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

by Tonya Craft

  “Yes,” Brianna replied.

  So now we’re back to this happening in kindergarten?

  Kittle, to her credit, tried to get some clarification on that matter. But Brianna’s answers only made it more confusing. She talked about my old house, then “she moved to the new house where she did it, where what happened … It was, like, down in Chickamauga.”

  Kittle asked again, “Where did this happen in the bathtub? At what house did it happen at?”

  “Her … not her old one, her second house,” Brianna said.

  I didn’t live in Chickamauga during Brianna’s kindergarten year—the only year she was in my class and the only year that I was her teacher.

  Kittle then pulled out anatomical dolls and asked Brianna to talk about what I did. Brianna changed her story significantly from the way she’d described things during her previous interviews. Instead of accusing me of using a “finger,” she said I used “fingers,” and she showed Kittle what she meant by pressing all of her fingers and her thumb together and making a motion, as if I was sticking my whole entire adult-sized hand up inside her vagina. The fact that a child would even suggest such a thing made me sick.

  Holly also asked her when the last time anything happened to her was, and Brianna replied, “First grade.” So that would have been through May of 2007. And yet her indictments listed a time frame that went through 2008.

  Brianna went on to talk about me throwing her down the steps and smacking her across the face. When Kittle asked her when this happened, she said it was when her mom was waiting for her out in my driveway. So I threw her down the stairs and this little girl doesn’t have a mark on her face, or a bruise on her body, or a broken arm, or even wet cheeks from the tears she cried? Not to mention none of it had come up in three previous interviews or even in the complaints her mother made to DFACS and others about me.

  None of it made any sense. Neither did the timing.

  It was April 1, 2009, when Brianna Lamb made these statements on the record that I’d penetrated her in the worst imaginable ways. Yet it took the detectives and the judge and the ADAs more than a month to have me arrested and thrown in jail on that charge. I couldn’t help but wonder what held them up for so long. Was there someone involved who recognized the inconsistencies in the stories? Did someone recognize the obvious coaching? Why wouldn’t they have arrested me on these new charges right away? Were they scared? Did they feel they needed the grand jury indictment in order to back up their actions? And was there not even one person involved who questioned whether the deteriorating state of mind of this little girl who was now calling me “the Evil One” deserved some investigation of its own?

  Seeing those interviews fueled my desire to know even more about how forensic interviews are supposed to be conducted with children. I started googling everything I could think of, and I read up on three very famous false-allegation cases: more on the Bakersfield case; the McMartin Case, a daycare case from the 1980s in California in which the children’s allegations included wild stories of underground tunnels and lions; and the Michaels case in New Jersey, which resulted in the accused being convicted on hundreds of counts of sexually abusing nineteen children—all of which were overturned after the accused spent many years in prison.

  Then, in the middle of one very long night, I came across something referred to as the “mousetrap studies.” The researchers in the mousetrap studies—Dr. Maggie Bruck, a psychologist at McGill University, and Dr. Stephen Ceci, a psychologist at Cornell University—took a bunch of little kids around four or five years old and tested the idea of implanting memories through conversation. None of these kids had ever had their finger caught in a mousetrap in real life before. The researchers interviewed their parents and had them sign affidavits and so forth to make sure of it. They started out by talking to these kids about what they had for breakfast and other everyday sorts of stuff. Then, after gaining their trust, the interviewers started talking to these kids about how their fingers got caught in a mousetrap. The interviewers would ask them, repeatedly, “Do you remember when that happened?” The kids said “no” at first. But then, when the question and the topic kept coming up, pretty soon those same kids answered “yes.” Then they started telling elaborate stories about their fingers getting caught and how much it hurt and what happened afterward. They came up with all kinds of stories, like, “The ambulance was going, and the sirens were going, and we had to make an emergency stop because somebody ran out in front of the ambulance!” I’m paraphrasing all of this, but the shocking result of the study was more than just “Oh my gosh, you can not only get a child to believe something that didn’t happen, but they can be detailed about it and even embellish it on their own.”

  The New York Times took a look at some of these studies in an article by Daniel Goleman, which appeared on June 11, 1993. The first few paragraphs sum it up pretty well:

  The testimony of small children has usually been considered truthful unless proved otherwise. Over the past decade such testimony has led to convictions in many child-abuse cases, and the younger the child, the less likely psychologists have thought it was that information could have been fabricated. But now a series of recent studies has turned this conventional wisdom on its head.

  Researchers have found new evidence that persistent questioning can lead young children to describe elaborate accounts of events that never occurred, even when at first they denied them.

  The research is at the center of a continuing scientific debate over the vexing question of how much judges and juries should rely on a child’s word when that is the only evidence of abuse.

  The article explained that an estimated 20,000 children testify in sexual-abuse trials each year, and as many as 100,000 are involved in investigations, many of which lead to plea agreements. It then directly addressed the issue of repeated questioning over a period of time:

  Certain techniques often used by investigators with young children increase the likelihood of false reports, the findings show. One is persistent, repeated questioning over periods of several weeks. When sexual abuse is suspected, children are typically asked the same questions by case workers, police investigators, and lawyers, as well as parents, before they testify in court.

