Accused: My Fight for Truth, Justice & the Strength to Forgive

by Tonya Craft

  Still, Sandra Lamb insisted she wanted to fix me up with someone, and it was her husband, Greg, who spoke up one evening and said, “What about David?”

  “Oh my gosh, he’d be perfect for you!” Sandra said. David was a friend of Greg’s, a real nice “country boy” who’s an executive vice president of a very successful business, they told me. I rolled my eyes and almost told her to forget it. Everybody was always trying to fix me up with somebody they thought was “perfect” for me. They never came close.

  I had also resolved that I would never, ever go on a blind date.

  Never say “never,” I suppose. My schedule was busy, and I only had every other weekend without the kids, so it took a while to set up. But in April of 2007, I wound up going out to dinner with Sandra and Greg Lamb and a man named David Craft. The three of them came together and picked me up at my house, and wouldn’t you know it: I fell head over heels for the man.

  We saw each other just about every single day after that first date.

  David definitely was a good ol’ country boy, just like they described. He had sandy-blond hair, and he loved bass fishing more than just about anything else in the world. He had skills manning the barbecue, which he used to impress me. (His bacon-wrapped filet mignon is to die for!) He was polite and well mannered. He also happened to be one of the most caring, gentle, kind, and generous men I’d ever met in the whole wide world. And the Lambs weren’t lying when they said he was a successful, self-made man. He’d started by sweeping the floors in the business he was in, a company that sold industrial ovens to all sorts of businesses all over the world. He’d worked his way up through every job in the company until he was finally named executive vice president a few years back.

  He had a beautiful house up in Soddy Daisy, about ten miles north of where I grew up. He had a nice bass boat (his pride and joy). He could afford to take me to the sorts of restaurants that Sandra and Greg liked to go to, so the four of us started to hang out together quite a bit. It was fun. You never would have known David had money by looking at him. He wasn’t flashy at all. He was humble. “Down-to-earth” is a phrase people use too often, but that’s really just how he was.

  We fell in love almost instantly, and it didn’t take long before I introduced him to my kids. They fell in love with him, too.

  Sandra was so thrilled that the two of us hit it off, and so proud that she had played the successful matchmaker, that she took us on as one of her “projects.” Sandra always seemed to have “projects,” whether it was remodeling her house—because, well, it was just remodeled four months ago and it needed updating—or seeing to it that David and I would live happily ever after.

  Don’t get me wrong. When David and I started dating, it was clear as day that the two of us were going to wind up getting married. Sandra just sort of jumped right in and pushed things along. She went to look at a ring with David. She actually saw my engagement ring before I did! She organized the whole wedding herself and insisted that we get married at her house. She decided she was going to be my maid of honor, and she had such a strong personality that I said, “Okay!” If you want to plan my whole wedding, that means I don’t have to do the work. I’m good with that!

  I was surprisingly ready to jump in with both feet, and that’s certainly what I did with David. We met in mid-April, and we set a wedding date of July 7—07/07/07—which had a nice ring to it.

  Chapter 9

  I felt dizzy. My mother and Tammy grabbed hold of me and led me to the sofa, where we all sat silently for what felt like ages. I suppose they didn’t know what to say after the day’s events. My throat was too constricted to speak. I sat in shock, trying to grasp some kind of understanding of this nightmare my life had just turned into.

  When my dad came by to pick up my mom, she was reluctant to leave. I told her I would be okay, even though I doubted that very much. But Tammy promised to stay the night after she dropped Hunter off at his father’s for the weekend, so my mother agreed to go.

  Tammy left soon after with Hunter, who had tears streaming down his face. He didn’t understand what was going on, but even a kid could tell that something devastating had happened in that house that day. After waving good-bye, I walked back into my house alone for the first time since those men first showed up. I felt like a ghost of myself. I didn’t know what to do. There was nothing I could do. No one else I could call. I made my way to Tyler’s bedroom. I looked over and saw Froggie, the stuffed animal that my son slept with every night. I grabbed hold of it and clutched it in my arms and wept.

