‘I Put My Hands Over My Ears And Then It All Went Quiet’: Gypsy Rose Describes Mother’s Murder

Claudine “Dee Dee” Blanchard screamed for help as a man in a clown sweatshirt stabbed her repeatedly. She yelled for her daughter, Gypsy Rose, the girl she allegedly forced into getting unnecessary medical treatments for years, to come save her, never realizing she’d helped orchestrate the attack. Gypsy Rose just waited for silence.

“I put my hands over my ears and then it all went quiet” she told Dr. Phil McGraw on his true crime podcast, "Analysis of Murder."

Gypsy Rose’s story has become a well known one – the subject of several TV shows and documentaries. Dee Dee Blanchard allegedly pretended her daughter had everything from leukemia to muscular dystrophy to developmental issues and she forced Gypsy to endure multiple surgeries and consume unneeded medications —  a condition often referred to as Munchausen by proxy. Gypsy Rose, now 27, says her mother even lied to her about her age – she thought she was just 15 years old when she learned she was actually 19.

The abuse went on until Gypsy Rose helped plot her mother’s murder: She asked her online boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, to kill her and he did, stabbing Dee Dee to death in 2015. He was sentenced in February to life in prison after being convicted of first-degree murder. Gypsy Rose was sentenced in 2016 to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder for her role in the attack.

Want to know more about the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case? Watch a special episode of "Killer Couples," available now on Oxygen.com.

Dr. Phil sat down with Gypsy Rose in 2017 inside the women’s prison in Missouri where she is serving her sentence. Unaired excerpts of that interview are now being released in his new podcast.

In part 3 of the podcast, Gypsy Rose admitted she asked Godejohn to kill her mother after they’d had a fight over her feeding tube. She said she pleaded with her mother to remove the tube, but Dee Dee refused. Not only that, Gypsy Rose said Dee Dee was planning to make her undergo yet another surgery.

In all, Gypsy Rose told Dr. Phil she had more than 30 surgeries, including many on her eye, throat, and salivary glands.

From 1999 to 2015, she said was forced to use a wheelchair. The wheelchair usage was triggered after she got into a motorcycle accident in 1999 and skinned her knee. At that point, Gypsy Rose said her mother told her she'd be in a wheelchair forever, even though she knew she could feel her legs and walk.

It was nothing new. Before the wheelchair, she claimed Dee Dee even made her use a walker.

“She said that I had muscular dystrophy,” she said. “There would be times I’d forget to grab it and then go to walk and my mom would catch me and go ‘Use your walker.'"

Gypsy Rose said she’d walk around the house secretly when her mom was in bed. Sometimes, Dee Dee caught her and that resulted in verbal abuse and even coat hanger beatings, she said.

“She was just so angry at me,” Gypsy Rose said. “She would tell me that she wished she had an abortion when [she] had the chance, that I ruined her life.”

Gypsy Rose said her mother told her she had the mind of a child and forced her to take an unneeded anti-seizure medication, Tegretol, which made her lose her teeth.

Still, Gypsy Rose said she didn’t feel victimized and felt like she had a good bond with her mother at that time. It was when she learned she was 19, not 15, that she felt trapped. That’s when she started rebelling.

She even tried to run away but said her mother caught her and handcuffed to the bed for two weeks.

Gypsy Rose said after she failed to talk her mother out of easing up on the feeding tube she asked for Godejohn’s help.