Olivia Kelly Gant was born in Pasadena, Texas, on June 21st, 2010, to parents Kelly and Jeff Gant. Olivia had a special relationship with her grandfather, Lonni Groo, calling each other “Livy” and “Papa.” He spoke lovingly of Olivia’s great imagination and joy in playing with her dolls. Some of Olivia’s favorite things were playing with her sisters and family trips to Dairy Queen for ice cream cones. She showed a special interest in the lions and sharks at her local zoo. In addition, her interest in dinosaurs led to trips to Dinosaur Ridge, where she was able to entertain her family with dinosaur facts she’d learned.
Kelly and Jeff had a difficult marriage, which led to Kelly, Olivia, and her sisters moving to Colorado while Jeff stayed behind in Texas. In Colorado, Olivia, who loved school and her friends, was able to experience Pre-K classes, kindergarten, and part of first grade at Coline Hills Elementary School.
In August of 2011, while the family was still living together in Texas, Kelly began a blog which would play such an important role in Olivia’s life. Initially, the blog existed to detail the various ailments of the two youngest girls. Early claims attributed Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and a non-specific autoimmune disorder to Olivia’s older sister, who would have been two at the time. It’s been stated that at this time, Olivia’s older sister was never diagnosed with anything more serious than ear infections.
In other blog entries, Olivia’s illnesses were listed as a misshapen head, developmental delays, seizures, a tumor, too much fluid in her brain, and celiac disease. Olivia was later found to be free of all these concerns but may have been developmentally delayed. Kelly took tons of photos of her daughter, many of which were laid out during hospital stays. While lying in bed or sitting in a wheelchair, Olivia was dressed up as a Disney princess, surrounded by stuffed animals.
A true diagnosis for Olivia’s medical condition was impossible. Kelly described many differing symptoms while consulting with what appears to be dozens of medical professionals. She generally indicated that Olivia was diagnosed with autism, seizures, and other neurological conditions, terrible pain when eating, and some form of intestinal failure. Kelly told the GI doctors that Olivia had undergone tests for allergies and testing at a hospital known as National Jewish, and reported that she had what she referred to as severe allergies. Specifically, these allergies were reported as being to peanuts, tree nuts, chocolate, milk protein, and cats. However, it was reported that since Olivia was autistic, they never really knew if she just didn’t like the color of something or if she was really allergic to it. It should be noted that Olivia was never diagnosed with autism.
Most of the information available regarding Olivia’s extensive medical history comes from the indictment of Kelly Turner. Over 5 years, the little girl had at least 25 surgeries and revisions, and she spent weeks in the hospital in total. Olivia’s medical journey began in 2012 when she was taken to the Children’s Hospital to seek help with a bout of constipation. Dr. Karamat performed a successful procedure in which hardened fecal matter was removed from Olivia’s intestines, but Kelly was soon back in the hospital seeking treatment for her daughter’s supposed inability to consume and digest food. Around this time, Kelly’s blog, called “Prayers for Olivia,” began to detail the fictitious story that she was building around her little girl—an autistic child with an inoperable malformation, a tumor.
Several of Olivia’s doctors were interviewed while building the case against Kelly, and the retrospective is a chilling tale of compliant doctors and a mother with an incomprehensible and distinctly unmaternal agenda. Over the next handful of months, several ER visits built a history of a little girl who was in constant pain with persistent intestinal concerns. She was hospitalized again, but her next surgery was scheduled for November of 2014. Kelly described the procedure as a “bellomy”—specifically when the doctors pull a part of the small intestine out of the body so waste can be passed in a more efficient fashion. This procedure is actually called an ostomy.
It was reported to help with Olivia’s constipation, but Kelly continued to complain of issues with eating, resulting in a feeding tube. In her blog, Kelly described Olivia’s intestines as protruding out; “It looks like a hot dog.” Kelly began to solicit money with the plea: “Help this sweet little girl with all the hospital bills she is incurring.”
