A video went viral on TikTok recently in which user @annakateeh shows a photo of her family at Disney World and in the background of the photo you can clearly see Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her mom, Dee Dee. In a follow-up video, Anna claims that she briefly spoke to Gypsy Rose and remembers wishing her well.

If you’re not familiar with the Gypsy Rose Blanchard story, I highly recommend watching HBO’s documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest”  which covers the story in-depth.

But to sum it up, Dee Dee Blanchard had Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP), meaning that she made up various illnesses that were plaguing her daughter, Gypsy Rose, even though she wasn’t sick at all. Throughout Gypsy’s life, Dee Dee claimed that she suffered from sleep apnea, leukemia, muscular dystrophy and more, causing Gypsy to undergo multiple unnecessary surgeries and be prescribed medications that she didn’t actually need. 

Dee Dee shaved Gypsy’s head to make it look like she had lost her hair from cancer treatments and insisted that she needed a wheelchair even though she didn’t actually need one. If doctors or anyone else questioned Gypsy’s ailments, Dee Dee stopped seeing that doctor and even moved away from family members who were becoming suspicious. Because she had a nursing background, Dee Dee was well-versed in what she needed to say to healthcare workers and even gave Gypsy medication to bring on symptoms that she otherwise wouldn’t have naturally. 

Dee Dee thrived off the sympathy and attention that she got from being Gypsy’s caregiver, especially from charity organizations. They moved into a home built by Habitat for Humanity in 2008 and enjoyed a free trip to Disney World thanks to the Make a Wish Foundation.

The ruse came crashing down as Gypsy grew older and went behind her mother’s back to gain internet access, where met a man named Nicholas Godejohn on a Christian dating website. There, she convinced Nicholas that they could only be together if he killed her mother. So in 2015, he came to Gypsy’s house and stabbed Dee Dee to death while Gypsy waited in the bathroom. 

Gypsy was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison and is eligible for parole while Nicholas is serving life in prison. 

So which part of this story constitutes murder by proxy? The minute Gypsy asked Nicholas to kill her mother, meaning she coerced him to commit the murder instead of her is when it all started. Another popular example of a proxy murder would be if someone hired a professional hit man to murder another person in their stead (we see a lot of this on Dateline episodes).

This case was particularly shocking because it proves that things aren’t always what they seem on a surface-level, and that even people like Dee Dee, who seem to be doing “noble” things may not have the best intentions.