The case of a 23-year-old woman who stabbed her mother to death after she was forced to live her entire life pretending to be disabled in wheelchair is to be made into a documentary.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard even stunned her own father when she walked into a Wisconsin courtroom last year and plead guilty to murdering 48-year-old mother Dee Dee Blanchard in June 2015.
The court heard that her her mother forced her into a wheelchair and held her prisoner for years in the family's home.
Rod Blanchard, Gypsy’s father and Dee Dee’s ex-husband told the New York Post that he was in "total shock" when he saw his daughter walk into the courtroom.
He added that he thought: “What has been going on all of these years?”
Blanchard was forced into a wheelchair and held prisoner for years in the home she shared with her mother in Springfield, Missouri, her attorney told the court at the time.
Her mother had claimed she had been suffering from a host of illnesses, including leukemia as a young child, and later muscular dystrophy.
“I really, genuinely believed that she had some issues,” Rod Blanchard, Blanchard's father, told the Post.
Upon realising the fabrication Ms Blanchard stabbed her mother to death, before taking to Facebook and announcing "the bitch is dead".
Acknowledging the abusive relationship Prosecutor Dan Patterson offered Gypsy Blanchard, 24, a plea agreement that included only 10 years in prison — the minimum sentence for a second-degree murder charge.
“Dee Dee was really good at convincing me that there was a problem," Mr Blanchard said. "I never, ever can fathom that she was really in the hospitals, and the doctors wouldn’t have caught on to something at some point over the years.”
The unimaginable story has now become the subject of a new HBO documentary, “Mommy Dead and Dearest.”
The film explores the relationship between mother and daughter and Ms Blanchard’s motivation for making her daughter pretend she was disabled.
Munchausen by proxy syndrome has been offered as an explanation for Ms Blanchard’s behaviour, a psychological condition in which a person acts as if an individual in their care has a physical or mental illness despite them being in fine health.
However others claim Ms Blanchard imprisoned her daughter in order to collect thousands of dollars in benefits payouts and donations from wellwishers.
The documentary will air on 15 May on HBO.
