Ken Urker, the father of Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s infant daughter, has died at 34.
The Lafourche Sheriff’s Office confirmed that officers responded to a call around 6:15 p.m. On October 1, where Urker was “found dead upon arrival.” His cause of death has not been officially revealed, and the Sheriff’s Office noted it is “continuing the death investigation.”
Reports said that Urker was discovered unresponsive at his Louisiana home on his birthday. According to the outlet, Blanchard had sent him a birthday message that went unanswered.
Blanchard, 33, later said that Urker died from an apparent overdose.
The couple’s relationship spanned nearly a decade of on-and-off connection that began while Blanchard was serving time for her role in her mother’s 2015 murder. They first met as pen pals after Urker watched the 2017 HBO documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” about Blanchard’s case.
“He wrote me a letter of support after watching the HBO documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest back in 2017,” Blanchard said in 2019.
“I wrote him back and pretty soon we just started writing on a weekly basis. We became fast friends.”
Their correspondence quickly deepened. “I talked to him like I had known him my whole life and vice versa,” she shared with the outlet.
The pair got engaged in 2018, but the relationship ended the following year. Blanchard then married Ryan Anderson while incarcerated in 2022, though that marriage also dissolved. Following her December 2023 release from Chillicothe Correctional Center, Blanchard and Urker reconnected.
“It wasn’t until I filed for divorce that I kind of really realised that that spark, that connection [with Urker] is even better than I expected,” she said in 2024. “And we’ve grown a lot. I’ve matured. He’s grown. And so I think right now is the time in our lives that it’s the right time, right place, right everything.”
In December 2024, Blanchard and Urker welcomed their daughter, Aurora Raina Urker. Urker also appeared alongside Blanchard on “Gypsy Rose: Life After Lock Up.”
Blanchard’s path to national attention began with years of abuse by her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, who fabricated and induced illnesses including leukemia, muscular dystrophy and developmental disabilities. Dee Dee forced her daughter to use a wheelchair, undergo unnecessary surgeries, and live with a feeding tube in a case that experts linked to Munchausen by proxy, now classified as factitious disorder imposed on another. As a teenager, Blanchard began an online relationship with Nicholas Godejohn, and together they planned Dee Dee’s murder. Godejohn fatally stabbed Dee Dee in June 2015 and is now serving life without parole plus 25 years for armed criminal action, while Blanchard pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and served eight years of her 10-year sentence before her December 2023 release.
Blanchard has not publicly posted about Urker’s death on her social media accounts as of this report.