In-Home Drug Testing Blanchard, LA

Local Area Info: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

Late on the night of June 14, 2015, sheriff's deputies in Greene County, Missouri, United States, found the body of Dee Dee Blanchard (born May 3, 1967, Chackbay, Louisiana, known as Clauddine (or Claudinea) Pitre), facedown in the bedroom of her house just outside Springfield, lying on the bed in a pool of blood from the stab wounds inflicted several days earlier. There was no sign of her daughter Gypsy Rose, who, according to Blanchard, suffered from leukemia, asthma, muscular dystrophy, along with several other chronic conditions and had the "mental capacity of a 7-year-old due to brain damage" she had suffered as a result of her premature birth.

After reading troubling Facebook posts earlier in the evening, concerned neighbors notified the police, reporting that Dee Dee may have fallen victim to foul play, and that Gypsy Rose, whose wheelchair and medications were still in the house, may have been abducted. The following day, police found Gypsy Rose in Wisconsin, where she had traveled with her boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn, whom she had met online. The Greene County sheriff reported that she was alive and well, but "things are not always as they appear". When investigators announced that she was actually an adult, and suffered from none of the physical and mental health issues her mother had claimed, public outrage over the possible abduction of a severely disabled girl gave way to shock and some sympathy for Gypsy Rose.

Further investigation found that some of the doctors who had examined Gypsy Rose, both locally and in the New Orleans area where she and her mother had lived before allegedly being displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, had found no evidence of the claimed disorders. In one case, professionals suspected Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental disorder where a parent or other caretaker exaggerates, fabricates, or induces illness in a person under their care to obtain sympathy or attention. Dee Dee had changed her name slightly after her family, who suspected she had poisoned her stepmother, confronted her about how she treated Gypsy Rose. Nonetheless, many people accepted her situation as true, and the two benefited from the efforts of charities such as Habitat for Humanity, Ronald McDonald House, and the Make-A-Wish Foundation.