March 2008ĭee Dee and Gypsy move into a house built for them by Habitat for Humanity. If you haven’t already dived into the first four episodes of The Act (which are streaming now on Hulu) then truly, what are you waiting for? If you have, and are curious to know more, here’s a comprehensive timeline of Dee Dee’s murder, Gypsy’s trial, and the disturbing sequence of events that preceded both. After two decades of being abused and effectively held prisoner, Gypsy came up with an escape plan, enlisting her boyfriend Nick Godejohn to murder Dee Dee.

In her 2016 BuzzFeed article detailing the extraordinary case, Michelle Dean-who now serves as co-showrunner and executive producer on The Act-noted that Dee Dee’s behavior was indicative of Munchausen by Proxy syndrome (a variation on Munchausen syndrome, whereby a person feigns or induces symptoms of illness in themselves). Over the first twenty years of her life, Gypsy was subjected to a battery of unnecessary medical procedures, forced to use a wheelchair and feeding tube, and denied any semblance of a normal life: She didn’t attend school past second grade, and never left the house without her mother.

Friends and neighbors knew Gypsy as a sickly, wheelchair-bound child, and Dee Dee as her devoted caregiver, but after Dee Dee’s death the truth emerged: Gypsy was perfectly healthy, but had been forced to pretend otherwise by her mother. Hulu’s new true-crime miniseries The Act, starring Patricia Arquette and Joey King, dramatizes the creepier-than-fiction story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who in 2016 was sentenced to ten years in prison for murdering her mother, Claudine “Dee Dee” Blanchard.

The true story behind the act on hulu