Nicholas Godejohn

Dee Dee Blanchard was born Clauddine Pitre in Chackbay, Louisiana, near the Gulf Coast in 1967, and grew up with her family in nearby Golden Meadow.

She was the youngest of five children of Claude Anthony Pitre Sr. and Emma Lois Gisclair.

Her siblings recalled in the documentary, Gypsy’s Revenge, that growing up Dee Dee’s mother would keep Dee Dee inside and stated she had Heart Murmur and emulated a lot of the same behaviors that Dee Dee would later do to Gypsy.

In 1986 Dee Dee was in a local beauty pageant ball.

Relatives claim that she had a habit of stealing from her family, which they speculated was a form of retaliation when "things didn't go her way."

They got married on December 27, 1990.

Shortly before Gypsy's birth in July 1991, the couple separated when Rod realized on his 18th birthday that he "got married for the wrong reasons".

He resisted Dee Dee's efforts to get him to return, and she took her newborn daughter to live with her family.

They named their daughter Gypsy-Rose because Dee Dee liked the name Gypsy and Rod was a fan of Guns N' Roses.

According to Rod, who remained involved with his daughter at this point, by the time Gypsy was three months old, Dee Dee was convinced that Gypsy had sleep apnea and began taking her to the hospital, where repeated overnight stays with a sleep monitor and other tests found no sign of the condition.

Gypsy says that one of her earliest memories is her holding a Barney the dinosaur and walking along with her mom.

Dee Dee subsequently became convinced that her daughter had a wide range of health issues, which she attributed to an unspecified chromosomal disorder.

At some point, Dee Dee claimed that Gypsy had muscular dystrophy and made her use a walker.

Gypsy's book claims that when she was five years old her grandfather made her and Dee Dee take a bath with him.

Gypsy said that, when she was seven or eight, she was riding on her grandfather's motorcycle when they were involved in a minor accident where she suffered an abrasion on her knee.

Dee Dee said that doctors had given her a wheelchair she would need to use.

Gypsy often went with her parents to Special Olympics events.

Her mother died in 1997, in interviews later on her family expressed suspicion that Dee Dee was neglecting Emma and might have killed her own mother by denying her food.

At some point early in her adult life, she worked as a nurse's aide along with Kristy Blanchard and Laura Pitre.

When she was 24 she met Rod Blanchard, then age 17 in a bowling alley bar.

In 2001, Dee Dee claimed Gypsy was eight (she was actually ten), she was named the honorary queen of the Krewe of Mid-City, a child-oriented parade held during Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Gypsy describes herself as being an animal lover with four cats and that she spends a lot of time with her grandfather who is her "best friend".

Dee Dee had a leg injury said to have been from a car accident, which required being in hospital for two months.

Gypsy and Dee were living at Dee's father Claude's house for 10 months.

On June 14, 2015, sheriff's deputies in Greene County, Missouri, United States, found the body of Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard (née Pitre; born May 3, 1967, in Chackbay, Louisiana) face down in the bedroom of her house just outside Springfield, lying on the bed in a pool of blood from stab wounds inflicted several days earlier.

There was no sign of her daughter, Gypsy-Rose, who most people thought was 19, She knew her real age was 23 and had made others aware that she was an adult.

It was claimed that Gypsy, had chronic conditions including leukemia, asthma, and muscular dystrophy and who had the "mental capacity of a seven-year-old due to brain damage" as the result of premature birth.

After reading troubling Facebook posts earlier in the evening, concerned neighbors notified the police, reporting that Dee Dee might have fallen victim to foul play and that Gypsy-Rose, whose wheelchair and medications were still in the house, might have been abducted.

The next day, police found her in Wisconsin, where she had traveled with her boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn, whom she had met online.

When investigators announced that she was actually an adult and did not have any of the physical and mental health issues her mother claimed she had, public outrage over the possible abduction of a disabled girl gave way to shock and some sympathy for her.

Further investigation found that some of the doctors who had examined Gypsy-Rose had found no evidence of the claimed disorders.

One physician suspected that Dee Dee had factitious disorder imposed on another, a mental disorder in which a parent or other caretaker exaggerates, fabricates, or induces illness in a person under their care to obtain sympathy or attention.

Dee Dee had changed her name for various reasons.

After her death her family claims this was due to them, confronting her about suspecting she had poisoned her stepmother and how she treated Gypsy.

Nonetheless, many people accepted her situation as true, and the two benefited from the efforts of charities such as Children's Mercy Hospital, Habitat for Humanity, Ronald McDonald House, and the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Dee Dee had been making her daughter pass herself off as younger and pretend to be disabled and chronically ill, subjecting her to unnecessary surgery and medication, and controlling her through physical and psychological abuse.

Marc Feldman, an international expert on factitious disorders, said this was the first case he knew of in which an abused child killed an abusive parent.

Gypsy-Rose pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and served eight years of a ten-year sentence.

She was granted parole in September 2023 and was released from prison on December 28, 2023.

After a brief trial in November 2018, Godejohn was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.