  Eventually I walked out and collapsed onto the couch. I didn’t move until the ringing of my cell phone snapped me back to attention. I looked at the clock. It was 7:21 P.M. The screen displayed the number of Ashley and Tyler’s stepmother—the same mobile phone Ashley would sometimes use to call me when she was at her father’s for the weekend. I desperately wanted to answer, but I couldn’t. I had placed my signature on that deplorable piece of paper forbidding me to have any contact whatsoever with my own children. So instead I sat there clutching the phone until it stopped ringing. Then I waited and waited, anxiously hoping to hear the “ding” that meant I’d received a message.

  “Ding!”

  With shaking hands, I lifted the phone to my ear and I heard my six-year-old baby girl, Ashley. Whispering. Almost like she was hiding and trying not to be heard: “Hey, Mommy. I love you. Bye. I won’t be seeing you for a very long time. Love you. Bye.”

  Chapter 10

  Looking back, I guess it seemed a little over-the-top to have a “beach wedding” around a pool in a backyard in Georgia. It took a dump truck full of sand to pull off the look. But with Sandra making all the plans and David writing all the checks, I was happy to just let it unfold while I tried to stay focused on everything else that was going on in my life.

  As July 7, 2007, came around, I was ready to enjoy myself—and to finally become Mrs. David Craft in the eyes of friends, family, God, and my children. It was a beautiful afternoon that flowed into quite the party that night. With the twinkling lights and tiki torches, it really felt like a beautiful beach getaway. All the kids (except for Brianna, since it was her house) eventually went for sleepovers elsewhere as the DJ turned up the volume. Everything in my life was so good at that moment that I decided to really cut loose. I drank more than I should have. Vodka and red-raspberry Crystal Light with water was my drink of choice—and I swear before I could empty a glass, Greg Lamb would come along and put another full one in my hand. Toward the end of the evening, I’m pretty sure he was skipping the water part.

  At one point, David and I jumped right into the pool with all of our clothes on. A whole bunch of other partygoers jumped in, too. The thing I remember most about the whole evening is how much laughter there was. Everyone seemed to have a great time.

  Thankfully we didn’t have to worry about driving. We’d made arrangements with the Lambs to spend our wedding night in one of the guest rooms at their sprawling house. Still, I shouldn’t have consumed so much alcohol. I wound up getting sick in the middle of the night. I didn’t make it to the bathroom and left a red stain on the Lambs’ carpet. I was mortified. David rented a portable carpet cleaner the next day, and when the stain didn’t come out, we insisted that we’d pay to replace the carpet. But Sandra and Greg wouldn’t hear of it. Sandra just laughed and laughed when she learned what I’d done. It seemed as if my behavior that night didn’t bother her in the slightest. It bothered me, though. I was incredibly disappointed in myself, but I think Sandra enjoyed the funny story she got out of it, and it certainly didn’t deter her involvement in my life. She even tried to convince us to buy a house right up the street from her.

  I didn’t want to uproot our kids from the perfect little life we’d created in Chickamauga, and David seemed perfectly comfortable with downsizing and moving in with the three of us. Lucky for me, my kids were comfortable with that idea, too.

  When fall came, life only got better. I swear every
night at our house was a party. Not literally, of course. I was always strict about my kids getting their homework done and eating a good dinner, and we always had a million things going on with the kids’ schedules. But somehow with the four of us in that house, life was always fun. We used to sit and watch Dancing with the Stars as a family before the kids went to bed some nights. Tyler and I would get up and do our best Mel B and Maksim moves, trying to mimic the spins and dips they were doing on the dance floor, and then Ashley and David would get up there and do their best Hélio and Julianne, and we’d trade off and score each other, and of course we really couldn’t do any of those moves so we’d wind up falling down and laughing like crazy.

  I felt so blessed. You hear a lot about the difficulties of blending families after a divorce and remarriage. With us it was never difficult.

