much. So no one has talked about the importance of witchcraft in the case of Gypsy Rose. I'm the first one that's going to promote this narrative tonight. So I want to begin with this narrative because I could argue that one of the reasons, maybe a large reason that Gypsy Rose decides to commit murder

is because this hax, this voodoo hacks, to her, is very fatalistic in the sense that she believes it's binding and she cannot overcome it unless her mother is dead. And because she feels that way, putting aside all the previous maltreatment and just focusing on this hacks, if you combine this hex with all the other things we're going to, all the other competing nerves we're going to talk about,

I think you'll find, or I could argue, if I'm starting with competing narratives, I would argue that this particular narrative has way more influence and power than people have recognized, including probably Gypsy Rose, and that I think part of her scheme to commit murder has to do with this hacks. Because even now, as she goes in the outside world and she's released from prison, she can't stop talking about this. She can't stop talking about the hacks. She can't stop talking, she can't stop talking about the fact that she needs to find love, so much so that she gets married in prison, and she can't stop talking about the fact that she has to find this happy ending. She wants

the Disney ending. So that's where we're going to start. I think that, so in that sense, my first narrative here has to do with witchcraft. I'm actually going to read from the book. This book is called This is Shakespeare. It's by Emma Smith. It's a wonderful book for those of you who love Shakespeare. Emma Smith is a Shakespeare scholar who teaches at Oxford University. Of course, I can't quote anyone else than a British Shakespeare scholar from Oxford

without doing justice to this topic. But she has a chapter on Macbeth, which is really interesting and it's brilliant. And I'm going to quote from Emma Smith's book. This is Shakespeare. She says this is page 241. Emma Smith says, well, let me set this up. She essentially says that Shakespeare is interested in three explanations for why Macbeth commits his murder. The first one is, it has to do with the individual. So it has to do with

individual personality and the role that a personality plays potentially in murder. The second element that Emma Smith points out has to do with other people and the influence of like the family and other people in one's lives, colleagues, and how they influence someone's decision to commit murder. And since I just talked about witchcraft, I'm going to pick up with her third and final reason. Page 241, she says, quote, and finally, there are causes that are supernatural

or metaphysical in origin, a category that includes God, the devil, and their intermediaries, including magicians and witches. McBeth presents a similar convergence of models of causation and agency. Is this a story in which Mcbeth willingly or unwillingly directs the action of his own play? Question mark?

Or is it better understood as a story in which he has acted upon by other people? Question mark. Might we see him puppeted by supernatural forces beyond his control? Question mark. These possible explanations coexist in Macbeth, a play that is more interested in exploring its own competing edioling. rather than in explaining them. So I know, again, I apologize,

I said we're going to have a high-level discussion. I think this is one of the difficulties of the Gypsy Rose case is that it's very much like Macbeth in the sense that I'm going to quote Emma Smith again. It's more interested in a way like Macbeth, there's more of an interest in exploring the competing etiology. than in explaining them. Because I don't think, I don't, there's, in the end here,

there's no final explanation. There's multiple explanation, and there's multiple narratives, and we'll get to that. And that's precisely, according to Emma Smith, that's what Macbeth is about. That Shakespeare isn't really interested in saying,

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Should we start with... Are you there, Lauren? Oh. I am here. Yes, you're doing great, babe. I'm listening along with everyone else. I'm like, go on. I thought I lost you there for a second.

So let's start with, let's start with the narrative about, so for those of you who watched the prison confessions, there was a nurse on there. I don't remember her name. She was a nurse and a lawyer, and she has some expertise in Moonschhausens by proxy. Her narrative is that this is Stockholm syndrome. And I know other people have talked about that,

or ask me that question on chat. And so Stockholm Syndrome essentially is that the victim begins to identify with the captor. The victim oftentimes might fall in love with the captor. The victim in some sense feels that they're very survival depends upon the captor. And her explanation was essentially that this is a version of Stockholm syndrome. that she has legitimate fear of getting out and she feels stuck and she believes the only way out is to murder her mother. So I would say that there definitely are elements of Stockholm syndrome in this case.

It's hard to deny that the Chipsy Rose felt like a captive. She felt like a hostage. There's no question that she over-idently. identified with her mother. There's no question that she sought her mother's attention in love. So I think all that's true. I think there are elements of Stockholm syndrome in this case. But let's consider an alternative perspective here too, though, that Stockholm syndrome mainly applies to adults. And Gypsy Rose, you know, this is her mother. She grew up with her, Right. So I guess you can argue that that means there's more dependency. But I mean, but still, it's not a great fit in the sense that by the time Gypsy Rose becomes an adult, she starts becoming more independent, right? She starts challenging her mother more, even though her mother doesn't know it, that she actually runs away. So, you know, her running away shows that she wasn't completely identifying with her mother,

even though, you know, she may have felt like a hostage. She may have felt stuck. She still believes that she has the freedom to run away and to express herself. Also, she's getting on all her mom's devices, computer, cell phone. She's using all of these at night when her mom's sleeping. So she's sneaking around and she's being a little rebellious. you know, that's not someone who's completely compliant. That's not someone who's completely a hostage and obeying by all the rules.

That's that's someone who's expressing themselves. That's someone who has some measure of free will and choice. That's someone, too, who's not necessarily afraid in the sense that she probably knows if she gets caught that her mom will admonish her in some way. but she doesn't seem to care. She gets caught with electronic devices, you know, when she runs away with Dan, when she's 19. And then even though she's caught and punished and physically harmed, she continues to do it.

She continues to get on Facebook accounts. She continues to get on her mom's a computer, right? So, you know, there are elements of Stockholm syndrome here. I don't know if that's a perfect fit. I don't think, I think it might explain some of the crime, but not all of it. So again, like the reason why this is so difficult is because now I've given you two explanations and I've argued that both of them have some validity.

Right. And we're going to keep going because it's important to show people that the complexity of this situation makes it so difficult. Let's talk about, somebody wrote to me and said, well, isn't this a case of a battered woman's syndrome? So this is another competing narrative. Battered women's syndrome was developed by Lenora Walker. And it's based upon Martin Zaleman's ideas of learned helplessness.

Learned helplessness is a version of operant conditioning, which I talked a little bit about last week. But in learned helplessness, the idea is that, Zelleman basically took some animals. He took some dogs. He put them in cages. He shocked them through a variable reinforcement schedule. And since the dogs didn't know when they were going to get shocked

and when they weren't going to get shocked, they essentially gave up. So they didn't try to get out of their cages or they didn't try to move to other areas where they had more freedom because because they felt like no matter what they were going to get shocked. And they simply gave up trying because there was a certain amount of helplessness that they developed. Yeah. So you, so is this narrative? So the narrative Harris-Battered Women's Syndrome.

Is, you know, is there some elements of that? Yeah, I think there are. I think there is some degree of learned helplessness. But again- Control, someone writes to. What's that? coercive control someone right? Yeah, we'll get, yeah, that's another

that's another competing narrative we'll get to. But, um, but, you know, there's differences. So the, the argument against learned helplessness is that the D.D. Blanchard wasn't physically abusive. There were no actual shocks. There was no, there was no slapping her, which occurred when she was 19. There was no physical abuse.

there was no putting her in a case. I mean, she was restrained, but Didi never specifically grabbed her and held her against her will, physically restrained her. So in other words, like this idea of actually shocking. So in the Zell-Oadmin experiments, there's an actual shock that harms these animals. There's no shocks that are being administered to Gypsy Rose.

and I know people are going to push back. You know, one of the biggest criticism we received last week was you guys don't understand that Gypsy Rose was she was being physically abused before the age of 19. Oh, yeah, right. Do you want me to read some of those comments? Yeah, why don't you read one of those comments if you can? You got a lot of pushback.

