Gypsy (left) with mum Dee Dee Blancharde.
Real-life murder stories are so hot in the entertainment world right now.
Chances are you've either listened to the Serial podcast, watched The Jinx or been sucked in to Netflix's riveting Making a Murderer series.
So it's little wonder that TV producers are constantly on the hunt for the next story that will be a ratings winner.
The Writ Large production company in the US believe the bizarre story of Clauddinnea "Dee Dee" Blancharde and her daughter Gypsy will capture the attention of viewers looking for their next crime hit.
Entertainment industry website Deadline reports that Writ Large has acquired film and TV rights to Michelle Dean's Buzzfeed feature about a 2015 murder case, titled Dee Dee wanted her daughter to be sick, Gypsy wanted her mum to be murdered.
It's easy to see why the production company believes in the story. It's one of last year's most jaw-dropping murder cases.
Dee Dee, 48, acted as a single mum and fulltime carer for her teenage daughter Gypsy, who was confined to a wheelchair and had a feeding tube. After they lost everything in Hurricane Katrina they settled in a quiet neighbourhood in Missouri, where neighbours described them as "sweet".
When asked about her daughter's diagnosis, Dee Dee would reel off a list as long as her arm, according to Buzzfeed. Her ailments included " ... chromosomal defects, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, severe asthma, sleep apnoea, eye problems.
"It had always been this way, Dee Dee said, ever since Gypsy was a baby. She had spent time in neonatal intensive care. She had leukaemia as a toddler". She also often reminded people that her daughter had to be homeschooled as she was "brain damaged".
The pair went everywhere together. "We are a pair of shoes," Gypsy once said. "Never good without the other."
"They were just perfect," a friend said.
"Here was this poor, sick child who was being taken care of by a wonderful, patient mother who only wanted to help everybody."
But things took a dark turn on June 14 last year when this message was posted to the Facebook page the mother and daughter shared.
An hour later, a comment was posted under the status: "I f**ken SLASHED THAT FAT PIG AND RAPED HER SWEET INNOCENT DAUGHTER ... HER SCREAM WAS SOOOO F**CKEN LOUD LOL."
After concerned Facebook friends alerted the authorities to the alarming status update, police found Dee Dee face down on her bed with multiple stab wounds. She had been dead for several days. There was no sign of Gypsy and friends feared the worst for the frail girl.
Shortly after a neighbour and a friend of Gypsy's told police that Gypsy had confided in her and told her she had a secret boyfriend who she'd met online on a Christian singles site. She's been communicating with Nicholas Godejohn for two years.
The pieces started to fall into place for police. They put a trace on the Facebook posts to Dee Dee's account and discovered that the IP address was registered to a Nicholas Godejohn in Wisconsin.
When police descended on the house in Wisconsin, Nicholas surrendered and Gypsy was found alive and well. Everyone was relieved that she seemed to be unharmed.
But, as police said at a press conference the next morning, "things are not always as they appear".
According to a statement by Greene County sheriff's Detective Stanley Hancock, Gypsy was actually they one who had posted the troubling Facebook posts ... because she wanted her mother's body to be found "quicker".
As Buzzfeed explains:
"It turned out that, in fact, Gypsy hadn't used a wheelchair from the moment she left her house a few days earlier. She didn't need one. She could walk just fine, there was nothing wrong with her muscles, and she had no medication or oxygen tank with her either. Her hair was short and spiky, but she wasn't bald - her head had simply been shaved, all her life, to make her appear ill. She was well-spoken, if shaken by recent events. The disabled child she'd long been in the eyes of others was nowhere to be found. It was all a fraud, she told the police. All of it. Every last bit. Her mother had made her do it."
It seems that Dee Dee had developed an appetite for the sympathy and financial benefits that came from having a "disabled" daughter. In their last few years together they had benefited from free flights from a volunteer pilots organisation, stays at a lodge for cancer patients, free trips to Disney World through various charities and they were living in subsidised housing.
It all points to a syndrome called Munchausen by proxy (a person with the syndrome either feigns or induces physical and psychological symptoms for no obvious benefit other than attention and sympathy ... If the person does this to themselves, it's plain Munchausen syndrome; when the symptoms are feigned or induced in others, it's called Munchausen by proxy).
So it seems that Gypsy had endured 23 years of hospital visits, having her head shaved, medications that made her sick, life in a wheelchair and operations ... many of which were most likely unnecessary.
"Some interventions were surgical. Gypsy's eye muscles were repeatedly operated on for alleged weakness. Tubes were put in her ears for alleged ear infections. She was given a feeding tube and ate very little by mouth, surviving on cans of the meal replacement PediaSure well into her twenties. Her salivary glands were first injected with Botox, then removed because her mother complained that she drooled too much. Gypsy's teeth rotted out and had to be extracted, though whether that was because of poor dental hygiene or a mixture of medications and severe malnutrition, it's hard to say," writes Dean on Buzzfeed.
Stunningly, doctors did not pick up on innumerable hints that Dee Dee's stories did not add up.
On top of making her daughter endure countless medical procedures, Dee Dee wouldn't allow Gypsy to have any friends, or a relationship, and monitored her contact with the outside world.
It seems that Gypsy asked her boyfriend to kill her mother after suffering years of abuse.
She told police she heard her mother screaming as Godejohn stabbed her. She said she tried to clean blood from her beau's cut finger with baby wipes before the couple fled in a taxi.
According to the statement, he mailed the knife to his home so he wouldn't get caught with it.
The couple also stole several thousand dollars from a safe in Dee Dee's bedroom.
Both Gypsy and Nicholas Godejohn are currently in prison.
Gypsy has told people she feels freer in prison that she did when she was living with her mum.
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