RedHanded - FROM THE VAULT - Episode 26 - Madness, Murder & Munchausen by Proxy: The Case of Gypsy Rose Blancharde

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

With the release of Gypsy Rose Blancharde’s memoir just around the corner, we thought it was high time we revisited the full story, from Episode 26 of RedHanded. And, to hear our thoughts on the book, check out this week’s Under the Duvet on Patreon.com/redhanded.--Things aren't always what they seem...To the world Dee Dee Blancharde was the perfect mum. She dedicated her life as a single mother to taking care of her incredibly ill and disabled child. But one night Dee Dee was brutally murdered, and what was revealed shocked the world. It turned out that her daughter Gypsy had never been sick at all.Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramXVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad free. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. ["The Wondery"] Here there is an always more difficult one. This is an ongoing investigation, and I want to start off with saying things are not always as they appear. This is a ongoing investigation and I want to start off with saying things are not always as they appear.

This is a tragic, tragic event surrounded by mystery and public deception. As we have unearthed the appearance of a long financial fraud scheme. I just went on blind faith that a mother knows best. What do you think about people that have sex with dead bodies? I'm Hannah, I'm Saruti. And welcome to Red Handed. And thank you as ever to our lovely Patreons for supporting our show. And this week, it's a thanks to all of you because we're up to date with our official thank yous.

We hope that you all enjoyed our monthly bonus episode on... Was it Yog? Good old Yog. Okay. Last week. And next month we're going to be rescheduling our live episode because obviously we got snowed out. And we do understand that Britain's snow isn't as hardcore as snow in other parts of the world, but genuinely Britain stops working. It's ridiculous. It happens every year, but we are incompetent. Anyway,

so we've rescheduled the live episode. It's going to be coming out in January and it's on Killer Kids and we will be doing the same format from the Halloween specials. So that is something to be excited for January about. I fucking hate January. It's genuinely the worst time of year, in my opinion. You'll have this to look forward to. I do. Like it's actually making me feel a lot better.

And we also want to take a really quick second to thank all of you. We are 100% committed to bringing you guys high quality content each week and we work super hard at it, but only because of each and every one of you and how rewarding you make it. Thank you so much for the last six months for sticking with us as we've grown and improved and also telling your mates. Here's to 2018. Yeah, tell your mates. Please tell your mates. With that, we'll jump right in with the five star thank yous. So first one, I love this one. This is a person after my own heart. RH6519 said, I am picky,

picky, picky about podcasts but subscribed after the first listen. You ladies are an excellent blend of murder, wit and what the fucks. I love that. That's great. That should be our tagline. It should. Let's steal it. This one is also hilarious, but for other reasons. This one is from Baby Cakes Loves Mitchies. And they say, I won't waste your time telling you how fabulous you ladies are. I just wanted to put my five star review out there so that algorithms can do their job. Thank you so much, but you gave us three stars.

Oh, baby cakes love smit cheese. If you can get back on there and edit it because your words are great, but you've given us three stars, just tweak. That would be really helpful. But thank you for the kind words. But we still love you. We do. That's why you're still in the five star thank you for the kind words. But we still love you. We do. That's why you're still in the five star thank yous, even though you gave us a three star review. And finally this week, Simply Fab 95, who said, slowly but surely becoming one of my

favorite podcasts. Keep it up, girls. I really feel like we should just start measuring the success of our podcast by how many people tell us it is their favorite podcast. Yeah, we should do a graph. Pie chart. Today we are covering the case of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. Now, the true horrors of what had been occurring behind closed doors at the Blanchard house suddenly became public in

2015. But where this case would go and what it would eventually reveal makes it one of the most troubling stories we've come across. So let's start somewhere in the middle today. It's June 14, 2015 in Springfield, Missouri, and the police receive concerned calls from the neighbours of Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard. Neither the mother Dee Dee nor her young disabled daughter Gypsy Rose had been seen in a couple of days. And now on the Facebook profile they shared, disturbing messages had started to appear. The first message posted that afternoon read, "'The bitch is dead' to which friends and family replied with shock. They thought the account must have been hacked. But then 17 minutes later another message was posted. I fucking slashed that fat pig and raped her sweet innocent daughter. Her screams were

so fucking loud. LOL." Yeah, just fucking let that sink in for a little. I know. Even as I read it, I felt a bit like, oh, and I took that up. The neighbours are now incredibly confused and they call the police, who arrived a short while later to do a well-fetched check. In the house, they found 48-year-old Deedee and she had been brutally murdered. She was found in her bedroom, face down on her bed, laying in a pool of blood. She had been slashed across the neck and had been stabbed multiple times in the back. But where was Gypsy? The girl was severely disabled

and suffering with leukemia and all of her vital medication was still in the house. She was also wheelchair-bound, but the wheelchair was still in the house. So police fear the worst. What sort of monster would have killed Dee Dee and kidnapped a sick young girl? To say that finding Gypsy Rose was the highest priority would have been an unbelievable understatement. And so the police now pour over message after message and all of the documents and posts and photos they can find on the Blanchard's computer. And in just a couple of days the police found Gypsy, alive and well, almost 600 miles away in Wisconsin. And when we say well, we mean well. Because she was walking

just fine and she seemed perfectly healthy for a girl who had left her vital medications behind at the scene of a murder just two days ago. But to answer what the hell was going on now, we have to go right back to the start, before Gypsy was even born. Dee Dee was born Claudine Petra in Check Bay, Louisiana in 1967. She doesn't seem to have had a great childhood, but there was family around her and by all accounts she was looked after. But I think it is important to say her dad has the weirdest accent I have ever heard in my life. We'll post a documentary on the Facebook group. But please, just educate me because how? Please. Maybe it's what you said though. Is it Creole?

Well maybe. I suppose they're in Louisiana. I don't know, but I don't want to reveal my ignorance anymore. Let's not reveal our ignorance. So Dee Dee's mother was a petty criminal and Dee Dee followed her example. Dee Dee was constantly in trouble for shoplifting and as she got older, she moved on to credit card and check fraud. Now at some point in her early 20s, perhaps in the hope to turn her life around, Dee Dee started working as a nurse's aide and eventually would even go on to try to become a nurse. And it's at this point that Dee Dee, age 24, meets Rod Blanchard, who was 17. He's

from a couple of towns over. They go on a few dates and Dee Dee gets pregnant. Not knowing what to do, Rod and Dee Dee get married. But within just a few months, and before Gypsy was even born, Rod, who's now 18 and like, what the fuck am I doing, leaves. He seems like a really simple guy. Didi and him, I'm just going to say they were never going to work out anyway. Yeah, and he says in the documentary, he's just like, she was pregnant, you got married, that's how it worked. Yeah, he's like, I was from the South, what else was I going to do? I married her. But it wasn't the right thing to do, and he realized this. He is a it worked. He's like, I was from the South, what else was I going to do? I married her. But it wasn't

the right thing to do and he realized this. And he is a bit simple. He got freaked out by things like, quote, she was into some dark shit. She talked about witchcraft and she had a pet tarantula. I don't think having a pet tarantula necessarily puts you in the box of a bad person. No. And that's what I was going to say is I think this is just horseplay. This is just dark horseplay compared to what Dee Dee is going to do. Maybe Rod got out at the right time. I mean, if Tarantulas was too much of it.

