It might have been as early as last week’s People magazine cover featuring Gypsy Rose Blanchard, but definitely by the time she appeared on Friday’s episode of “The View,” as the hosts awkwardly joked, “murder is wrong,” that I started to wonder what the hell I was watching.
A few days before the taping, Gypsy Rose had still been in prison for her role in the death of her mother, a grisly crime that obsessed the nation in 2015. The 24-year-old Missourian had been raised to believe she was desperately sick: leukemia, a degenerative muscular disorder, a surgically inserted feeding tube. Only later did she realize that all of it — including her rotted teeth, her bald head and her wheelchair — had been wholly unnecessary. Dee Dee Blanchard perpetuated a horrifying decades-long hoax, cajoling doctors into performing procedures that made her healthy daughter into a frail dependent. Upon learning the truth, and believing she had no other way to escape, Gypsy Rose conspired with her online boyfriend to kill Dee Dee. He was the one who wielded the knife; she was the one who posted on Facebook, “That b---- is dead.”