Some people were saying, how dare you ask the question, why didn't she stand, when actually it was a lot of, Leah and others had asked the question and you posed it and helped answer it throughout the entire episode. Some people told you to go back to the patriarchy that you came from and learn about victims. And so, you know, yeah, so when you said that, I was like, foo, but let's, yeah, let's read, let's read a couple of these things. So, and yeah, a lot of people have gotten upset.

that you mentioned there was no physical abuse. That was one of our biggest pushbacks. Somebody told me I set back victims rights 10 years. Yeah, well, maybe you did. I hope not. I hope not. Yeah. You would feel very, you would feel very bad if you did that.

We are four victims here. This, let me explain it this way too. A lot of people pointed out, well, you know, medication and surgeries are abuse. Well, you know what? I'll read these. I'll read these comments from our. listeners. Here's one from Chaos 9495.

Actually, could you read the other one? Oh, you want me to read the other one first? Yep. Okay. Sorry, Chaos. You're next. Melissa Fisher, her mom had been physically abusive before she was 19. Along with her grandpa, S. abusing her and molesting her.

How do you expect her to not fear for her life? wife. Even without her mother verbally saying she was going to do something to her, she still had reasons to be scared for her safety. Do you really think nothing had happened? And just because she tried to escape that her mom physically abused her, you really think that that is where it started, Dr. John? Well, this is, this is, so this is a really important issue, by the way. because Gypsy's argument for killing her mother is essentially

that she was desperate and she was afraid. Last week I pointed out that I thought the fear had more to do with attention seeking, that it had more to do with her mother removing her love, removing her attention. And I talked about the example with the cat. But Gypsy Rose is,

actually the one who tells us that there was no physical abuse until she ran away at age 19. Actually, could you play that? Yeah, I recorded it. John found it and showed it to me. It's on the prison confessions. I've got my, have my voice memo. I'll just play it right in my mic.

Tell me if this works. Let me play that one more time. I think I had it in the wrong spot. My mother never laid a hand on me until my attempt to run away. Could you hear that? Play it one more time. Please. I don't know if I'm holding it in the right spot.

Yeah, I can hear it. My mother never laid a hand on me until my attempt to run away. My mother never laid a hand on me until my attempt to run away. Gypsy Rose. And not only did Gypsy Rose said that. So she said that in episode three. of the prison confessions, you'll find it there. Not only does she say that her mother never laid a hand on her,

which means her mother was never physically violent or physically aggressive with her until she tried to run away when she was 19, so she doesn't say her age, but we know she was 19 when she ran away. It wasn't until then that there was any actual physical violence or physical abuse. And she actually says later, she says, my mother was very kind to me. I mean, putting aside all the medical stuff, she says, my mother could be very affectionate and kind to me.

Right. And so that doesn't mean that she wasn't abused. I'm not arguing that. And no, yeah, yeah, but, go ahead. But the butt is that if the question is, did Gypsy Rose fear for her life? Was her fear? Was there an imminent fear?

for her safety in her life. I think that there were fears. I think that there were fears bodily fears, fears for her bodily safety, but that's different than fears for her life. I think there were fears that she would undergo unnecessary medical procedures. I think there were fears that,

you know, her mother was overly controlling. There were fears that she was too dependent upon her mother. There were a lot of fear. There were fears she would never find love or have a regular life. But we're not talking about that. I mean, so the question is, can those fears, can the fear of your mother withdrawing love lead to murder?

I mean, yeah, I guess so, but it's a different fear. It's a different fear than a fear that someone is going to kill you, is going to murder you, right? And so that's what we're talking about here. Gypsy Rose just told us her own words, there was no physical abuse in this relationship. until age 19, after she ran away. I think her much, as an adult, when Gypsy Rose becomes an adult, I think her mother definitely feels more desperation.

Because she knows that the, she knows that Gypsy Rose is her meal ticket and that if she loses control of her, she's essentially losing control of her lifeline. Yeah, not only her meal ticket and her lifeline, but what will come out, what will be exposed, right? What frauds?

And money and crimes will be exposed. So yes, I'm sure her mother felt a lot of desperation as Gypsy grew older and more independent and started running away. So the evidence is, and I mean, I'm getting the evidence from Gypsy Rose. So the evidence is that there was no physical abuse before 19. I don't even know, by the way. So there are, there's these, when I do forensic interviews, I say this a lot. But when I do forensic interviews, I'm always looking for these little tells, these little moments, that I'm always looking for these little moments that provide so much insight.

And a lot of times the people who say these things like Gypsy Rose during the interview, it's unintentional. They don't understand the ramifications of what they're saying. And I definitely think this is one of those moments. And the reason I say that is because in the HBO documentary, she implies, throughout that her fear was for her life. She implies that her mother was, she says her mother slapped her, her her mother hit her.

She doesn't clarify, she clarifies it in the prison confessions, but she never clarifies that the slapping and the hitting and the tying her to the bed, all of that occurred after she ran away as punishment. None of that occurred prior to age 19. So there's very much this sense, like in the HBO documentary, that you're led to believe that the abuse was physical, before 19, it wasn't. And she's very clear about that in the prison confessions.

So. I like what Elizabeth says here. I think there was fear that she was not psychologically strong enough to free herself from her mother as long as her mother lived. But she was not at risk of dying physically. Right, right. And so if we're talking about battered women's syndrome and if we're talking about learned helplessness and if we're talking about Stockholm syndrome,

oftentimes those explanations, those narratives, will involve some physical threats to safety, that the offenders in those cases will restrain people, they'll harm people, they'll engage in aggression or violence, they'll push, they'll hit, right? Even in the learned helplessness experiments, they're being shocked. Chipsy Rose is not being shocked. She's not being restrained.

I mean, she's being held captive, but she's not being restrained until 19 when her mother chains her to the bed. So this is confusing. And I'm not arguing, by the way, let me go back to this competing narrative point. I'm not arguing that these aren't accurate. I'm not saying that there wasn't Stockholm syndrome or learned helplessness or battered women's syndrome.

I'm simply saying that there are a lot of narratives here that are competing for attention. And all of them have a little bit of validity. So I guess the way I would describe it is that all of these are true and none of them are true. You know, I know that's a contradiction. This is going to take me back to McBeth. Fair is fall and fall is fair.

It's hard to know what's accurate here. They're all a little bit accurate. And so let's dive into what I call the Disney story or the standard story. And this is the story that Gypsy Rose herself tells. Gypsy Rose tells us in the HBO documentary, I think it was HBO. I've watched so many of this stuff. I'm losing track of my sources a little bit, but I believe it was HBO.

She talks about her love of the movie, the Disney movie Tangled. And I don't remember when that movie came out, but she watched this movie repeatedly, and she identified with it, and she loved it. And, you know, we know that Chipsy Rose went on trips to Disneyland. She went on trips to make a wish, that she had kind of this obsession with Disney.

and these fantasies about finding or Prism Charming, right? All this stuff. So the Gypsy Rose story is essentially a version of Tangled, which is, for those who have seen the Disney movie, that Rapunzel is being held captive in the tower by Gothel. And Gothel is sort of the evil witch. And Gothel restrains her and keeps her captive because her hair provides her with eternal.

youth. So as long as Rapunzel has her long hair and she's in the tower, then Gothel, the evil witch, can live forever, right? So obviously she doesn't want to let her out and she normalizes everything that's going on

even though she's captive. I should point out, by the way, that there's no physical abuse in the tower. It's clearly child maltreatment, you know, but it's clearly. It's clearly abusive, right. It's clearly abusive. but she can't kill Rapunzel because then she loses the hair that keeps her alive, right?