Exactly. So on July the 22nd in 1991, Gypsy Rose was born. It was reported and the family recall that Gypsy was born a little bit prematurely but there was no real impact or other issues at birth. But aged three months this all changes. Dee Dee, who remember was a nurse's aide, started saying that Gypsy had sleep apnea. Now this can be very hard to diagnose properly and even after overnight monitored stays in the hospital, the doctors couldn't conclusively say what or if anything at all was wrong. So why risk it? So Dee Dee procures a sleep monitoring machine for Gypsy who now just aged three months is

sleeping with the machine strapped to her. I've seen one of these in real life. They look like nose snorkels and they are loud. And she's sleeping with it like strapped to her face and chest from three months old. It's horrifying. Yeah, it's not a minor piece of kit. No. And then after this, it escalates. Gypsy is then plagued with problems with her eyes and her hearing and her digestive system. She goes through surgery on her eardrums and on her eyes and the doctors put in a feeding tube because she isn't gaining weight and

Dee Dee tells him she won't eat and has bad acid reflux. Now Rod, who isn't on the scene, but to be fair does give Dee Dee on average about $1000 a month for gypsy, starts to wonder why there are so many things wrong with her. But with Dee Dee using her mild medical knowledge as having been a nurse's aide, tells him that she's handling it and it's all down to a mystery chromosomal disorder. Dee Dee even tells Rod that Gypsy won't make it past her teens. Now we're going to tell you at this point that Gypsy Rose Blanchard does not have a mystery chromosomal disorder. She didn't need these

surgeries and she isn't sick, but her mother is because Dee Dee Blanchard is afflicted with Munchausen syndrome by proxy and Gypsy is her victim. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a mental illness. But first and foremost, it's a form of abuse. It's characterized by a parent or caregiver, which is usually a mother intentionally causing illnesses in her child. So Munchausen syndrome on its own is when you're inflicting pain on yourself. Biproxy is on another person. And there are different intensities and manifestations of this disorder and the symptoms of the syndrome are hard to identify. But the most obvious one is that the child only becomes sick in the presence of his or her mother. I think salt poisoning is a really common form of munchausen by proxy. What's

really difficult with this case is trying to understand why a mother would intentionally make their child sick. But the whole disorder is centered upon the mother's need for attention and sympathy and compassion to precate self-doubt in the sufferer. The emotional gratification the mother derives from the label of martyr and hero and like super-mom and outpouring of sympathy and kindness and crucially money that comes from having a sick child somehow reaches her and soothes her emotionally in a way that she can't get elsewhere. So it's about attention. And like with most other psychological disorders or forms of abuse, when left unspotted, the symptoms further escalate and in this case the mother tries harder and harder to gain the

attention of those around her. And escalate it does. The surgeries and the doctor's visits keep going and as young Gypsy who is still sleeping with a breathing machine on every night continues to lose weight, the doctors are forced to implant the feeding tube. And having a feeding tube put in is just more invasive surgery. It's carried out under general anaesthetic and the surgeon goes in through the abdomen and places the tube into the stomach. And in cases of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, you see this again and again because a feeding tube is an absolute must have for any Munchausen mum because it's the easiest way to do whatever you want.

You can put whatever you want into that feeding tube and therefore into the child's system. It's an open portal for all sorts of health that the abuser can now make the most of. Medications, poison, anything can be put into that feeding tube. And the child doesn't even need to be awake now so you can poison away without even causing the fuss of making the child swallow it. And vitally also the child can't give you away now. They can't say to anybody, oh mum made me drink something weird. That's now no longer even a problem for you. And as you said salt poisoning is such a common problem. But how do you get a child to swallow a massive glass

of incredibly salty water? You don't need to now. You just pour that straight into the feeding tube and you'll see the impact that you want. It's absolutely horrifying. I have to say, I had two laparoscopies on my abdomen two years ago and I'm a grown woman and I was in agony. Seriously, abdominal surgery is excruciating because you can't sit up. I think it's important to say it's not a nose tube. This isn't something that's gone up her nose. No, no, no. It's literally something you screw off and then you're inside her body.

Yeah. It's through the, like, it's almost like through next to where the belly button is into the stomach, straight into the stomach. And so now with the feeding tube in place, Dee Dee's actions continue. And According to medical records, Dee Dee took Gypsy to local hospitals over 100 times between 2005 and 2014. And then at the age of 10, Dee Dee then declares that Gypsy can no longer walk and Gypsy is given a wheelchair. For the next 14 years, she's totally confined to this chair, despite the fact that she could walk perfectly well. Dee Dee would film Gypsy a lot, presumably for more of this attention, like maybe fundraising

drives and stuff, because they got an extreme makeover house and all of this stuff because of the illness. And there's a particular video, which is in the documentary, where Gypsy is outside the house sitting on a wall and she says, I'm going to jump into the snow. And she sort of launches herself off this wall with her hands and she lands on her feet. That is not what would happen to someone who can't walk. But obviously you're not going to challenge it if you think someone's kid is sick. And to some people, Dee Dee claims that Gypsy has muscular dystrophy, to others she says that Gypsy has MS, and to others Gypsy is apparently suffering with quadriplegia. Can you?

It's madness, but this is how she manages to get away with it because she's in different places telling different stories to different people. So Gypsy was, and there's absolutely no argument about this with experts, consistently, viciously, and systematically subjected to munch hasm by proxy at the hands of her mother. The trauma she endured was the point of it all. The more traumatic the experiences for Gypsy, the more emotionally gratifying it was for Dee Dee. So eventually Gypsy was said to have the following disorders, asthma, epilepsy, hearing and vision

impairment, gastrointestinal problems, quadriplegia so that's paralyzed from the waist down, GI reflux, leukemia, hyperventilation, lung disease, heart murmur, muscular dystrophy, incontinence and a developmental delay. I think that's 14. This I don't think is even the full list. What's important to note is that Gypsy was not diagnosed with all of these conditions. Some of these are more easily faked than others and some are very easily tested for. Something like Leukemia you could test for and immediately know. But the point was that Dee Dee was continuously swapping doctors, constantly lying about Gypsy's medical

records and her history and even told hospitals that all of Gypsy's medical records had been destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. But most crucially, she had amassed by this point literally an entire cupboard full of medicine. There was so much medication. Imagine giving a child anti-seizure medication when they aren't epileptic. The drugs that she had were hardcore and these drugs themselves made Gypsy sick. So this was also the problem for doctors. The medication that Gypsy was taking were inducing many of the symptoms the doctors thought that they were treating. So it's like in other cases, if they can't get their hands on medication like this, they'll use salt, they'll use common

poisoners. But this is perfect because it's a catch-22. She's getting more of the medication because Gypsy is presenting more of these symptoms. But it's the medication she's being prescribed for Gypsy that is making Gypsy sick. It made her so sick, her teeth fell out. Yeah, her teeth fell out. All of her teeth drop out. Also taking hardcore pharmaceuticals like that from a young age. This is happening from when she's a baby. The damage that that would do to her developmentally speaking. And her liver. Of course, that's what I mean. Absolutely, to her organs, everything. I think if you

have a genuinely sick child, you would make the allowance that you need to give them that medication even at a young age because it's going to save their life. Giving those medications to a child that is essentially healthy, it's poison. It's poison. But still, how does Didi get away with all of this? How does she get doctors to go along with all of this? This is what I've really struggled with doing the research for this, because it's so many procedures. Like you said, putting a feeding tube into a child is such an invasive surgery and I am just astonished that they managed to get a doctor to do even

one procedure on someone who wasn't sick, let alone the loads and loads and loads that she had. I know, but think something like a feeding tube. It's easy to feign the reason why, because she's so young at the time she gets the feeding tube. You just withhold food. Just withhold food, she'll lose weight. The only reason the doctors will put in a feeding tube is if the child is not gaining weight. That's really easy to feign in a child. Just withhold food. So then they will believe what the mother is saying and they'll go along with it and put the feeding tube in. It is a last resort, but Dee Dee could push them to the point that

it is perceived as a last resort, or perceived as being necessary, sorry. Because she was highly manipulative. She absolutely knew what she was doing. There were reams and reams of medical notes on Gypsy from the hundreds of doctors that she saw. All of them cited that their diagnoses were made upon mother's information and upon history provided by mother. In one case, the doctor even notes that Dee Dee held her hands over Gypsy's ears so as not to offend her before telling the doctor that she is mentally retarded. That is evidence of her concealing things from Gypsy in front of another person. Obviously, it's only recorded once, but this must have been happening all the time.