  Maybe God knew we were going to have enough to deal with without having to deal with that, too.

  The fall of 2007 kicked off beautifully in my work life as well. I dolled up my classroom all over again and met a whole new crop of kids and parents. Ashley was a kindergartner by then, so both of my kids were in the same school right down the hall from me and able to walk to my classroom at the end of the day.

  I happened to have the daughter of Sandra Lamb’s best friend in my class that year: a little girl named Lauren Wilson. Lauren’s parents had actually requested me to be her teacher because of all the glowing things Sandra had to say about me. The principal told me that, which I thought was a bit strange. Parents aren’t supposed to handpick their kids’ teachers, but it seemed she’d obliged the Wilsons’ request right away.

  Lauren’s mother, Sherri Wilson, and Sandra were like peas in a pod. Sherri stepped up the exact same way Sandra did to serve as a classroom mom before I had even asked for volunteers.

  The thing about Sherri is that her last name preceded her everywhere she went. The Lambs might have been well-off, but the Wilsons had both money and power. They were one of the most powerful families in the whole region. The Wilsons owned Angel Ambulance Service, the ambulance company that served all of North Georgia and all the way up over the Tennessee border into Chattanooga. Sherri’s husband, DeWayne, also happened to be the county coroner. The Wilsons were an old Chickamauga family, and from what I understood, they had millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of contracts with the county. They even owned the local funeral homes. So the Wilsons had their hand in everybody’s business, from life right on through death.

  Brianna Lamb was a second-grader at that point, and she was good friends with Sherri’s older daughter, Lydia, so that whole bunch of children would wind up hanging out in my classroom after school sometimes.

  The thing is, just as I probably wouldn’t have been friends with Sandra Lamb under any other circumstance, I probably wouldn’t have been friends with Sherri Wilson, either. There was something about the combination of Sherri and Sandra that didn’t sit well with me. It’s almost as if they brought out the worst in each other, like they were tryin’ to one-up each other at times in the way they spoke about other people. I couldn’t help but wonder what they might be saying about me when I was out of their presence.

  And heaven forbid anyone ever said anything critical about their children. Their children seemed to be off-limits to any sort of reprimand—and that is difficult when you are the teacher or adult who might ever have to correct them.

  For the most part, though, Sandra’s and Sherri’s talk would just go in one ear and out the other. I didn’t have any reason to focus on it. I was just a happy-go-lucky newlywed, blissfully enjoying everything and everybody. I was happy to have Sherri’s help in the classroom and happy to see our kids getting along.

  I use that word a lot when talking about those days: “happy.” That’s what I was. I was happy.

  Chapter 11

  Hey, Mommy. I love you. Bye. I won’t be seeing you for a very long time. Love you. Bye.

  I listened to Ashley’s message over and over. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t understand why she would say something like that. When you don’t have much to go on, you cling to things and try to dissect them and discern every little bit of information you can.

  When Tammy returned after dropping Hunter off at his father’s, I said, “You’ll never believe the message that Ashley just left me.” I repeated it to her word for word and then bombarded her with my thoughts on its oddities.

  “Tammy, that detective said very clearly that Joal knew nothing about these allegations. Why would Ashley say she’s not going to see me for a long time if somebody hadn’t told her that? And why would they tell her? Joal must know something. He must! And what did he tell my kids? And why was she cryin’ so hard when she left this house? Did she know something was happening even then?”

  Tammy did her best to help me calm down. She tried to say I might be getting worked up over nothing, and maybe I should just take a step back. So I played the message for her so she could hear it for herself, and after hearing Ashley’s voice she agreed with me.

  “You’re right, Tonya. It makes no sense,” she said. “Somebody must’ve told her something.”