And so you have in a way, it's interesting because you have a similar dynamic with Didi that Didi doesn't want to kill. In fact, you know, Gypsy Rose is Didi's prized possession. Correct. And helps keep her alive and is her meal ticket. Right. Keep her alive. She keeps getting attention. She keeps making money on this thing, right, all of that.

So in Rapunzel, you know, the final outcome is that she kills the Wicked Witch. Rapunzel kills the Wicked Witch. She works with the, I don't know, his name is Flynn Ryder. Flynn Ryder is sort of the paramour who rescues her from captivity. And then she's reunited with her royal family at the end. I think that Gypsy Rose definitely is influenced by this story. And so her narrative is that she's held captive against her will. That's all true.

And that there's such fear and desperation that the only way out is to murder her mother. To do that, she recruits Nick. I guess she sees Nick like Flynn Ryder in the movie. Nick hesitates to help her initially. Nick pushes back. Nick is very reluctant, but Gypsy Rose is relentless. And Gypsy Rose pushes this idea of murder. Nick finally agrees.

He carries out the murder and convincing Nick that, convincing Nick that this is the only way they can ever be together, which is what Nick wants more than anything. And then she has her happily ever after. In order to make that narrative work, number one, you have to show that there's a huge amount of fear. You have to show that there's an inordinate amount of fear that justifies murdering her mother. That's one thing. The other thing is you somehow have to justify Gypsy Rose has to justify her role. In other words, she has to blame Nick, essentially,

so that she's not culpable. You can't tell this Disney story. And we'll get into why this is problematic in a minute. But I'm going to read some quotes from the prison confessions about Nick. This is a quote from Gypsy Rose. She said, quote, had I asked a responsible person to commit murder, the response would have been, no, I'm going to the authorities. But Nick was like, okay, I'm going to kill your mother.

That's episode four. So notice the slight of hand there. You know, if this is said in one of my offender groups, my, I guarantee you every one of the offenders in that group would have jumped on that statement. and said, you're evading responsibility, right? Like, she's saying essentially that it was, even though Gypsy Rose is pushing, even though she's relentless in telling Nick, you need to do this or we're not going to be together. The one thing Nick wants more than anything else is to be with her.

And remember, we talked about last week, Nick is autistic. He was diagnosed with autism according to his mother. He has the intellectual capacity of a 15, 16-year-old. She's pushing him. Nick knows that his prospects for a significant relationship are fairly limited, I think, or he senses that. He sees this as a bonanza. He sees this as his happily ever after.

So he's getting, as Nick tells the investigator in the interrogation, I would have done it. He says, quote, I would have done anything for her, even if that involved murder. But here, so here we have Gypsy Rose with the sleight of hand. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the internet, and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent.

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Rose stop, right? So there's some indications that Gypsy Rose, there's definitely indications that she planned the murder for a year. It appears that it might have been longer. We're going to collaborate with some people that have some of the discovery, and we're going to look into the timeline a little more. But we know that the murder was being planned for at least a year, and Gypsy Rose was the architect of that plan. We know that because Gypsy Rose made a video of, essentially of the steps that Nick would need to take to commit the murder, including the way that she envisioned him stabbing

her mother to death. So the video or parts of the video are actually on the prison confessions. they're fascinating, you know, in the sense that it shows just how planned it was and how, you know, Gypsy Rose in some ways, I think, was leading the charge. At the very beginning of this life, someone said, if we haven't been looking at documents and if we haven't been talking to people, then we have no place to talk. But I want you to know that John and I do take that seriously

and do take looking to evidence seriously. and we are reaching out to people who worked with the family, who knew the family, who have records, and we are doing our best to collaborate with those who know much more than we do because we know that this is a case that has been going on for years. So I do want you to know that. So we are working with people and we're grateful for all of the people that have come forward. If anybody has information on this case, please email us at hidden true crime info at gmail.com. So we're getting closer to the source here. We haven't seen these records.

We haven't had a chance to vet them, but we're getting close. So bear with us. We'll probably do some shows after we have a chance to review some of those records. And we get into more detailed conversations with the people who have them. And of course, I want to make sure that we're doing that ethically, you know, meaning that we can access these records ethically and legally. Of course, we'll do that. And that will help to answer Kay Vala Woodcock's question, or maybe we can even answer it later.

But what about the abuse every time she brought her to a doctor claiming a non-existent illness, although I agree it could have been handled differently. Should we get to that later? Or I also want to say that this will be answered in depth as we continue this as well. And we'll delve into a little bit later. Let's get to that in a second. Because I want to go back to what's going on now with to tell the Disney story. You have to tell that story in a way.

that, you know, Repunzel doesn't plan a murder. Rapunzel doesn't plan the murder of her, of, you know, the evil witch. It happens somewhat impulsively or by accident. I don't remember the movie exactly, but, but again, so this is another quote. I want to read this quote from Drithy Rose, quote, she's talking about Nick, quote,

murder was something he's, murder was something he always wanted to do as a fantasy, unquote. She said, quote, I could have been anyone. So again, here's Gypsy Roe's blaming Nick for the murder. She's almost implying. I mean, she acknowledges that she's the one who suggested the idea. But what she's saying here is that she threw the idea out and Nick just grabbed on to it.

He couldn't resist because Nick always wanted to commit murder when she, she threw that out there, he just couldn't wait. He'd been fantasizing about murder for years and years, and here it was, wow, this was the perfect opportunity. She could have been anyone. Except the problem is that she wasn't anyone. She was Gypsy Rose and she wanted to murder her mother. Right?

And so, you know, there's a lot of, I mean, so obviously she's shifting blame there. You know, she, which makes sense. So she's painting Nick as this malicious evil. doer who's just pining to commit murder and he would have murdered anyone he just had to have the right opportunity right i mean none of that is true by the way nick has no previous violent crimes and i i'm going to cite the research of a guy named david bus david bus is a psychologist david bus he looked at he did a survey of 5 000 people all over the world and what he found was that 91% of men and 84% of women had all fantasized about committing some type of murder.

Those are extraordinary numbers. If you want to read about that, you can get a summary of David Buss's research in his book, The Murderer Next Door, published in 2006. But this survey is fascinating in the sense that what Bus essentially does, is he normal that murderous fantasies according to bus are perfectly normal so when Gypsy Rose is

implying that Nick just couldn't he had these fantasies of murder and he just couldn't wait to do it she's really her point is is does not have any strength if you look at in the sense that if you look at bus's research

most men and women have had some fantasies of murder at some point in time it's not unusual The difference is obviously they don't act on them. My argument would be that Nick acts on them because she persists. She won't let it go. Right? Like, so when Gypsy Rose says, I could have been anyone, I think she actually gets it wrong.

We talked about this last week. That the reality is that if you remove Gypsy Rose from the equation, my guess is that Nick's free right now. Gypsy Rose is the catalyst. She's the one who comes up with the idea. and she's the one who persists. She even makes a video to show him where her mother will be in bed. She shows how she lays in bed and how he can stab her when he comes into the home.

No, I'm not letting Nick off the hook here, by the way. Like, Nick at any time could have said, no, obviously. He could have held his ground. He could have walked away from this whole thing, and he didn't. So Nick obviously is culpable. but this idea that somehow Gypsy Rose is Rapunzel, who really had a minimal role, she just happened to meet this guy, Nick, who was an evildoer,

and he just took it from there. She threw out the idea of murder, and then Nick rammed with it and finished the act. So on a few recent interviews that Gypsy Rose has been on, she says, quote, I'm not the one that committed the act of the kill. She says, quote, I can't kill anyone.