She's giving doctor information without Gypsy even being able to hear it. When they went to the doctors, Gypsy was under strict instructions. Dee Dee was to do all of the talking and she'd tell Gypsy, don't speak, don't move your legs and stay calm. There really are just so many doctors, so many notes and procedures and medications and just so little connection between them and what was really happening to Gypsy. The claimed developmental delay is so important because it was such an easy way for Dee Dee to take control and explain away why Gypsy didn't speak or engage with the doctors.

It explained why Dee Dee always held Gypsy's hand in public. If you've watched any of the videos with them, the documentary, all of the footage, Dee Dee is always holding Gypsy's hand and it comes across like a way to support and soothe this child who has all of these illnesses, is apparently developmentally delayed, but in reality the hand holding was to give Gypsy a strong warning squeeze if she's ever speaking dangerously. So if Dee Dee feels that Gypsy's giving too much away, that she's talking too much, she would crush her hand. That's why she held it. That's horrifying. And of course the developmental delay is also hard to test for, so it's very easy to just say it. And couple this with how childlike Gypsy

was even as she grew, it's easy to see why it was taken at face value. Which brings us on to the other vital weapon in Dee Dee's arsenal, to keep Gypsy permanently in an infantile state. This was absolutely crucial to allow Dee Dee to keep the control and maintain the situation. She would force Gypsy to act younger than she was, and we know that she lied about Gypsy's age. In many of the medical records Gypsy is listed as being far, far younger than she was. Her mannerisms and her behaviour and her voice is all so childlike. But you have to remember that Gypsy was totally isolated. She was pulled out of school aged six and homeschooled by Dee Dee. So even though Gypsy wasn't developmentally delayed in a medical sense, like Dee Dee said

she was, but I think she had a completely limited education. I genuinely would be surprised if she can read. Yeah. Dee Dee wasn't wasting any time educating Gypsy at home. She didn't even seem to know how old she was. Her dad calls her for her 18th birthday, and Dee Dee tells him not to tell her that she's 18 and to say, Happy 14th birthday instead. And Dee tells Rod that this is because it might upset her because she's so far behind and he goes along with it. So by the time Gypsy is 20 years old, she's still being passed off as just 10 or 11. And

there's a horrifying picture of Gypsy with a shaved head sitting in the sink like a baby. I think in that picture, she's like 18, 19, and she's completely naked sitting in a sink like you would put a baby in the sink. It's what it was absolutely Dee Dee's control to keep her in that infantile state. It's such a horrifying form of abuse. It's really such an upsetting case. The way I think Didi managed to get away with this, like the constant medical records and changing doctors, because she can't stay with the same doctor for very long because they're going to be on to her, I think perhaps the way healthcare works in the States, there being lots of different

health insurance companies probably helped with this as well because if they're private hospitals, they won't be talking to each other like, here you have your NHS number and that connects you. When you change doctors, you give your NHS number and everything is moved over automatically for you. But I'm not sure that's necessarily the case, especially if they're moving from state to state. I mean, we talk about it with police information not being passed over state lines, so I imagine it might be similar for medical records. So she keeps moving them around and they wouldn't stay in one place for too long. And vitally, she kept moving Gypsy further and further away from her family and from Rod, her dad. And there's two reasons

for this, obviously the doctors, so she could keep changing and to keep the family away to prevent too many questions being asked. And also to keep refreshing the community around them. Firstly, to keep Gypsy's age a secret because if you stay in one place too long, Gypsy's going to have to age. And also definitely, I think, to get a huge new hit of sympathy from a group of new people. Like I can really imagine her just getting bored with the same people being like, oh, how's Gypsy? How are you? What do you need? She'd get bored of it because people will taper off with that sort of stuff. She moves to a new place to get a new hit, a new fundraising drive, a new charity to work with. Because we see throughout

the whole case, aside from just the sympathy and support that people were willing to give, they really opened their hearts and more importantly, their wallets to Dee Dee and Gypsy. They received support from organizations like Make-A-Wish, the Ronald McDonald House Foundation, and Habitat for Humanity. So they got free trips to Disney World and help with medical expenses and even airlifts to a hospital in Kansas City. And the level of deception and fraud is just absolutely diabolical because obviously if you see a woman, she's a single mother, she's on her own, she probably can't work because she's looking after this child all the time. Her child is so ill and in a wheelchair and developmentally delayed. Obviously if you see that and it's your neighbour, you're going to be like, let me help you, what can I do? And to abuse that trust of the people around you,

let alone your daughter, is just absolutely despicable. It's nearly 20 years into this fucking long ass con before we see the first time a doctor noting the strangeness of Gypsy's case. But don't get excited, he's not the hero of the piece. Dr Bernardo Flasterstein, a neurologist that Dee Dee took Gypsy to, made comments in his notes that he thought the mother is not a good historian. And his suspicions grew from the fact that for someone who at this point has not walked for nine years, Gypsy should have muscle atrophy in her legs. Her muscles should have wasted away due to lack of use. But her legs,

he noted, looked fine. And he notes that her brain MRI and spinal MRIs are essentially normal, concluding that there should be no reason that she shouldn't be able to walk. This doctor even spoke to a past doctor of gypsies who told him that gypsy did not have muscular dystrophy. So this doctor wrote in his notes after analysing all of the facts and after talking to her previous paediatrician, there is a strong possibility of Munchhausen syndrome by proxy. So why didn't this end here? He's done it. He's spotted it. Well, this doctor, Dr. Bernardo Flasterstein, decided that you report when there's neglect. But this mother wasn't neglecting her. In

his words, she was over-treating her. Right, we'll come back to that. And he said that he feared because there was so much attention on this child, she was a part of the hospital's outreach programmes, etc. He said that if he had reported this, he would have just been immediately dismissed. No one would have paid any attention to him. And he rationalizes it, I feel, to himself by saying, no one else said anything about it, so I didn't feel like I could pursue it and continue to keep saying something was wrong with her mum. So he just didn't do a thing. And this makes me really angry. I really feel like he's such a piece of shit. Overtreating her.

She's poisoning her. This isn't fucking over treating. This is poisoning, like you said. I just think if everyone just stays quiet, nothing changes ever. That's how the world works. And I think as a doctor, with your Hippocratic oath to do no harm, to see something like this and to spot it for what it is and not take it any further is wrong. But yeah, he does write it in the notes, so that's something that someone else, but he doesn't follow up on it. And I imagine that Dee Dee, oh, because Dee Dee requested the medical record. So Dee Dee saw this letter and she took Gypsy away and they never saw him again.

Yeah, of course. But, you know, he absolutely should have followed up with it. The fact that he even recognises it for what it is, he sees that it's Munchausen syndrome by proxy. So it is at this point something that is a recognised issue. So he knows what this means or what this could mean for Gypsy, but he lets it go anyway. That's what makes me so angry. Yeah, Munchausen's proxies has been around for a long time. Doctors are aware of it and they're aware that it's fucking child abuse.

And often, more times than not, it's fatal. And he knows it's that and he just lets it go. So whilst all of this is going on, what's Gypsy getting up to? We can gain a little insight into Gypsy from the many, many, many home videos that her and Dee Dee have shot. And in these videos, Gypsy does seem to be playing along. I don't know if that's the right term, but I struggle with this so much. Has she been conditioned? Does she now also long for the attention that her illnesses bring her? Or is she going along with it so enthusiastically in videos

because she's scared of her mum abusing her? Because no doubt about this, every expert says that when munch house and by proxy manifests, it is also accompanied by physical abuse. But the key thing here that I don't know whether I have the answer to, does Gypsy really believe that these things are wrong with her? Gypsy has had so many operations from eye procedures, wrapping her stomach lining around her esophagus, having gastrointestinal surgeries and even having her salivary glands removed because Dee Dee told doctors that she drooled too much. But that seems so extreme and also she's drooling too much because her fucking teeth have fallen out. Her mother is just the most manipulative.

