Gypsy Rose Blanchard is ready to walk down the aisle.
The 28-year-old, who has been in jail since 2015 for her role in the murder of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, told E! News that she’s planning an in-prison wedding to her fiancé, Ken.
The couple — who met when Ken sent Gypsy a letter after watching the 2017 HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest, which detailed her murder case — plan to marry in the visitation room at Missouri’s Chillicothe Correctional Center, where she’s serving 10 years after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in 2015.
Gypsy and Ken, who got engaged in October 2018, originally planned to exchange vows in January 2020. But after their recent split and reconciliation, the pair decided to put their nuptials on hold. Still, that hasn’t stopped Gypsy from envisioning what she wants her wedding to look like.
The Missouri native is considering two ceremonies: one behind bars and one as a free woman. For the in-prison wedding, the bride and groom are allowed to bring a maximum of four guests, which Gypsy said will be her father, Rod Blanchard, her stepmother, Kristy, and Ken’s mother. The couple also plan to have their own rings and written vows.
“It’s very intimate, it’s very small. They don’t really do anything extravagant for a prison wedding,” she said.
As for the outside wedding, Gypsy pictures something much, much different.
“I think I envision what every woman envisions her wedding to be,” she said. “I have always wanted in my mind, an outdoor ceremony, possibly in a gazebo. I had Ken get me a subscription to a bridal magazine so I could look at dresses and stuff. I don’t want a poofy dress. I think I want something pretty but not too, too much. And all of our friends and family invited.”
Specifically, Gypsy wants her dress to be “silky with probably a lot of bling.”
“I watch Say Yes to the Dress quite frequently, and I like the dresses that are kind of capped sleeves,” she said. “I don’t need to pull off anything too long — I’m short, pushing 5 foot. So something simple, yet elegant.”
Though Gypsy admits that Ken’s proposal “wasn’t out of the blue,” she still considers the moment, which happened on a visit in October, to be pretty romantic.
“He held my hands close and told me how much I meant to him and he’s like, ‘I would really, really be honored if I could have your hand in marriage,’ and I said yes,” she shared.
Ken proposed to Gypsy with a silver-band engagement ring, which she said was confiscated.. Ken has since bought his wife-to-be a new ring.
As for plans to start a family, Gypsy said she “definitely” wants to be a mom.
“We’re probably not going to wait a year or two after I am out,” she said. “We want to give ourselves that adjustment period, that way we can have our big wedding ceremony, have a honeymoon, have time together as just us, and then work on having a family after that.”
So far, Gypsy knows she wants to have at least more than one child, given the limited relationship she had with her family growing up.
“My mother didn’t allow me to have a relationship with my half-siblings, so growing up as an only child, I would want my child to have a sibling and to have that bond,” she said, adding that she wants “probably two or three” kids.
Dee Dee was murdered in June 2015 by Gypsy’s then-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, who was convicted of first-degree murder and is currently serving a life sentence.
Throughout Gypsy’s life, Dee Dee claimed that her daughter suffered from muscular dystrophy, asthma, sleep apnea and leukemia. She also fed her through a feeding tube. After Gypsy realized that she was completely healthy and that her mother had lied to her about her medical conditions, she orchestrated Dee Dee’s murder with Godejohn.
Dee Dee was later diagnosed with Munchausen by proxy, a mental illness in which a caretaker fakes symptoms to make a child look sick in hopes of benefiting from the situation. In March, Gypsy’s story was adapted into the Hulu series The Act, starring Joey King and Patricia Arquette.
