On Hulu's The Act, Gypsy and her boyfriend have just made their escape after Nick murdered Dee Dee Blanchard. In real life, Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn were both tried and convicted for the murder of Gypsy's mother, Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard. Many suspect Dee Dee suffered from Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, which would account for Dee Dee pretending Gypsy had a series of severe illnesses, though she was never diagnosed. However, the constant deception and control became too much for Gypsy, who convinced her out-of-state boyfriend, Godejohn, whom she'd met on a Christian dating website in 2012, to travel from Wisconsin to Missouri and stab her mother to death with a knife in June 2015. Now, Hulu's The Act has caught up with that piece of the story, but how long were Gypsy and Nick running before they were caught?
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Gypsy, who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and is serving a 10-year prison sentence at the Chillicothe Correctional Center in Chillicothe, MO, calmly recounted the details during Godejohn's November 2018 trial, according to a video obtained by the Springfield News-Leader. Their plan was simple and, arguably, not well thought out, and their time together was short-lived.
After a year of planning the murder, Gypsy said she purchased Godejohn a ticket to travel from Wisconsin to Missouri by train. He arrived around June 8, 2015 and stayed at a nearby Days Inn hotel. Two days later, on June 10, Godejohn arrived at Gypsy's home and repeatedly stabbed Dee Dee to death at around 3 a.m. Gypsy, who said she gets "squeamish" around blood, allegedly sat in another room. Three hours later, the two packed their things and went back Godejohn's hotel room, where they stayed for two days before booking tickets to Wisconsin, where Godejohn lived with his mother, step-father, and younger brother.
For two days, Gypsy and Godejohn lived independently. They dined at a waffle house, ran errands at Walmart, and even shipped the murder weapon to Godejohn's home in Wisconsin and listed her Missouri home as the return address. "I figured, mail it," she said during the trial. "People mail knives all the time. They buy knives offline. Nobody would know the difference."
The two arrived in Wisconsin on June 13. When pressed about what she planned to do once she had arrived, Gypsy said, "Just staying with [Godejohn] forever there" and added that the thought that they might get caught never crossed her mind. A day later, she posted a sinister message to Dee Dee's Facebook account, which read "That Bitch is dead!" Her intention, she said, was to scare people into thinking that Dee Dee had been killed and she had been taken.
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"I thought maybe if people knew I was gone they would just think I was missing, and missing people go unfound all the time," Gypsy admitted in court. "So, I just thought I'd remain a missing person."
Concerned neighbors who'd seen the Facebook post alerted authorities, who found Dee Dee's body on June 14, according to BuzzFeed. The next day, law enforcement traced the ominous Facebook message to Godejohn's home and arrested Gypsy and Godejohn in connection with the murder.
For three years, Gypsy dreamed of a life with Godejohn. Instead, she got five days.
Now, the two are separated by both the legal system and by choice. Gypsy has reportedly gotten engaged to her prison pen pal, and Nick is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole after being found guilty of first-degree murder in 2018. Godejohn's feelings about Gypsy have changed, too.
"She was basically the mastermind behind it all, [and] I was basically a hired hit man in its own weird sense," Godejohn told ABC News.
"I loved Gypsy to the point where I would ... do anything for her," he continued. "I've proven that with what I did. Unfortunately, because of how far I went, I feel as if she's betrayed me. I feel that she's abandoned me."
So much for their happily ever after.