Near the end of his two-part televised interview with Gypsy Blanchard, psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw told the alleged victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy that she needed to "own her part" in the murder of her mom and that he condemns what she did.
"Nick (Godejohn) is going to have to own what he's done," McGraw said. "And you have to own your part. Your mother wasn't even on his radar until you put her there."
McGraw then softened his tone with the 25-year-old Blanchard.
"This is not a typical situation. You are both victim and perpetrator," McGraw said. "You were chronically victimized by a sick and demented woman — if she's done all the things it appears and the records reflect that she has done to you."
Blanchard pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the stabbing death of her mother in their Springfield home in 2015 and is serving a 10-year prison term.
Blanchard admitted that she arranged for her online boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, 27, to travel from Wisconsin to Springfield to stab her mother to death inside their home.
Godejohn has been charged with first-degree murder. His case is still moving through the court system.
McGraw asked Blanchard how she felt about Godejohn now.
"I can't stand him because I went from one abusive person to another," she said. "I asked him a question. I asked him to kill my mother. But I didn't hold a gun to his head and make him do it. He seemed more happy to do it than anything."
Blanchard said she is angry that Godejohn didn't take a more "responsible" approach to helping Blanchard get away from her mother, like calling the police and reporting the abuse.
Gypsy and Dee Dee Blanchard came to Springfield from Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. Dee Dee convinced neighbors and Gypsy's doctors that Gypsy suffered from various ailments, including leukemia, muscular dystrophy and seizures. Neighbors and national organizations provided monetary donations, trips to Disney World and even housing, courtesy of Habitat for Humanity.
Dee Dee Blanchard kept Gypsy's head shaved and forced her to use a wheelchair even though there was nothing wrong with her legs. Dee Dee Blanchard also convinced a physician to put a feeding tube into Gypsy and would tell people that Gypsy was mentally incompetent.
"On one hand, can it be looked at as self-defense?" McGraw asked Blanchard. "She was dicing you up, girl. How many surgeries did you have?"
About 30 different procedures, Blanchard responded, including multiple eye, leg and throat surgeries. Blanchard's salivary glands were also removed.
"You have been cut open. You had parts taken out of you. You got hacked up. You got poisoned," McGraw said. "Your childhood was stolen from you. Your adolescence was stolen from you."
Blanchard told McGraw that she is working on forgiving her mother, as well as forgiving herself.
"You are very conflicted right now. I mean, you feel guilty on one hand and very exploited on another," McGraw said. "That is because both things are true. You were terribly victimized. You were tortured as a child year after year after year.
"It's just a perfect storm of bad circumstance and bad psyche," he continued. "I think that is why they were willing to make a plea deal with you instead of dropping the hammer on you."
A 500-year-old vampire named Victor?
McGraw reminded the audience at least three times that anything Blanchard said about Godejohn was just allegations. Godejohn has not admitted to any crimes, and he has not yet been convicted, McGraw said.
Blanchard told McGraw that she had been in a mostly online relationship with Godejohn for nearly three years.
She said Godejohn had multiple personalities, including a 500-year-old vampire named Victor.
"He had other personalities that were much more violent and scary, such as the one he called the 'Black One.' He would just talk in this horrible and scary voice," she said. "He would talk about how he wanted to kill me and how he wanted to rape me."
McGraw reminded Blanchard that she still wanted to meet Godejohn.
"I was in love, or I thought I was in love, with the good side of him," she responded. "I was very, very naive back then. I never had a boyfriend. I didn't know a good relationship from a bad one. All I knew of love was what my mother showed me."
McGraw pressed on, asking Blanchard about the sexual conversations — the erotic role-playing and talk of sadomasochism — she had with Godejohn on the internet.
“You had alter egos as well, right?” he asked.
Blanchard said she created alter egos to "fit his."
There was Kitty, whom Blanchard described as a "little girl," and Candy, whom Blanchard described as a "vixen."
"Ruby was for Victor," Blanchard said. "Ruby was a werewolf and she was the evil one."
Blanchard told McGraw about the only time she met Godejohn in person, before the murder. She and her mom were planning to go see the new Cinderella movie at a Springfield theater. She bought Godejohn nice clothes so he would impress Dee Dee Blanchard. He traveled to Springfield from Wisconsin and pretended to not know Gypsy Blanchard and that he was a stranger who happened to sit down next to the Blanchards in the auditorium.