  But that repetition may lead some young children to concoct stories, according to results of a study by Dr. Ceci and colleagues reported last month at a meeting on emotional memory at the University of Chicago. …

  “The more often you ask young children to think about something, the easier it becomes for them to make something up that they think is a memory,” he said.

  The worst part to me is that when the researchers eventually told the kids the truth and said, “Okay, your finger didn’t actually get caught in a mousetrap,” the kids would fight back: “Yes, it did!”

  Once a memory is established, children seem to adopt it as a real event.

  As one might imagine, the effects of this in a courtroom can be chilling.

  The studies also claimed that the use of anatomical dolls during questioning (not unlike the ones Holly Kittle had used during Brianna’s fourth interview) could lead to false memories and false allegations in some cases.45

  Basically, what I learned is that it takes extraordinary amounts of work on the part of detectives and therapists and everyone involved to get to the truth when it comes to children. It seems that children want to please any authority figure they’re talking to and therefore can modify their answers to fit what they think the authority figure wants to hear. And yet all of the interviews with the kids in my case were filled with obviously leading questions and questions that offered the children a choice of suggested answers (rather than letting the child come up with the answers themselves), plus the sorts of repeated questions that might make any child think, Gee, I must have answered that question incorrectly, so maybe I should change my answer to try to give the right answer!46

  I got quite the education. What I couldn’t understand then, and what I stil
l don’t understand now, is why so many individuals who deal with children’s cases all the time, who have such a massive impact on families and children all over this country, don’t seem to take the same time or put in the same effort to educate themselves in these matters before possibly ruining lives through false accusations—and potentially destroying the very children they claim to be protecting in the process.

  From my viewpoint, there is something very wrong with a system that allows someone with a five-day training course to conduct forensic interviews with children in a sexual-abuse case. Would a teacher be allowed to educate after a five-day training course? Every parent in America should be outraged at the very idea of that. Even if the abuse is real, how is an interviewer with limited experience or education going to get to the truth of what happened?

  In my opinion, there is something even more wrong with a system that has the audacity to go ahead and arrest people, to take them to trial and try to put them in prison for life based on those same faulty interviews. In fact, it seems to me that some ADAs don’t even read the interview transcripts. If they did, they couldn’t possibly move ahead when bad interviews happen. It seems to me that the arrest warrants in these cases are based on the written “summaries” of those interviews, to which there don’t seem to be any checks or balances to help discern errors or even purposeful omissions that could be meant to sway the court’s bias in the direction of guilt.

  In my case, none of the interview summaries seemed to mention any portion of the discussions that might have pointed toward my innocence. So do ADAs glance over the summaries and then go tell a judge their own summary of the summary they’ve just read? The whole thing seems like one big childhood game of telephone out on the playground! Only in this game, people’s lives are at stake—and, in some cases, few people in the game seem to take the time or make the effort to go back and find out what was really said in the first place.

  Chapter 38

  I spent hundreds of hours sifting through phone records as we got them. Joal was quite a talker, so his in particular were filled with an abundance of calls and hundreds of different phone numbers—including the dozens of calls he’d made to and received from Sandra Lamb, Laurie Evans, Stephen Keith, Sherri Wilson, and others involved in my case.47

  There was one odd number that really stuck out to me, though. It was a New Jersey number that Joal had called more than a hundred times, for long periods of time, and especially around some of the key dates of our custody hearings and even my arrests. I called that number and a woman answered. I tried my best to confirm who she was, but she wouldn’t give me any information. The best I could do was track down an address in Newark that was tied to that particular phone number. I wasn’t sure if it was truly important or not. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe she was an old friend of Joal’s I’d never known. Maybe she was a girlfriend or former girlfriend. Maybe she was a psychic or shrink or someone that he was leaning on. I had no idea. I tucked that number and that woman’s voice into the back of my mind and tried to focus on the information I did have.

  Once I had most of the numbers figured out, David and I worked side by side putting everything into Excel spreadsheets and cross-referencing those calls against the calls that showed up on other people’s phone records, sorting by phone number, triangulating between all of the various records so I could see what went on. David was much better at putting things into the computer than I was. I’ll admit it felt good to work on some of this with him right there at my side. I think the collaboration was good for our marriage—and it was certainly good for my case.

  Sandra Lamb’s and Kelly McDonald’s phone records never showed up, no matter what we did to try to get a hold of them. (Those records wouldn’t show up until near the very end of my trial—when it was too late to matter.) Even without their records, David and I were able to put together the basics of patterns and routines between all of those people.

  The facts illuminated through those phone records were enormous to me. For instance, during our deposition of Sandra Lamb, on that same stressful day when we deposed David, Sandra stated that she had never, ever called Kim Walker, and therefore never could have “threatened her” the way Kim had described to us. Well, I might not be able to prove she threatened her because their conversation wasn’t recorded, but guess what? Kim voluntarily gave me her phone records, and Sandra’s phone number is sure as heck on there—as an incoming call—during the exact time period when all of that hullabaloo about the sidewalk chalk and the parents questioning their kids about the boyfriend-girlfriend game had occurred. It was a fact. Sandra had called Kim.

