photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Carrody Buchhorn hugs attorney Bill Skepnek after her testimony Thursday, Oct. 30, in her wrongful conviction trial. Attorney Quentin Templeton is at left.

Updated at 5:48 p.m. July 6, 2026

A Douglas County judge has ruled that a woman accused of murdering a 9-month-old baby at a Eudora daycare 10 years ago was wrongfully convicted, and he has ordered that she be given a certificate of innocence, in addition to a lump sum payment of $368,000 and attorney fees.

The woman, Carrody Buchhorn, and her legal team have been in a yearslong fight to clear her name in the death of Oliver “Ollie” Ortiz – a case that has involved a conviction, years of prison and house arrest, a reversal on appeal, dueling theories of death and intense distress for both Buchhorn’s and Oliver’s families.

“I’m a little overwhelmed right now,” Buchhorn told the Journal-World right after the ruling. “I’m speechless. It’s such a relief. The judge did the right thing.”

Buchhorn said she got the news via a phone call Monday afternoon from her attorneys, Bill Skepnek and Quentin Templeton. She was babysitting her 6-month-old granddaughter at the time — her first grandchild, born shortly after the wrongful conviction trial last fall. She and her husband, Tim, planned to meet with the attorneys right away and give them a “big thank you” for standing by her and believing in her all these years.

Reached by phone later in the afternoon, Skepnek told the Journal-World that it was a great day not just for Buchhorn but for Lawrence and for justice.

“To me, the story here is how the state can crush somebody, and here we have a court that has pushed back,” he said, calling Judge James McCabria’s decision “so deeply thoughtful and considered.”

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Kaylen Ortiz, on Thursday, Oct. 30, 2025, describes her son Oliver “Ollie” Ortiz as he appeared in a photo taken the night before he died at a Eudora day care.

McCabria announced his decision Monday — the long-awaited culmination to Buchhorn’s wrongful conviction trial in October 2025. Buchhorn had steadfastly maintained her innocence while the state continued to paint her as a violent killer, even as a forensic pathologist’s report sought by the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office declared Oliver’s death to have been the result of a defective heart and not child abuse.

That report led then-DA Suzanne Valdez to cease prosecution of Buchhorn, though she had vowed to retry her and had continued to espouse a belief in Buchhorn’s guilt. Buchhorn was never retried in Oliver’s death after the Kansas Court of Appeals overturned her second-degree murder conviction, ruling that her trial attorneys failed to adequately challenge Coroner Erik Mitchell’s controversial “depolarization theory” regarding Oliver’s cause of death. Buchhorn’s attorneys — and others — consistently condemned Mitchell’s theory of death as “junk science,” and even Valdez described his professional reputation as questionable.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Former Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez leaves the witness stand Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025, at the wrongful conviction trial of Carrody Buchhorn. Buchhorn’s attorney Bill Skepnek is at left.

Buchhorn was tried and convicted while Charles Branson was the DA, but Valdez spearheaded the case through the appellate process. Her testimony that it was not Buchhorn’s actual innocence that led her to drop the charges was a central part of the state’s case because Buchhorn, in order to prevail, had to prove (1) that she was actually innocent and (2) that her actual innocence led to the dismissal of the charges.

In his Monday ruling, McCabria was scathing of Valdez’s conduct after she received the report of Dr. Jane Turner, the forensic pathologist who said that a hole in Oliver’s heart, along with an infection, is what killed him. Valdez, McCabria wrote, did not have a single conversation with Turner, Valdez’s own retained expert, “either before or after” the report — an omission McCabria called “astonishing.”

“We never talked about the possibility that she was innocent,” Valdez had said. “…That was never a discussion I had with anyone.”

McCabria described that position as undeserving of consideration in his analysis of the evidence before him and said that “the subjective belief of a prosecutor cannot be the deciding factor.”

“[T]his court finds the opinion of Suzanne Valdez as to the innocence or guilt of Carrody Buchhorn so lacking in legal and factual understanding of the evidence as to merit no weight whatsoever,” he wrote.

The state, he said, had not countered Turner’s forensic evidence, and its other evidence — for example, “vulgar” text messages by Buchhorn, an admitted “potty mouth” — was not persuasive.

McCabria cited Buchhorn’s “history of caring for children, her demonstrated concern for [Oliver’s] health and well-being” as bearing “no serious indication of an intent or desire or action by Ms. Buchhorn to harm” him.

McCabria acknowledged the possibility that Turner’s report was wrong, that evidence was missed, that Buchhorn, who was alone with Oliver, snapped and acted out of character. “Anything is possible,” he wrote.

“But, the only objective, measurable, credible and testable evidence presented in this case indicates a natural cause of death,” he found.

In the wrongful conviction trial Buchhorn had to prove her innocence to McCabria by a preponderance of the evidence. And he concluded that she had done so “by a large margin.” In her suit, she sought $368,000 for her 2,072 days of imprisonment and at least $25,000 in attorney fees. She also sought — most importantly, she has repeatedly said — a certificate of innocence.

“That is what I really wanted,” she said again Monday. With that certificate, her criminal record will be expunged.

Buchhorn also has a lawsuit pending in federal court claiming that the state “schemed” and conspired to frame her by fabricating a fictional cause of death, withholding evidence and propagating false narratives of guilt for years.

Skepnek and Templeton are also representing her in that suit.

“How many people have been crumpled up and thrown away?” Skepnek said after Monday’s ruling — people who don’t have the family support that Buchhorn did, including relatives who came to Skepnek and talked him into taking the case. He almost didn’t, he said, given how busy he was, but he’s “so proud that I was given the opportunity to help them.”

He has handled “important” cases before in his nearly 50 years practicing law, he said, but “of all the things I’ve done, if anything is on my tombstone, this is it.”

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Judge James McCabria is pictured at the wrongful conviction trial of Carrody Buchhorn on Thursday, Oct. 30, 2025.