- Gypsy Rose Blanchard was picked up by her husband after being released from prison on Thursday.
- Blanchard’s husband is a middle school special education teacher from Louisiana.
- The couple met after Anderson wrote Blanchard a letter while she was in prison.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the woman who conspired with her then-boyfriend to have her mother killed, was released early from prison on Thursday, and picked up by her recently-wed husband.
Blanchard, 32, married Ryan Scott Anderson last year while she was serving a 10-year sentence at the Chillicothe Correctional Center in Missouri.
She was granted parole after serving eight years for her role in the death of her mother Dee Dee Blanchard, who prosecutors also acknowledged was abusive.
Anderson picked Blanchard up in a silver Cadillac, according to a photo published by People. The vanity plates on the car said “HITMAN,” which, coincidence or not, is reminiscent of the events that put Blanchard behind bars in the first place.
Who is Gypsy Rose’s husband, Ryan Scott Anderson?
According to People, Anderson is a middle school special education teacher from Saint Charles, Louisiana.
The couple were married in August 2022 in Chillicothe, Missouri while Blanchard was still in prison, according to the Springfield News-Leader. At the time, she was 30 years old and Anderson was 36 years old.
Anderson also appears to be a wrestling fan. The vanity plate on the car Anderson picked Blanchard up in was styled after WWE Hall-of-Famer Bret Hart, who often went by the stage name “The Hitman.”
Blachard told People in an interview before her release that Anderson was a crucial source of support since they met in 2020. She and Anderson told People that they were planning on consummating their marriage after her release from prison, and expressed desires to have children.
Blanchard told People that she knows it’ll be difficult to explain her mother’s absence to her future children. However, she said that she’s confident she won’t treat her children the way that her mother treated her.
Courtesy of the Blanchard Family
“Whenever someone says, ‘Do you think that because of what you went through, you’re going to do that to your kids?’ I say, ‘You know what? Absolutely not.'” Blanchard told People. “I have learned what not to do. I have no concerns about my parenting when it comes to that.”
How did Gypsy Rose and her husband meet?
Blanchard and Anderson first met after Anderson wrote her a letter while she was in prison back in 2020, the teacher told People.
According to Anderson, he decided to write to her after his coworker said that he wanted to write to Joseph Maldonado, the subject of the Netflix docuseries “Tiger King” better known as “Joe Exotic.”
“It was when ‘Tiger King’ was really popular,” says Anderson of the hit Netflix show about wildlife businessman and convicted felon Joseph “Joe Exotic” Maldonado.
“I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, if you write him, I’ll write Gypsy Rose Blanchard,” Anderson recounted to People. “I never thought she’d be my wife.”
Anderson told the publication that he wrote in his letter to Blanchard the impact that she had on him, in addition to plenty of information about himself.
“She told me the main reason was probably because I was from Louisiana,” Anderson told People. “So I credit that as being the most important thing.”
The couple’s relationship grew as they corresponded, both Blanchard and Anderson told People. Anderson said that he’d get “butterflied” when they wrote emails to each other, but hearing her voice for the first time was a tipping point.
“Ryan has seen me through some really good times, some really hard times. I would say that he is probably the most compassionate soul that I’ve ever met, and the most patient,” Blanchard said to People.
Murder followed by years of abuse
Blanchard was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2016 after she was found guilty of conspiring to kill her mom Dee Dee Blanchard, who was found dead in 2015.
Her story received nationwide attention due to the strange and extraordinary circumstances of the situation: Blanchard has said in interviews that for years, her mother has subjected her to medical treatment she never needed, including forcing her to use a wheelchair, eat through a feeding tube, and undergo several surgeries.
One pediatric neurologist told Buzzfeed News in 2016 that he didn’t “see any reason why she doesn’t walk” after performing numerous tests on Blanchard.
Dee Dee was widely believed to have Munchausen by proxy, a rare behavioral disorder in which a caretaker, such as a mother, imposes a physical or mental illness on someone who is otherwise healthy.
Blanchard has said that she was desperate to get out of the situation, leading her to ask her then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn to kill her mother.
Godejohn continues to serve a life sentence for first-degree murder at the Potosi Correctional Center in Missouri.
While Godejohn has said in interviews that he would kill again for the sake of Blanchard, Blanchard told People that she regrets what she did.
“Nobody will ever hear me say I’m glad she’s dead or I’m proud of what I did,” she said. “I regret it every single day.”
