Where were you when you first learned about Gypsy-Rose Blanchard? Were you listening to a true crime podcast? Scrolling through Tumblr? Were you binging a new show? Were you reading a book? Did it come up naturally in a conversation with your friends, where you were trying to outdo one another with messed up true crime facts? Were you scrolling through TikTok, seeing the excitement of her 9.8 million followers, some waiting outside her prison for a glimpse of Gypsy-Rose, now free?
I found out about Gypsy-Rose Blanchard through Facebook as the case was unfolding. I think it was through Buzzfeed, and I was early enough that no one knew how involved Gypsy was at the time. It was June 2015 and Dee Dee Blanchard’s body was found stabbed in her bedroom, Gypsy nowhere to be found. It was early enough that the world still thought Gypsy was a chronically ill child, so the fact that she was missing caused panic to those who knew the Blanchard’s intimately and that worry spread online. As the crime took hold of the internet, Gypsy was found and the true story unfolded, one where a young woman was revealed to be the victim of Munchausen by Proxy who found murder to be the only way she might escape it.
It has all the makings of a V.C. Andrews novel and was compared to that in the beginning when all the details of the Blanchard’s were coming out. I never became a dedicated true crime fan, but I consumed a lot of it after my mom died, which also happened to be the same year Dee Dee Blanchard was murdered. My interest in true crime came before that though, mostly consumed through Buzzfeed articles with titles like “Ten Most F-ed Up Cases to Keep You Up at Night” that offered smiling photos of the victims and bite-sized paragraphs from fans about why these cases scared them and a link to the Wikipedia articles about the cases. I’d lurk various true crime Reddit threads reading about cases and other people’s opinions about what had happened. If I read these articles or subreddits too late at night I was unable to sleep. It just before the true crime boom. While I’m sure some existed at that time the only one of note I can think of is Serial that arguably started the genre (My Favourite Murder didn’t come out until January 2016). It was in December of that year that Making a Murderer also premiered, but it was still too early for many to know or care about Gypsy-Rose as much as they do now.
Sarah O'Connor 