It's surgical mutilation. That's exactly what it is. But with all of these things happening to her, with the huge amounts of drugs that she was taking, it was inducing the illness. So Gypsy can't have been feeling great because she's on really heavy duty stuff. So I do feel like she probably did believe that she was truly sick. And I think what is the crux of this is that her mother is completely in control of her entire life. And it's actually quite similar to Colleen Stan, I think, because it's this person controlling what goes into your body, where you go, when you can walk. And Gypsy today says that she was completely in the dark.

She says that the only thing she knew was that she could walk, but the rest of it she completely believed and her mum made her believe it. Dee Dee would shave Gypsy's head saying it's going to fall out anyway because of the cancer treatment. Let's keep it neat. Okay, the feeding tube, I can get how you could get a doctor to do that. I don't understand how you're going to get your hands on leukemia medication if you don't have cancer. She wasn't giving her leukemia treatment. If you look at all of the medications she has, it's the things that are harder to prove. There's stuff like cancer treatment. She wasn't getting it, but she was telling Gypsy, you have cancer. And it's very easy when you're out in public, oh, my daughter's got cancer. That's why she's got shaved head.

And also she was going to specialists. They're going to a neurologist to talk about whatever they're now talking about, muscular dystrophy or the epilepsy or whatever. They're just saying, oh, she's also got leukemia, but we're seeing an oncologist about that, so don't worry about it. That's under control. And she just wouldn't go to an oncologist because she knows cancer is too easily picked up. Like you just do a blood test, you know that that person doesn't have leukemia. So she was just picking anything that gave really visual symptoms. So having a child that is bald that you've shaved, that is like the perfect poster kid for a sick child, isn't it? And that's what she wanted. But listening to all of this, everything we've said, her teeth were missing, the amount of abuse she was facing. Gypsy Rose, in my opinion, was absolutely held in captivity. She was a hostage. She was born into this abuse

and there was just no way out for her. And yes, I can't deny that in the videos she's upbeat, she's happy, but she doesn't know anything else. And the only love and affection she can hope to gain from pretty much the only person in her life, Dee Dee, was to play along. Dee Dee's power over Gypsy was absolute, completely suffocating and absolutely all-consuming. But try as she might, Dee Dee couldn't stop the unstoppable force of Gypsy sexual development. And once aged around 20, Gypsy ran away from home with a guy she'd met online. He told her to pack up all her stuff and come live with him. So in the middle of the night Chipsy snuck out of her house and hitched a ride with a stranger.

But within four hours Dee Dee found her and brought her home, telling her, you ever try anything like that again, I'll break your fucking hands. Now this is what Chipsy tells us now, so we we can't verify it but given what we know about Munchasm by proxy I am inclined to believe it. We know that it manifests in conjunction with severe physical abuse to maintain the control so why wouldn't this be true? Gypsy running away leaving home and going to live with some stranger that is the ultimate fuck up for Dee Dee.

She can't allow that to happen. And after this betrayal by Gypsy, Dee Dee wasn't taking any more chances. And this is when she gets a lawyer to draw up papers saying that Gypsy was mentally handicapped. So if Gypsy ever ran away again and happened to tell the police what was really happening at home, Dee Dee could just show them the papers and say, she doesn't know what she's talking about, she's mentally retarded. And at this point, I think it's glaringly obvious. Gypsy has been failed by everyone.

The Sherry's department even got an anonymous report of abuse and they did nothing. The lawyers, the doctors, the social workers, nobody helped. And even her father, Rod, couldn't help. Because Dee Dee told everyone that he was a drunk. And I think she probably said that that ten times worse to Gypsy. There's an interview with the father and he says that he would go and meet Gypsy and Dee Dee in a restaurant and Gypsy would be shaking because she was so afraid of him. So obviously Gypsy can't reach out to him. No one else is helping her. No one's spotting the signs. And even when they are, they're not doing anything

about it. So why would Gypsy think that anyone was going to be able to help her? How long could she wait? All of the doors had been closed and she couldn't run away. No one who should save her was going to save her and Dee Dee wouldn't stop until Gypsy was dead. But Gypsy was childlike. Honestly, her voice is something else. You have to listen to it. I know. I feel like when I first watched this, I was really shocked by her voice, especially in the interviews later on when it's all over and why she still sounds like that. It was something that I couldn't quite get to grips with because I really felt like, is this her continuing to fake it?

Is she being manipulative towards us now? Why is she still putting on this little girl's voice?" It was something that I found quite hard to settle in my mind with the rest of the story. Then I took a break from the research that we were doing and I was watching Hannibal. You watched the TV. I've watched a couple, but I haven't dived into it. Would you recommend? I would recommend. I'm off for Christmas now, so I needed something to binge, so I've been watching Hannibal. It's very dark. I don't believe in anything, no fake, but

it was like it just suddenly popped out at me. It's full of psychiatrists, blah, blah, blah. Just one sentence, rogue in there. They're in a psychiatric hospital and they say, why do all of these women have little girl voices? I can't stand to listen to them. The psychiatrist says to this patient, severe trauma can affect vocal development. And I was like, bingo, that's it. And I googled into it and yeah, it's a thing. Trauma or severe stress or severe abuse in childhood can affect vocal development. That is fascinating. Thanks, Hannibal. I also don't think I can describe in words how young she does look. I genuinely would believe that she was 11 years old even when she's in her 20s. She was obsessed with

Disney, because I think her mother saw that as quite a safe space. But actually, Disney is all about good championing over evil. Princesses are trapped in castles by their evil, usually, stepmom. Then they're freed by a handsome prince slaying a beast who's holding the prisoner. I think that's really interesting because that's her only frame of reference is fairy tales. In a fairy tale, you kill the monster, you turn Jafar into a bad genie, and even if it's dressed up in a different sort of metaphor for it, more times than not in fairy tales, the baddie dies or is vanquished in some way. Absolutely. And you can see that this is the foundations around which Gypsy's moral compass gets built. And obviously in a normal child, they would have that in childhood,

but they would grow up to see the world not to be so black and white. And obviously they wouldn't be going through such trauma. But Gypsy never the world not to be so black and white and obviously they wouldn't be going through such trauma but Gypsy never stopped seeing the world in such black and white because this is all she's allowed to watch so it completely informs her worldview and ironically what would end up happening to Dee Dee. So Gypsy now age 23 longed for freedom but if she couldn't free herself because she's tried, she can't run away, she can't depend on anybody else, she needed help. And that's when she met Nicholas Godejohn on a Christian dating website. Now Gypsy says it's a Christian dating website,

we don't know for sure, it could have been anywhere but they meet online. And as far as Dee Dee knew, she and Gypsy shared a Facebook profile. I mean the level of control by this woman. But what's interesting here is that she's already run off with someone she's met online. So Didi knows she is doing other things online that she is not aware of. It's funny that she hasn't found a way to stop that. I don't think Didi is a particularly smart woman and would have been able to figure out what Gypsy was doing online.

I wonder if Dee Dee ever even found out how Gypsy met that guy. I don't know if she did. Aside from the shared profile that Gypsy kept up with Dee Dee just to keep up the pretenses, Gypsy had started her own secret profile on Facebook. Four days after Gypsy and Nicholas met on this dating site, they were now in an online relationship on Facebook. And Gipsy's Facebook posts confirm, just as we thought, how much she wanted a fairy tale Prince Charming. And finally, here was Nicholas Goedajohn.

