“This is my personal account my mom is still overprotective so she don’t, know about this account,” Gypsy wrote in October 2014. Then she confessed she’d met a man on a Christian singles site. She was in love with him, she told Aleah. Gypsy hadn’t yet told her mother. She wrote that she knew Dee Dee wouldn’t approve, that she wasn’t allowed to date, though she longed to grow up and have a boyfriend like other girls her age.
“In the past I told my mom something mean I says I wished ur mom was my mom instead of my mom cus mrs Amy let Aleah date anyone she wanted so that hurt my mom,” Gypsy wrote.
The new boyfriend’s name, Gypsy revealed, was Nicholas Godejohn. They’d been communicating for over two years. He didn’t care that she was in a wheelchair. And Gypsy planned to marry him. They were both Catholic. They had agreed on names for their children. She was cooking up an elaborate plan for Dee Dee to casually meet Nick at the local movie theater, after which Gypsy was hoping they could be open about their relationship.
This wasn’t the first time Aleah had gotten clandestine messages from Gypsy about boys. She knew that Gypsy had tried to meet men online before, that in spite of what Dee Dee said about Gypsy’s seven-year-old mind, thoughts about romance and sex were taking root anyway. But she was concerned. Gypsy had always seemed naïve to her. In October 2014, she wrote “I’m 18. Nick . . . is 24,” which made Godejohn six years older.
Plus, the way she talked about the relationship was odd. “It was like some kind of magnificent fairy tale was unfolding,” Aleah said over coffee in Springfield last fall.
She was worried, too, about Dee Dee, who’d confronted her in 2011 about her chats with Gypsy, telling her she was corrupting a child. “I’m not going to tell your mom about the things you said,” she told Aleah. “But I don’t want you talking to Gypsy like that.” Dee Dee took away Gypsy’s phone and computer for a time. Gypsy had always managed, nonetheless, to slip through some crack in her mother’s attention, find some other way of getting to Aleah. But the two saw each other less and less, and after the messages about Nick Godejohn in the fall of 2014, Aleah didn’t hear from Gypsy again.
Standing in front of the house half a year later with the crowd that had gathered, it occurred to Aleah that the police should know about all this. She showed them the Facebook messages, and they wrote the name down. The police also put a trace on the Facebook posts to Dee Dee’s account. The IP address was registered to a Nicholas Godejohn in Big Bend, Wisconsin.
On June 15, a team of officers in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, were dispatched to Godejohn’s house. The standoff was brief. Nick quickly surrendered. Luckily enough, Gypsy was with him, unharmed, in excellent health. Relief flooded everyone, at least for a moment.
“Things are not always as they appear,” the Springfield sheriff said at a press conference the next morning.
It turned out that, in fact, Gypsy hadn’t used a wheelchair from the moment she left her house a few days earlier. She didn’t need one. She could walk just fine—there was nothing wrong with her muscles, and she had no medication or oxygen tank with her, either. Her hair was short and spiky, but she wasn’t bald—her head had simply been shaved, all her life, to make her appear ill. She was well spoken, if shaken by recent events. The disabled child she’d long been in the eyes of others was nowhere to be found. It was all a fraud, she told the police. All of it. Every last bit. Her mother had made her do it.
“I just cried,” Aleah said, her sheer disbelief about everything that had happened overwhelming her.
Kim Blanchard cried, too. “At that point it really became: ‘I don’t know anything about this person. What have I been believing? How could I have been so stupid?’”
“No one asked for any more documentation. No one raised an eyebrow,” Amy Pinegar told me later. “Were they behind closed doors laughing at us”—she paused for a second—“suckers?”
DEE DEE’S LEGAL NAME WAS CLAUDDINE BLANCHARD. She’d used various aliases and misspellings over the years: DeDe, Claudine, Deno. By the time she reached Missouri, she went by Clauddinnea and always added an “e” to her last name. Not all of her stories turned out to be false. She was, indeed, from Lafourche Parish, in the ball of Louisiana’s foot. She had grown up in a town called Golden Meadow alongside five brothers and sisters, most still living. Her mother died in 1997, but her father is still alive.
So is Rod Blanchard, Gypsy’s father. He still lives in the area, in Cut Off, not far from Golden Meadow. Gypsy has his nose. He has a laconic manner, sometimes stoic, sometimes funny. He met Dee Dee when he was still in high school, and they dated for four to six months. He was 17 to her 24 when she became pregnant, and at the time the only logical thing he thought he could do was marry her. “I woke up on my birthday, on my 18th birthday, and realized I wasn’t where I was supposed to be,” he told me recently. “I wasn’t in love with her, really. I knew I got married for the wrong reasons.” He left Dee Dee, and though she tried on more than one occasion to get him back, the marriage would not stick.
Gypsy Rose was born shortly after the couple separated, on July 27, 1991. Rod said Dee Dee liked the name Gypsy, and he was a Guns N’ Roses fan. As far as he knows, neither of them knew about Gypsy Rose Lee, the 1920s vaudeville child star–turned-stripper whose early life was the basis for the Broadway musical Gypsy. That Gypsy had a controlling stage mother, too, one who lied about her daughter’s age to make her seem younger, one who kept forcing her daughter to perform even though she didn’t want to.
Gypsy was healthy at birth, Rod said. But when she was three months old, Dee Dee became convinced that her baby had sleep apnea, that Gypsy would stop breathing in the night. It was then that Dee Dee began taking her to the hospital. As Rod remembers it, the doctors couldn’t find anything, in spite of three rounds of tests and a sleep monitor. The conviction that Gypsy was a sickly child took hold. She explained the increasingly bewildering array of problems to Rod by saying that Gypsy had a chromosomal defect. Many of Gypsy’s health issues, she claimed, stemmed from that one thing.
It all spiraled so quickly. Dee Dee always had a new idea about what was wrong with Gypsy, a new doctor, a new drug. She had once worked as a nurse’s aide; she had a knack for remembering medical terminology and spitting it back. The information overload acted as a kind of wall around mother and daughter. It always seemed that Dee Dee had things under control. She knew so much, and she was never troubled by questions—she always had an answer.
Rod eventually remarried and had two other children. He and his new wife, Kristy, saw Gypsy often over the first 10 years of her life, and can share pictures from various happy family outings right up until 2004. They remember going to the Special Olympics, too, but have good memories of it. “All smiles,” Kristy said. They have a picture of Gypsy grinning widely with her father and brother there. In all those years, Gypsy never said a word against her mother or anything else.
Meanwhile, Dee Dee’s relationship with her own family, never great to begin with, got worse. The cause isn’t clear. (In spite of repeated attempts to contact her father, Claude Pitre, I was never able to speak to her family directly.) She’d begun to get in trouble with the law, usually for small misdemeanors, like writing bad checks. Eventually, Dee Dee simply moved away, to Slidell, two hours north and kitty-corner to New Orleans across Lake Pontchartrain.