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

by Tonya Craft

  I couldn’t tell what the jury thought, but I could sure tell they were paying attention. There wasn’t one of them who took their eyes off Doc when he spoke. From what I could see, he was mesmerizing.

  “What’s Chloe do?” he continued. “She’s on-script. But Kelly is a loose cannon, according to Sandra Lamb. They’re worried about this. So Sandra calls Kim Walker, Skyler’s mom, and threatens her. The cops call and threaten her: ‘You better get your kid back down here, we’re going to interview her again.’ With no control for parental influences. With no control for rumor formation. No control for repeated questioning effects. No control for modification: ‘Outside your clothes or inside your clothes?’ ‘Outside.’ ‘Okay, was she nice to you?’ ‘Yeah, she was nice to me.’ ‘Well, a minute ago you said it was inside your clothes, tell me how it felt when it was inside your clothes.’”

  Doc started flinging his hands all around and shook his head. “That’s a modification! She didn’t say that. You said that! There was no control over modifications, no control over suggesting things to children. My goodness. We’re bringing you the premier interviewer for the State of Georgia who testified for the prosecution hundreds and hundreds of times. She’s a nurse, she’s a PhD, she’s a professor, and she says, ‘Wait a minute. I teach this subject.’ She will tell you, ‘I’ve done this for decades. These interviews stink!’”

  I felt like Doc had everyone in the palm of his hand. I was so glad we had him on board.

  “The evidence will show the rest of the story: They take Ashley and Tyler away,” he said. “And just a little while later, she gets a phone call from her little daughter, Ashley. ‘I love you, Mommy, but I’m not going to see you for a very long time.’ What?”

  Doc got into the whole previous story about Ashley and Chloe maybe touching each other, way back in 2006, and Kelly smacking Chloe and screaming, “I told you not to do this!”

  “So what does ‘evil child sexual abuser Miss Tonya’ do? She goes immediately to the physician and says, ‘Please check my daughter.’ Leaves the room and asks a pediatric diagnostic to examine her daughter. Ashley’s fine. Okay. But the moms are talking, and the evidence will show, Chloe has done this before with other children,” Doc said.

  “Fast-forward, 2008, detectives show up and Miss Tonya, she’s got a knack for picking guys. I don’t know what happens. All that education. She had a very bitter divorce with Mr. Henke. The evidence will show that there is serious pathology in this family. Bitter divorce. And Ashley, little Ashley, when she had to go visit after Sarah—oh, yeah, Joal married Sarah. Sarah was Miss Tonya’s student in Sunday school. That’s who Joal picks to marry. Anyway—Joal and his family are so difficult, Ashley, when she has to go: chronic, routine diarrhea. Tonya asks [the] pediatric diagnostic what to do about it, and what does Tonya do about it?”

  He described Ashley’s diaper rash and how I put medicine on her to help her—the way any mother would.

  “Ashley says to Tonya that Sarah, the young girl that Joal married, is showering with her. ‘Okay.’ Ashley who’s having this chronic upset stomach, says, ‘Sarah’s showering with me and Daddy’s in there, too.’ Tonya goes, ‘Oooh.’ And she says, ‘Oh, honey, okay.’ She tries to figure out what to do about it. And Ashley says, ‘She teaches me how to shave,’ and she’s shaving her pubic hair! Tonya says, ‘Oh my God.’ She calls her friend, the sheriff.” Doc motioned toward the prosecutors. “They didn’t tell you that, did they? She says, ‘I think my daughter’s been abused.’ And she makes an appointment. The deputy that handles this, who’ll come and testify, called her right back, and they set up a forensic interview that was scheduled to happen right after Memorial Day weekend in 2008. So when Detective Deal shows up, she had already set up an interview for Ashley! They didn’t tell you that.

  “So they take her in for an interview, and what does she say? Yeah, boyfriend-girlfriend game, yeah. And ‘Mommy put medicine on me. Mommy put medicine on me, ’cause I was sore.’ And despite all the attempts, repeated questions, sadistic questions, modifying what she said: ‘She just put medicine on me.’ And when she got hammered and hammered by this interviewer—oh, wait a minute, was the investigator investigating an alternative hypothesis to get to what was going on here? Nope. Just trying to get the goods. So what did little Ashley say? She asked her to stop questioning her like that. And then she got badgered and badgered and she started to cry! And she told the interviewer that her daddy, that this guy who the evidence will show has serious pathology, had been badgering her and badgering her about Miss Tonya and ‘touching.’ Oh, wait a minute, no control for parental influences before you come into the interview—”

  ADA Len Gregor stood up right then and interrupted: “Your Honor, at this point I’m just going to object because we keep getting into argument. I don’t like objecting during the opening, but I’ve given Mr. Lorandos a lot of leeway here, but we just keep going back to it. If he wants to talk about what the evidence he thinks will show or expects to show this jury, that’s fine. But he keeps arguing now, and I want to object to arguing.”

  Doc never looked back. He never looked at Len Gregor at all. He never looked at the judge. He simply looked down at his notes on the podium until Mr. Gregor stopped speaking, and Judge House piped in: “Let’s stick to what’s pertinent to opening.”

