The first time Rod saw his daughter walk as an adult was in a news report on Gypsy’s arraignment hearing in Wisconsin. No one had prepared them; Kristy had spotted the video on Facebook. Rod was so confused when he saw it that he said his first reaction was “I was really happy that she was walking.”
When Gypsy’s attorney showed them Dee Dee’s autopsy report, Kristy said she stared for a while at the portion about Dee Dee’s brain. The lawyer asked her why.
“I want to know what the hell was going through her mind,” Kristy said. “What is in that brain of hers that triggered all of this shit?”
DEE DEE WON’T EVER BE ABLE TO ANSWER ANYONE’S questions. All there will be is Gypsy’s story. And Gypsy doesn’t know all of it herself. From the time she was arrested to my more recent talks with her in prison in Missouri, she is confused about details large and small. For example: when she was arrested, Gypsy told the police that she was 19. Rod and Kristy were able to straighten that out by giving authorities Gypsy’s birth certificate. She was actually 23.
Parents make your world, and Dee Dee made Gypsy’s into one where she did, indeed, have cancer. Gypsy told me her mother said some of the medications were related to it. Even as she grew older, she wasn’t sure how to question it. There are lingering questions, in fact, about exactly what medications Gypsy was given over the years. Some of them may never have been prescribed to Gypsy at all; her attorney, for example, suspects Dee Dee gave Gypsy some kind of tranquilizer.
The pile of bogus diagnoses, the confusing lists of drugs: it all points to a syndrome called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Munchausen syndrome was first identified by a British psychiatrist named Richard Asher in 1951. A successor, Roy Meadow, identified Munchausen syndrome by proxy in 1977. It has been in the DSM, the diagnostic manual used by psychiatrists, since 1980. (In the latest version, the DSM-V, it goes by the name “factitious disorder,” but for clarity’s sake I’ll stick to the Munchausen nomenclature.) In short, a person with the syndrome either feigns or induces physical and psychological symptoms for no obvious benefit other than attention and sympathy. If the person does this to themselves, it’s plain Munchausen syndrome; when the symptoms are feigned or induced in others, it’s called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. The DSM-V recommends distinguishing Munchausen syndrome from what is called “malingering,” that is, faking or inducing symptoms of illness where there is some hope of material benefit. Malingering isn’t considered to be a mental illness. It’s just plain fraud.
While most with the syndrome are mothers, there are also documented cases of fathers doing this to their children, husbands doing this to their wives, nieces doing this to their aunts. And doctors often don’t detect it for months or years. In fact, it’s difficult to say just how prevalent Munchausen is in the general population. By its very nature, it hides in plain sight.
That doctors often miss Munchausen seems counterintuitive, but the doctor-patient relationship is a bond of trust that goes both ways. “As health-care providers,” said Caroline Burton, a doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Florida who’s treated cases of Munchausen where the proxy is an adult, “we rely on what a patient tells us.” Even if a doctor suspects his or her patient is lying, there isn’t much incentive to refuse treatment based on the doubt. What if the doctor is wrong and the patient suffers for it? “You have to be careful not to overlook organic disease,” Burton said. “You’ve really gotta go through quite a lot of diagnostic hurdles.”
A diagnosis of Munchausen syndrome by proxy is attached to the perpetrator, not to the victim. Because Dee Dee is dead, it’s impossible to diagnose her. She didn’t leave behind a diary or some other documentation of her intentions. She did keep a binder of medical information in which she seemed to be sorting through the different information she’d given to various doctors. And she did fit certain parameters that doctors often cite as red flags for Munchausen syndrome: for example, she had some medical training. The number of doctors she took Gypsy to see over the years, and her propensity for changing locations so there was no clear medical trail, are also common. So are the concerns over sleep apnea, which is one way Munchausen often seems to begin in the various documented cases.
It is also not unusual, as Burton told me, for extended family members—and even sometimes immediate ones—to be totally unaware of the feigning of illness. “The perpetrators are very intelligent people,” she said. “They know how to manipulate other people.”