"I was very excited to meet this person I had been talking to for so long," Blanchard said. "My mother was sitting right next to us. My mother got increasingly angry because I was paying more attention to him than I was to her.
"We had went to the bathroom, the men's bathroom," she said. "I wheeled myself to the bathroom and he followed while my mother was in still in the auditorium."
Blanchard said she had sex with Godejohn in the handicap stall and then returned to the auditorium.
"After this meeting at the movies, did you ask him to kill your mother?" McGraw asked.
Blanchard said yes.
"We had thought of different ideas. We called it Plan B. I was getting desperate," she said.
McGraw then read messages Blanchard and Godejohn sent to each other over the internet and said the messages show that Blanchard was very much in on the planning process.
"On June 2, you send the text that says, 'I'm 100 percent in, Hon. I'm ready truly.' ... You say, 'Because I finally allowed myself to accept that you are my everything. I will go with you and live our dream.'"
McGraw continued reading messages in which Godejohn and Blanchard discuss her leaving a knife, gloves and duct tape for Victor, Godejohn's alter ego.
"At any point during this time did you look at this and say, 'This is beyond weird here. I'm talking to a guy that is talking about himself in the third person, the third person is a 500-year-old vampire and he's glad that my mother is a light sleeper so she'll be awake when he is hacking her to death'?" McGraw asked.
Blanchard said she felt like it was them "just having another conversation about it" and she "didn't think about it until it was actually happening," she said.
Blanchard told McGraw that two days before the murder, she and her mother were arguing. Blanchard said she told her mom she wanted the feeding tube removed and she wanted an upcoming surgery canceled.
"(Dee Dee) was like, 'There is nothing I can do about it. The doctor wants it,'" Blanchard said. "So I became very numb to Plan B and I talked to Nick. He had me talk to Victor. ...
"I said, 'Victor, will you please come kill my mother for me because I can't do it myself.'"
Blanchard said Godejohn then took a Greyhound bus from Wisconsin to Springfield and checked into a motel. She said she texted Godejohn when her mother fell asleep and left plastic gloves by the front door for him. When he came inside, she gave him a knife and then went into the bathroom.
"I closed the door behind me and kind of got down in a kneeling position, put my hands over my ears so I couldn't hear anything," she said. "But I did hear stuff. I heard her screaming for me a couple of times.
"I wanted to go and help her, but he had told me prior if you come in the bedroom, Victor might hurt you too. Victor will lash out at you if you try and stop it. So I was scared," she said.
Blanchard went on to tell McGraw that after her mother was dead, Godejohn packed a suitcase for her and called a cab. The two went to Godejohn's motel room.
McGraw showed her video Blanchard made of the couple laughing and joking in bed.
"That is less than 24 hours after your mother has been stabbed to death," McGraw said.
Blanchard cried.
"I wasn't myself. I had been taking narcotics, Xanax and Vicodin," she said. "I was high, very high."
McGraw questioned Blanchard about the June 14, 2015, Facebook posts she made on the account she shared with Dee Dee Blanchard, shortly after Dee Dee had been killed.
One post, which is still on Facebook, read "That (expletive) is dead!"
The posts caused friends and family to become concerned about Dee Dee and Gypsy Blanchard and soon led to the discovery of Dee Dee's body and a search for Gypsy.
"The whole point of the post was I wanted her found," she said.
McGraw asked why she didn't just call police from a pay phone and ask officers to do a wellness check.
"I wasn't that smart," she said.
Authorities quickly found Gypsy Blanchard in Wisconsin. And two days after her mother's body was found, Gypsy Blanchard and Nicholas Godejohn were charged with murder.
Blanchard also cried when McGraw showed a 2015 interrogation tape in which Blanchard pretended to not know that her mother was dead.
"I wish I would have never done anything," she said. "It's hard to see pictures of the house, the memory and her. And the wheelchair."
Did she feel the murder was justified? McGraw asked.
"No, she didn't deserve what happened," Blanchard said. "If anything, she just deserved to be where I am."
McGraw then asked if life with her mother warped Gypsy's mind and moral compass.
"She taught me how to be a good liar, a very good liar without any conscience," she said. "I'm changing that. I'm trying to be a good person now."
