MOMMY DEAREST: DID THIS IDAHO MOTHER MURDER HER DAUGHTER?

Ava Granger had a brief and difficult life up until her death on September 10. Her mother, Penny Cleary-Granger—Hayden resident and older sister of ski racer Katie Cleary—seemed like a paragon of motherhood to most who knew her. By all appearances, she’d gone to heroic lengths to care for her daughter, Ava, who was born premature and had been diagnosed with failure to thrive. But now, the Journal Sentinel has learned, Penny Cleary-Granger is under investigation for the murder of her three-year-old daughter. What happened?

“Penny was such a good mom,” a family friend of the Grangers, Samantha Perkins, told us. “I don’t know how I would cope if my child was sick, and now she’s under suspicion of hurting her? I can’t even imagine. I don’t know how she’s still standing.”

A look at her extensive social media history paints Penny, 29, as a devoted mother who would go to any lengths for her daughter, and a loving military spouse who kept the home fires burning for her husband, Air Force Captain Stewart Granger, while he was away on multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Journal Sentinel investigation has discovered five separate Facebook pages for Cleary-Granger, with the followers totaling over 7,000. Many are “friends” who had never met Ava or Penny in person, but have followed Penny’s extensive chronicles of her daughter’s illnesses for years from such far-flung locations as New York, London, and Perth.

Neighbors of the Grangers in their small town of Hayden, ID, remember Ava as a happy little girl, despite her many trips to the hospital. “She was cute as a button,” Nadine Frost, who lived next door to the Grangers, said. “And with Stewart having to be gone so much, there was a lot for Penny to deal with, you know? But she never complained. Even though she was working part-time and being a full-time mom, she was always offering to watch our grandkids. And she was so good with them! We always felt so secure since she was a doctor and all. She was constantly taking them in for earaches, fevers, all that stuff kids get.”

Though records show that Penny Cleary-Granger holds a nursing degree from Boise State, a Journal Sentinel investigation into her employment history shows that she falsified documents in order to work as a physician’s assistant, a job she left voluntarily before her daughter was born. She appears to have told friends and acquaintances that she was still working as a physician’s assistant or, in some cases, a doctor.