They manipulate their victims, too, and the longer it goes on, the higher the chances are that the actual patient might collude with the perpetrator. The desire to please a parent can be enough to enlist a child in the deception. But even in adult cases, there can be some kind of emotional attachment keeping the patient in on the lie. “The relationship that develops between the two is so unhealthy,” Burton told me of the adult cases she had treated. And no source I consulted had ever heard of a case where the abuse went on for this long, into the child’s adulthood. One thing seems certain: for the patient in a Munchausen by proxy case, the truth becomes corroded.
GYPSY’S MEDICAL RECORDS ARE SOBERING. ALL THE way back in 2001, doctors at Tulane Medical Center tested Gypsy for muscular dystrophy. Her tests came back negative. In fact, all scans of her brain and spine were relatively clear. The records of all those tests survived Katrina. Nonetheless, Dee Dee continued to insist to doctor after doctor in Louisiana and Missouri that Gypsy had muscular dystrophy. Most doctors appear from these records to have taken her assertion at face value and didn’t probe. Instead, they proceeded to treat Gypsy for various vision, hearing, sleep, and salivation problems that were presumed to flow from the muscular dystrophy. (The records I reviewed for this article appeared to cover only some of Gypsy’s care. It’s impossible to say how many other relevant records might exist.)
Some interventions were surgical. Gypsy’s eye muscles were repeatedly operated on for alleged weakness. Tubes were put in her ears for alleged ear infections. She was given a feeding tube and ate very little by mouth, surviving on cans of the meal replacement PediaSure well into her twenties. Her salivary glands were first injected with Botox, then removed because her mother complained that she drooled too much. Gypsy’s teeth rotted out and had to be extracted, though whether that was because of poor dental hygiene or a mixture of medications and severe malnutrition, it’s hard to say.
The repeated invasions of Gypsy’s body in the name of these illnesses she turned out not to have were, in short, serious and prolonged. It is difficult to say now whether any of it was medically needed at all. What is not difficult to say is that all of it began when Gypsy was impossibly young and could hardly have been expected to challenge authority figures—her mother or her doctors—about how she was feeling.
For their part, doctors did not pick up on innumerable hints that Dee Dee’s stories did not add up—not even the sleep doctor, Dr. Robert Beckerman, who saw Gypsy both in New Orleans and in Kansas City. Instead, he featured his treatment of Gypsy in the hospital newsletter and mentioned repeatedly in the medical files that she and Dee Dee were his “favorite mother, daughter patient.” (Beckerman did not reply to requests for comment for this story.)
There was one exception. In 2007, a pediatric neurologist named Bernardo Flasterstein, consulting on the case in Springfield, became suspicious. In a recent phone conversation, Flasterstein told me he had his doubts from the first time he saw Dee Dee and Gypsy. Dee Dee’s stories about Gypsy’s myriad illnesses didn’t fly with him. In his notes to Gypsy’s primary care doctor after the first visit, he wrote, in bold, underlined type, “The mother is not a good historian.”
There was an “unusual distribution” to Gypsy’s weakness for a muscular dystrophy patient, he wrote in his notes. Still, Flasterstein says, he gave the case the “benefit of the doubt” and sent Gypsy for all the usual tests, the MRIs and the blood work. It all came back normal. “I remember having her stand up,” he told me, “and she could hold her own weight!” He said he told Dee Dee, “I
don’t see any reason why she doesn’t walk.”
In between his visits with Gypsy, Flasterstein tracked down a doctor who had seen Gypsy in New Orleans. That doctor told him that the muscle biopsy in New Orleans had been negative for muscular dystrophy, and that Gypsy’s previous neurologist had explained that to Dee Dee. When confronted with the problem, Dee Dee simply stopped seeing those New Orleans doctors.
“Analyzing all the facts, and after talking to her previous pediatrician,” Flasterstein wrote in the file, “there is a strong possibility of Munchausen by proxy, with maybe some underlying unknown etiology to explain for her symptoms.” Dee Dee stopped seeing him after that visit. “I assume she got my notes,” Flasterstein says. He said nurses told him later that on the way out of his office on that last visit, Dee Dee was complaining that he didn’t know what he was talking about.
Flasterstein never followed up. He told me that in the network of Springfield doctors Dee Dee saw, “everyone bought their story.” He remembers being told to treat the pair with “golden gloves.” He says he thought that if he reported it to social services, they wouldn’t believe him, either.