And it all starts off so innocent. She's just living out her fantasies. It's escapism. She literally wants to escape but is trapped in that house, in that wheelchair with her mother, who's her fantasies. It's escapism. She literally wants to escape but is trapped in that house, in that wheelchair with her mother, who's her captor. So she escapes through the internet. The couple talk about things like where they'd get married, where they'd go on honeymoon, where they'd travel to, like seriously usual stuff. And even though she's 23 and he's like 25, 26 at this point, it's very

like teenage talk. It's very like juvenile. It is very juvenile. And I really do think, I'm sure I've mentioned this before, like kids, it's so easy to get carried away. Like when your kids have like a super overactive over imagination, which I 100% did as a child, and I would play pretend games all the time and be like, no, it's real. And that I feel like that's what this feels like to me. It is because Dee Dee held her in a state of childhood for her entire life. Even though this is now a woman in her early 20s, she is still trapped in the mind of a child because Dee Dee has kept her there. But the problem was Nicholas Godejohn, this guy she'd

met online was a very troubled individual and he displayed some clear emotional and behavioral problems. He's also on the autistic spectrum and his mother states that he is developmentally delayed with the mind of a 15, 16-year-old even though he'd have been about 25, 26 when he met Gypsy. In police interviews though, he's very clear and considerate. He is, but then a 16 year old, it's not like she's saying he's six, she's saying he's 16.

What it is, I think it means is like, he's intelligent, he's articulate, but it's the immaturity, it's the juvenile behavior, it's the risk taking, it's the recklessness of adolescence that he's never grown out of, and also put in kind of he has got other emotional behavioral problems we go on to like. The thing is that both disturbed, they're both troubled, they're both vulnerable and

they meet each other and this is when the problems start. Because Gypsy says that after the initial fun, things got weird. He starts talking to her about BDSM and he's obsessed with her serving him. He tells her repeatedly that he is the master and she is there to do her duties. Gypsy has absolutely no frame of reference for what a normal relationship looks like, so let alone a normal, healthy, romantic relationship for people who are in their early 20s. She didn't even have a normal mother-child relationship to fall back on. And she does say that she wasn't too keen on the whole BDSM situation, but she went along with it anyway. And that I do understand because she's got no

other relationships apart from her mother who's severely abusing her. So I can understand why when this guy comes along, she'd just do whatever he says. But having said that, she does come into her own, shall we say. So does Gypsy now go from being controlled by her mother to being controlled by Nicholas Godejohn? And is it because she has grown up conditioned to please, to acquiesce, to be submissive because in the Facebook posts she does appear to go along with this? Then she gets a surprise. GoToJohn's ex-girlfriend reaches out to Gypsy and tells her he's a really bad guy. He thinks he's a vampire. He's into some really bad stuff.

Unbeknownst to Gypsy, GoToJohn also had a criminal record. This, I can't, I'm not sure I'm even going to be able to say this. He was arrested for watching porn in a McDonald's and masturbating, wait for it, for nine hours. I think watching porn in a McDonald's is worse than watching porn on the tube. It is the worst thing. It's the worst place. Was it like a 24-hour McDonald's and he was there during the night shift? That's the only time I can imagine that that would fly. That is so weird. But I have been in the King's Cross McDonald's at like 1am and it is a fucking weird place to be. Yeah, it's a fucking shit-

I could imagine Nicholas Goedert on getting away with sitting during that graveyard shift. Well, graveyard shift is pretty busy. The night shift at the King's Cross McDonald's, wanking for nine hours and not get caught. Nine hours? That's not a con! I mean, I don't know physically how he can do it, but he could get away with it there. I mean, I've done it. But even physically, nine hours is a long fucking time to do it. Yeah, I mean, physically, how could he do it? That's what I don't understand. I must have been like a raisin.

Oh, gross. I also feel like now we're talking about King's Cross McDonald's and having all sorts of terrible flashbacks of times I've been in there. While it is, it's quite easy to laugh at, the psychology behind it though is still quite troubling because it's voyeurism and it's like inappropriate public conduct and like getting off on the shock of other people. And it really does point to a very disturbed or, you know, at the very least, a troubled individual. He also claimed to have multiple personalities and to hear voices in his head. I'm sure we've spoken about this before, like a lot of people do confuse

schizophrenia with multiple personality disorder and is that maybe what that could be? I don't know. I don't know because he does seem to specify that he has multiple personalities because the whole thing that happened was after this, Gojjon had Gypsy dress up and take on the personalities, take on other personalities to match all of his. So he'd say, I've got six different personalities and you now need to have six different Gypsies to match all of his, then he'd say, I've got six different personalities, and you now need to have six different gypsies to match my six different personalities. But don't people who have multiple personality disorder, they don't know what's going on when

another personality takes over? I mean, correct me anybody out there who thinks that I'm wrong. I don't think there's ever been a proven case of multiple personality disorder. No, there hasn't. Like a peer-reviewed, this is legit, diagnosable case, like I just don't think that exists. And it is very different to schizophrenia, but multiple personality disorder is a Hollywood fabrication. It's not real. He may well have been hearing voices in his head, but the point is that he was troubled. There were many, many red flags in Nicholas Codaertjohn's life from his ex-girlfriend, his behaviour, his arrest

for the whole McDonald's thing, the things that he's telling people about himself. He's not okay. And this really, then he starts to push this behaviour onto Gypsy or how much of it she willingly wants to take part in. We can't say. So as I said, he has her dressed up as all these different characters. And if we can find the pictures of these, we'll definitely post them on the Instagram and the social media. It's so weird. He has her take on a character, one of a little girl, one that's slutty, one that's evil, and she dresses up like this and poses for sexual pictures and sends them to Godichon. The whole subject of sex had been banned in Gypsy's house growing up.

Dee Dee had held Gypsy in that permanent state of childhood. She wasn't gonna, you know, talk to her about sex or anything. And given her total isolation, Gypsy had found this way to feed her growing curiosity and sexuality. And a year into their relationship, because yes, it goes on for that long, it's surprising. Gypsy tells Godejean everything, everything that Dee Dee's been doing. And this is when Nicholas Godejean also seems to develop a sort of Bonnie and Clyde mentality. He sees himself as her protector and they both view it as us against the world. They post online that they would kill for each other, do anything for each other because they were so in love. Now, we definitely know, we all know those people, those people on social media who do things like this. Oh I love him,

my babe. Like I literally could not give less of a fuck. Do you know what I hate the most? It's like oh great night out with this one, he's your boyfriend, you know his name. Oh God it's the worst. I hate that. I'm so glad we hate the same thing because it's so annoying. I'm just like, go fuck off. And I really feel like there's some sort of deep-seated thing in there of like, the more you post about your relationship on social media, the less secure you feel in that relationship. Oh, for real.

Oh, it's so cringe. It just makes my stomach turn. But anyway, so because people obviously do do this, no one was really taking these seriously. But you can see the foundations being laid for what would eventually happen. At first, Gypsy says she just wants to be with Nicholas and she needs to find a way to get him introduced into her life so Dee Dee will allow it. So Gypsy and Nicholas planned a meeting. Gypsy was to go to see Cinderella with her mum at the cinema, and Godojon was to come there too. They were going to meet at the cinema and make friends there. So Didi would think that he was just a stranger at the cinema that they had befriended. But unsurprisingly, Didi hates Godojon, labeling him a creep. Which, to be fair, he is a 25-year-old man going to watch Cinderella at the cinema on his fucking own. I would

literally be like, you are a pedophile. But that would be my initial response. Especially if he was wearing a trench coat. Niamh There's pedophiles in their trench coats. If I was a pedophile, I would never wear a trench coat. Then everyone would be onto you, wouldn't they? Georgie The couple saw that their plan had fallen through. They say, I find this so difficult to believe, but they say that they snuck away from Dee Dee and had sex in the toilet in the cinema. I'm calling bullshit on this because there is no way in hell Dee Dee would have let Gypsy out of her sight.

Gypsy is in a wheelchair. No one is going to let an adult man wheel a child into a toilet. He says in the police interview that she grabbed him and went into the men's toilet and she made him have sex. But she can't walk. Well she can walk, but she's in a wheelchair. She's not going to be walking in public, is she? But then I also kind of can believe it because it's like they've been talking for a year now exchanging all of these racy pictures, like it's been building and building and building. They've obviously talked about it. And then could

they have controlled it not happening? I don't know. It's just, it's the fact that Dee Dee is there that makes me think I don't, I just don't think Gypsy ever goes to the toilet without Dee Dee being there. Probably. Especially in a public place. I know. It's a weird thing for them to say if it's not true. It could be true, but if not, but to be fair, it's pretty irrelevant whether it happened or not.

