From: gemini23x@gmail.com   
      
   Corey Brickley for BuzzFeed News   
      
   Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom To Be Murdered   
      
   Dee Dee Blancharde was a model parent: a tireless single mom taking care of   
   her gravely ill child. But after Dee Dee was killed, it turned out things   
   weren’t as they appeared — and her daughter Gypsy had never been sick at   
   all.   
      
   Posted on August 18, 2016, at 7:09 p.m.   
   Michelle Dean   
   BuzzFeed Contributor   
      
      
      
   For seven years before the murder, Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blancharde lived in   
   a small pink bungalow on West Volunteer Way in Springfield, Missouri. Their   
   neighbors liked them. “'Sweet' is the word I’d use,” a former friend of   
   Dee Dee’s told me    
   not too long ago. Once you met them, people said, they were impossible to   
   forget.   
      
   Dee Dee was 48 years old, originally from Louisiana. She was a large,   
   affable-looking person, which she reinforced by dressing in bright, cheerful   
   colors. She had curly brown hair she liked to hold back with ribbons. People   
   who knew her remember her as    
   generous with her time and, when she could be, generous with money. She could   
   make friends quickly and inspire deep devotion. She did not have a job, but   
   instead served as a full-time caretaker for Gypsy Rose, her teenage daughter.   
      
   Gypsy was a tiny thing, perhaps 5 feet tall as far as anyone could guess. She   
   was confined to a wheelchair. Her round face was overwhelmed by a pair of   
   owlish glasses. She was pale and skinny, and her teeth were crumbling and   
   painful. She had a feeding    
   tube. Sometimes Dee Dee had to drag an oxygen tank around with them, nasal   
   cannula looped around Gypsy’s small ears. Ask about her daughter's   
   diagnoses, and Dee Dee would reel off a list as long as her arm: chromosomal   
   defects, muscular dystrophy,    
   epilepsy, severe asthma, sleep apnea, eye problems. It had always been this   
   way, Dee Dee said, ever since Gypsy was a baby. She had spent time in neonatal   
   intensive care. She had leukemia as a toddler.   
      
      
   Facebook via WISN   
   Gypsy (left) and Dee Dee   
   The endless health crises had taken a toll. Gypsy was friendly, talkative   
   even, but her voice was high and childlike. Dee Dee would often remind people   
   that her daughter had brain damage. She had to be homeschooled, because   
   she’d never be able to keep    
   up with other kids. Gypsy had the mind of a child of 7, Dee Dee said. It was   
   important to remember that in dealing with her. She loved princess outfits and   
   dressing up. She wore wigs and hats to cover her small head. A curly, blonde   
   Cinderella number    
   seems to have been her favorite. She’s wearing it in so many photographs of   
   herself with her mother. She was always with her mother.   
      
   “We are a pair of shoes,” Gypsy once said. “Never good without the   
   other.”   
      
   Their house, like everyone else’s around them, had been built by Habitat for   
   Humanity. It had amenities specially built for Gypsy: a ramp up to the front   
   door, a Jacuzzi tub to help with “my muscles,” Gypsy told a local   
   television station in 2008.    
   Sometimes, on summer nights, Dee Dee would set up a projector to play a movie   
   on the side of her house and the children of the neighborhood, whose parents   
   usually couldn’t afford to send them to a movie theater, came over for a   
   treat. Dee Dee charged    
   for concessions, but it was still cheaper than the local multiplex. The money   
   was to go to Gypsy’s treatments.   
      
   Dee Dee became particularly close with some people across the way, a single   
   mother named Amy Pinegar and her four children. Over years of tea and coffee,   
   Dee Dee would tell Pinegar her life story. She was originally from a small   
   town in Louisiana, she    
   said, but she’d had to flee her abusive family with Gypsy. It was her own   
   father, Gypsy’s grandfather, who’d been the last straw; he’d burned   
   Gypsy with cigarettes. So she’d lit out from her hometown for good.   
      
      
   She told Pinegar that Gypsy’s father was a deadbeat, an alcoholic drug   
   abuser who had mocked his daughter’s disabilities, called the Special   
   Olympics a “freak show.” As Pinegar understood it, he'd never sent them a   
   dime, not even when Dee Dee and    
   Gypsy had lost everything in Hurricane Katrina. It was a blessing that a   
   doctor at a rescue shelter had helped them get to the Ozarks.   
      
   Sometimes, listening, Amy Pinegar found herself overwhelmed. “I wondered,”   
   Pinegar told me over the phone last fall, “keeping this child alive... Is   
   she that happy?” All she could do was be a good neighbor and pitch in when   
   she could. She’d    
   drive Dee Dee and Gypsy to the airport for their medical trips to Kansas City,   
   bring them things from Sam’s Club. Ultimately, they did seem happy. They   
   went on charity trips to Disney World, met Miranda Lambert through the   
   Make-a-Wish Foundation.    
   Looking back on it, Pinegar was sometimes even jealous of them.   
      
   It was a perfect story for a human interest segment on the evening news: a   
   family living through tragedy and disaster, managing to build a life for   
   themselves in spite of so many obstacles. But the story wasn't over. One day   
   last June, Dee Dee’s    
   Facebook account posted an update.   
      
   “That bitch is dead,” it read.   
      
      
      
      
      
   Corey Brickley for BuzzFeed News   
   It was June 14, a hot Sunday afternoon that had driven a lot of people indoors   
   to the blessings of air-conditioning. The first few comments on the status are   
   from friends expressing wild disbelief. Maybe the page had been hacked. Maybe   
   someone should    
   call. Does anyone know where they live? Should someone call the police, give   
   them the address?   
      
   As they debated it, a new comment from Dee Dee’s account appeared on the   
   status: “I fucken SLASHED THAT FAT PIG AND RAPED HER SWEET INNOCENT   
   DAUGHTER…HER SCREAM WAS SOOOO FUCKEN LOUD LOL.”   
      
   Kim Blanchard, who lived nearby, was among the first to react. Though Kim had   
   a similar last name to the Blanchardes, she wasn’t a relative. She had met   
   Dee Dee and Gypsy in 2009 at a science fiction and fantasy convention held in   
   the Ozarks, where    
   Gypsy could wear costumes and not be particularly out of place. “They were   
   just perfect,” Kim said. “Here was this poor, sick child who was being   
   taken care of by a wonderful, patient mother who only wanted to help   
   everybody.”   
      
      
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