Thinking about it now, Flasterstein regrets not doing more. He says this was only the second case of Munchausen he’d seen in his decades-long career. He heard about the murder when a former nurse in his office wrote him about it last year. “Poor Gypsy,” he told me. “She suffered all those years, and for no reason.” He wishes he “could have been more aggressive.”
It was not the only missed opportunity for authorities to intervene. In the fall of 2009, someone made an anonymous call to the Springfield Police Department, asking for a wellness check. The person said that they had doubts that Gypsy was suffering from all the ailments her mother described. (Flasterstein says it was not he who made that call.) The police drove over to the house, but Dee Dee put their fears to rest. She told them that the reason she sometimes used inconsistent birth dates and spellings of her name was to hide from an abusive husband. No one called Rod Blanchard or checked on these claims. The police accepted the explanation. Gypsy “does suffer from some type of mental handicap,” they wrote in their report. The file was closed.
Gypsy also tried, once, to escape her mother. She met a man at the science fiction convention that Kim Blanchard and her husband also attended. Gypsy and this man began communicating online. At the time, in February 2011, Gypsy and Dee Dee were leaving everyone with the impression that she was 15. (She was actually 19.) According to Kim, the man in question was 35. He took Gypsy back to his hotel room. Through conventioneer intelligence—“We were all overprotective of her,” Kim Blanchard said—Dee Dee found them. She apparently knocked on the hotel room door with papers that showed Gypsy was a minor, and the man let Gypsy leave. (He could not be reached for comment.)
After that incident, Dee Dee was furious to the point of public spectacle. She smashed the family computer with a hammer, cursed the internet to her friends. When she eventually replaced it, Gypsy was allowed to use the internet only with Dee Dee’s supervision. And for months afterward, Kim Blanchard said, Gypsy was subdued, though “she wasn’t acting any differently than a normal child who was in trouble at that point.”
The whole situation has left bystanders in Springfield with feelings of guilt. “I just wish she would have come to me,” Aleah Woodmansee told me. A lot of people feel that way. If Gypsy had, just once, stood up and walked across the room, the spell would have been broken. But plainly it wasn’t that easy for her. In a way, that makes sense. She slipped, as people are fond of saying, through just about everyone’s cracks. She had no reason to believe that her life would change. Until, apparently, she met Nick Godejohn.
UNDER OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES, A TALE OF CHILD ABUSE as long and as involved as what Gypsy experienced might have inspired public sympathy. But something about the fraud element deeply offended people, particularly those who hadn’t known Gypsy or Dee Dee at all. Evidently there are a lot of people who are worried that others who are sick and disabled don’t deserve their generosity. So Facebook groups began to spring up. They splintered on whether Gypsy could be said to be blamed, whether Rod and Kristy were in some way in on the fraud. Some groups ballooned to over 10,000 members, some of them posting every day about the crime, voicing unfounded theories about what had happened.
If their speculation had been confined to private forums, it might have been one thing. But more than a few of these amateur detectives were not satisfied with online discussion. They wanted to affect the case in real time. A St. Louis–based Thought Catalog writer named Meagan Pack was keeping track of “tips” she’d gotten from Facebook about Gypsy and Dee Dee’s crimes and posting them to a much-referenced post. Pack told me she called the police detective to inform him of all she’d learned. Random observers on Facebook also called the police with their various speculations. Then, when the court hearings began, they came to those, too. One even showed up to Dee Dee’s house when the initial “That bitch is dead” Facebook post went viral in Springfield. She hadn’t known Gypsy or Dee Dee at all. She was shooed away from the crime scene by the neighbors and the police.
The result was informational chaos. Kim Blanchard’s GoFundMe became a flash point for online sleuths. When Dee Dee’s financial fraud was revealed by the sheriff, Kim shut it down, but not before the groups had taken it upon themselves to investigate Kim herself. Several thought Kim and David Blanchard were lying about their involvement with Gypsy and Dee Dee, and assumed they were relatives because of their last name.
