Co-Conspirator in Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard Sentenced to Life in Prison

Nicholas Godejohn, the Wisconsin man who murdered his girlfriend’s mother at the request of his girlfriend, has been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

The 2015 murder of 48-year-old Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, and the subsequent murder trials of her daughter Gypsy Rose and Godejohn, has attracted national attention. While Gypsy’s friends and family believed that she had cancer, in reality, Gypsy was allegedly the victim of child abuse; Gypsy, who is now 25, alleges that her mother abused her for her entire life—keeping her sick, subjecting her to multiple surgeries and consigning her to a wheelchair—signs of Munchausen by proxy, a rare mental health condition in which a caretaker invents or induces illnesses in another person in order to gain sympathy or attention.

Gypsy struck up an online relationship with Godejohn three years before the murder. The two talked frequently, where, according to reporting from Buzzfeed, they “had constructed an elaborate online fantasy life, mostly through a jigsaw puzzle of Facebook accounts.” In 2016, Gypsy pled guilty for plotting Dee Dee’s murder with Godejohn.

Fox 14 reports that in 2015, Godejohn, 29, confessed to Dee Dee Blanchard in her Missouri home, saying that he did it because he was love with her daughter, Gypsy Rose. “I did actually stab her,” he said in a video of the interrogation. “I would have never did it if it were not for me and her.” The prosecution argued that Godejohn understood the severity of the crime, while the defense argued that his autism prevented him from understanding what he did.

Gypsy Blanchard is currently serving a ten year sentence in prison. In 2017, HBO aired a documentary, Mommy Dead and Dearest, about the tragedy.