Before the tragic 2015 stabbing orchestrated by her and boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn, Gypsy discloses that she had initially tried to shoot her mother. However, the firearm turned out to be a BB gun, not a rifle, as initially believed, adding a surprising twist to the already shocking story.
From Huffington Post:
As Blanchard grew up and sought independence, she said, her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, became more tyrannical.
Dee Dee said her daughter suffered from epilepsy, leukemia and muscular dystrophy, forcing her to use a feeding tube, shaving her head and confining her to a wheelchair. Blanchard said she could walk unassisted but went along with her mother’s ruse in public. In 2011, when she ran away to be with a man she’d met at a science fiction and fantasy convention, her mother brought her home and chained her to the bed for two weeks, she said. And then Dee Dee bought a gun.
“That scared the ever-living ‘f’ out of me,” Blanchard says. “I was afraid that she would kill me. … I was afraid she would do something worse than hitting me or starving me.”
Blanchard decided to run away again, but her mother found her packed bag and confronted her. Blanchard grabbed the gun, she says, and threatened her mother with it.
“And before I knew it, I pulled the trigger as many times as I could.”
Blanchard shot at her 10 times. Only when she saw that her mother’s wounds were superficial did she realize it was a BB gun and not a deadly handgun.
After the shooting, Dee Dee told another lie to garner more sympathy: She said she’d been shot by a robber who’d held them up in a Walmart parking lot.
Blanchard said she was relieved she hadn’t killed her mother but was also angry.
This entire narrative vividly underscores the psychological turmoil experienced by both Gypsy and her mother, Dee Dee, during that tumultuous period. While it's crucial to emphasize that murder is never justified, one can grasp why Gypsy found herself thrust into a fight-or-flight scenario when she believed she was shooting her mother.
