Waukesha County does play a role in “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard,” Lifetime’s new, six-hour documentary on the much-discussed true-crime story.
But it’s not a big role.
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For those who have missed the past eight years of news coverage, true-crime episodes, documentaries, tabloid articles and award-winning drama series (Hulu’s “The Act”), Blanchard was convicted of second-degree murder in the 2015 stabbing death of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard.
Dee Dee had put Gypsy Rose through years of unnecessary surgeries and medications, as well as physical and psychological abuse, in what experts after the fact determined was an extreme case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
Finally having had enough, Gypsy Rose — who although she was 23 at the time she believed, because of her mother’s lies, that she was 19 — talked Nick Godejohn, her boyfriend from Big Bend, Wisconsin, into coming to her home in Springfield, Missouri, to kill her mother and take her away. After the killing, the pair fled to Godejohn’s mother’s house in Big Bend, where they were arrested soon after.
As its title suggests, “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard” is built on 18 months of phone and in-person interviews with Blanchard while she was serving her 10-year sentence at Chillicothe Correction Center in Missouri for her role in her mother’s murder. The documentary series cuts back and forth between the the story of Blanchard’s life with her mother leading up to the murder and Blanchard’s life in prison, including whether she will be granted parole — and whether her marriage while in prison will hold up.
(Spoilers: Blanchard was released on parole Dec. 28, 2023 — hence the timing of the new series — after serving 85% of her sentence. And she and Ryan Scott Anderson, who were wed in June 2022, are still married. If you want to be surprised by any revelations in “Prison Confessions,” and there are a few, stop reading here.)
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Just about everyone in Blanchard’s story gets screen time — except Godejohn, who is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for first-degree murder.
The story of Gypsy Rose’s life before the murder of her mother, and the murder itself, take up less than half of the docuseries’ running time, and Wisconsin’s connection to the story even less. Here’s where the Badger State fits into the series, which premieres at 7 p.m. Jan. 5 on Lifetime and runs for three straight nights on the cable channel.
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One of the first scenes is in the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department
After an introduction to Blanchard, the series cuts to surveillance footage of her after she’s been detained by the Waukesha County Sheriff’s department on June 15, 2015, one day after her mother’s body was found in their home in Missouri. In the scene, repeated later in the series, Blanchard feigns shock at the news of her mother’s death, then appears to break down.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard finds out Nick Godejohn lives with his mom outside Waukesha
Blanchard first “met” Godejohn when they connected on a Christian online dating site. Not long after, she discovered that, although he came across as a strong, independent type, the 26-year-old still lived with his mother in her house in Big Bend. When Blanchard actually got there, she says, she found out where he slept was “the equivalent of a 15-year-old boy’s room.”
Blanchard’s stay in Waukesha County was very brief
After Godejohn fatally stabbed Dee Dee Blanchard, he and Gypsy Rose went to a nearby hotel, with plans to take a bus to Waukesha the next day. But when that bus was sold out, the pair stayed at the hotel for two more days. Not long after their arrival in Wisconsin, Gypsy Rose, on a computer in the Godejohn home, posted a message on a Facebook page she shared with her mother, exclaiming “That B- Is Dead!”
Alan Voss, retired senior detective with the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department, tells the docuseries’ producers that the post triggered messages to the police in Springfield — and after getting information from a Blanchard friend about her relationship with Godejohn, helped police get Facebook to track the computer’s IP address to find her.
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Early on the morning of June 15, 2015, there was “racket” outside the Godejohn house, Blanchard says, and she discovered the house was surrounded by armored vehicles.
“It was a full SWAT team response,” Voss says. “It was a mini-standoff, I would say. … They didn’t react violently but initially refused to come out.”
Blanchard’s appearance throws off the Waukesha sheriffs
Because of the nature of the crime scene in Missouri, Voss relates, law enforcement had speculated that Dee Dee Blanchard had been murdered and Gypsy Rose kidnapped, since a wheelchair that the younger Blanchard was never seen out of had been left behind. At the time, no one — including other members of the Blanchard family — suspected that Gypsy Rose’s years of illness were faked and exacerbated by her mother.
So when Blanchard walked out of the Godejohn house “perfectly fine,” Voss says, it “kind of put the whole investigation into a spin.”
2 Waukesha interrogation rooms, 2 different stories
In Waukesha, law enforcement kept Blanchard and Godejohn “completely separate,” she says. Blanchard, grilled by “Detective Hancock from the Greene County (Missouri) Sheriff’s office,” initially sticks to the story they concocted to tell the police.
But Godejohn is shown in the docuseries spilling the beans almost instantly, saying he stabbed Dee Dee Blanchard four times because Gypsy Rose asked him to kill her mother so she could be with him. Confronted with that information, Gypsy Rose says she’ll tell “the truth.”
A Waukesha court room brings a cold realization
Blanchard, who insists in her telling of the story that she was high on painkillers during the murder and afterward, says that after she told the Missouri detective what really happened, she knew she had been involved in something bad but “never dreamed” she could spend the rest of her life in prison. She only realized how much trouble she was in, she says, when she made her first court appearance in an orange jail jumpsuit in Waukesha.
Source: https://t-tees.com
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