Gypsy Rose Blanchard is weathering an unimaginable tragedy.
The Life After Lock Up star’s boyfriend Ken Urker died on his 33rd birthday on Oct. 1 in Louisiana, the Lafourche Sherriff’s Office confirmed to E! News.
In addition to their 21-month-old daughter Aurora, Blanchard and Urker shared a long history spanning back to her days in prison, when she was serving time for the 2015 murder of her mom Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard.
The pair first connected in 2017, when he wrote to her in prison after watching Mommy Dead and Dearest, the HBO documentary about Blanchard’s complicated relationship with her late mother, who allegedly suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy syndrome.
“We became fast friends,” Blanchard recounted in a 2019 interview with E! News. “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 initial chemistry was so strong that Urker proposed in 2018, popping the question with a “silver band” that Blanchard said was later confiscated by prison guards. But as Blanchard continued to serve her prison sentence, their romance fizzled out.