Hulu’s The Act, with Patricia Arquette as Dee Dee and Joey King as Gypsy Rose, launches Wednesday, adapted from the authoritative BuzzFeed article on the matter, Michelle Dean’s “ Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter to Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered.” The latest offering, coming just a few short months after that, attempts to put the high-brow, prestige television lens on the sordid case.

As sure as the sky is blue, there was a Lifetime movie, Love You to Death, starring Marcia Gay Harden and Emily Skeggs, that aired in January. It goes without saying that the Investigation Discovery channel was all over it. There’s 2017’s HBO documentary, Mommy Dead and Dearest, and the 20/20 special, “ The Story of Gypsy Blanchard,” that featured Gypsy Rose’s first interview from prison. It’s no wonder then that the saga has been ripe for TV treatment in the few short years since the murder occurred. Gypsy Rose and her boyfriend were both charged with first-degree murder, in one of the wildest modern crime stories to date. Was it child abuse? Was it Munchausen syndrome by proxy, the mental disorder in which a person either invents or inflicts illness on someone close to them so that they need their care? Or was it plain fraud? Dee Dee would warn people that, though she was a teenager, Gypsy Rose only had “the mental capacity of a 7-year-old due to brain damage.” Gypsy Rose was confined to a wheelchair, and had the shaved head many patients with chronic conditions opt for when their hair falls out. No neighbor could accurately recount the list of ailments Dee Dee had told them Gypsy Rose suffered from: muscular dystrophy, chromosomal defects, sleep apnea, leukemia, acid reflux, asthma, numerous allergies, and many more. For as long as they’d known Dee Dee, since she moved into her Habitat for Humanity-built bungalow in Springfield, Missouri seven years earlier, she had been the devoted caretaker for her daughter, Gypsy Rose. It read, “That bitch is dead.”Īll of this would be alarming even if it weren’t for the extraordinary circumstances that sent Dee Dee’s neighbors into more of a panic. Neighbors called the police after a Facebook post on Dee Dee’s account made them concerned that either she had been hacked or something was gravely wrong. In June 2015, Dee Dee Blanchard was found dead, facedown in her bed, revealing stab wounds that were inflicted several days earlier.

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