Love to kill for: The chilling story of how Gypsy Rose Blanchard groomed her boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn to kill her mother
On Thursday, July 11, E! News revealed the first-ever photos of Gypsy Rose Blanchard with her prison pen pal-turned-fiancé, Ken, as the two celebrated their engagement, which took place in April earlier this year. A family friend told the outlet that the two were planning on building a future together after she is released, following her 10-year prison sentence.
But while life appears to be getting happier for Blanchard, her co-conspirator and boyfriend at the time, Nicholas Godejohn, is still serving a life sentence for first-degree murder in the killing.
Blanchard is serving time for the killing of her mother Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard who, because of her Munchausen syndrome by proxy abused her, forced her to take unnecessary medication, surgery and made her pretend to have cancer and other illnesses. Dee Dee had also made her daughter pass herself off as a younger girl and pretend to be disabled and chronically ill. She had also physically abused her, even chaining her once for several days when she attempted to run away.
Oxygen's new two-hour special 'Gypsy Rose & Nick: A Love to Kill For' explores his side of the story.
Godejohn was 26 when he committed the murder in June 2015 for which he is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder. He, after months of planning with Blanchard, had taken a bus to her home in Missouri and stabbed her mother 17 times, almost decapitating her. During the time of the murder, Blanchard had been hiding in the bathroom, as her mother screamed for help. After the deed was done, he had come to get her and the two had celebrated by having sex in her room.
It had taken months of planning. A little over a year, infact. Blanchard had spent more than over a year piecing the murder together as she felt that she had to take extreme measures to be free of her mother. She has called her extremely "controlling" in her chats to Godejohn and expressed many times that it was the only way they could ever be together.
She was convinced that she couldn't carry out the murder herself so she convinced her boyfriend, who was very much in love with her, to do it for her and he had agreed. Experts in the documentary have also said that she had groomed him to carry out the murder.
Godejohn had been reluctant at first to do it. They had devised two plans to make it work. One of them involved her getting pregnant with his baby so that it would force Dee Dee to keep him around in her life because he was the father. They had also tried to get Dee Dee to like him through a staged meeting but it had gone south very quickly.
They had debated over how to kill her too, after reaching the conclusion that it was the only way. They didn't know how to get poison and they didn't want to use firearms because it would be loud. Stabbing had seemed like the best option.
The couple, whose long-distance relationship was almost exclusively online, initially met in a chatroom in 2012. They had become fast friends, as the texts between them show. It had escalated quickly from being a casual conversation to a steamy string of messages and photos of two people who seemed to have only each other. Godejohn had confessed his love to her and she had reciprocated and they seemed to want to be closer to each other with every text.
A lonely kid with a mental disability, Godejohn had found a friend in Blanchard. To her, it seemed like he was the only key to his freedom. A victim of manipulation all her life, she had learned from the best, the documentary says.
He, on the other hand, had felt like her savior. She had told him about the fact that she could actually walk and that she had been forced to a wheelchair. She had told him about the time her mother had hit her. But, until the two were caught, she didn't know that she was actually physically healthy.
Godejohn had repeatedly said that he wanted to stop her from being abused anymore and wanted to make sure that her mother wouldn't harm her. The former couple had fled after the murder for five days before being caught.
"That was, man, probably the best days of my life, that’s the only way I can describe it,” Godejohn says in the documentary from prison. "I enjoyed every second of it." He wanted to have a life together with her and even had plans to marry and have children.
The documentary tries to answer many questions about the very disturbing nature of the case, that blurs the lines between who the victim and the perpetrator was and if justice can really be served in such circumstances. Watch the candid documentary that talks about Godejohn's perspective airing on Oxygen on Saturday, July 13 at 7/6c.