They're just weird kids. Not even kids, they're not kids. They're in their 20s. They're two really, really messed up people. And then once they get home, Gypsy says she's realized that she was fresh out of options and she called it Plan B. And now Nicholas Goedajohn was her only hope. They had to kill Dee Dee. There is a lot of speculation about whether Goedajohn forced Gypsy into this so he could have her all to himself or if it was Gypsy's idea and she manipulated him into killing

Dee Dee for her. And the texts really are quite revealing. She says to him, and this is a quote, I'm 100,000% in, hun. I'm truly ready. I've finally allowed myself to accept that you're my everything and will go with you and live the dream. He replies, babe, it's my evil side. Doing it he won't mess up because he enjoys killing. And Gypsy just keeps saying, we'll be happy after this. Once you've done it, we can be together and we'll never bring it up again. Was Go To John already someone headed down the path to kill? I mean, he was certainly troubled, but I just don't know if he would have killed under his own fruition. we can safely say he didn't

really put up much of a fight. He doesn't seem to have any problem with going through with this at all. He doesn't have a problem with it. And she was just there to supply the motive and the rationale I feel for something that he had no issue doing. You know, you hear these cases again and again of when somebody manipulates someone telling them, oh, this person is so abusive, whether it's my mom, my dad, a husband, whatever, you need to help me. And there won't be any abuse, they just want to get rid of that person and not be implicated and that person, they'll kill them because they'll find someone who's vulnerable and

manipulate them. In this case though, the abuse was real. So how far is it manipulation and how far is it just that he genuinely wanted to do this for her and he was okay doing it? I don't know, it's so hard. So together they plan the murder and Gypsy scrapes together enough money to buy him a bus ticket to her house and the next day, once Dee Dee was asleep, Gypsy texts Go-Dajon saying that she's left gloves outside for him and to come in quietly because the door

squeaks. She then also tells him that she has a knife and duct tape and bizarrely, she follows this up with a text saying that she's also doing her nails and that they're pink. It's so premeditated. I've left gloves outside for you. Here's the money for your bus ticket. Be careful when you open the door, it squeaks. I've got a knife and duct tape. She literally hands him the knife as he walks through the door. No, I don't think you can argue that it wasn't premeditated. I think there is an argument, but she just doesn't know potentially the gravity of what she's doing or the consequences. I think if you're going to go down the child mind argument.

Then I feel like she absolutely does know because she knows if we do this, the consequences that I'm free. So I feel like she understands absolutely the finality of what she's doing and why she's doing it. I don't think she sees the maliciousness of like, I want my mom dead because she's a bitch who did this to me. I think she's like, I want you dead because you'll never stop and there's no other way I get out of this situation. Again, we're jumping the gun, we'll get that guys.

As I said, when Go To John arrives, he texts her and says, come to the door, and she was definitely all in. Because again, the text just reveals so much. She texts him back things like, yes sir, coming to open the door sir. It's so jokey and it's like you're letting your 16 year old boyfriend around, not like you're letting your 26 year old boyfriend around to murder your mum. And once he's in the house, Gypsy hands him a knife and then she waits in the other room as Nicholas Godejohn goes into Dee Dee's bedroom and stabs her to death.

Once he's killed Dee Dee, this is so disturbing, he really, really wants to have sex. And both Gypsy and Godejohn admit in later police interviews that he had wanted to rape Dee Dee. But apparently Gypsy had told him, and they both say this, apparently Gypsy had told him, don't rape her, just kill her and then I'll have sex with you. And this is what signals to me that kind of lack of maliciousness. I mean yes she wanted Dee Dee dead, but to be free. She didn't seem to allow Godaadon to do anything above and beyond what was necessary to secure her freedom. If she really hated her mom, she could have let Godaadon go to town on her, do what he wanted, but she didn't.

I do think, though, stabbing is quite a violent way to go. Oh, and it's absolutely a substitute for sexual penetration. Yeah, but in terms of gypsies, I mean, because they've come up with this plan together, so who knows whose idea the stabbing was, but I do feel like if you want to get your mum out of the way, why aren't you poisoning her? Why aren't you drowning her? Why are you stabbing her? That for me is a malicious, passionate way to go, rather than a clean cut. This is going to get me something that I want. Let's do it as quickly as possible with zero mess, because there's blood everywhere.

That's a fair point. If we think about, take Nicholas Goethejohn out of the pit shop, why doesn't Gypsy just poison her on her own? She has access. She can get access to poison. She's old enough to figure that out now. And she's got a whole fucking pharmacy in her house. But is it the fear this person has kept you trapped, captive for your entire life, build up the courage to put poison in her food? What if she catches you? That's it. You're fucked. This is a blitz attack. Ambush. He comes in. You're not to do with this. If Dee Dee wakes up, I don't

know who this guy is, he's broken into our house and he's trying to murder us. The fear, the courage, I don't know, courage is the right word. What it would have taken, Gypsy, to build up the courage to find poison, to put it in Dee Dee's food. I don't know if she was capable of that. This, she can be a passive bystander in it once the attack begins and it's out of her hands, and GoToJohn will take care of this. I feel like that's what it is, the fear for her to be proactive and take the step that she needed to do this herself. Yeah, I think I could buy that. In any case, Gypsy convinces GoToJohn that they should

pack and leave, so they wait until they get to a motel before they have sex. So it's unclear whether what happened at the motel was sex or rape. When the pair were eventually caught two days later, Gypsy did have bruises and bite marks on her. I don't think that's enough for a rape allegation. No, and he said that, yeah, I did. I did those things. I bit her, but it was consensual. She says it wasn't. But then she carries on the tradition when they get to the motel and you see in the

documentary that she makes home videos on her phone with the two of them in bed together and the things that she's saying they they're having sex. I'm not saying he's not violent and aggressive he's a fucked up guy but she seems pretty happy but then she spent her entire life being very good at wearing a mask. Maybe she sees this as a means to an end to buy her freedom. Or is she genuinely in love with him? I don't know. The video is fucked because they both sound completely fine, super happy, and they've literally just killed her mum and she's had to stop her boyfriend from raping her.

I feel like the way the policewoman in the documentary interviews him, and you hear it in the clip that we played at the start of this episode, when she's consistently asking him and persistently asking him, did you put your penis on Dee Dee after she was dead? Did you touch her with it? Did you put it in her mouth? Did you put it anywhere near her? Did you lick her? He's like, no, no And she's like, are you sure? No, are you sure? No, I didn't. Why consistently ask that? I think they found something. That hasn't come to light, but there seems to be a lot of questions about whether he sexually interfered with Dee Dee's body after she was dead.

But despite that, they both seem to be just having a grand old time and they actually stole $4,000 from Dee Dee. They use this to go shopping, they eat fast food, there's no hint of remorse or fear, but it literally is what kids do. That's the first thing a kid wants to do if they've got any freedom at all is like- Teenagers. Yeah, get some delicious takeaway and hang out. Gypsy even says that she just wasn't thinking

about what was happening at home and eventually the two go to stay with Go to John's mum and stepdad in Wisconsin. And once there again they're just acting totally normal and it does suggest to some extent sociopathic behaviour. This is also when Gypsy posts these Facebook posts which are just so disturbing. Things like the bitch is dead, I slashed her that fat pig and raped her daughter. Where is this coming from? It's so intense.

It's such crazy things to post. And why is she even posting these at this point? She says that it was because she wanted Dee Dee to be found and she knew that if she posted those things that someone would go check it out. Again, why is she so concerned with that? Why is she playing these risky games? She's in Wisconsin with this guy. They've got this money. They're free. It's very weird. Is it now a little bit of remorse? Isn't it that you want that person found because you don't want your mother just lying there to rot? Well, that's what she says, isn't it? She was like, I posted it because I wanted someone to find her. Yeah. What would be the other reason?