I just don't identify as that, meaning a murderer. So that's interesting. So in the prison confession, she actually said that she was concerned that she wouldn't be able to meet a boyfriend because they might see her as a murderer. And let's keep in mind that she was convicted of second-degree murder, which means that in the second-degree murder,

which means that in the state of Missouri, she's considered a murderer. So some people have written and said, well, if it was manslaughter, she's not a murderer. No, that's technically by the law she's a murderer. But here you can see her evading this issue altogether. She says, quote, I'm not the one that committed the act of the kill. Therefore, she doesn't see herself as a murderer. Which, by the way, with Kay being here, that would, I'm sure Kay recognizes the absurdity of that because Lori Valo-Daybell didn't, quote, commit the act of the kill,

but she's doing multiple life sentences because she was involved in the murders of many people. This idea that somehow you actually have to plunge the knife into another human being, you know, if you don't plunge the knife into another human being, then you're not a murderer. That's incorrect. That's false. Thank you. Thank you. And you know what?

Gypsies touring. I've been seeing several videos actually where she says on the vials files that she is not a murderer. After spending eight and a half years behind bars for being a convicted murderer, she's now on tour saying she's not one. So I don't know how much she's learned about remorse either. Sorry. Yeah, some people are saying you're being very diplomatic right now. Maybe that was a little harsh.

But I would hope that someone had a little bit more humility and a little bit more remorse after years behind bars. And she's now going on podcast saying, no, no, no, Nick is the murderer. I am not one. Right. So I think by her logic, I think she should go to Idaho and immediately seek the release of Lori Valo-Dabelle. because by that logic, Lori Valo-Dabell is not a murderer either. And by the way,

that would make, there's a lot of co-conspirators and a lot of murders that would be walking free if that was true. For those that are only here tonight because of our covering of Gypsy Rose and don't know how we've covered the Lori Valloday-Bell case,

Kay Woodcock is here tonight. Kay Woodcock is a dear friend of ours and she is the grandmother of a little innocent boy who is the victim of Lori Valje. Al-Daba. And we're thinking of you tonight, Kay. And we know that you probably sign off and on when you're capable, but thank you for being with us tonight. May justice be served. We still have some more trials when it comes to that case. So I think I'm not going to probably have time to get through all

these narratives, these competing narratives of the case. But let me, let me, well, before we move on, if we're looking at the Disney narrative, so the problem with Gypsy Rose's narrative, is of this case is that she has to completely blame Nick, which doesn't accord with the evidence, and she has to show that her fear is so intense and so immediate that she has to commit murder and she can't somehow walk away. Now, again, this is a complex issue in the sense that battered women's syndrome and Stockholm syndrome, all of these things, you know,

that she, I'm sure she has a distorted view of reality. And it probably is difficult for Jitzy Rose to feel like she can just walk away from her mother, at least emotionally, in a way where she can be safe and independent. And, you know, I think that's accurate, you know, but again, my question is, does that mean she has to murder her? Right. And so this brings us to this issue of fear. and Gypsy Rose tells us, she tells us that on the night her mother was murdered,

that she watches a movie with her, and she's sitting on the couch with her, and she's getting close to her, and her mother tells her some stuff. Her mother tells her some last words. So could you, we have that. This is from the HBO documentary. Could you play that, please? Yes, here we go. And I pulled this from a TikTok.

profile and that the link to this is in the description of our video as well. I got into an argument. And we had made a lot. She said starting to feel more relaxed. So there you go. Yeah.

I mean, that's to me this, and again, this is in the HBO documentary for those who watch that. But that's a show stopping moment. for me, when I watched them in the HBO documentary, I dropped my pen in the sense that if your narrative is

that you're so afraid of someone that you have to kill them, and you're on the couch watching a movie with them, and your mother tells you, I'm starting to feel more relaxed, Gypsy, don't hurt me. Let that sink in for a minute. it. Right? Is that someone who's imminently afraid for their life? Right? I mean, actually, when I heard that, my question was, who's afraid of who? Her mother is asking her not to hurt her. Her mother has a knife by the side of the bed. Does her mother, so this raises a big question. Has her mother

intercepted some of her correspondence with Nick? We know that her mother's extremely intrusive. We know that her mother probably is going through her electronic devices, her phone or computer. We know that gypsy's corresponding on her mother's computer. Did her mother intercept some of her correspondence with Nick talking about the murderer? Right? Her mother is afraid of Gypsy. She tells us that. Gypsy tells us that. So this narrative that somehow she was deathly afraid of her mother, and it's true, her mother was becoming more physically aggressive after age 19 and the murders occurred at 23. But this raises a big question mark.

Why would her mother be afraid of her? Right. This completely undermines this narrative of fear and desperation in the sense that her mother is telling her don't hurt. I mean, I can't. It's unbelievable. an attorney here with us tonight. She may have been threatening her mother openly.

We will never know. We will never know. We won't know. So, right. And so I think this really undermines this whole notion of, of her being deathly afraid of her mother, at least to some degree. And at the very least, it undermines this idea within,

let's say, a few weeks or leaning up to her mother. eventual murder. Yeah. Cece is saying that she's reminding us of the BB gun. Perhaps she was also afraid because of the BB gun incident where Gypsy claims that she picked up a gun that she thought was real and shot her mother and then only realized later it was a BB gun. I'm sure there were many things like that.

Kay is also stating that Gypsy, this is true that maybe she was just afraid of of Gypsy leaving her. Don't hurt me. That's true too. I agree. I think the biggest fear, that is exactly, the biggest fear that both Gypsy and D.D. have is that one or the other of them will leave. And this dependency or codependency will somehow be broken, this bond that we've talked about.

So last week I mentioned the quote from Gypsy about, let me say, if I could find it, that they were bonded by lies. This is a quote from Gypsy Rose, quote, my mother and I were bonded by this lie together that we couldn't escape. Gypsy Rose. Another quote by Gypsy Rose. Thank you, John, for being a listening ear and picking up on the quotes we always, that we maybe don't hear.

So this issue of telling her mom, not to, you know, her mom telling her not to hurt her, it becomes the plot thickens on this one. It becomes more interesting because in the prison confessions, Gypsy changes the story, completely changes the story. So in the prison confessions, Gypsy tells the same story about how she's on the couch with her mom. They're watching a movie.

They're getting close to each other. And this is what Gypsy Rose says. And I'm going to tell you why this is so important in a minute. In the HBO documentary, the last words were, don't hurt me from her mother. In the prison confessions, her last words were, Gypsy gives her a hug.

And the last words her mom ever said to her were, quote, what's that for meaning the hug? Quote, what's that for, I'm not dead yet? So in other words, she's giving two different stories in two different documentaries.

On record. On record. On record, Gypsy Rose for two separate documentaries is dating two separate experiences of what her mother's final words are, which is probably something she's not going to forget. But let's talk about why this is so critical.

So in 2016, when she does the HBO documentary, she says the last words were, don't hurt me. And now in, so over 18 months, the Lifetime did this other documentary. So this is roughly 2023, let's say, Gypsy Rose says her mother says, I'm not dead yet. You know, the reason she changes the story is because I think she understands how damning her first analysis was, right?

That I think this idea of don't hurt me really changes the roles. I think that Gypsy Rose has years to think about it. I think people have probably asked her about it. And now all of a sudden we have a different story. So we obviously know many, many people have talked about this, but you know, Gypsy Rose has said openly that her mother taught her to lie and manipulate that she says, quote,

I have never told the truth, not even to my own attorneys. That's from the prison confessions as well. But here we're seeing this in action. And the reason why this is so critical is because it shifts the narrative from her mother being afraid of her to her mother being much more neutral in terms of her mother. Gypsy sees the second statement on the prison confessions as being kind of a prophecy of sorts

or an allusion to the fact that kind of a harmless allusion to the fact that Gypsy knows she's going to die but her mother doesn't. So she sees her mother as being somewhat pressing. that she foresees her own death. But I think Gypsy must have heard or known that she had to change that story because the first story was so damning.