In July of 2015, she began to post to her blog about Olivia’s terminal illness, despite the fact that there was never any form of diagnosis to that effect. “Princess Olivia, we need you to respond… to a dumpster fire. She is a ball of fire today; her wish came true to become a firefighter. She’s in intestinal failure, and we don’t know how much longer she has, and so we made a bucket list, and one of her things was to become a firefighter.”
At Kelly’s prompting, Olivia had several surgeries over the course of four and a half years to assist her in gaining the nutrition she needed in a more accessible form. While recovering from her ostomy, she had feeding tubes in her nose. This was a short-term solution, which was quickly replaced by a GJ tube. This tube was placed in January of 2015. A GJ tube is a soft, narrow tube that enters the stomach in the upper part of the abdomen and is threaded into the small intestine. This tube has several ports for things like medicines, patient comfort, and nutrition.
This form of tube feeding presumably failed because, in June of 2015, Olivia received a TPN tube. TPN is the most extreme feeding option, chosen when it’s clear that the tract is not functioning and unable to absorb nutrients the body needs. If this is a long-term choice, it generally would require a care team to manage the various aspects of usage; infections and adjustments are common. Dr. Jason Soden is a TPN specialist and was one of the primary members of Olivia’s care team from 2017 onward. Dr. Soden spoke to police investigators regarding Kelly’s behavior, specifically a claim that Olivia was rejecting her TPN. According to him, this is not something that happens. Dr. Soden advocated for Olivia trying to have her dependency on intravenous nutrition reduced, but Kelly pushed back on him, claiming, “We’ve already tried that.”
Olivia underwent occupational therapy with therapist Jackie Camerer in June of 2015, resulting in an improved ability to eat. Camerer specialized in children who need to work on eating normally. In discharge, Olivia had graduated to age-appropriate foods and had no problem swallowing or tolerating food by mouth. Unfortunately for Olivia, normal eating habits wouldn’t get Kelly attention or donations, so she didn’t continue practicing feeding her daughter normal foods.
On March 24th, 2017, Kelly Turner began her final assault on Olivia’s life. Given the high doses of potent narcotics that Olivia was on for pain relief, she could have had an episode of breathing concerns or cardiac distress. This can be treated quickly and simply with a dose of Narcan or adjustments to the dosage of painkillers. However, Kelly requested that Narcan not be administered. Kelly went one step further at this point, talking to the doctor about a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order. According to Dr. Soden, Kelly pressed the issue that Olivia’s quality of life was poor and it was impacted by her pain, dependency on TPN, and inability to sustain feeding. As a result, Dr. Soden signed the DNR.
An interview with Olivia’s pediatric surgeon, Dr. Beer, sheds further light on Kelly’s personality and goals. He was familiar with the family, having been the one to perform Olivia’s G-tube, ostomy, and central line surgeries. As a specialist, he received this referral from her primary care physician due to Olivia’s reported constipation problem, dysmotility, and her status as a challenging diagnosis. Most tellingly, he described Kelly to the investigators as a “high-maintenance mother” and said that she was “not afraid of surgery.”
Another interview was conducted with Dr. Robert Kramer, Olivia’s original pediatric gastroenterologist. He described Olivia’s outgoing personality and said that he was shocked by her death. His observation was that Olivia was not a terminal patient. Further information was obtained from Dr. Seth Eisdorfer, who is the director of the Chronic Pain Clinic at Children’s Hospital. He was the treating physician for the pain Kelly reported Olivia was having. He told investigators of the arguments that he made against putting Olivia in hospice care. He said that Olivia was not a terminal patient. Kelly was given options other than withdrawing care, but she insisted, reasoning that Olivia had a life-limiting disease and her quality of life was poor.
Olivia’s grandfather talked about how heartbreaking it was to watch his beloved granddaughter die. Unaware of what was happening, he said, “She didn’t know she was going to die; she was happy to get out of that hospital and feel like a normal child.” Once at the facility, Olivia was only given small amounts of melted popsicles and juice—just enough to moisten her mouth and lips. Mr. Gant said that Olivia opened her eyes, recognized me, and said, “Papa, I’m hungry.” She was hungry.