I believe her that that's why she did it. And, you know, it works. And following the discovery of Dee Dee's body, the police eventually track the two of them down. And on June 15, 2015, Gypsy Rose and Nicholas Godejohn are brought in to be questioned by the police for the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard. Now Gypsy acts completely hysterical and she acts like she doesn't know that her mom is even dead. Now it comes back again here to who is being played. Dee Dee was a master manipulator. Had Gypsy simply picked this up, knowing she could control and manipulate Godajon using

her sexuality and use him to get rid of her mother. That's still that little girl voice, it's so disarming when you hear it. Is she a manipulator or was she just an innocent abused girl who needed an out and found her freedom through a troubled young man? I personally don't think that is she a manipulator or is she an innocent abused child. I don't necessarily think they're mutually exclusive. No, I agree. I can really understand why critics of her think that she is playing games and lying because when you watch her interviews as a free woman, as an adult woman, you just get this, I certainly did, got this overwhelming sense that she is not giving the whole game

away. Like she even says at the beginning of the interview, she's like, oh, I'm going to tell you the truth. I haven't even told my lawyers the truth. So immediately, that's like classic manipulation. You're special. I'm telling you this because you are special. That is textbook. And when she talks about the killing, she says all of the right things. She's talking about her remorse and her sorrow, but she doesn't, she has no tears, absolutely none. And even when she like cries in averted commas, totally dry face, she does wiping away of the single tear. It's all very dramatic, but she doesn't cry. Also, fuck Dee Dee. Why should she cry about it? That I can completely understand, but because she is doing this weird act, I can

see why people think that she's not being totally sincere about remorse, but I'm not sure I would feel fucking remorseful if I'd gone through what she'd been through. I don't think it was malicious apart from the stabbing I find difficult. But I also see your point of stabbing is a blitz. It's a quick solution. Absolutely. And what if poisoning- Poisoning might not work. It's going quick solution where is the am what is poison might not work it's gonna take longer absolutely what is she survived the poisoning it's in out get it done. Just make sure it's done so i'm free what's really clear like gypsy just she wanted out so and with her frame of reference and having such a limited not even next education having such a limited exposure to life in general. I do understand why she felt like this was the only thing that she could do. But then

problematic are the text messages. It seems like both Gypsy and Go To John really relish it, but the interview she gives are totally at odds with what's in the texts. So she says in this interview that she was in the texts. So she says in this interview that she was in the fetal position while the stabbing was happening, but the texts suggest something completely different. Perhaps once it got going, it was a bit overwhelming and too much for her, but it's really hard to believe anything she says because she does lie so much. She does. And I also think maybe this is also just a very textbook indicator of someone who is very manipulative and very good at it because she knows, maybe in the text she

isn't relishing it, maybe she is but you know hear me out, maybe she isn't relishing it but she knows this is what Godejon wants. That's what I think. He wants this, he needs me to play along with this. He needs to be my saviour. I need to be totally into this and I'm going to give him what he wants so that he gives me what I want, which is kill her. Vanquish this beast that holds me captive. And then now she knows, she's intelligent enough to know when I'm talking to these

people I need to show remorse and not only do I show remorse, I show that at the time it was happening I was struggling with it. Therefore put myself in that childlike position. She's even using words like, I was lying in the fetal position. She knows that the symbolism behind that is what she's spent her entire life hiding behind, the idea of being a child. She knows how to garner that sympathy. So I feel like she is very good at being manipulative. People who are also know how to profile people and understand what that person needs to hear from you to get them to do what you want. I think she's very good at that, but I don't think for a second that it diminishes what she went through and the

fact that she needed to get out and the fact that she knew it's fucking her or me at this point. Because this is what it's all about. Munchausen syndrome by proxy pretty much always ends fatally unless it's caught, unless it's picked up. And also, what's so alarming, like, do you remember when we said at the start that Dee Dee told Rod she won't live past her teens? She was dragging this out. Like, yes, Gypsy had already survived past her teens, but she was telling everybody that she was still a teenager. There would only be so far she could keep Gypsy alive. And the ultimate end game for Dee Dee was to kill Gypsy. The sympathy that comes with a dead child. That's the endgame. She can't keep her forever.

Yes, but I've literally just had this thought. If Gypsy truly believed that she had all of these things wrong with her, why is she like, this is abuse? So I think she potentially thought that all of these things were wrong with her for a long time. And she says in the, I feel that's a good point because she says in the interviews later that she was, it was all she ever knew. So you don't know it's abuse if you've only ever lived that. But I get your point because why would she then want to escape? But I think as she got older, she realised that these things aren't wrong with me. When she escaped, ran away, didn't take any of her medication, even the first time, didn't take

it. Maybe she even started to feel better. I think she knew before that. I don't believe her in the police interview when she was like, I only knew that I couldn't walk bollocks. She knew nothing was wrong with her. The thing is, all of this started way before Chipsy could have had any say in it. At what point do you say, so this started when she any say in it. At what point do you say, so this started when she was three months old, at what point do you say, at five years old, at 10 years old, at 12 years old, at 17, at what point can we say the switch flipped and she knew, oh, this is all fake and this is abuse. I don't know, it's so difficult

to know. You watch those same videos right up until the week before she runs away. It's like Gypsy is totally bought into this and believes it or she plays along with it. There was a long time where Gypsy definitely believed that this was all real. But you're right, I don't think she believed it in the end. Otherwise, why would she try to escape? But it's hard to know when that happened. And that's a really good point. But it's also, your point is also valid in that exactly like you said, 10 years old, is that when she figured it out? Like there's no more pinpointing the time she realized what

happened because the point is that she did. And she does tell the police that she knew nothing about Goldie John's plan to kill her mom, which is bollocks because she gave him the knife, she paid for his ticket, and she planned it. And it's all there in the text and the messages they've been sending back and forth. So I think she genuinely must have had a total lack of understanding that like the police have this information, they know that's not true, because I think she must have seen her mum time and again lying to doctors who are heralded as the most intelligent people and her mum can get away with that. So obviously she thinks she can trick the police.

Yeah, that's a good point. And also, I don't think she has any understanding of what the police would be able to find. It's like she sat around watching CSI at home. I don't think she knew what the reality of the situation was, that they could just go through it and read it, or she probably thought if she deleted it, that it was gone. Yeah. So it's hard to pin it down. But let's consider what Gypsy's intent was. I think she wanted to be free. I think that is, you can't really argue against that. And maybe on a subconscious level, she wanted her mum to suffer. But experts on Munchausen by proxy state that victims do tend to lose touch with reality and are left with a limited capacity for what's normal. I think that is bang on. I think she had a very distant relationship with the real world. She lived her life in total isolation. What's normal for her? She was a captive. Can we look at this as a captive, a victim killing her captor to escape to freedom?

