HBO retreads Jinx steps with true crime doc

US premium cable network HBO has greenlit a true crime documentary film featuring the bizarre and dark case of Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard.

Mommy Dead and Dearest comes from Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop filmmaker Erin Lee Carr, and will play on the Time Warner-owned cable channel in March 2017.

HBO has been at the forefront of the return to prominence of the true crime genre. Its six part doc series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst was universally acclaimed, generated strong ratings, and has developed a cult following.

The HBO Documentary Films programme is based a news story that has shocked the American public over the past 18 months. In June 2015, wheelchair-bound Gypsy Rose Blanchard stabbed her mother, Clauddine ‘Dee Dee’ Blanchard, to death.

She has been convicted of second-degree murder despite the premeditated nature of the murder due to years of abuse she silently suffered at the hands of the deceased. She has been sentenced to ten years in prison, while her boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, is facing a first-degree murder charge.

HBO said the doc will show that “what starts out as a grisly tale of matricide morphs into a rabbit hole of deception”, with the story including “child abuse, mental illness and forbidden love converge in this mystery of a mother and daughter who were thought to be living a fairy tale life that turned out to be a living nightmare”.

The doc features exclusive prison access to Gypsy Rose, who is believed to have the suffered from controversial Munchausen by proxy syndrome, which develops where caregivers mentally or physically abuse a vulnerable person under their care.

Lee Carr is director and producer, Andrew Rossi producer, and Alison Byrne and Andrew Coffman coproducers, with Sara Bernstein senior producer and Sheila Nevins executive producer.