by Tonya Craft
“Can I have some water?” Sandra asked the judge at that point.
Scott went on to get Sandra to admit that she was “angry” at me for reprimanding her daughter at Ashley’s birthday party. “When somebody pushes me or messes with my children or my family, I have a horrible temper,” she said.
Sandra could not “recall” what she’d told the person at DFACS during her first call to them, so Scott went to the written records of that call and reminded her. Reading from the report, Scott noted that the reason she’d started questioning Brianna about what “happened to her” was because Brianna was suffering from “night frights.” Scott tried to pin her down on whether or not those night frights began around the time that she took Brianna and some friends to see the horror film she was in, which was also in January of 2008—a “scary” horror film that Sandra admitted she would never have taken Brianna to see if she weren’t in it. She seemed appalled at the idea that Brianna could have been traumatized by watching an R-rated horror film and instead wanted to focus all of her daughter’s fears on me.
I remember being so thankful in that moment that we’d done all the homework we’d done. I thought of Eric Echols and some of the details he’d managed to dig up for us, which were about to put a big wrinkle in the latest iterations of Sandra’s story.
With a little help from the transcript of Sandra’s very first call to DFACS on May 19, 2008, Sandra finally admitted that she’d been the one to start questioning Brianna about whether or not anything had “happened to her”—but she still tried to insist that she only did that after Brianna had told her about the boyfriend-girlfriend game. Using the transcript as a crutch (since she testified that she had “no memory” of any of this), Sandra confirmed that she then had asked Brianna whether someone “had done something to her,” to which Brianna initially responded, “No.” Then she had asked Brianna, “Did anything happen when you were with Miss Tonya?” To which Brianna responded, “No.” Then she had asked her daughter whether she could think of anything else that made her uncomfortable, and Brianna had responded to that question: “Tonya was mean to me.”
“So that’s it?” Sandra had responded. And Brianna, she agreed, had said, “Yes. That’s it.”
Scott basically brought her right back to the original moment of her questioning Brianna and showed that jury that Sandra was the one who seemed to push the idea of “Tonya” doing something to her into Brianna’s mind. As I listened, I thought, As soon as Brianna confirmed to her that I had done something (by being “mean to her”), Sandra jumped right onto it, and wouldn’t let go.
Sandra looked all kinds of flustered to me as this questioning went on.
Scott got her to say that she’d questioned Brianna “at least four times” before Brianna came up with any accusations against anyone.
“I can tell that you’re trying to confuse me,” she testified, “and I understand that, and I knew you would … You act like I just asked Brianna all of these leading questions, and that’s not what happened! I wasn’t interrogating her!” she insisted.
“I’ll rephrase for your sake. Did you consider for one moment that it might be better for you to stop repeatedly questioning her about this and allow somebody that was trained professionally to question her?” Scott said.
Sandra’s only response was, “I had never dealt with anything like this in my life.”
Hearing that answer, I once again had a thought about Sandra Lamb that I very much didn’t want to have: I felt sorry for her. I was furious; I was livid that I had to look at her for all of those hours in that courtroom. Yet at the same time, I felt sorry for her. I truly did.
I felt even sorrier for her daughter.
Scott’s questioning went on for hours. He went over every bit of everything that had happened, including how many times Sandra had spoken to the detectives in the case and how often she’d been in contact with Joal. Scott asked her about the various interviews and whether she had talked to the interviewers in between the questioning—and whenever he asked what seemed to me like a sticky question, Sandra simply said that she couldn’t remember.
Scott then asked her about Brianna’s undocumented June 4, 2008, charge of me putting my whole hand up into her privates. While Brianna had said she told Suzie Thorne about it while they were walking down the hall, Sandra said Brianna told her that she forgot to tell Thorne something, and then they went to find Thorne together. And let’s not forget the story Sherri had told about being the first to hear of this disgusting “revelation.”
I just hoped the jury was picking up on all of those little discrepancies. Those little differences mattered.
Near the end of the day, Sandra answered some redirect questions from Chris Arnt, and then some additional re-cross from Scott. In that short exchange, she mentioned a time that I supposedly had Brianna at my house all by myself without her knowing it, after my own kids had gone to Joal’s for the weekend. She testified that she couldn’t recall a date for that or an approximate time when “it happened.” As far as my team knew, she had never mentioned it anywhere on the record before that moment. She didn’t even allege that anything had happened on that particular occasion. She just mentioned it, as if she wanted the jury to fill in the blanks.
That never happened.
