CHEYENNE — The death penalty won’t be pursued against a Cheyenne woman accused of murdering her newborn baby boy and abandoning him in a ditch 38 years ago.
Eva Martinez, now 57, also has been denied a motion to throw out her bind-over to Laramie County District Court on a charge of first-degree murder and have a new preliminary hearing.
Sweetwater County Attorney Daniel Erramouspe, who’s acting as a special prosecutor in the case for the Laramie County Attorney’s Office, confirmed he won’t seek the death penalty during a July 30 hearing on Martinez’s motion.
“It was not my intention to seek the death penalty on this case,” he said during the hearing with First Judicial District Court Judge Catherine Rogers. “I just wanted to get that on the record.”
Also on the record is that Rogers didn’t buy the argument of Martinez’s public defender, Stacy Kirven, that the original judge who presided over the preliminary hearing cited the wrong legal terminology to move the case forward to trial.
“We all know exactly why this motion is even being filed, and it’s because if there’s a conviction, they’ve already started with one issue for appeal,” said Judge Rogers, according to a transcript of the hearing.
“It’s the way our system works,” she added. “That’s the way laws developed in Wyoming. And so even though it’s caused a bit of a delay, it’s been an interesting issue.”
She then moved forward with the case as Martinez, who is free on bond, officially pleaded not guilty.
‘Semantics’
The crux of Kirven’s argument is a forensic review of the original autopsy of the newborn, dubbed “Baby John Doe,” and whether that constituted a “second autopsy” of the body.
That the judge repeatedly referred to a “second autopsy” while testimony at the first preliminary hearing indicated there wasn’t one is reason to throw out the results of the hearing, Kirven argued.
“In the preliminary hearing, Detective Martinez unequivocally testified that there was not a second autopsy,” she said. “He did that two times.”
The public defender was referring to Detective Sgt. Ryan Martinez of the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office (no relation).
After that, the judge referred to the findings made by the forensic review “being made based upon the second autopsy,” Kirven said. “And that doesn’t exist, there wasn’t a second autopsy.”
She also argued that inferring the meaning of various terms shouldn’t fly.
“A second autopsy is not the same as an updated autopsy,” she said. “It is not the same as a review of an autopsy and that, quite frankly, is very important.”
That’s where Judge Rogers stopped Kirven, saying that while she can appreciate that position, it’s clear the first judge “was referring to the work that resulted in the updates of the death certificate being a second autopsy when we know it doesn’t fulfill the technical definition of the term.”
Erramouspe said debating “second autopsy” in reference to reviewing the original documents is “semantics” and that taking things too literally can be dangerous.
“I mean, are we saying that (the first judge) went out and actually dug up a second autopsy or imagined a second autopsy to happen?” he said. “It’s clear on the record what she’s talking about.
“She’s talking about … reviewing the files and then coming up with this determination.”
Gruesome Discovery
The body of Baby John Doe was discovered Feb. 28, 1988, near a culvert off Happy Jack Road just west of Cheyenne.
Martinez would have been 18 at the time, and repeatedly told investigators during their investigation leading up to her June arrest that she was never pregnant around that time.
However, DNA testing shows it’s 1.97 million times more likely she’s the baby’s mother than anyone else, according to investigators.
While the grisly discovery of the boy’s body happened more than 38 years ago, it wasn’t until 2021 that advanced DNA testing allowed investigators to advance the case and identify Martinez as the boy’s probable mother, according to an affidavit of probable cause written by Detective Martinez.
When first interviewed by detectives decades later on Dec. 22, 2025, Martinez “repeatedly denied knowing anything about Baby John Doe or having any children or pregnancies around that time frame,” the affidavit says.
It was during that interview that a sample of her DNA was taken.
When she was interviewed again months later after results showed the strong probability of her being Baby John Doe’s mother, she maintained her first story, according to the affidavit.
“She denied having any knowledge of Baby John Doe, having knowledge of anyone else who was responsible for Baby John Doe’s death, or why Baby John Doe’s body was placed in the culvert at Happy Jack Road and McKinney Drive,” the affidavit continues.
She claimed she wasn’t in Cheyenne around that timeframe, but investigators could not verify that information.
Martinez graduated from Cheyenne Central High School in 1987, and at some point afterward moved to Las Vegas, where she worked for about the next 20 years before returning to Cheyenne, the affidavit says.
Finding The Body
When Laramie County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to a call at Happy Jack Road and McKinney Drive just southwest of the boundary for F.E. Warren Air Force Base in 1988, what they found was anything but routine, the affidavit says.
People who had been walking in the area discovered the dead baby near a culvert.
“Their juvenile son had initially noticed a dog chewing on something in the area, and they later realized it was a deceased baby,” the affidavit says. “It was determined that the deceased baby had initially been inside the culvert prior to the dog moving it.”
The baby was “abandoned, unclothed, deceased … discovered near the roadway,” according to an LCSO report announcing Martinez’s arrest last month.
“An autopsy concluded that the baby was a fully developed, full-term, 6.5-pound baby,” according to the report. “The autopsy found no evidence of significant injury, congenital anomaly, or disease.”
It also was determined that the baby was born alive and remained alive for “an amount of time due to air being in the baby’s lungs and stomach,” the report says.
However, at the time the cause and manner of the boy’s death were undetermined.
If convicted of first-degree murder, Martinez could get life in prison.
Because of the complexities of this type of case, including securing expert witnesses, a trial date hasn’t been set, but Judge Rogers said it’s not likely to happen before late 2027.
Greg Johnson can be reached at greg@cowboystatedaily.com.