Right? Like, if your Disney narrative is that you're afraid for your life and then your mother's last words are, don't hurt me. I mean, man, that's... Let's listen to it one more time. Here we go. I've got into an argument.

She said... The whole thing, too. She said, she said to be a good girl. She said that she was starting to feel more relaxed. Her mother said, that she had said something to hurt her feelings. And she said, be a good girl. I'm starting to feel more relaxed. Don't hurt me.

The whole thing is like, boom, boom, boom, wait, what? Who's afraid of who here? Right. That's my question. And so when you take that and when you take her statement in the prison confessions about the one we played earlier about her not experiencing any physical abuse or violence until the age of 19, it really throws into question this issue of how afraid she was. Again, most battered women.

So I've done groups for abusive men, for domestic violence offenders. And in almost every one of those cases, there's either been physical violence, physical abuse, or threats to the spouses or girlfriend or significant other partner's life. But you don't have that here. And again, I don't want to minimize this because, yes, there is maltreatment. Yes, it's a problem. Yes, it's concerning.

Yes, she's a victim. I'm going to say yes to all of that. Yes, these competing narratives are all true to some extent. And yet they're not true. They are and they aren't, right? And so that's why I think this case is so maddening, because more so than most cases that we talk about on this channel, these competing narratives all kind of clash with each other.

And there's no clear explanation that's going to take, you know, priority over any other one. And so on that issue, let's get to a few more of these. I know I don't have time to go through all the competing narratives. I wrote down like 20 of them. We're just not going to have time. But one of the critical ones we need to look at is Moonschausen's by proxy. Oh, yes.

One of the most important, I would say, because I would say that's the theme in every documentary and in her in Gypsy's entire narrative. So this is no small one to go over. Let me say thank you for the loving reminder to hit the thumbs up and subscribe. if you guys appreciate what we're saying tonight. If you could give us a thumbs up or like our video, whatever it is that you call it, it does help us so much. We are trying to grow.

We are trying to use our voices in this true crime world to help and to be ethical and to help explain. And it just means so much when you help us grow by subscribing or sharing with your friends and family or liking our video. We talked about this last week a little bit about whether there is Moonschausen by proxy and to what degree. So one of the narratives is that there's a clear diagnosis here of what's called factitious disorder imposed on another now not Moonschausens. But one of the one of the narratives in addition to the ones we've already talked about tonight is that in some ways

Gypsy Rose was the object. She was treated like an object. She was the object of D.D.'s attention and that D.D. fabricated or imposed all these medical issues on Gypsy Rose. That seems clear. Gypsy Rose clearly had concerns for her. bodily safety and her response was that that created some of the fear, right, that she didn't

want to continue to undergo these invasive procedures. So she fought back. She, you know, I guess the argument would be that because she was subjected to all these surgeries and unnecessary medications and the wheelchair that all the, right, leukemia told that she was having had leukemia, that in order to feel safe, she had to murder her mother. So that's essentially the argument. Let's go through Moonschallens by proxy. This is factitious disorder imposed on another. There's four criteria in the DSM.

This is the DSM-5. There's four criteria to diagnose this. I'm going to read them. Okay. Because we need to figure this out. Factitious disorder imposed by another. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling.

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Other companies might sell just credit monitoring, or just a VPN. ORA gives you all of it, together, at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at aura.com slash remove. Protect yourself now atora.com slash remove. Right. So I should point out that the previous diagnoses are slightly different from different versions of the DSM, but I'm going to diagnose it based on the current version of the DSM. The first criteria, criteria A, there's four. Falsification of physical or psychological signs or symptoms or induction of injury or disease in another associated with identified deception. So check, yes. there's falsification of physical or psychological signs or symptoms.

Note that it doesn't have to be physical. It can be psychological so the leukemia would still count, for example. There was no leukemia. Right. Even though maybe a doctor didn't diagnose it, it would still count. I talked about last week how most of the cases of Moonshausen that I'm familiar with involved, quote, induction of injury or disease. So induction of injury or disease means poisoning.

Right, that there's actually some, that a disease is manufactured or induced or an injury is induced. So, but that now you don't need just induction. You can have falsification of physical or psychological signs. She has that. So she meets A. B, the individual presents another individual in parentheses victim. So the individual DEDE presents another individual. Gypsy Rose, the victim, to others as ill, impaired, or injured.

She meets B. So she meets A and B. C. This is the most important one. C. Okay. Let's hear C. Okay. Here we go.

C. Okay. The deceptive behavior is evident even in the absence of obvious external rewards. So the answer, so she doesn't fit C. Wait, wait, wait. Say C again. Let's talk this. The deceptive behavior, meaning all of the symptoms, all of the physical and psychological

symptoms that she exhibits, which are false, that are fake, the deceptive behavior is evident even in the absence of obvious external rewards. In other words, there's clear external rewards that D.D.D. is getting. She's getting money. He's getting trips to Disneyland. She's getting clothes. She's getting all the stuff. She gets a house.

house. Yes, a house, Disneyland. Ronald McDonald's days. Those are a big ones for them. A free house, a free house. Disability. I saw their disability. I saw the disability application today.

Well, actually, anyone can see it if you pause the documentary. You can see it too. That's how I saw it. And they actually claimed it was a medical record, which is why I paused it. But it was actually an application for disability. And they shared all of these things about gypsies. and why she was just this helpful thing and they needed disability. So there's another one.

I'm going to read further down. So there's an area of the DSM called Diagnostic Features, which clarifies the different criteria. It says one of the diagnostic features is, quote, the diagnosis requires demonstrating that the individual is taking surreptitious actions to misrepresent, simulate, or call. signs or symptoms of illness or injury in the absence of obvious external rewards, right? So the DSM is saying essentially that all the misrepresentations and causes and signs and symptoms

of illness or injury need to occur in the absence of obvious external rewards. They don't. D.D. is clearly doing this for external rewards and for external gain, right? And so in that sense, technically speaking, Gypsy Rose doesn't even meet criteria for factitious disorder imposed on another. In the sense, right? But Fancy actually told us today that.

We spoke to Fancy today. she was in touch and helping the family directly for three years. Go ahead. So fancy, right, fancy Mazzelli. She told us today that her, one of her doctors, she didn't say what, she didn't give us a name. I wouldn't mention the name anyway, but she didn't give us name. One of her doctors was actually responsible for making the referral for the home that was built for them by Habitat for Humanity. So in other words, the doctor of Gypsy Rose was actually, according to Fancy,

was actually participating and rewarding, providing these external rewards, providing the house for this family. That would matter because it would be the reason for going to doctors to tell them to convince doctors of her illnesses. Is that what you're saying? No, what I'm saying is that to get this diagnosis, that you have to take the external rewards out of it. In other words, it's more obvious that it would be,

if you're getting houses and money and trips and, you know, invitations to the American Cancer Society to sing, if you're getting all this stuff, then there's a clear reason for malingering. There's a clear reason for, you have a clear motivation for why someone is creating these symptoms or these maladies in someone else, and Gypsy Rose in this case. Right. In other words, it's a red flag to the medical community in the sense that what makes

Moon Chauzen so confusing is that it's not clear cut, that there's no, that you're not showering someone with gifts and external rewards, right? And so what I'm saying is that, there's that even the doctor who's tweeting them, who's giving them a house essentially, is being misled. He doesn't see it. And he's not taking into account the fact that he's contributing. He's contributing to the malingering, right?

