Gypsy Rose Released From Prison Early

Gypsy Rose Blanchard has been released from her 10-year prison sentence early seven years after she and her boyfriend murdered her mother, Claudine “Dee Dee” Blanchard. The case made headlines in 2015 when a stunning Facebook post led police to find Dee Dee’s body inside her and Gypsy Rose’s Missouri home.

After serving seven years, Gypsy Rose was released from the Chillicothe Correctional Center at 3:30 a.m. on Thursday, a Missouri Department of Corrections spokesperson told CBS News. The department previously said no in-person coverage of her release would be allowed “in the interest of protecting safety, security and privacy.”

Gypsy Rose, 32, was granted parole in September. By the time she was released on Thursday, she served 85% of her sentence, as her time spent in the Greene County Jail before the Missouri Department of Corrections contributed to her overall sentence.

“I’m ready for freedom,” Gypsy Rose told PEOPLE in an interview conducted just before her release. “I’m ready to expand and I think that goes for every facet of my life.” She said that she regrets stabbing Dee Dee. “No one will ever hear me say I’m proud of what I did or I’m glad that she’s dead,” she continued. “I’m not proud of what I did. I regret it every single day.”

When police discovered Dee Dee’s body in 2015, Gypsy Rose, then 23, was found nearly 600 miles away from the crime scene with her boyfriend, Nick Godejohn. They were both arrested and charged with murder. Gypsy Rose later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Godejohn, who fatally stabbed Dee Dee, was found guilty of first-degree murder and armed criminal action in 2018. In 2019, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole plus an additional 25 years for armed criminal action.

Inspiring the 2019 Hulu miniseries The Act – starring Joey King as Gypsy Rose and Patricia Arquette as Dee Dee – the sequence of events leading up to Dee Dee’s murder initially appeared as a fraud scheme gone wrong and later devolved into a story of abuse at Dee Dee’s hands.

Dee Dee said that her daughter suffered from multiple medical issues, including leukemia and muscular dystrophy. Chronicling the “illnesses” on social media, Dee Dee created an image of a doting mother and sickly daughter, which generated a lot of kind messages from supporters. The “Dee Gyp Blancharde” Facebook page, which is now a memorialized account, still has the now-infamous post from June 14, 2015: “That B- is dead!”

After friends and family saw the post in real-time and contacted the police, Dee Dee was found dead in her bed and Gypsy Rose was reported missing. Police said at the time that Gypsy Rose posted the messages from her boyfriend’s home in Wisconsin. They were arrested.

Although Gypsy Rose was initially believed to be confined to a wheelchair, she indeed was able to “walk without assistance” and could do that “very well,” Greene County Sheriff Jim Arnott said at a news conference at the time. He detailed the alleged fraud that Dee Dee had been perpetuating for years, calling it a “tragic event surrounded by mystery and public deception.”

Gypsy Rose’s lawyer argued that she was the victim of abuse and that Dee Dee had a psychological condition called Münchausen syndrome by proxy that drove her to fabricate medical crises and subject Gypsy Rose to unnecessary medical treatments.