Similarly to Colleen Stan, I wonder if Colleen Stan had killed Cameron Hooker, would we be questioning it this much? No, absolutely. If Colleen Stan, who was unrelated to Cameron Hooker, very clearly abducted, taken into captivity, had killed her captors in order to escape and obtain her freedom, no one would question it. She wouldn't be going to jail. She wouldn't be answering beyond the cursory police interviews once they established that this abuse had taken place. She would have been free. She would have

been heralded. But in this case, why is it that we cannot let go of the fact? And I've heard so many people, read so many people talk about how they think Gypsy was in on this somehow. It's so interesting. Why is it we can't accept it? It's because it's her mom. Absolutely, because I think on some level we feel like, what would it take for me to kill my mother? And was this woman really capable? Was this woman really abusing her child to this extent? It's so unbelievable. But do not forget what

Dee Dee did to Gypsy Rose. Her teeth fell out. She kept her as a child well into her mid-20s. This was, and make no bones about it, this was abuse. Why is this not as bad as what any captor does to their victim is the question. And why do we approach it with such a different mentality? And I don't know. I think for me, the thing that really struck me was how insincere Gypsy Rose is in interviews. I think she's a weird person. It's like the Amanda Knox thing. She's a fucking weird person. And so when you watch those interviews, you're like, is she guilty or is she a weird person? And you jump to guilty first because there's a murdered person in the story. And in this,

it's the same thing. But in what world was Gypsy Rose ever going to be a normal person? No, exactly. She grew up in captivity. Imagine for a second that Gypsy Rose was kidnapped as a child, kidnapped as a baby and then suffered all of this abuse. Would anybody question it? I don't know why we do, but yes, absolutely Gypsy faced two decades of systematic abuse and for what? For fraud and to quench her mother's desire for attention. It's just barbaric and absolutely baffling to get your head around. And there are no questions over the mitigating circumstances in this case. Even the prosecution

agreed that they weren't going to go after the death penalty and it was taken off the table almost immediately for Gypsy. And in July 2016, Gypsy eventually pled guilty to murder in the second degree and she was sentenced to 10 years in jail. She'll be eligible for parole in 2024 at the age of 32. And I have to say, this makes me really sad. What are your thoughts on this sentence? It's so hard. The reason I find it so sad is because these lawyers and these police officers, they talk about how murder is murder and that Gypsy's actions, quote, were not justifiable. Well, to me, that's just pretty fucking convenient

for these people to say, isn't it? She was failed by these same people, by law enforcement, by healthcare professionals, by social workers, by lawyers. I'd love for them to tell me how else they expected Gypsy to escape her abuse and torture. They left her to suffer. The system failed her. She fell through every crack in the child protection system. So then to say that her actions were unjustifiable, everyone failed her. And once all hope had run out, when she saw that there was no other way to escape her fate, she did what she needed failed her. And once all hope had run out, when she saw that there was no other way to escape her fate, she did what she needed to do. And I think the question that lies at the heart of this, if anybody's wondering how to feel about this, I guess

the question to just ask is, what would you or what wouldn't you do to survive? That's what it comes down to, isn't it? And I can understand why. But what seems very irresponsible to me is that clearly, and it has been proven and there's mountains of evidence, that Gypsy Rose has suffered an enormous amount of abuse. Don't put her in prison, put her in a hospital. Put her in, not like for the criminally insane, but like put her in treatment, put her in a program. Don't put her in prison. Absolutely. If you really want to deprive her of her liberty, fine, fair enough, but put her somewhere where she can get therapy, where she can get treatment and have some

hope of a semblance of a normal life when she gets out because this is what they do. You put petty criminals in prison. I'm not saying that she is, but she's in there for second degree murder, officially speaking. They come out hardened criminals. Who is she going to be associating with for the next eight and a half years? What is the point? I guess the difference here between if Colleen Stan had murdered Cameron Hooker and escaped is that she brought Nicholas Goedegon into this. Is that why? Because is this inciting murder, soliciting murder? She got someone else to do it for her. Maybe had she killed Dee Dee herself, I think maybe she wouldn't even be facing prison time.

That is such a good point. I hadn't thought of that. I think that's what it is because if he was nothing to do with it, it would be a totally different story. But this is what makes people see her as this master manipulator and question what was going on with her mum in the first place, possibly. Absolutely. And I think it's also, as you said before we were recording, the very, very sexual nature of the Gypsy Rose, Go To John relationship. Gypsy's serving her time. And I do hope that when she gets out at age 32, she manages to have some sort of a normal

life but I genuinely don't think she will. The only redeeming factor in this, the only chance that she has is that Rod and her stepmother, Rod her father and her stepmother are still standing by her. It seems like they are. Yeah. And I hope that they will be there for her when she gets out. And as for Goedejon, he is still awaiting trial and it's expected to be some point early next year, 2018. He was actually meant to have his trial last month,

November 2017, but he originally waived his right to have a jury trial, which is weird. Always have a jury trial, fucking hell. Always have a jury trial. And then he decided, no, actually I do want a jury trial because it's the right, it's the fucking right decision. And so now they've had to postpone it. Why would you ever just want to try with a judge judges you? Get those jury in there, look them in the eyes and cry. You have to make just one of them, just one

of them not believe what you're being accused of. But anyway, outside of my strategies for not getting put away. Finally, to end this story with, as we always like to do, is just delve into the backstory of the culprit, of the evil doer. And it's interesting in this case because it's Dee Dee. Let's be honest, who is to blame for what happened here? First, it's Dee Dee. And then secondly, it's all of the people

that failed Gypsy and then after that it's Gypsy and Go To John. That's how I see it. So we wanted to look into Gypsy's backstory and also how it links to the causes of Munchausen's Biproxy. Now there are various theories regarding the causes of Munchausen's syndrome and Biproxy. Some people theorise that a mother may feel that a sick child can bring her closer to her spouse. And whilst we know that once Rod left, Dee Dee did try desperately to get him back. But this doesn't fit too much because after this she did keep moving further and further away from him. It's more likely that this theory fits, is that mothers inflicted with this disorder have an emotionally deprived childhood and a high probability of a history of physical abuse. Women with childhoods like this are much more likely

to be depressed and insecure and channel their personal inadequacies into abusive behaviour, which in turn produces gratifying attention for themselves. And by all accounts, Dee Dee's family don't seem to give a fuck that she's dead. That is a very clear indicator that she probably had quite an emotionally deprived childhood. It's astonishing really. Obviously she's done these fucking awful things. But even, I watched an interview with Aileen Warnos' mom and even she had some sort of emotion, even though her daughter's a fucking serial killer. Of course. You watch all of these, especially when we're doing the research for the killer

kids episode, that was so stark. None of these parents turn their backs on their kids, even if your child is a monster. Most of them still say, still have sympathy and try to find an excuse, say she's sick, there was something wrong. No one behaves like this. Alien Warnos' mom said that when Alien was born, the umbilical cord was tied around her neck and maybe that's why. So she had, you know, exactly that, exactly that. But in an interview with Dee Dee's dad with his insane accent, when he's asked what she was like as a child, he says she was all right. Yeah, I know. Can you imagine? They ask the family if they are sad that Dee Dee is dead. The stepmother says she couldn't believe it at first and she thought that it was another

one of her tricks. But the overwhelming feeling from Dee Dee's own family is that she got what she deserved. They say themselves that no one cares about her. And this is, it's unbelievable. When asked what they wanted to do with Dee Dee's ashes, the only response they received was flush them. And I think that is enough that we need to know into the backstory of Dee Dee Blanchard and why she had munchers and syndrome by poxy. This doesn't excuse anything she did. It's, you know, it's not a psychiatric disorder, it's an emotional behavioral problem and it manifests itself in the abuse of others. First and foremost, this is a form of child

abuse and that's what we can't ever forget. So my sympathies for Dee Dee and the childhood that she had extend only so far. But thank you guys so much for listening. Oh my god, Hannah that's the last episode of 2017. Oh my god. That's crazy. And if you are like Hannah, and you've got some January blues heading your way, please don't worry. We've got the episode on the Wests coming up next week, which is we're so super excited to do. They are crazy. And I was shocked that people on Facebook were like, I haven't heard of the Wests. So- Oh my god, I haven't heard of the Wests. So you are going to be in for a horrifying treat with that.

And also if you aren't yet a Patreon supporter, please do think about heading over there for as little as a dollar a month. You could support the show this year. And if you do this month, you can absolutely be part of the live episode, which is coming very soon. And keep leaving us those lovely five star reviews but please do actually leave five stars and not three. And most importantly tell your mates.

Tell your mates. Follow us on the social medias and we'll see you in the new year. Bye guys. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime and there's much more to come.

This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On The Media. To listen, subscribe to On The Media wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mom's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery+. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part,

Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge. But this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me. And it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy.

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