Like, I mean, I'm not blaming it. I'm just saying that even he has been immensely deceived. I mean, he says this on the documentary. But so by the current. criteria of Moochausen's also now called factitious disorder, Gypsy Rose actually doesn't meet criteria. And the reason she doesn't meet criteria is because the external rewards that they're receiving are so obvious and so blatant. As someone stated, so what does this mean then? If it's not, if it's not factitious disorder or Moonshausen, sorry, by proxy, by proxy, people are

correcting me, or if it's not factitious, imposed on another, what is this? What is this? Yeah. So let's consider a few other narratives. So, well, let's talk about, we've been talking about Fancy's analysis. So Fancy believes that this is medical fraud, that Fancy's analysis is that most of this or all of it's a con. And again, this isn't my opinion. I haven't looked at the medical records. I'm taking, I'm taking this from someone else. And we are talking to many, many people.

I want you to know. And some people are mentioning, well, this happened with fancy and that happened with fancy. Sure, we're not getting into the details. But this is what we know through information that fancy as and she knows the family. Go ahead. So yes, there's some element of trusting her and her analysis. We haven't double-checked her work or even checked her works, so we're taking this on faith. But her analysis is that this is medical fraud. She believes in many ways that this is an elaborate con and the purpose of this scheme was precisely what you would think.

It was to receive money and goods and services and attention and, right? And so I'm not saying I agree with that, by the way, but that's another narrative. It's another narrative. Another narrative. My goal at the beginning of this was to look at the competing narratives. Here's another one. Is this medical fraud? I don't know.

But it's a narrative that other people have that have more information than we do. I'm not going to be able to get to all the competing narratives, but I do want to. Well, can we just clarify something, though? This happened when she was, this started when she was an infant. So it's still child abuse. It's still child abuse. She did not have. Yes.

I think it's definitely child abuse. Definitely child abuse. And on that sense, yes, right. I mean, so when all these medical procedures, even if you think that the medical procedures weren't as significant or serious or there weren't as many of them as was initially thought, you're still dealing with a child that can't give consent and that's helpless to a large degree who's undergoing unnecessary. procedures. She's been told to stay in a wheelchair, right? She's been given all this misinformation. She's been misled. I mean, there's no question it's maltreatment. So yeah. Yeah, people are saying, absolutely. She was an infant. C.C. is saying, though, I also have to wonder if the scam was coming to an end. Gypsy was getting older and society cares less about

ill adults. Right. Probably right. Yeah. The scam was coming to an end. at some point it had to come to an end because and I think this was one of Didi's biggest fears by the way was that Gypsy would become an adult that she would become independent and Didi would do everything in her power to to keep her dependent right because in some ways Gypsy Rose emotionally and financially and psychologically was her lifeline gypsy Rose was Didi's lifeline so yes she absolutely must have been very scared of the fact that Chipsy Rose was getting older, that she was becoming more independent,

and she had to find new ways to keep her kind of captive or, right, to continue. If this is medical fraud, she certainly had to find creative ways to keep that going, especially with someone who's 23 years old. So let's, that'll bring me to, so let's look at one more competing narrative,

and that is the narrative that we're talking about, which is child abuse. So this narrative of child abuse, child maltreatment is going to dovetail with the narrative of the cycle of violence. We haven't talked a lot about that with this case, but it's really critical. So I'm sure many of our listeners have heard about the cycle of violence. Cycle of violence, I'm going to – so 1989 – Kathy Spatz Whidem, WIDEM, is spelled W-I-D-O-M. Kathy Spatz, Widom, was one of the first researchers to really articulate and study the cycle of violence. She wrote a seminal paper in 1989 called The Cycle of Violence.

It was published in Science Magazine in April of 1989. I'm going to have her to find it right here. This is from a more recent paper. This is from a paper that she wrote called Long-Term Impact, of childhood abuse and neglect on crime and violence. This is her definition of the cycle of violence. It's on the first page. The cycle of violence refers to the phenomenon

whereby children who have experienced physical abuse become perpetrators of violence in adolescence or adulthood. So many people have expanded that from merely physical abuse to neglect, sexual abuse, other types of molestation, the cycle of violence essentially says that violence in childhood begets violence in adulthood. So that's how she defines it. This is from another article by Wydom from 2021, so it's more recent.

The title of this article is, quote, the title is the cycle of violence, abused and neglected girls to adult female offenders. I'm going to read, I'm reading from page 272. These are some of Whitams. This is a summary of some of her own research. She says, quote, Max Field and Wyatom, that's the researchers, found that abuse and neglected girls were 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes

compared to the non-maltreated control girls. This pattern continued into later adulthood when the previously maltreated girls were more than twice as likely to have been arrested for violent crime than the control girls. Thus, and this is her conclusion, this is really important, thus there is clear evidence that child maltreatment leads to externalizing behavior in girls and to increases in risk for being arrested for violence in adulthood. So what does that mean? If you want to, so again, this is a competing narrative. The narrative here is the cycle of violence, which is simple.

That if you're maltreated in adulthood, even if you're a female, because I know some people are going to push back here and say, well, doesn't this mainly apply to males? Nope. Wydom has done the research on females and as she says, girls, that girls are equally likely, if not more so in some cases, to engage in violent behavior as adults, if there's been any type of maltreatment in childhood.

And so here's another competing narrative that you have someone who was abused and not just by her mother, by according to Joe's, her grandfather as well, Claude. We won't get into that, but you have multiple forms of abuse here that then translate into later potentially.

And again, I want to say people say this all the time. Well, people will say, well, I was abused and I'm not violent. Yes, the issue is not, not everyone who's subjected to maltreatment is going to go on to become violent. But if you are subjected to maltreatment, you have a higher probability of being violent later on. That's all it suggests. So compared to the average person, there's a greater likelihood of engaging in violence later on. So I think, so this narrative is important. in the sense that the cycle of violence has application to almost every case we talk about, right?

That it's really important for us. So let's take Brian Colberger. I mean, he hasn't been convicted yet. So maybe he's not the best person. But if you think of any serial killer or any person that engages in violence or a lot of the cases we talk about, not all, but many, most, there's some type of. Not all. Not all. Not all.

Not all. There's usually some type of maltreatment that could be neglect. It could be physical abuse. So keep in mind, I said neglect. Neglect doesn't involve violence necessarily. Physical abuse, sexual abuse. Any type of maltreatment increases the probability. It doesn't ensure it.

It increases the probability of later violence and potentially murder. So I think in this. This is where this kind of gets into the issue I talked about last, in our last show, about anger and rage. And I feel like Gypsy Rose really has not been able to get in touch with that. That she's really kind of repressed a lot of her anger and rage. She can't. She hasn't once that I've seen expressed any real anger towards her mother, by the way. So that's interesting.

But she certainly, with her murder, she certainly acted it out. So here we have another competing narrative. You know, as you pointed out, Lauren, that a lot of, some of our listeners really kind of pushed back on this issue and said, well, she's a peer victim, right? She's a pure victim. And that somehow gives her a pass to be violent or to harm her mother. Yeah. Right.

Gypsy killed her torture, not innocent people is. One comment right here. Everyone else said, it's self-defense. Everyone else said it's different. Okay. Not fair. Right. I mean, and again, you know, my argument here is that there's a lot of competing narratives.

They all have some truth. And they all have, they all lack some truth, too. So they all have validity and they all lack some validity. So I don't know. You know, this is where. This is where this case is really challenging. And it's really difficult to understand. And I think this is where so many people are invested in a particular opinion.

