However as everything of Gypsy’s stunning story got here to gentle, investigators in the end concluded that Dee Dee had spun an enormous net of fraud and that her daughter was a sufferer of her illness.
The posthumous professional consensus was that Dee Dee confirmed basic indicators of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, when an attention-seeking or in any other case agenda-driven caregiver deliberately sickens, injures or creates the picture of well being issues in a dependent, normally their very own baby.
Acknowledging the abuse she’d suffered, prosecutors provided Gypsy a deal, and in 2016 she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for her function in her mom’s homicide. She was sentenced to the minimal attainable period of time, 10 years in jail.
“Whenever you have a look at this case, it is a homicide—and it is a first-degree homicide,” Greene County Prosecutor Dan Patterson instructed the Springfield News-Leader on the time. “But it surely’s additionally one of the extraordinary and strange {cases} we now have seen.”
The fraud began “when Gypsy Blanchard was in all probability 4 or so,” he continued, and ended up “part of her total life rising up. And I believe should you have a look at her medical data and the best way the physician’s visits had been dealt with, it is clear that the one that spoke to the medical professionals and others was Clauddine Blanchard.”
Gypsy’s legal professional Mike Stanfield instructed the publication his consumer was more healthy after a yr spent in county jail than she’d been in Dee Dee’s care, again when she was taking medicine that made her tooth fall out and present process pointless medical procedures.
“Even after studying by the entire data and going again and compiling them to supply to Mr. Patterson,” the lawyer stated, “it was nonetheless tough for me to learn a number of the issues that I used to be studying.”
Although he believed he may have justified Gypsy’s actions to a jury, Stanfield stated, taking the plea was “the correct factor to do for everyone.”