A 33-year-old woman, who captured the world’s attention after she hatched a plot to murder her mother, has revealed how she knew her mom was lying about her illnesses.
Gypsy-Rose Blanchard’s mother Claudine ‘Dee Dee’ Blanchard started to feign illnesses for her daughter when she was just three months old.
She claimed Blanchard had sleep apnea.
Then, it was issues with her eyes, hearing and digestive system.
She claimed her daughter had everything from muscular dystrophy to leukemia. She fed her daughter medications which had horrible side effects.
A feeding tube was also inserted into her, and she was forced to use a wheelchair.
“I knew that I could walk. I knew that I could eat, so I didn’t need the feeding tube,” Blanchard told 60 Minutes during a tell-all interview in Sunday’s episode.
“But the other things like cancer, you can’t see that. So I had believed that I had cancer up until the time that I was arrested and could talk to my lawyer.
“By the end of it all, there was not a single part of my body that didn’t have something supposedly wrong with it.”
After Blanchard’s true story came to light, it soon became clear that Claudine had Munchausen syndrome By Proxy.
The condition, now known as Fabricated of Induced Illness by Carers, is when someone fakes an illness or produces illness in someone else, according to Better Health Victoria.
It’s considered to be a form of child abuse and, in Australia, is rare with 15 to 24 cases of it each year.
Due to Blanchard’s alleged illnesses, the family received assistance from charities.’Due to Blanchard alleged illnesses, the family received assistance from charities.
Blanchard said she tried to do everything she could to get out from under her mother’s thumb, claiming she “tried to exhaust” all the options she believed she had.
Until she met Nicholas Godejohn through the internet in 2013.
Blanchard hatched a plot to kill Claudine, and Godejohn was happy to help.
It took two years for the pair to finally enact it.
Before her murder, Blanchard recalled saying “I love you” to her mother, and giving her a hug.
She recalled holding her mother’s pillow and crying, apologizing over and over again as a way to say goodbye.
Blanchard let her then-boyfriend into the home as she hid in the bathroom.
Godejohn stabbed Claudine 17 times — something Blanchard said wasn’t part of the plan. Blanchard then fled to Wisconsin, where Godejohn was from, before being caught by police.
Godejohn was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole.
Meanwhile, Blanchard pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to a decade in prison.
“I wasn’t born evil. I wasn’t born a murderer,” she told 60 Minutes.
“I’m both victim and perpetrator.”
She said despite the fact she has paid her debt to society, she still carries around guilt about what happened.
She was released on parole in December 2023.
While in prison, Blanchard married Ryan Anderson. However, shortly after her release, the pair filed for divorce and she reunited with Ken Urker. The pair initially met when Urker wrote Blanchard while she was in prison. Blanchard first revealed she was pregnant with Urker’s child in July 2024, after her divorce was finalized in April.
She later posted paternity results to confirm that Urker was the father of her baby.
“There’s been a lot of chatter around the paternity of our baby and while we’ve known for sure from the beginning, I feel that it’s finally time to put all these theories to rest. Here are the results showing Ken is the father,” she captioned the prenatal paternity test results in November.
Anderson addressed the speculation surrounding the baby in October, telling his 717,000 TikTok followers that he had no doubts Urker was the child’s father.
“I’ve never once questioned who the baby daddy was,” Anderson said in a video.
“[I] never once said ‘I’m gonna make a fuss about it’ or ‘I’m gonna prevent this’ or ‘do that.’ I’ve never said anything like that. I’ve always said ‘guys it’s not my baby’.”
Blanchard expressed excitement during her pregnancy, including at her gender reveal party in August.
The 60 Minutes episode was filmed ahead of Blanchard giving birth to Aurora on December 28. However, she spoke about her promise to her daughter.
“I would just want my, my children and my child to have a childhood that I never had,” she said.
She said she didn’t have any fears about becoming a mother but she wanted to be a better mother to her child than her own was to her.