  Basically, what the phone records showed to me is that everybody was talking to everybody—except me.

  It was exhausting, but doing all of that work was good for me. I think it was part of what kept me from losing my mind during all of that waiting and all of that time that I was unable to see Ashley and so rarely able to see Tyler.

  Keeping track of it all was certainly a challenge. In fact, one night in the middle of all of this I left my trusty black laptop open for a few minutes while I went to the bathroom, and our dog Candy Cane started digging at the keys like he was trying to bury a bone. The keys went flying everywhere.

  “Candy Cane! No!” I screamed as I shooed him away.

  It took forever to find those keys and snap them back into place. I never did find the “W.” It’s still missing to this day. One of the dogs must’ve eaten it. I had to go through everything to make sure I hadn’t lost any research. Luckily my files were all okay, but the constant spate of near disaster was almost comical at times.

  “Really, God?” I shouted. “Really?”

  Realizing how quickly things could go wrong made me double my efforts to get everything organized and backed up so nothing important would get lost. I worked with Clancy to put all of my files into a Dropbox account that could be shared between all of my attorneys, so we could see everything over the Internet. I went down to Cary and Scott’s office and organized all of their files on my case, too. I color-coded and labeled every binder. I had their staff running all over, making photocopies, stapling, unstapling, binding, alphabetizing, and scanning. In the middle of it all, I kept asking Cary and Scott, “How on earth are you going to get to the information you need during a trial if it’s not perfectly organized and arranged?” They both said they’d always done just fine. “Well, guess what? You haven’t won every case you’ve ever tried, have you?” I said. “I am certainly not going to be on the losing side of any attorney’s record because they won’t collate and color code.”

  They didn’t like it much when I said things like that, but when I was fully engaged, God filled me with so much clarity of mind and purpose, there was nothing that could stop me. I wouldn’t stay that way all the time, of course. I don’t think anyone could. I would stumble and go into free fall and sleep for three days and cry. But when I was up, my hope was that everyone benefitted from the work I did.

  In public, acquaintances would sometimes say to me, “You’re so strong to keep fighting like this.” I wanted to say to them, “Well, what else am I supposed to do? Roll over and just let them put me in prison?”

  Chapter 39

  In the middle of one sleepless night, I decided to turn my attention to a thick binder full of documents that I’d ignored for weeks—a file marked “Laurie Evans’s Divorce Records.”

  For the longest time I’d thought, What more could possibly be in those records that would make a difference anyway? I was relieved that she wasn’t seeing my children any longer. What else is there to know?

  I barely got through the first page before I pulled out my stash of Post-it notes, pens, and highlighters. Laurie Evans had been diagnosed with PTSD.48 In November 2006, Laurie Evans’s attorney filed a motion in her divorce case stating that she was not emotionally stable enough to participate in a deposition due to “severe emotional distress” and PTSD. Yet since July 2006 she’d been employed by the CAC to “provid
e therapy to children who have experienced traumatic events,” to oversee the therapeutic program, and to provide staff supervision and legal consultation. This individual was simultaneously claiming severe abuse and was in therapy for it while she was providing therapy and legal consultation on abuse cases for children. Not just my children. Not just Brianna and Chloe, whom she was still seeing, but lots of children.

  According to the divorce records, which we pulled from public record, which anybody could see at any time, this woman had a diagnosis that placed her on the spectrum described as “severely impaired.” It seemed obvious to me that a person in that condition should not be treating children. Is this the only person whose recommendation led ADA Chris Arnt, as well as Judge Van Pelt, to keep me from seeing my daughter for the past year and a half? This woman is clearly crucial to my case. I wanted to kick myself for waiting to go through every detail of her history.

  My attorneys managed to get a motions hearing set for November 23, 2009. It was the first time we’d be going back to a courtroom in Georgia since spring (despite the constant custody appearances in Tennessee courts), and we had a lot to address. Judge Van Pelt agreed to hear arguments for the demurrer (our argument that the indictments were faulty and not based on charges of any actual merit) that day, as well as our requests for a change of venue, and for more discovery. (Other than the DVDs of the interviews with the girls, the ADAs had sent us next to nothing. We knew there must be more.) Most importantly, Judge Van Pelt would hear our new arguments for modification of the bond—and hopefully obliterate all of Laurie Evans’s previous testimony and recommendations about Ashley and Tyler, based on the findings in those divorce records and more.

  My attorneys and I felt better prepared going into that motions hearing than we had going into any hearing since the beginning. All of the months of work we’d put in had paid off. Add to that the results of my polygraph exams, which we were finally prepared to enter into evidence, and we felt strongly that Judge Van Pelt would be compelled to drop at least some of the twenty-two counts of the indictment.