  Doc started speaking immediately, without missing a beat.

  “So the evidence will clearly show, the evidence will clearly show that Ashley didn’t say anything about Tonya. However, the evidence will also show … that as soon as she got into the clutches of, into the custody of the dad, and with the ‘therapist’ that the cops put her with, that it got worse and worse and worse. No contact with Mom. None. Kept away from Mom for two years! [ …] The evidence will show that the ‘do-over,’ the idea, the rationale that’s used, is to say, ‘Well, they were scared and they had to be in therapy for a while, and they had to trust us so they could tell the story.’ And if that was true, if that was true, why would decades and decades of scientific research—”

  Len Gregor stood up again: “Your Honor, again, we’re going into argument.”

  Judge House said, “Let’s quit the argument and get to the reason why we’re here, for the opening statement.”

  Doc kept pacing back and forth and responded, “Opening statement is argument, but I’ll try to confine myself to what the evidence will show. The evidence will show, and we’re going to bring in a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry from Vanderbilt who wrote the guidelines, and he will tell you—he’s been doing this for thirty years—he wrote guidelines, he’s published gigantic amounts of research on these very issues, and the expert will come in and he’ll tell you that when you do not control for parental influences, when you do not control for repeated questioning effects, when you do not control for rumor mills, you get very badly skewed and emotionally abused children.”

  Doc went on to talk about the physical examinations of the girls and how we would bring in experts who would show that those examinations didn’t show any signs of abuse whatsoever: “The evidence will show it’s not indicative of sexual abuse any more than a bump on your head is indicative of a car wreck.”

  Doc’s opening was already longer than the ADA’s. I knew he was only getting started in some ways. We had so much we wanted to say. We had so much we needed to share. It seemed to me that the difference in the opening statements laid out for the jury what the difference in this whole trial would be: The prosecutors were relying on the words of the accusers and their parents, the therapist (whom they didn’t mention by name), and one nurse who’d examined the girls (who we felt wasn’t nearly the “expert” she claimed she was), all built around the contradicting stories of Brianna Lamb. Brianna seemed to be their biggest focus. We, however, were the ones who were going to bring that jury loads of evidence to consider, different voices, different experts, different friends and family who would all tell a very different story.

  I hoped Doc wasn�
��t talking too long, but from what I could tell, the jury seemed intrigued. They seemed to be listening. I prayed that their minds were still open.

  Doc walked them through what we felt were the various outlandish allegations that Brianna made during her fourth interview. He walked through some of the names of my real friends and the children who were at my house every day and who would come to tell that jury the rest of the story that the prosecutors seemed to purposefully leave out. “The evidence will show that contrary to what little piece of the picture you’re shown by the state, the defense wants you to see the whole picture,” Doc said. “What matters is it didn’t happen. It couldn’t have happened the way they say. It doesn’t make sense!”

  He went on: “The evidence will show, very clearly, when you see it all, that the therapist—the therapist, quote-unquote, that they put these kids with before they were able to get Tyler and Ashley away from her, the therapist has serious issues.”

  Len Gregor stood up yet again: “Again, Your Honor, I’m just going to object. We’re talking about argument, not facts, and I would just ask counsel to move on to an opening argument.”

  Doc started right up again, without a beat: “The evidence will definitely show that this therapist has serious iss—”

  “Your Honor!” Gregor said. “I will rely on the previous ruling by this court.”

  “Let’s stick to what the evidence is going to show and let’s not get into any argument,” the judge said.

  Doc took a sip of water and walked over and placed it on the table right in front of me. He then turned and walked straight back toward the jury. I could see people shaking their heads on the other side of the courtroom, right behind those prosecutors. I tried to focus my eyes straight ahead so it wouldn’t bother me.

  “So,” Doc said, “the bottom line, as we were told earlier, is the truth. The bottom line is the truth. In every case like this, every juror says, ‘Well, if it didn’t happen, why would they say it?’ And every defendant is in the horrible position of having to climb that mountain and make explanations about, ‘If it didn’t happen, why would they say it?’ That’s backward. She’s not guilty until proven on every piece of every element of the crime that you believe that she’s guilty. She’s innocent until then. So, I don’t know why they did this. The parents, the children, the professors, they’ll give you their ideas. But it’s you that can only take those tools that you need and make the decision that you’ve got to make.

  “So how do you defend yourself? How do you defend yourself from allegations that this happened in 2006, and 2005, and 2004? How do you get the information to defend yourself? The allegations are so horrible, you’re toast before you even get into court. You have to go back and try to find things, so we’re going to bring you—and the evidence will show—pictures. Pictures of what was going on. I wasn’t there. You weren’t there. Pictures of what was going on. People who were there. People that were actually there all the time who know Miss Tonya and know that this is the product of parents who went off the deep end. Maybe they were angry at Tonya, maybe I don’t know what happened, but the kids were questioned over and over and over again. We will bring you not the people that depend for a living on finding child abuse, but the people who teach how you do it properly. Because in the final analysis, what we want is to spend our resources into getting the bad guys. Not divert them into witch hunts or hysteria. Because every time we spend our resources like this,” he said, throwing his arms out wide toward everyone who was sitting in that courtroom, “we don’t have ’em to spend on little kids who were really abused.

