A Colorado mom accused in the death of her 7-year-old daughter—whom she’d pretended had a terminal illness—was sentenced to 16 years in prison in Denver on Wednesday.
District Court Judge Patricia Herron accepted a plea agreement that Kelly Turner, 43, and prosecutors settled on last month after the mom was initially charged with two counts of first-degree murder, which carry a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment if convicted in Colorado.
Herron called the agreement “difficult to stomach,” as Turner pleaded guilty to the lesser charges of committing child abuse and negligently causing her daughter Olivia Gant’s death in 2017.
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Authorities had accused Turner of pretending her daughter was sick and convincing doctors to perform procedures on her in order to cash in on donations and bask in attention from television news appearances until the little girl died. Turner also entered a guilty plea for charitable fraud and theft between $100,000 and $1 million, prosecutors said.
“For any number of reasons, I understand how we end up here. But it’s difficult when we have the death of a young child. A death after, what the court considers from my review of the documents, after this child had been submitted to a lifetime of painful, frightening tests and surgical procedures ultimately resulting in this child’s death,” Herron said at the time, according to the Denver Post. “It is unthinkable, and from this court’s perspective, generally would be met with the harshest of sentences.”
Investigators said they unearthed blogs, a GoFundMe page that raised more than $22,000 to “offset” the cost of medications, and news stories that chronicled Turner’s various claims about her daughter suffering from a variety of ailments that diverged from her medical records—including a seizure disorder, a tumor and a buildup of fluid in cavities of her brain.
Prosecutors alleged that Turner had lied for years about Olivia’s symptoms, after moving with her daughters from Texas to Colorado. Beginning in 2012, they said she sought treatments for Olivia for fabricated illnesses and lied to doctors at Children’s Hospital Colorado about her medical conditions, ultimately causing them to perform “significant medical procedures” that she didn’t need, according to the indictment.
At one point during her repeated hospital visits, a surgeon removed part of Olivia’s small intestine and inserted a feeding tube, resulting in a case against the hospital brought by Olivia’s grandparents and father for failing to report child abuse that was eventually resolved.
Turner’s sentencing on Wednesday puts her in prison for 16 years on the child abuse charge, which Herron said would be served at the same time as a 10-year sentence for one of Turner’s theft charges, and a three-year sentence on the other theft charge.
In February 2017, after drawing up a “bucket list” with the help of her mother, Olivia was transformed into a “Bat Princess” in an elaborate $11,000 costume party at a hotel thrown by the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which helps grant the wishes of critically-ill kids.
Weeks before Olivia died in hospice care in August 2017, Turner insisted that her daughter’s health and quality of life was poor and wanted her to be withdrawn from all medical treatment. She requested that Olivia’s feeding tube be removed and she signed a “Do Not Resuscitate” order.
According to her obituary, Olivia’s death came after “a long battle to a rare disease” that required “many operations and numerous stays in the hospital.” It was only after Turner brought her older daughter to Children’s Hospital Colorado in 2018 with complaints about “bone pain” that authorities launched an investigation.
Olivia’s cause of death was initially attributed to intestinal failure, but an autopsy in 2018 found no evidence of the condition. A coroner ultimately said her manner of death was “undetermined,” but before Olivia was brought into hospice care, doctors said she had only been receiving 30 percent of the nutrition she needed, according to the indictment.
When Herron entered her guilty plea on the lesser charges in January, Chief Deputy District Attorney Christopher Gallo told Herron that prosecutors had struggled to identify a “discreet moment in time” when Olivia’s abuse occurred resulting in her death, according to the Denver Post.
“This is not perfect justice by any means,” Gallo said at the time. “But certainly, Judge, this plea is in the interest of justice. And for those reasons we ask the court to accept the plea.”
Turner’s behavior appears to mirror a psychological disorder which she denied having during an interview with investigators, the Denver Post reported. The difficult-to-detect illness is known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy and people affected by the disorder often seek attention by fabricating claims about medical conditions involving individuals in their care.
