Do We Become Our Mothers?

Gypsy Rose Blanchard murdered her mother, who murdered her own mother

Amy Punt
6 min readJan 12, 2024
A striped tabby cat looking at the viewer. He has questions in his eyes.
Photo of Link by author

Previously published on Substack

I’m working on a longer piece regarding Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the young woman who planned the murder of her mother and whose boyfriend carried it out. Her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, confined her daughter to a wheelchair her entire life. She manipulated doctors into performing all kinds of unnecessary surgeries on Gypsy and even changed her birth certificate to keep her a child. Dee Dee, a former RN, created symptoms to mimic certain diseases by giving Gypsy medications that caused the desired side effects. Doing so allowed her to defraud charities like the Make-a-Wish Foundation, the American Cancer Society, and Habitat for Humanity out of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions when you add up all of Gypsy’s surgeries.

At 19, Gypsy attempted an escape, and Dee Dee retrieved her and chained her to the bed, starving her intermittently. She then had papers drawn up by lawyers labeling Gypsy an incompetent. If she ever tried to get away again, Gypsy would have no legal recourse. Meanwhile, Dee Dee had other surgeries planned.

Gypsy didn’t snap. She premeditated the murder. It took several years before all the pieces were in place, and the person she believed was her knight in shining armor was ready to do the deed. But make no mistake, Gypsy acted in self-defense. The prosecution saw the scope of her abuse and confinement, and she pled guilty to second-degree murder. In December of 2023, after serving eight and a half of a 10-year sentence, Gypsy walked out a free woman.

I’ve poured over her interrogation and watched every documentary and nearly every interview, of which there are countless now. In doing so, however, I walked into her psyche, took up residence in her trauma, and now I cannot find the exit door. I wake up trapped in the bed with her and her mother, twisting and turning uselessly in the oily bed sheets. I can’t breathe. My thoughts trapped in a lava lamp that’s been on too long, heating up, stifling, morphing slowly over the same shapes, patterns, endless patterns of domination, obsession, infantilization, devaluation, annihilation, powerlessness, and chaos. It’s a swirling vortex of starvation, sorrow, and psychological poverty.

The bedroom floor has mounds of old clothes, stuffed animals, shiny chintz princess costumes, plastic crowns, and cast-off medical equipment. Equipment that could have gone to someone who needed it. A safe filled with thousands in cash is in the corner of the room. Everywhere you turn, there are prescription pill bottles on every surface, and the pantry in the kitchen is floor to ceiling with them.

Strangely, the bathroom is clean. That’s what struck me about the crime scene photos. Gypsy’s wheelchair is in the bathroom, presumably where she left it when she walked out of her house that night. I have so many questions. Did Dee Dee force Gypsy to stay in the chair even when they were alone? When Gypsy answered the door to let her boyfriend in as her mother slept, did she answer it in her wheelchair? Both she and Nick separately confirmed that that’s where she was during the murder. It’s a haunting image.

And what happened to the three cats? Two of them were very old by 2015. They’d survived Hurricane Katrina. The third, Princess Sweetie Pie, a black and white cat Gypsy had raised from kittenhood, had two perfectly formed black hearts on her back. Gypsy filmed a walkthrough of their Habitat for Humanity home for Nick. In it, she walks back to the bedroom, revealing an unmade bed, dirty bedsheets, and an oily pillow where her obese mother slept. Princess Sweetie Pie is lying on Gypsy’s side on the only corner of the bed that isn’t crumpled. It’s the opposite end of Dee Dee’s. We take the space our abusers forget to look at because of their own dissociative chaos.

Gypsy shows Nick her mother’s side and pantomimes stabbing her right below the pillow. It’s no accident he nearly severed Dee Dee’s head during the act. Nick, who has Autism Two and an IQ of 80, followed Gypsy’s directions literally.

But where are the cats, Gypsy? What happened to Princess Sweetie Pie?

Gypsy recounts an anecdote about one of the cats from her childhood in the HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest. She had done or said something her mother didn’t like, so Dee Dee picked up the cat, cooed over it, and gave her a treat. Then she looked at Gypsy and snarled. The message was clear: you aren’t worth loving if you don’t keep me happy, and I’m only happy when you do what I want. Any child of a narcissistic mother understands that dynamic. For me, my mother favored my brothers and routinely devalued and diminished my gifts, my affection, and my needs.

I’m disassociating as I crawl through Gypsy’s psyche. I’m losing the thread of my progress, but I can’t stop. I have to know to understand. I have to hear it all.

Put down the remote. Go outside.

I do, and all I can think about is her, so I rush back and grab the remote and white knuckle yet another interview to pour over her gestures and answers. I have questions I still need to form and am looking for answers I may never find.

Gypsy’s answers change, you know. She’s lying, but what would you expect from someone raised by a psychopath with a superhuman ability to manipulate and deceive? It’s all she knows.

The essential details of the case remain more or less the same. These were unique circumstances, and poor old Nick was in the wrong relationship at the wrong time. Criminal forensic psychologists don’t believe she’ll murder again. I tend to agree. Nick’s case is separate. There are several reasons he was charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. I’ll discuss those in the other piece.

As for Gypsy’s role, it’s true she manipulated him to get the deed done, and that’s what she lies now to obfuscate. She doesn’t want people to love the cat more. She wants to give them a version of herself worth loving, the version she thinks they want. Once people start to observe those inconsistencies, they’ll turn on her, and it will get ugly. Nobody likes to be lied to, especially not a ravenous public.

But it started in the interrogation. The detective is pressuring her to tell him why, and he wants a specific answer. He doesn’t yet know her story and isn’t interested in it. She tries to lie, cry, and deflect, and he gets more combative. “Why,” he bellows repeatedly and won’t let her talk until she gives him something that makes sense to him. She crumbles, and her well-prepared remarks finally slip. She asks him for permission to speak. He lets her. Carefully, quietly, and without tears, she says this, “My mother had papers drawn up with lawyers saying I was incompetent.” He cuts her off and, rapid-fire, peppers her with cues to get the confession he wants to hear — that Nick manipulated and killed her mother so that he could have her to himself.

But that one line, the one about the papers and the lawyers, is the real reason, and that is why we can trust that justice has been served. Gypsy didn’t do it for revenge. She did it for her freedom.

This is a child who is a master at picking up people’s cues and giving them the version of herself that they want. Later, during Nick’s trial, Gypsy takes the stand for the defense and tells the truth that best aligns with the mountain of evidence: the texts, the social media posts, and the secret online life they shared. She manipulated Nick into killing her mother.

Nick was convicted of life without parole, but that’s not her fault. Currently, his family is appealing his trial in hopes that the first-degree murder conviction will be overturned for the lesser charge of second-degree murder. Autism experts agree this is a far more appropriate charge.

Lies are complicated, and their reasons must be examined and understood.

Gypsy is not her mother, and she won’t murder again. I wish she’d take time to heal and process and figure out what life looks like as a free and private citizen. The relentless media coverage and constant social media attention will not end well. But she won’t because she can’t. I’ll talk more about that, too. I’m still processing it all and trying to untangle my feelings about my mother and my abuse and picking apart the crime scenes in my home to figure out where Gypsy ends, and I begin.

I needed to get this out before I lose too much time in a dissociative fugue state that tempts me to throw out my work and forget this obsession. There’s a fine line between research and dissociative fugue states.

©Punt On Point Media, Inc. Amy Punt 2024

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Amy Punt
Amy Punt

Written by Amy Punt

Writing about Personal Growth, Trauma, Recovery and the cultural moments that reflect our hidden traumas.

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