If you've been watching (read: obsessed with) Hulu's latest show The Act, then you know it stars Patricia Arquette and Joey King as the real-life mother-daughter duo Dee Dee Blanchard and Gypsy Rose Blanchard. While their story is being dramatized for TV now, Gypsy Rose first made headlines in 2015 when she and her ex-boyfriend Nick Godejohn were caught for murdering Dee Dee.
Just in case you missed it, the true story leading up to Dee Dee's murder is intense: Dee Dee suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy (recently renamed factitious disorder imposed on another, or FDIA), a mental health disorder where a caregiver fabricates or causes an illness or injury to a person under their care for attention and sympathy, often subjecting the victim to unnecessary medical treatments. That's exactly what she did to Gypsy Rose , telling her-and the rest of the world-that she had a plethora of illnesses, from leukemia, asthma, vision and hearing impairments to muscular dystrophy and epilepsy.
Gypsy Rose dealt with her mom's FDIA for most of her life, but eventually decided to ask her then-boyfriend Godejohn to stab Dee Dee to death (she's currently serving a 10-year sentence and recently got engaged to a different man she met through a prison pen pal program).
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But Gypsy and Godejohn were not smooth criminals, according to investigators. Apparently, they left a super-obvious trail of receipts, surveillance camera footage, and Greyhound bus tickets. "This is like a crime I call 'Hansel and Gretel,' where you drop the clues along the way as you go," said former FBI agent Brad Garrett in an 20/20 interview . "They couldn't have laid it out better for the police."
In the most recent episode of The Act, Nick murdered Dee Dee (using a fishing knife), and then the two of them stayed in a local hotel room for a few days before taking a Greyhound bus to Wisconsin before getting caught-which only lasted five days IRL.
But just last year, Gypsy Rose also opened up about her and Godejohn's exact plan to police, per the Springfield News-Leader . Here's how it went down: The couple planned Dee Dee's murder for a year. Godejohn (who lived in Wisconsin at the time), traveled to Springfield, Missouri where Gypsy Rose and her mom lived on June 8, 2015. He chilled for two days at a nearby Days Inn, and then on June 10, 2015, he stabbed Dee Dee to death while Gypsy Rose was in the bathroom. Before leaving the scene of the crime, the couple had sex in Gypsy's bed, according to 20/20 .
They then planned to leave for Wisconsin after a couple days. After arriving there on June 13, 2015, Gypsy Rose posted a bizarre message on Dee Dee's Facebook account that read "That Bitch is dead!" Apparently, Gypsy Rose wanted to scare people into thinking that Dee Dee had been killed, and that she had been kidnapped.
That was the beginning of the end for this wannabe Bonnie and Clyde. When people saw the post, some of Dee Dee's concerned neighbors alerted authorities, who then found her body on June 14, 2015. Law enforcement traced the Facebook message to Godejohn's home the next day and arrested Gypsy and Godejohn in connection with the murder. Both ultimately confessed to Dee Dee's murder, and Godejohn is now serving life in prison for it.