A local woman is suing the Green River Police Department and Wyoming Department of Family Services officials on claims she endured a malicious child abuse prosecution last year. She was arrested for DUI one day before her lawsuit was filed.
On Nov. 25, 2022, a 4-year-old girl watched as police tried to wake her 5-year-old sister Annabelle, who lay on their babysitter's couch in Kemmerer with her pulse fading after a brutal beating.
Annabelle died hours later from injuries the girls’ babysitter, Cheri Marler, inflicted on her with her hands, feet, and a wooden spoon.
A jury convicted Marler more than a year later, and a judge sentenced Marler to life in prison without parole.
Investigators at the time observed numerous injuries on the 4-year-old as well, court documents say.
That little girl went to live in Green River with her foster mother Vallory Dodson, and Dodson’s husband.
Dodson was not involved in the Kemmerer incident.
Bruises And A Black Eye
An evidentiary affidavit filed in December 2024 in Sweetwater County Circuit Court says the girl’s teacher in Green River voiced concerns that autumn about bruises, a black eye covered with thick makeup, and a broken arm sustained by the then-kindergarten-age girl.
The girl told Green River Police Department Detective Martha Holzgrafe that November that she’d tripped while walking. She also said she’d been hurt when she was pushed on the playground, the affidavit says.
About five weeks later, the girl gave Holzgrafe another interview and said Dodson had grabbed her by the ribs and thrown her to the ground.
By then, says a court filing from Dodson's counsel, the state had placed the girl in her teacher's home.
Sweetwater County Chief Criminal Deputy Attorney Micaela Lira charged Dodson with felony child abuse Dec. 20, 2024, and police arrested Dodson, who was reportedly eight months pregnant at the time.
Lira asked the court to dismiss the charge permanently the following June.
She says she did so to guard against re-traumatizing the child by making her testify.
“While preparing for trial, the state met with multiple individuals, witnesses, support members for the alleged victim, and the alleged victim herself,” wrote Lira in the June 5, 2025, motion to the Sweetwater County District Court. “
"After consultations with the alleged victim’s current caregivers (I find) any form of testifying in this matter would be detrimental to the well-being of the alleged victim and may (undo) the growth and healing she has accomplished,” Lira added.
District Court Judge Suzannah Robinson granted Lira’s request and dismissed the case the next day.
Lira reiterated her point in a Tuesday interview, telling Cowboy State Daily that the girl was emphatic about not testifying, “because if she did, it would bring back all the memories of what happened to her when she lived there.”
Sweetwater County Attorney Daniel Erramouspe echoed that.
“What we put in the motion is accurate,” he said. “It wasn’t something we did lightly. There are rare occasions where that’s actually the case — where testifying is absolutely worse than what would have happened (otherwise). You know, than getting justice in this particular case.”
The prosecutors filed that motion to dismiss the charge about one year before the Wyoming Legislature passed a law allowing children in cases of violence to testify via a video link and bring comfort objects or a therapy dog into the courtroom with them.
The Doctors
Now Dodson is suing the city of Green River, the Wyoming Department of Family Services, and various officials, saying authorities undertook her arrest and prosecution without probable cause and violated her rights.
Her civil complaint alleges a counterpoint to Lira’s motion, saying that, at least in DFS’s administrative handling of the incident, the child abuse case against Dodson lacked substance.
The complaint says investigators didn’t request the girl’s medical records until months after filing the charge, and that multiple doctors opined that the girl’s broken arm was consistent with an injury sustained from falling.
The expert Dodson hired in her own case, Dr. Wade Jensen, reportedly said the break was most consistent with “a fall from a standing height.”
The complaint says the emergency room doctor who'd tended the girl's broken arm did not report any abuse.
Little Did He Know
Dodson’s attorney Jason Gay filed the civil complaint on her behalf in the U.S. District Court for Wyoming on May 11.
Gay didn’t know at the time, he told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday, that Dodson had been arrested on suspicion of driving drunk with a toddler in her car one day earlier.
“That was a coincidence in timing,” said Gay Tuesday. “The lawsuit had been pending for a while.”
He’d sent the state and the city drafts of the complaint before its filing, and before that arrest, Gay added.
As for the DUI charge, Gay noted that his client is 30, saw her now-dropped child abuse case spread via the media, and after a “long, drawn-out process… ultimately dismissed.”
He pointed to her relative lack of criminal history before the felony case was filed and the media attention followed.
“And I think you’re seeing the impact that that can have on a person,” Gay added.
Dodson remained in the Sweetwater County Detention Center on a $30,000 bond as of Tuesday, the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office confirmed. Court documents claim she rear-ended a Toyota 4Runner while driving drunk in Rock Springs.
A woman in the 4Runner was temporarily hospitalized, and Dodson at first faced the felony of DUI causing a serious bodily injury – which carries a penalty of up to a decade in prison.
But Lira dropped that charge upon the realization that the victim’s injuries weren't serious enough to carry the charge, court documents say.
Still, Dodson faces three remaining charges of DUI with a child passenger, improperly buckling a child under 9 and following another vehicle too closely.
Dodson pleaded not guilty to those three charges May 20. She could face up to a year in prison and fines if convicted.
The alleged crash happened two days after Dodson pleaded guilty for breach of peace – in a case where she was originally charged in March with domestic battery, on claims she attacked her husband with his wristwatch after an argument about his inability to cook quinoa.
She had received six months' unsupervised probation in that case, with the threat of jail time if she failed probation.
The Lawsuit
Dodson’s lawsuit accuses Green River Police Department officials of detaining her wrongfully.
It accuses DFS officials of exacerbating that detention by disregarding evidence that didn’t support “their theory of abuse,” and it accuses investigators from both agencies of advancing a malicious prosecution against Dodson.
It also accuses DFS officials of abuse of process and violating Dodson’s rights.
It accuses officials from both agencies of conspiring against Dodson to interfere with her imminent adoption of the girl.
The civil complaint says Dodson took the 6-year-old girl to the emergency room on Oct. 17, 2024, due to pain in the girl’s right arm.
At that time, the girl had indicated another child at school pulled her arm, the complaint says. Dodson had been the girl’s foster parent and was finalizing her adoption of both that girl and the girl’s other, surviving sister.
The complaint says the doctor diagnosed the girl with an arm fracture. Because Dodson was a foster parent, the doctor reportedly contacted DFS to tell the agency about the diagnosis and gain authorization to perform a surgery on the girl.
One month later, Holzgrafe responded to the elementary school to investigate the girl’s black eye.
The girl said her eye was injured while she was playing with a dog, “and the Wyoming Department of Family Services later confirmed this to be the case,” the document says.
School staff also told Holzgrafe about the girl’s October arm injury.
Both the girl and Dodson said the girl had injured her arm while walking home from the bus.
“Holzgrafe chose not to preserve the video and it was deleted by the school district,” the complaint alleges.
For a few weeks after the judge dismissed Dodson’s criminal case, Wyoming was still waging administrative child protection proceedings against her, court documents say.
But that ended that August when DFS declared its investigators’ findings “unsubstantiated,” the complaint adds.
The Names
Dodson’s lawsuit accuses six people, all in their official capacities, of wrongdoing, as well as the city of Green River.
Those six are:
• DFS Director Korin Schmidt
• Green River Police Chief Shaun Sturlaugson
• Green River Detective Martha Holzgrafe
• DFS social worker Victoria Collett
• DFS special investigator Cassie Torres
• DFS quality improvement manager Lisa Bauman-Brown.
The case is ongoing.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