  We continued to analyze and scrutinize every aspect of every word I’d heard that day as the night progressed. Tammy also tried unsuccessfully to get me to consume even a small amount of food. My stomach would reject anything edible before it would reach my lips. The rest of the night devolved into a blur. I am aware that I spoke with my mother several times, and that I also phoned another very close friend of mine, Diana—who was not only shocked when I told her what was going on but also immediately jumped in to help me scrutinize the situation. I appreciated her directness and willingness to help.

  Diana was a dear friend from Tennessee who had known me for a few years longer than Tammy—longer than any of these new friends from Chickamauga. To have her support in the middle of that first night meant the world to me.

  As the night went on, I’d fall asleep, then wake in a state of panic. I was fearful that one of those times I’d doze off only to find law enforcement back at my door, busting in with a search warrant or arresting me after all. At some point well after midnight, I grabbed a permanent marker and wrote my attorney’s phone number on both palms of my hands. Tammy wrote the number on both of her palms, too, in case she was the only one with immediate access to a phone line.

  Every hour felt like days, and I couldn’t imagine how I’d possibly make it through the weekend.

  “I think we should call some people,” Tammy finally said in a hushed tone at the breakfast table on Saturday morning. I still couldn’t eat or drink. I couldn’t swallow. “Just some of your closest friends. To come over and pray for you. To pray about what’s happening, and most of all to pray for your children. What do you think of that?”

  Suddenly there was something uplifting and purposeful to focus on. Tammy made some calls, and that afternoon, seven friends showed up at my house. Seven people whom I had come to trust and love. None of them knew exactly why they had come. They just showed up because I needed them—yet each person who entered my house seemed to sense the unspeakable atrocity of the situation. The heaviness that permeated the air as I welcomed everyone was awful. Everyone took a seat in my living room and sat there, silently, until finally I sat down on an ottoman, tucked my feet underneath me, wrapped my arms around my body, and fixed my gaze on the floor while trying to gather the strength to say what I needed to say.

  “I have been accused of sexually abusing three little girls,” I said. “I wanted you to hear this from me before you hear it from anyone else. I want you to know that I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything that could be misconstrued like this. I did nothing of the sort. I am innocent.”

  It was the first time I had uttered that phrase out loud.

  “The detectives who showed up at my front door yesterday threatened to arrest me, but they didn’t. As far as I know, a person cannot be arrested when they haven’t done anything wrong. So I’ll be okay. I’ve contact
ed an attorney and I have faith that the truth will come out, and this will all get worked out on Monday morning, but I’m having a real tough time right now. All I ask is that you pray for the truth, and pray for my babies—”

  The tears flowed when I spoke of my children. I looked up for a moment and saw tears on just about everyone else’s faces, too.

  “Tyler and Ashley don’t deserve to be put through this. So please pray for them, okay?”

  Everyone had questions, of course. But no one seemed to question my innocence. No one who knew me, no one who cared about me, could possibly think I had actually done something to harm a child. Any child. I took some comfort in that. We talked, we cried, and we prayed.

  As the day progressed, one by one, my friends had to leave to get home to their families and back to their lives. In my agony it felt as if the entire world were standing still. It was difficult for me to accept that life around me was still going on. Diana and Tammy both stayed with me into the evening and persuaded me, finally, to eat a little something.

  Diana realized how worried I was about my children and how this would affect them. She insisted I get in touch with an attorney she knew through church up in Tennessee. An attorney named Clancy Covert. Diana put us in touch on the phone that day, and I told him most of what had happened. We made an appointment for Monday afternoon—hopefully late enough that I’d have already met with my local attorney and heard back from Brandon Boggess about the interviews with my kids, so I could bring them back home. So much would be happening that Monday, it was overwhelming for me to think about. It’s difficult to keep track of a schedule when you’re so panicked you can barely force yourself to eat.

  Diana saw how distressed I was and she asked if I’d like to come spend the night at her home on Sunday. “You could just come back with me after church,” she said. Tammy would have to go home and take care of Hunter that night, and I’ll admit I was scared to death about staying in my house alone. I was terrified those men were going to come back and arrest me, so I was very thankful for Diana’s offer.