  “So this is why it’s the rest of the story that is so critically important,” he said. “It didn’t happen. It couldn’t have happened the way they say it did. It doesn’t make sense.”

  And with that, Doc gathered up his papers and very quietly said, “Thank you.”

  Chapter 48

  I felt like there were a million things we needed to do and a million things we needed to discuss as we reviewed the opening arguments that night back at the war room. What did we learn from Len Gregor’s opening? Were there any surprises? What’s their main focus? Who do we have to be careful of?

  We would talk about all of those things back at my parents’ house, and the discussion would last for hours. We would focus especially hard on that hand gesture that Len Gregor made during his opening—that notion that I’d put my fingers together and put my whole hand into Brianna’s privates, and our questions about when that first came to light. We didn’t see it turn up until Brianna’s fourth interview, but now they were claiming she’d been saying that since day one? It didn’t make sense.

  We spent almost as much time discussing the observations that came from the mouths of my parents, and David, and a couple of my friends who came by to see how I was doing. What I didn’t realize until that evening was just how unfairly my supporters felt they were being treated in and around the courthouse. From what they were telling me, supporters on the other side were getting the red-carpet treatment compared to what my supporters were getting.

  First of all, anyone who was going to be a witness wasn’t allowed to sit in the courtroom. David, who vowed to be there every single day, was forced to sit out in the hallway on a wooden bench where he couldn’t see or hear any of the proceedings. He tried to bring a book in with him so he’d have something to do for all those hours. They told him he couldn’t bring it in. He tried to bring in a bottle of water. They confiscated it. They wouldn’t let him have a phone, or a newspaper, or anything.

  None of my supporters were allowed to carry anything into the courthouse. Nothing. Every one of my supporters and witnesses would have to come through the metal detector at the front door, too, which would take forever and a day. Then another metal detector right before entering the courtroom. Witnesses on the prosecution’s side weren’t forced to do any of that.

  It turned out that the prosecution’s witnesses—some of whom had already gathered in case they got called that afternoon—were all being put in a big room downstairs, right underneath the courtroom. A few of my supporters had been walking by at opportune moments and saw what was going on in that room. “They had laptop computers in front of them! They had newspapers! They had food and drink! It looked almost like they were having a party in there!” they told me.

  To say it was upsetting was putting it mildly.

  The fact was the judge had ordered that witnesses were not to have access to testimony. That was why David and all the other witnesses weren’t allowed in the courtroom. We didn’t even allow David to eat lunch with us because we didn’t want him overhearing anything he shouldn’t. With computers open in that downstairs witness room, what was keeping anyone from reading the media’s live Tweets from the courtroom or reading quotes from the previous day’s testimony or anything else?

  Plenty of people also saw spectators on the prosecution side get waved right past the metal detectors. That’s not only unfair, I thought, it’s not safe. There’s a lot of high emotion running around. What if somebody decides to do something crazy?

  Joal’s father, who came back as a spectator, walked through the front door with a cup of coffee in his hand at the very moment my husband was stopped and told firmly to throw his bottle of water away.

  I tried to put it all behind me. I told my attorneys to stay focused on the trial. I told my friends and family to fight for what they could. They had rights, just like anyone else, to come and go from that public courtroom—and they had a right to demand that they were treated fairly. Some of them were sure to go to the media with these complaints, and that was fine with me. The media seemed fed up already. We heard Judge House told them not only to get off the front lawn, but to back away to a farther radius from the courthouse on that second day. It seemed like the judge and the media were going to be fighting the whole time. I just hoped none of these extraneous fights would affect my case in the wrong way.

  I went to bed sometime shortly before dawn once again. I
woke up at five. I got dressed. Walt made me my coffee. He and Karen wished me well. I rode over to the courthouse, ready to face the day—only to run headlong into a whole slew of craziness instead. Judge House came after our team that morning, without letting the jury in, to complain that there were vehicles parked on the courthouse square with “Truth for Tonya” bumper stickers on them. He fined David $300 for displaying that sticker on the van we used to bring the files to the courthouse. He said anyone parking anywhere near the courthouse with one of those bumper stickers would be fined, and he called out a number of spectators on my side of the courtroom and told them to go move their vehicles. He’d actually had law enforcement officers run down their license plates, and then he called out their names in the courtroom. So all of a sudden a bunch of those people, plus David, had to scramble around to go move vehicles to comply with the judge’s order.

  My friend Jennifer was interviewed by Melydia Clewell about the whole debacle. “I think it’s their way of keeping us quiet,” she said on the air.

  All of it seemed like a nonsensical distraction to me. We were about to hear our first witnesses in the trial that could put me in prison for life. I wanted to focus on that.

  The thing is, even without all that distraction, absolutely nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to face on the witness stand.

  We hadn’t even taken our seats yet when Judge House came in and cleared the courtroom of all spectators. He ordered the camera turned off, too.