Gypsy’s mother, Claudine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, had Munchausen by proxy, a rare syndrome in which a parent pretends to have a child with various conditions or deliberately makes a child sick in order to draw attention to themselves.
Dee Dee pretended that Gypsy had leukemia, a muscle disease and other conditions. The girl was in a wheelchair and was tube-fed, even though she didn’t need to be.
Chained to bed
The mother even convinced doctors to remove Gypsy’s salivary glands because she was allegedly drooling excessively. This was actually because Dee Dee used local anesthetics on her daughter.
Gypsy was hardly allowed to go outside and was sometimes even chained to the bed, the daughter later explained. People who knew the mother and daughter believed that the child was seriously ill, and praised Dee Dee for the dedicated care she gave her daughter.
Gypsy herself discovered as she got older that she was actually perfectly healthy. When her mother again wanted to force her to undergo an unnecessary medical procedure, the daughter, now 23 years old, decided to intervene.
Boyfriend
She convinced her boyfriend Nicholas, whom she met online, to kill her mother. He stabbed her while Gypsy waited in the bathroom.
The couple fled, but the police tracked them down after a few days. Nicholas received a life sentence for the murder, Gypsy received ten years in prison. Now, after eight years in prison, she is released.
The story of Gypsy and Dee Dee is the subject of several documentaries and series. In an interview with the American People Magazine Gypsy says she regrets the murder. “She didn’t deserve that,” she says. “She was a sick woman and unfortunately I wasn’t educated enough to see that. She deserved to be where I am now, in prison, as punishment for her criminal behavior.”
2023-12-28 14:04:22
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