Kristy Blanchard, meanwhile, was still gathering a lot of the news about her stepdaughter from Facebook. That’s when she discovered that many thought she and Rod were in on Dee Dee’s plans. Others thought Rod must have been a neglectful father who didn’t financially support his own child. “They don’t understand that I’ve always been supportive,” he said. “In every way,” Kristy chimed in. In fact, if anything, Dee Dee may have had so much money—Gypsy and Nick had escaped with about $4,000 from Dee Dee’s safe—because they were receiving his support checks. (Dee Dee died intestate, without a will, and apparently without meaningful assets other than that cash.)
Kristy tried, at first, to defend herself and Rod to these groups, but it turned out they were hard to convince. “It was hell,” she said. She withdrew from all the groups and asked friends and family to stop accepting new friend requests, which were pouring in.
The neighbors in Springfield also had this problem. “It was like, ‘Forget you!’” Amy Pinegar said of the few attempts she made to correct the online sleuths on their factual errors. The obsessives ended up piling confusion onto the already confusing situation Dee Dee had created. And they proved quite resilient. At the hearing I attended in September 2015, two people from the largest Facebook group were there. After the hearing, they made a beeline for the local television crew and started talking to them. Gypsy’s attorney, Michael Stanfield, saw them, too, and tried to hurry out of the courtroom to confront them.
“Who were those people?” he asked the television crew. “What did they say?”
FOR A WHILE, IT SEEMED LIKE GYPSY’S CASE WOULD, eventually, go to trial. The prosecutor declined to go for the death penalty, but both Gypsy and Nick were charged with first-degree murder. As the investigation into the crime continued, it turned up text messages between the two that appeared to discuss and plan Dee Dee’s death. “Honey, you forget I am ruthless, and my hatred of her will force her to die,” Godejohn texted Gypsy. “It’s my evil side doing it. He won’t mess up, because he enjoys killing.” Prosecutors also said they found social media evidence of Gypsy directly asking Godejohn to kill her mother, though these have never been made public. Documents from pretrial discovery show him telling a friend about Gypsy’s desire to murder her mother as early as May 2014.
Godejohn referred to his “evil side” because he and Gypsy had constructed an elaborate online fantasy life, mostly through a jigsaw puzzle of Facebook accounts. They were into BDSM imagery. Th
ey had specific names and roles for each other. They took pictures of themselves in costumes, Gypsy dressing up at one point as the comic book character Harley Quinn, posing with a knife. Reality and fantasy blended quite a lot, for both of them. Even now, it’s not clear why Godejohn participated in this scheme. He had no history of violence. (Reached by telephone, Godejohn’s attorney Andrew Mead declined to comment on the case.) His only prior arrest was for lewd conduct in 2013 at a McDonald’s, where he had been watching pornography on a tablet. But both he and Gypsy told police he was the one to wield the knife. She said that while her mother was being stabbed, she was in the other room, listening. One of the taxi drivers who’d carted the pair around Springfield after the murder told interviewers they thought Gypsy was the ringleader.
Gypsy’s attorney, Michael Stanfield, is a public defender. In an average year, he told me, he handles over 270 individual cases. He drew Gypsy’s case at random and had no idea what he was in for. “I think this is probably the most complicated case I’ll ever get,” he said. The Greene County public defender’s office was somewhat lucky in that they were also able to pull a former leading public defender, Clate Baker, out of retirement for the case. Stanfield also had an investigator and a paralegal working on it. Kristy and Rod had no money to hire a private attorney, though they told me repeatedly as I reported this story that they would never have told Gypsy to switch attorneys because they found Stanfield so capable and reassuring.
The process of figuring out what had happened was, in a word, complex. Stanfield went down to Louisiana and dredged up some elements of Dee Dee’s past. It took him months to get Gypsy’s own medical records, because Dee Dee had set up a power of attorney over Gypsy’s medical decisions after Gypsy turned 18. The hospitals refused to help, even though the power of attorney did not surrender Gypsy’s rights to look at her own medical documents.
When the records finally arrived, though, they were so damning, Stanfield called the prosecutor without needing to investigate further. A plea deal was worked out. On July fifth, Gypsy pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. The judge gave her the minimum sentence: 10 years. With the year she’s served, she’ll be eligible for parole in about seven and a half years, at the end of 2023. By then she will be 32 years old.
Unspeakable Acts Page 3
