The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, parts 4 through 6 (Category 6 Media, Wonderland West, Arts & Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023, released 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately the Golden Globe Awards ended just a few minutes over their appointed time slot, so I was able to switch to the Lifetime channel for parts four through six of the odd TV miniseries The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. I’d watched the first three parts, running nearly four hours, the night before (Saturday, January 6), and I was hoping I could catch the rest of it even though I’d been pretty worn out by Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s squeaky voice (the last operation her mom-from-hell Dee Dee Blanchard put her through was one in her throat that was supposed to lower its pitch, but it didn’t take) and the strain of self-pity that runs through her account. At the same time her past was so horrific it’s understandable that she should come off as a bit of a whiner about it. Gypsy Rose Blanchard strikes me as a basically good person who only committed murder under very rare circumstances and with the aid of another person – in her case, her then-boyfriend Nick Godejohn – who listened to her fantasies of killing her mother and therefore liberating herself from mom’s hellish domination. Nick heard in them fulfillment of his fantasies of killing someone and feeling morally good about it. Ironically, Gypsy Rose met this moral basket case online on a “Christian Dating” Web site – let this be a warning to you that picking a “Christian Dating” app does not guarantee you won’t meet some guy who’s into BDSM and/or has Satanic fantasies (in Nick’s case, his alternate persona as “Victor,” a 500-year-old vampire – though there were limits: while he killed Dee Dee Blanchard by stabbing her repeatedly and thus drawing a lot of blood, he didn’t try to drink any of it; he also was disappointed when Gypsy Rose told him not to rape Dee Dee first, with Gypsy Rose watching, but afterwards he insisted on having sex with Gypsy Rose because she hadn’t let him do it with her mom before he killed her).

The main focus of this episode was on the two years Gypsy Rose had to remain behind bars – in the Missouri women’s prison at Chillicothe – because even though she was granted parole on December 9, 2021, she had to wait until December 28, 2023 before she could actually be released. In 2019 Gypsy Rose had an affair with a man named Ken whom she met online after he wrote her, only they broke it off after two years without any physical contact. Then she was attracted to another man, Ryan Anderson, a sixth-grade teacher who wrote her in prison, the two started a correspondence and fell in love, and he determined to marry her. In fact, … he determined to marry her even before she was released; the ceremony occurred on July 21, 2022. Ryan showed up in a white tuxedo and brought a box of 12 cupcakes, arranged in a box with enough room between them so the prison guards could cut into them and make sure they didn’t contain any contraband. Gypsy Rose had to wear her usual prison khakis and was disappointed that her father, Ron Blanchard, and her stepmother Kristy couldn’t be there for the ceremony. The Chillicothe prison rules had previously been that people participating in a prison wedding could each invite one or two witnesses, but that had been changed in 2020 due to COVID-19. Among the quirkier things about this part of the show was seeing Gypsy Rose’s prison garment with a name tag reading “Blancharde,” with an extra “e” at the end – which her mom Dee Dee had added as yet another mechanism of control even though Rod resented it and specified to the people interviewing him that his family name is “Blanchard,” without the “e.” The remaining Blanchards had planned to spend a weekend in Missouri at a rented house so they could have a celebration before Gypsy Rose returned to Louisiana to live with her husband – it’s unclear from the show when, where and how Gypsy Rose and Ryan first had sex with each other (I’m guessing in their motel room the night of her release) – but the Missouri authorities threw the Blanchards and Ryan a curveball. It came from a phone call from the Department of Corrections stating that Gypsy Rose had just 24 hours to leave Missouri and get her ass back to Louisiana. It wasn’t clear just why the Missouri authorities were so dead-set on getting Gypsy Rose out of state as soon as possible, but Gypsy Rose was understandably resentful about having a parole condition imposed on her that wasn’t standard practice in Missouri and being threatened with re-incarceration if she didn’t comply.

The show ends in medias res, with a title reading, “To be continued … .” There was also a sequence earlier about a crisis in the Ryan-Gypsy Rose relationship in which in the fall of 2022 Gypsy Rose received an unsolicited contact from a previous boyfriend (not Ken, she insisted to Lifetime’s interviewers) who said he wanted to get back with her. Ryan responded by having a jealous hissy-fit and Gypsy Rose decided to stop wearing her wedding ring and have the marriage annulled – and though she later thought it over and decided to keep it going and finally unite with him after her release as planned, she e-mailed her qualms to several friends, one of whom shared it and it made the media. The show also mentioned that Ryan’s love for and eventual marriage to Gypsy Rose cost him his job teaching at a private Christian school. His bosses fired him on the ground that being involved with a murderess was not properly “moral” for a member of their staff – which I thought was yet one more example of how far a lot of America’s self-proclaimed “Christians” are from the ideals of their religion’s founder. One of the things I like about Jesus was he was always reaching out to “the lowest of the low” of his time – remember that he walked among the lepers at a time when almost no one else would dare (which I thought of a lot when at the height of the AIDS epidemic so-called “Christians” were spitting out condemnations of anyone who had AIDS and Gay and Bisexual men with it in particular) – and likewise I think that if Jesus were around today he’d have some pretty tough things to say about his so-called followers firing a man for taking a convicted but genuinely repentant murderess into his heart and wanting to be with her!