Beyond Gypsy Blancharde: When Mothers Harm Their Kids for Attention

Former chemist and mother of three Hope Ybarra had a flare for the dramatic. She documented her very public battle with cancer in a detailed online updates that culminated in posts about picking out colors for her casket. Her "bravery" after three bouts of cancer made Ybarra the soft-spoken darling of local Texas news. The diagnosis was most devastating to her daughters, however, who were made to believe they were about to lose their mother. The youngest daughter, born prematurely, had her own host of medical issues. But when Ybarra's lies began to unravel, first about her own health and then that of her children, suspicions arose that pulled out an endless thread of medical fraud and feigned diagnoses.

Ybarra was never sick, and neither was her youngest daughter, until Ybarra poisoned her with stolen pathogens that sent the child into anaphylactic shock. Later, the Fort Worth mother admitted to using nasal spray to alter the results of a sweat test for Cystic Fibrosis and draining her daughter's blood little by little with a syringe. "There are many things I could have done that would have straight up killed her," pled Ybarra after receiving a 10-year sentence for inflicting bodily injury on a child. "Obviously I was hurting her, but I wasn't trying to."

Upon further investigation, holes continued to appear in her daughter's medical history, including 30 to 40 unneeded hospital procedures. Ybarra eventually admitted that she wanted people to "pay attention," a classic symptom of a person with Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. Ybarra has been incarcerated at the Gatesville Texas prison for nearly eight years and will become eligible for parole in 2019.