A Daughter Trapped, A Mother Murdered- Fatal Family Secrets

A new HBO documentary explores how a young girl everyone thought was disabled and dying plotted to kill her mother to escape a life of lies

- Harriert Sokmensuer

As Springfield, Mo., police entered the pink-and-white three-bedroom house shared by divorced mother Dee Dee Blanchard and her petite teenage daughter Gypsy Rose, they had no idea what they might find. Dee Dee was known around the quiet suburban neighborhood as a caring, devoted mother to Gypsy—a frail but sweet toothless girl whose myriad health problems required her to use a wheelchair. Responding to calls on June 14, 2015, from concerned friends who had seen a foreboding Facebook post on a profile shared by the mother and daughter that read, “That Bitch is dead!” police were horrified to find the lifeless body of Dee Dee, facedown in a pool of blood on the bed she shared with her daughter. Gypsy was nowhere to be found, her two wheelchairs left inside the house. A multistate alert was immediately dispatched to locate the girl. “We thought she was abducted, that someone had carried her out,” says Greene County sheriff Jim Arnott. “But everything we had been told began to unravel.”