Olivia Kelly Gant passed away on August 20th, 2017. She was only 7 years old. Olivia did not have to die in hospice, slowly starving to death. Some of the doctors quoted in the indictment are more forceful than others, but it becomes clearer and clearer that none of the doctors thought that hospice and withdrawal of care was appropriate. Still, they all deferred to Kelly as Olivia’s mother, assuming that she was advocating for the best care of her daughter.
Kelly’s role in Olivia’s short and painful life was not immediately known. It wasn’t until early October of 2018 that Kelly was investigated for CA (child abuse) related to her middle daughter. This daughter was a minor at the time of investigation; thus, all identifying details including her name were redacted in investigation documents. Olivia’s sister went to a new physician, Dr. Antonia Kessa, after her primary care physician had retired. When her history was examined by Dr. Kessa, there was a report that she was treated for bone cancer between the ages of 2 and 5. Doctors in Texas confirmed that there was no record that Olivia’s sister ever had cancer, nor was she treated for cancer. These discoveries led to Olivia’s body being exhumed in November of 2018 to investigate her true cause of death. Her autopsy found that Olivia had a lack of anatomical findings to account for intestinal failure, as well as Kelly’s other claims appeared to be unsubstantiated.
Many people became familiar with Munchausen syndrome by proxy after the Gypsy Rose Blanchard case. This is a mental disorder and often appears as child abuse. It is defined as when the caretaker of a child either makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms to make it look like the child is sick. No clear cause for this disorder has ever been discovered, but sympathy or donations are often incentives for the caregiver in this scenario. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is hardly unknown to the medical world, even if cases are rare. A physician faced with the demands of Kelly Turner should have sought guidance from the hospital’s ethics board. Specifically, a doctor won’t refer a child to hospice unless the child has a life-limiting condition and won’t approve removing nutrition unless the feeding process is doing more harm than good.
One of the questions that pose a concern is whether there was a failure of medical ethics by the hospital and Olivia’s doctors, some of whom definitively opposed the treatments Kelly was seeking. Early on, an examining neurologist indicated that there was no evidence that seizures were occurring, and Olivia did not need to be taking strong anti-seizure drugs. However, she stayed on the medication for almost five more years.
When she asked for a DNR, many of Olivia’s doctors didn’t agree with Kelly’s wishes: “On heroic doses of narcotics… though you sneak up on that, right? You know… so although that none of us would survive, I don’t think the doses that she was receiving… even if we split them between the three of us… but that was a scenario where I was really taken back, and I’m saying, ‘Well, all right, well this girl stood up on the gurney and gave me a hug,’ if I remember correctly, in the ER at the time of the admission, and I’m saying, ‘Okay, well where does the DNR come from and who does not have a quality of life?'”
“I had frank conversations with Mom that went kind of shockingly well. I think palliative care was there with us when I had to tell her that I’m not comfortable with this; I cannot sign this DNR. And I told her, ‘I can’t trust you to tell me she has no quality of life.’ And I think I probably said, ‘It doesn’t matter who you are… I’m not going to trust you to be the only voice for her… and tell me that she doesn’t deserve everything that we would offer for another child here.’ And we also talked about, ‘Well, what do you do in this scenario?’ And there were some meetings, and I called an ethics consult, and had meetings with palliative care, and then eventually with a colleague who took over her care because I just wasn’t comfortable with that scenario.”
“And in those conversations, we talked about, ‘Well, what do you do with this?’ Right? You know, where you don’t know? And I was clear about, ‘All right, I don’t know. Intestinal failure has dysmotility or not, and there is no test I could do to do that other than to challenge this.’ And we had conversations… about, ‘Well, okay, you hospitalize… if you hospitalize and a parent, Kelly or otherwise, is in that room at all, well that’s not going to be a very good test, right? So, what? Do home, and do another placement?’ And wow, that’s an enormous step.”
“I think the last admission there was close to… despite the many, the many hours that day… there really was no substantial discussion about signs or symptoms there. It was really all about, ‘Okay, we have a DNR.’ This is a horrible situation in my mind, and I don’t think we should have a DNR, and I can’t find anyone who could tell me why we should have a DNR. And I sought out people who… and that was the focus of the last admission. And in the end, you know, I remember being very, very uncomfortable with the situation. I mean, I’ve never been in a situation where I refuse somebody’s care; I’ve never heard of that before.”
