She was 19 at the time (though she and her mother claimed she was 15) and the man was 35. After meeting a man (his identity was kept anonymous in Dean's Buzzfeed article) at a science fiction convention she attended with Dee Dee, Gypsy began communicating with the man online. Gypsy made her first, and seemingly only, escape attempt.

At the time they moved into the house, Gypsy was wheelchair-bound and used a feeding tube and sometimes an oxygen tank. She also claimed that Gypsy’s medical records had been destroyed in the flood (this was later found not to be the case many of her records did, in fact, survive Katrina) and that her daughter suffered from a range of chronic illnesses all stemming from “chromosomal defects,' including muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, severe allergies, and asthma. Per BuzzFeed, Dee Dee claimed that their home in Louisiana had been hit by Hurricane Katrina, and their apartment destroyed. The two moved from Slidell, Louisiana to Aurora, Missouri in September 2005, and lived in a rental home before the Habitat for Humanity house was completed. March 2008ĭee Dee and Gypsy move into a house built for them by Habitat for Humanity.

If you haven’t already dived into the first four episodes of The Act (which are streaming now on Hulu) then truly, what are you waiting for? If you have, and are curious to know more, here’s a comprehensive timeline of Dee Dee’s murder, Gypsy’s trial, and the disturbing sequence of events that preceded both. After two decades of being abused and effectively held prisoner, Gypsy came up with an escape plan, enlisting her boyfriend Nick Godejohn to murder Dee Dee. In her 2016 BuzzFeed article detailing the extraordinary case, Michelle Dean-who now serves as co-showrunner and executive producer on The Act-noted that Dee Dee’s behavior was indicative of Munchausen by Proxy syndrome (a variation on Munchausen syndrome, whereby a person feigns or induces symptoms of illness in themselves). Over the first twenty years of her life, Gypsy was subjected to a battery of unnecessary medical procedures, forced to use a wheelchair and feeding tube, and denied any semblance of a normal life: She didn’t attend school past second grade, and never left the house without her mother. Friends and neighbors knew Gypsy as a sickly, wheelchair-bound child, and Dee Dee as her devoted caregiver, but after Dee Dee’s death the truth emerged: Gypsy was perfectly healthy, but had been forced to pretend otherwise by her mother. Hulu’s new true-crime miniseries The Act, starring Patricia Arquette and Joey King, dramatizes the creepier-than-fiction story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who in 2016 was sentenced to ten years in prison for murdering her mother, Claudine “Dee Dee” Blanchard.

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