Gypsy Rose Blanchard is facing an unimaginable personal loss.
The Life After Lock Up star’s boyfriend, Ken Urker, died in Louisiana on Oct. 1, his 34th birthday, the Lafourche Sheriff’s Office confirmed to E! News.
Blanchard and Urker shared a 21-month-old daughter, Aurora, as well as a complicated history that began during her time in prison. She was serving a sentence for the 2015 murder of her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard.
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The two first connected in 2017 after Urker wrote to Blanchard in prison. He had watched Mommy Dead and Dearest, the HBO documentary exploring her troubled relationship with her late mother, who was alleged to have suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
“We became fast friends,” Blanchard told E! News in a 2019 interview. “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.”
Their connection deepened quickly, and Urker proposed in 2018 with a “silver band” that Blanchard said prison guards later confiscated. However, while she continued serving her sentence, their romantic relationship eventually came to an end.