#Gypsy rose blanchard movie#

It was a blessing that a doctor at a rescue shelter had helped them get to the Ozarks. She told Pinegar that Gypsy’s father was a deadbeat, an alcoholic drug abuser who had mocked his daughter’s disabilities, called the Special Olympics a “freak show.” As Pinegar understood it, he'd never sent them a dime, not even when Dee Dee and Gypsy had lost everything in Hurricane Katrina. So she’d lit out from her hometown for good. It was her own father, Gypsy’s grandfather, who’d been the last straw he’d burned Gypsy with cigarettes. She was originally from a small town in Louisiana, she said, but she’d had to flee her abusive family with Gypsy. Over years of tea and coffee, Dee Dee would tell Pinegar her life story. The money was to go to Gypsy’s treatments.ĭee Dee became particularly close with some people across the way, a single mother named Amy Pinegar and her four children. Dee Dee charged for concessions, but it was still cheaper than the local multiplex.

#Gypsy rose blanchard movie#

Sometimes, on summer nights, Dee Dee would set up a projector to play a movie on the side of her house and the children of the neighborhood, whose parents usually couldn’t afford to send them to a movie theater, came over for a treat. It had amenities specially built for Gypsy: a ramp up to the front door, a Jacuzzi tub to help with “my muscles,” Gypsy told a local television station in 2008. Their house, like everyone else’s around them, had been built by Habitat for Humanity. “We are a pair of shoes,” Gypsy once said. She’s wearing it in so many photographs of herself with her mother. A curly, blonde Cinderella number seems to have been her favorite. She wore wigs and hats to cover her small head. She loved princess outfits and dressing up. It was important to remember that in dealing with her. Gypsy had the mind of a child of 7, Dee Dee said. She had to be homeschooled, because she’d never be able to keep up with other kids. Dee Dee would often remind people that her daughter had brain damage. Gypsy was friendly, talkative even, but her voice was high and childlike. The endless health crises had taken a toll. She had spent time in neonatal intensive care. It had always been this way, Dee Dee said, ever since Gypsy was a baby. Ask about her daughter's diagnoses, and Dee Dee would reel off a list as long as her arm: chromosomal defects, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, severe asthma, sleep apnea, eye problems. Sometimes Dee Dee had to drag an oxygen tank around with them, nasal cannula looped around Gypsy’s small ears. She was pale and skinny, and her teeth were crumbling and painful. Her round face was overwhelmed by a pair of owlish glasses. Gypsy was a tiny thing, perhaps 5 feet tall as far as anyone could guess. She did not have a job, but instead served as a full-time caretaker for Gypsy Rose, her teenage daughter. She could make friends quickly and inspire deep devotion. People who knew her remember her as generous with her time and, when she could be, generous with money. She had curly brown hair she liked to hold back with ribbons. She was a large, affable-looking person, which she reinforced by dressing in bright, cheerful colors. Once you met them, people said, they were impossible to forget.ĭee Dee was 48 years old, originally from Louisiana. “'Sweet' is the word I’d use,” a former friend of Dee Dee’s told me not too long ago. For seven years before the murder, Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blancharde lived in a small pink bungalow on West Volunteer Way in Springfield, Missouri.