Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the woman sentenced to a decade in prison for the murder of her abusive mother, was released from prison Thursday after serving eight years behind bars.
Blanchard, 32, was granted parole in September and cleared for an early release from Missouri’s Chillicothe Correctional Center, the state’s Department of Corrections confirmed.
“Nobody will ever hear me say I’m glad she’s dead or I’m proud of what I did,” Blanchard told People a day ahead of her release. “I regret it every single day.”
She was released from prison around 3:30 a.m. local time Thursday, the Department of Corrections confirmed to HuffPost.
In a 2015 plea deal, Blanchard was found guilty of the second-degree murder of her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, who had foisted numerous fake illnesses upon her daughter, including leukemia, muscular dystrophy, brain damage and an unspecified chromosomal disorder.
Blanchard’s mother reinforced the charade by forcing her daughter to use a wheelchair, shaving her head to mimic the side effects of chemotherapy, giving her unnecessary medicine that caused severe tooth decay and convincing a doctor to install a feeding tube in her. Blanchard says her mother maintained control over her through isolation from the outside world and physical abuse.
Her story was portrayed in the 2019 scripted Hulu series “The Act” and recounted in the 2017 HBO documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest.”
In her People interview, Blanchard said she’d spent her years behind bars trying to understand her mother’s situation, including her suspected case of undiagnosed Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
“It’s a journey. I’m still really trying to come to a place of forgiveness for her, for myself and the situation,” Blanchard said. “I still love my mom. And I’m starting to understand that it was something that was maybe out of her control, like an addict with an impulse. That helps me with coping and accepting what happened.”
After her mother was found stabbed to death in her Springfield, Missouri, house in 2015, Blanchard admitted to conspiring with her boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, to kill her mother, arranging for him to carry out the act while she hid elsewhere in the house.
Godejohn was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Blanchard married Ryan Anderson, a 37-year-old Louisiana teacher, while in prison last year, she told People.
Blanchard’s commentary will also be featured in the upcoming Lifetime series “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard,” which is scheduled to air on Jan. 5.
