Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Ken Urker built their relationship across prison visits, a broken engagement, other partners and an eventual reunion. Urker died in Louisiana on Oct. 1, the day he was due to turn 34, the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office confirmed.
The Life After Lock Up star and Urker shared a 21-month-old daughter, Aurora. His death brought a sudden end to a history that stretched back nearly a decade, beginning while Blanchard was serving a prison sentence for her involvement in the 2015 murder of her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard.
How did Gypsy Rose Blanchard meet Ken Urker?
Urker first contacted Blanchard in 2017 after watching Mommy Dead and Dearest, HBO’s documentary about her life and her deeply troubled relationship with her mother. Dee Dee was alleged to have had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a condition in which a caregiver fabricates or causes illness in someone under their care.
“We became fast friends,” Blanchard told E! News in 2019. “It was pretty soon after that that we started talking on the phone. We would spend hours on the phone. I talked to him like I had known him my whole life and vice versa.”
The friendship quickly became romantic. In 2018, Urker proposed with what Blanchard described as a silver band. Prison guards later confiscated the ring, because even an engagement apparently had to comply with institutional property rules.
Their relationship did not survive the remaining years of Blanchard’s sentence, however, and the couple eventually separated.
Why did Blanchard and Urker reunite?
By the time Blanchard left prison in 2023, she had been married for more than a year to Ryan Anderson, a special education teacher she also met through prison correspondence. Urker had not entirely disappeared from the picture.
During the first season of Life After Lock Up, Blanchard admitted that she had spoken to her former fiancé three weeks before marrying Anderson. That disclosure did little to reassure her husband.
“It’s one of those things where it’s like, ‘Do I worry that she’ll leave me for him?’” Anderson said on the series. “I do feel second fiddle.”
Blanchard and Anderson separated in 2024. Soon afterward, she reunited with Urker, explaining that the two had remained friends throughout the intervening years.
“It wasn’t until I filed for divorce that I kind of really realized that spark, that connection with Ken is even better than I expected,” she said that year.
What did they say about their second chance?
Blanchard said timing and personal growth persuaded them to try again after their first engagement ended.
“We’ve grown a lot. I’ve matured. He’s grown,” she explained. “Right now is the time in our lives that it’s the right time, right place, right everything.”
Their renewed relationship led to the birth of Aurora. Together, they moved from a romance conducted through prison correspondence and phone calls to family life outside, after years of separations and major changes in both their lives.
Urker’s death on Oct. 1 leaves Blanchard grieving her longtime partner while raising their daughter. Authorities confirmed the death, but the information provided did not include further details about the circumstances.
