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. They 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.