And, you know, all of them are right and none of them are right. Was it self-defense? I mean, again, if you want to argue, if you want to go with self-defense, then you have to feel that her safety, that her, that her fear, her deathly fear of being harmed was imminent. Can I, can I suggest something to you when it comes to the people saying, but she was abused, but she was abused, how dare you this is different, she was abused? Being in this true crime world, I mean, hidden true crime has always, always,

always looked for the hidden motives from the very beginning. It's what we set out to do and we have done that and continue to do it. We have never veered from this. that when there is a crime and a criminal, we delve into who they are and their background in what happened to them, to understand the hidden motive and to understand the criminal more.

I feel like the people watching Gypsy, well, let me go back a little bit. A lot of times people will jump. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions, pulling details about you from public records and the internet, and then packaging and selling it.

usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where ORA comes in. Ora actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But ORA goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to $5 million in identity. theft insurance, all backed by 24-7 U.S.-based fraud support. Other companies might sell just credit monitoring or just a VPN.

ORA gives you all of it, together, at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at ORA.com slash remove. Protect yourself now at aura.com slash remove. To our show, as we're delving into a criminal's past in a criminal's childhood and discussing their abuse or discussing what happened in their childhood, to say, oh, come on, stop it. They're just evil. Stop excusing them.

They're just evil. Well, first off, we're never excusing anyone by trying to understand what created a criminal or how they became who they are. We're never excusing them by doing that. We're understanding and hoping to understand humanity and helping to get a better understanding of crime and maybe to stop this from happening and to help us raise our children better, whatever it is. And people will just jump to their evil, they're evil.

And I think that what we're seeing with the gypsy rose phenomenon is people that have never delved into the hidden motives of a criminal before. And this is your career. This is your job, John. This is what you've always done your entire life. This is what you do.

There's never a criminal you don't do this with. You always learn the underlying issues of their childhood and have empathy. for their childhood and the abuse they suffered in their childhood to understand how they became a perpetrator. I feel like it's maybe like the, like, because the world doesn't do that, like you do that every day of your life or we do that on our podcast. It's like typically people are just evil.

But now that we understand someone's childhood experience for the first time, which is Gypsy Rose, now, now she's like the first criminal that. who've ever understood had a bad past, where you know that every criminal has had a bad pass. So this is easier for you to separate. Where the rest of the world doesn't get to hear all the time the criminals past. Anyway, just a thought I've been thinking about as like we've gotten these comments and how the world is celebrating Gypsy like, she's different. How dare you? No, so many criminals have really difficult childhoods that we can feel empathy for their childhoods. And yet they are still a perpetrator and we need to hold them accountable.

It doesn't excuse them. Rant over. Sorry. That's a really good point. So the cycle of violence narrative, I think, it doesn't necessarily separate her. I mean, yes, one of the arguments we're hearing a lot from people is she's different. She suffered more. She was abused more significantly. She had more trauma, right? No, I mean, actually she didn't. She's in many ways very similar to many of the criminals that we assess. So, and again, I mean, we have a lot of empathy for all these hardships and all the adversity that so many of the people we assess have gone through. So yeah, thank you for making that point. I think that, I think you're right.

I think that for some reason, a lot of people are more inclined to see her as being different and to give her a pass because of her experiences and somehow the argument is that she's different. I mean, she's making that point too, to some degree. That brings me into the second question I wanted to look at. And we'll just go through this quickly. But then that's the question of who do we blame here?

I think part of the problem here is that, there's so many people to point the finger at, right? That makes this confusing, too. Not only do you have all these competing narratives, but you have all of these parties that can potentially absorb some of the blame, right? Like when you think about, so I just wrote down a few. I just wrote down quickly this afternoon some of the people that might be responsible, right? So I wrote down Emma.

Emma is Gypsy Rose's grandmother. Emma treated Dede, the same. way that Didy treated Gypsy Rose. I mean, no, not quite as extreme, but there seemed to be similar issues with Emma. There's Claude, the grandfather. Claude may or may not have engaged in some type of molestation with Gypsy Rose. Then you have Didi. Obviously, Dedy is culpable to a large degree, right, for all the maltreatment.

You have Nick. Gypsy Rose points the finger at Nick. Nick Gypsy Rose says, Nick's the one who, you know, who took the reins and really led the charge on the murderer. You know, Gypsy Rose sees Nick as being the primary culprit. Then you have Gypsy Rose herself. You have Dr. Mark Feldman said in one of the documentaries that her Facebook posts were consistent with someone who has sociopathy,

that she's a sociopath, right? So the question here is, is Gypsy Rose have a personality disorder? Is she narcissistic? Is she histrionic? Is she a psychopath? Probably. Yeah, I don't know. I'm asking the question, but the point is that does Gypsy Rose get a pass for this murder or not?

Can we blame her? We can blame the medical system. We can blame her doctors. We can blame the voodoo hacks. We can blame Nick. We can blame Nick. We can blame Nick. Right.

Nick obviously participated. Nick was the one who killed the murder, D.D., Nick obviously is culpable. He's spending the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole. We can blame Didi's family culture that there appears to be an intergenerational cycle of abuse in the family that clearly doesn't start with Didi. It goes back generations according to fancy. There's, we can blame child protective services and DFS who have made multiple trips to the home and found to find it and substantiate it. The police, we can blame the police. The police have come to the home.

They too believe Didi. They too failed to find anything wrong, right? I can go on and not. Like part of the complexity here is that there's so many people here that could be culpable. So many people that we could blame or that someone could blame, that gypsy can blame, that anybody could blame, right? And so when you put together these competing narratives and this difficulty of assigning blame, I think that that makes this case very, very difficult to really,

evaluate and to really reach a definitive conclusion. And I think people are struggling with that too in the sense that people really want to simplify this story. Right. Blaming other people is actually a great way to simplify things. Saying someone's evil is a great way to simplify things. And when we don't want to say someone's evil, just blaming everyone else is also a great way to simplify things. It still doesn't solve the complexity of this issue, though. Right. And just looking at it from Gypsy's perspective, by the way, if we go over my blame list, um,

Gypsy doesn't blame Emma. She doesn't blame, well, I don't, I don't know if she blames Claude. She doesn't, she says that Claude harmed her. I don't know if she, she doesn't seem to blame him for the murder, although clearly if that happened, probably played a role.

She blames Didi to some degree, but not a tremendous amount, even though Dedy's a victim, clearly. She mainly blames Nick. She doesn't blame the medical system or doctors. She doesn't blame D.D.'s family culture. She doesn't blame CPS or DFS. She doesn't blame the police.

She herself is obviously simplifying her story to try to get people, the public, to agree with her. Yeah. And you know, I want to say that. That's interesting, too. This is just me realizing it. You're right. She does blame Nick.

She does this on many of the podcasts and interviews recently and the documentary. The blame is on Nick, but I just started reading her book and her book starts with a letter to her mother blaming her mother. But one thing that I'm noticing is Gypsy blames a lot, blames either her mother, Nick. She doesn't ever blame herself. She doesn't own this. you know and I mean we'll get more into that later so I don't know you know I didn't cover everything

I wanted to cover this is such a large topic let's just let me just summarize a few ideas and then we'll we'll say good night but let's get back to Macbeth I want to get back to Macbeth to close this let's come full circle here this is I'm going to quote from Emma Smith again this is page 254 quote Mcbeth asks Macbeth asks Macbeth asks why things happen, that we still can't answer is key to its unsettling hold upon our imagination. Macbeth, she's saying, is a play that really still stirs the imagination because there's no why. There's no simple answer to Macbeth. That we read the play because we're still interested.