In October of 2019, Kelly Turner was indicted on 13 counts, including first-degree murder, child abuse, and fraud. Kelly began using GoFundMe, a site commonly used for individuals to help fund medical treatments and associated costs. She made 100 updates between July of 2015 and August of 2017 and raised a total of $22,277 from 161 donors.
“She won our hearts as Bat Princess Olivia Gant, living out her wish as a superhero on a Make-A-Wish day in 2017. Now, her mother is fighting charges that she faked her daughter’s illness and murdered the girl when Olivia was 7 years old. I’m Alan Gionet. That woman, Kelly Turner, was in court this morning where a judge reduced her bond, but her attorneys came out firing, saying they have doctors ready to dispute the prosecution’s case.”
Rick Salinger is covering Colorado First and joins us from the Douglas County Justice Center. “Rick, this is a very emotional case.”
“Good afternoon, Alan. It certainly is, given that it involves the death of a little girl. But today’s hearing dealt strictly with bond. The prosecution asked for a $4 million bond, while the defense wanted $110,000. The judge settled at a quarter-million dollar bond. Kelly Turner has been held for 93 days without any bond at all. Now, at least she has a chance to get out. She is accused of falsely telling people that her daughter Olivia was terminally ill when she was not. The mother raised money for treatment with the help of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which threw a Bat Princess party for Olivia. Police and fire departments granted her wishes.”
Kelly Turner had a friend from Texas who came all the way from there and said that Turner was not truthful: “I don’t think she has; I think she’s just mentally ill. You can’t believe anything she said. Everything that she has said to us is nothing; what’s the truth? We have found out since this has happened.”
Arraignment has now been set for February 28th, at which time Turner will enter a plea of guilty or not guilty. The investigation into donor fraud led to information about the Make-A-Wish Foundation granting Olivia’s Bat Princess wish, which was essentially a large party. She had a limo ride, a costume, fancy decorations, and props at a nice location. Olivia dressed in a cape and a bat mask for an imaginary story in which she worked with Batman to save two princesses. The cost for the adventure and party were over $11,000.
Further investigation showed that Jeff had been told to remove all three girls from his insurance, despite a lack of any claim denials or problems. Kelly chose instead to enroll them in Colorado’s Medicaid program. While signing up for this program, she used an incorrect social security number and also applied for benefits for her husband, who was not even present in Colorado at the time. When supplied with accurate data, Medicaid estimates that it was overpaid around $540,000.
In addition, Kelly solicited donations from several individuals to proactively assist with Olivia’s funeral expenses. A local Colorado real estate industry supported a foundation called Professional Miracles Foundation, specifically for families with extremely ill children. Mike Dugan, a local realtor, personally gave Kelly a check for $3,000, which was deposited in her account in mid-August. The Hefbower Funeral Home and Seven Stones Cemetery both reported that they never received any payment from Kelly.
Faced with 13 counts, including first-degree murder, child abuse, and fraud, Kelly decided to cut a deal with the prosecution. As part of the arrangement, Kelly pled guilty to negligent child abuse causing death, theft, and charitable fraud in January of 2022. As a result, she was sentenced to a total of just 16 years behind bars. To this day, Kelly Turner still maintains her innocence.
Olivia was buried at the Seven Stones Chatfield Cemetery in Littleton, Colorado. Her headstone, which was essentially a large rock, bears the simple inscription “Always be joyful,” as well as a reference to 1 Thessalonians 5:16. This verse reads: “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”
Descriptions of her, despite her heavy burden, show how appropriate this epitaph was. She loved to wear princess dresses instead of hospital gowns and became a beloved figure around Children’s Hospital Colorado. Her grandfather spoke to the media, referring to his little granddaughter as a joy to be around: “She was so energetic, so loving and caring; she loved life so much.” He is understandably heartbroken by Olivia’s loss and advocated for mandatory reporting by hospitals to be revamped, simply saying, “I want to know why nobody reported a concern, and that the policy the hospital had has to be changed to protect other children.”
