After she surrendered to the authorities, Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s attorney spent months digging through legal and medical records that confirmed her health and the depth of Dee Dee Blanchard’s deceptions (per BuzzFeed News). Based on his findings, he negotiated a plea deal in 2016: Gypsy Rose confessed to second-degree murder, and she was given Missouri’s minimum sentence of 10 years (she was ultimately paroled in December 2023, per People).
Sentencing for Nicholas Godejohn was more complicated. He faced charges of first-degree murder, to which he pleaded not guilty (per ABC News). The defense and the prosecution both accepted that Godejohn was the one who killed Blanchard, but at issue in his November 2018 trial was whether his actions constituted premeditated murder. The Springfield News-Leader reported that Godejohn and Gypsy Rose had been discussing the murder for over a year, and he had not only confessed to the police that he killed Blanchard but also that he contemplated raping her first. Per Cosmopolitan, he also thought of having sex with Blanchard’s corpse after the murder, and Gypsy Rose later claimed that she let him have sex with her to stop him (their accounts disagree on whether it was consensual).
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Against that, the defense argued that Godejohn, who is autistic, was not capable of premeditated murder and instead was the willing accomplice of Gypsy Rose. He claimed as much himself to ABC News ahead of the trial. But text messages exchanged before the murder indicated he was involved in its planning, and in November 2018, Godejohn was found guilty of first-degree murder. He was given a mandatory life sentence in February 2019.