We're still trying to figure out the competing narratives. On that issue, I actually want to read something that Gypsy Rose said, something that Gypsy Rose said in one of her prison confessions. She said, quote, over the years, it's been nothing but a process to understand what happened to me. There's so many, many questions that I still have not had closure about. Right. So even Gypsy Rose, here in this quote, even Gypsy Rose is acknowledging the complexity of this case, the complexity of the situation.

She sounds a lot like Emma Smith when she says this. I wrote this down because there's a part of her that sees this, and there's a part of her that understands it, and there's a part of her, this, by the way, is not the part that's on tour, right? The part that's on Turner is saying she's not a martyrer. But the fact that she had that insight is interesting. And I think that really kind of brings me to,

you know, Gypsy Rose said that this is a cautionary tale. She sees this as a cautionary tale from the perspective of if children are being abused or they're involved in these types of relationships that she wants to open their eyes to help him get out. And I think that's really great. You know, if she can do that, that's fantastic. For me, I'm going to go a little bit above that. And I see this as a cautionary tale about what I would call self-knowledge.

I think this is a cautionary tale about knowing oneself. You know, this goes back to the famous, the Oracle of Delphi and Oedipus had above the temple, the words, know thyself, right? And I think a part of the problem here is that both D.D. and Gypsy Rose don't really, and never had a chance to really kind of develop what I would call an authentic self. that they don't really know themselves that well.

There's moments when Gypsy Rose shows some insight. There's moments when she shows the capacity to really to change and to really empathize with other people. But it's only glimpses. So to me, that's really, you know, the cautionary tale here is to really kind of step back and reflect upon our lives, to understand some of our motivations more,

even if there's many competing narratives, even if there's a lot of people that we can assign blame to, that this quote I just read from Gypsy Rose, quote, there's so many, many questions that I still have not had closure about. That's what she said. And my response to that is,

you probably won't get that closure, you know, in the sense that a lot of the uncertainty and complexity here, I don't think is ever going to have, there's not going to be a final answer here to all the complexity. And we want there to be, final answers as human beings. We want there to be an answer. What's your end game, John? Dr. John. Right. We want a conclusion to make sense of this world and sense of this case.

Right. As I hope to show tonight, there's no one narrative that's going to make sense of this. It's not Chipsy Roses, not the police, not the attorneys, right? It's not the psychologists. I should point out, by the way that in the documentary, there was a psychologist whose narrative essentially was. There's a narrative that he talked about, which was that D.D. Blanchard is a psychopath and that Gypsy Rose couldn't get out from under her spell. So she had no choice but to murder her mother because a psychopath is relentless. They'll pursue you forever. The only way out is to murder your mother.

So that's another competing narrative. Someone said, get comfortable with loose ends. and uncertainty. Then you have peace because that's how life is. I think I can also say that I myself need to get used to silence. It's a similar thing. Right, which I talked about last week. Yeah, then you have peace and that's how life is, that there are loose ends and uncertainty, and that that is hard. I started with Macbeth and witchcraft. Let's end with Macbeth. This is a quote from Macbeth that I think has a lot of pertinence to our discussion tonight. And that quote is, This is from Act 1, scene 4, near the end of scene 4.

Quote, this is from Macbeth himself, quote, Stars, heart, I'm sorry, let me start again. I'm not a Shakespeare actor, so I might have to do a few takes here. John played football in college. He wasn't, he wasn't in Shakespeare, played football. I wasn't a Thesbian, yeah, so I need to work on my Shakespeare. here. Quote, stars hide your fires. Let not light see my black and deep desires. It's a simple quote. It's a beautiful quote. The reason I like this quote so much is, Lauren, you're always talking

about shining light on things to illuminate them. I wish that somebody along the way here, whoever that was, whether that was Rod or Christie or CBS or that a doctor, right, there's so, many people that could have shed some light on those black and deep desires. And they didn't. You know, even Gypsy Rose, she could have, she could have shed some light on her own black and deep desire. I hope she does now. I hope she's willing to kind of dig, dig a little deeper into who she is and what her

motivations were or are and could be. And maybe she'll come out better for that. That the more we hide stuff and the more secrets we keep and the less light we shine on things, potentially the more complicated and disastrous things can get. There were a lot of places here in this story, in this very tragic and complex story, where light could have been shown on the darkness, and we would have had a different outcome. Thank you for your support. Please share.

Please subscribe. And leave your comments and questions for John in chat. Someone, one of our dear gems just commented that you can tell that John is very passionate about this case and I think as his wife looking at him I'd have to agree he is he's delved in and I think we might see another week of this so please leave your questions and comments and chat because we're going to do a Q&A and we clearly never got there again patreon dot com slash hidden true crime if you appreciate what we do uh we rely so much on your support and patreon is a place where we give back it is a place where you can do a monthly donation

for us, large or small, whatever, even just a little bit. But donate your, you know, a Starbucks coffee a month. But we do give back there. We want to thank you for that. And we have bonus episodes that you will never hear anywhere else. You'll get an entire catalog of those. And you'll get thousands of pages of FOIA documents and court cases. And just thank you to those who support us on that platform as well. And here and everywhere. Thank you. We are trying to grow. if you haven't noticed. We are here to stay and we are going to make 2024 a good year, starting with Gypsy Rose. Yeah, what a way to dive into the new year. I really appreciate our community and how we can have

these high-level discussions with so many people in our community and they really contribute to these discussions at a very high level. And I think that's unique. So thank you very much. Thank you, everyone. And yeah, I am passionate because I think the larger issue here about oversimplifying crime is a really important one. You know, I think that's one of the points we always try to make is that even the most heinous criminal acts are complex. And we learn, I hope, you know, I hope one of my points is that we learn from analyzing those, those acts. We can learn about ourselves. You know, so many, so many true crime channels resort to the most, oftentimes resort to many, overly simplistic

explanations that he was evil, she was evil, she's a psychopath, he's a sight right? And so we really want to kind of delve into something at a deeper level than that. And hopefully that's what we're doing here. I think that's what we're doing. One of the complaints you got in comments last week, I didn't tell you, John. But they were like, dude, your summary is way too long. And I responded, I'm like, this ain't a summary. So if you're looking for a summary, don't come here.

because Dr. John is not going to give you one. No. And let me promote the book club. So we're going to be reading Terry Eagleton's book on evil this month. We'll be talking about that in a few weeks. I'm looking at the calendar. And we're going to discuss this very idea of evil, what it means, whether we should use it in true crime, whether it's an oversimplification of what's going on with true crime.

and Eagleton is a brilliant scholar. It's not an easy book. That's exactly what we're going to talk about in a couple of weeks. So please join us for that. So for the book club members, I told Lauren, like, I'm beyond excited for tomorrow because True Detective Season 4 starts on HBO. And I love True Season 1. I think that was a groundbreaking true crime.

television series and season four with Jody Foster is supposed to just based on the reviews I'm reading it's supposed to be amazing. I can't wait to see it and we will be

it will require some commitment but we will be discussing that for our next video analysis in what is this January? In February we'll be going over TrueKime season four. So for those in the

book club will want to watch that, I I'm just on the AC. I can't. Johnny Foster's amazing. An early announcement about the February book club. A lot of people think that I post things late. I do. Sorry about that.

But I'm getting ahead of the curve here. Good night, everyone. All right. Good night. Hello, Hidden Jems. It's Lauren with Hidden a True Crime podcast. As a TV reporter, I learned the art of visual storytelling. So if you're like me, you enjoy listening, but also viewing.

You can actually head to our YouTube channel. Hidden True Crime to watch these interviews. Hit the subscribe button for surprise lives and breaking news. And for exclusive content, things Dr. John and I only dare say behind a paywall, become a Patreon member at patreon.com slash hidden true crime. You'll find bonus episodes, early releases, and insider info. Thank you for your endless support. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day.

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