She also spoke of the fact that her husband had filed for a divorce and said that the stress of this situation—caused by me—was a factor in the divorce itself, despite the fact that there is no mention of my case in the divorce petition that Greg Lamb had filed. In fact, that petition—which we had a copy of and which Scott placed right in front of her—had Greg placing blame on Sandra’s behavior.60
It was hard for me to imagine that Sandra might really believe everything she testified to. How awful that must be for her if it’s the case. The fact that her marriage had fallen apart and that so much of the blame for everything in her life seemed to be placed on me, the Evil One, made me once again feel sorry for her.
When I stopped and thought about the truth, I went right back to feeling angry instead. But by the end of that day, the only thing I felt was exhaustion. Facing Sandra Lamb in the courtroom had been a long time coming. It was over now. Whether a jury would wind up believing her or me was in God’s hands.
Chapter 52
On the seventh day, my trial seemed to pick up steam. The Sandra Lamb testimony was referred to as a potential turning point by my team and my supporters the night before. I didn’t see it as a turning point. I didn’t feel more secure for one second about my chances. It did seem as if the prosecution side had grown increasingly annoyed at my attorneys’ long, detailed questioning of their witnesses. It felt like they were starting to lose their cool.
I was proud of my team. All I wanted them to do was to keep pushing for the truth, to keep their composure, and to never lose their cool no matter how heated anything got.
The day started with one more “victim’s mother” on the witness stand: Kelly McDonald. Kelly’s presence was very different from Sandra’s. She didn’t seem to carry such an edge or an attitude into the courtroom. She came across to me as more down-to-earth. I wondered if the jury might find her more sympathetic because of that.
The prosecution presented Kelly as my former “best friend.” She got up there and talked about how our friendship developed and how she and her kids used to spend time at my house frequently.
As far as I was concerned, the most important factor in Kelly’s whole testimony was that she testified to questioning her daughter, Chloe, repeatedly on the way to both of her interviews with Detective Tim Deal. She didn’t admit to “coaching” or planting ideas in her head. But she did say on that stand that she’d questioned Chloe before she sat down for her interviews—and we were prepared to use our expert witnesses later on in this trial to explain to the jury just exactly how damaging and influential any such questioning can be to a young child.
“I said, honey, if anything else has happened, you need to tell Mommy, because yo
u’re fixing to have to talk to the police,” Kelly testified. “She was scared. She was crying. And I said, ‘It’s okay, you haven’t done anything wrong.’”
Kelly also tried to make it sound like she had “no idea” any allegations were being raised against me before she took her daughter in for questioning that first time on May 29.
“I only knew I was there to talk about child-on-child,” she insisted.
We had documentation to back up the fact that she absolutely knew that Chloe was going to talk about me during that first interview. She had filled out a child victim information sheet at the CAC when she brought Chloe in on May 29. On that form, she wrote, “I caught my daughter, Chloe, and Ashley Henke under the bed and Ashley was touching Chloe in her private area and then told her to do the same thing to her to make her feel good. Then when I confronted Chloe about the situation at Ashley’s house the night in question with Brianna, Skyler, Chloe, and Ashley she told me Ms. Tonya had touched her in her privates and touched Brianna in her privates.”
The jury hadn’t heard much about Skyler yet. They hadn’t heard that after the chalk incident, she had gone in to be interviewed and had made absolutely no allegations against me whatsoever. But they had heard from Brianna, and from Ashley, and neither of those two girls backed up Chloe’s claim that they had all been present together when any touching was allegedly going on. So where is Chloe getting this story from? Who is it that put that idea in her head?
I hadn’t had a chance to go back and relisten to Chloe’s interviews yet. Now that I’d heard her mother’s testimony admitting to the fact that she’d “questioned” her on the way to those interviews, I was determined to go back and review them to see if there was anything we’d missed.
Next up for the prosecution was Suzie Thorne, the interviewer from the Greenhouse who had interviewed Ashley and then performed Brianna’s third interview on June 4, 2008—the one that led to my arrest, despite the fact that Brianna made no mention of “penetration” whatsoever.
The prosecutors actually spent a long time with Suzie. They went through her educational history. They talked about her job. They talked about the fact that she’d been trained not to ask leading questions. On the surface, she seemed like a decent interviewer and somebody who could be trusted. She didn’t seem like a mean person who would try to twist the words of a child. In fact, to the jury I bet she seemed pretty sympathetic. She had left the Greenhouse after four and a half years to go back to work as a detective, she said, because there was only “so much” you can hear from little kids who’ve been molested. I can’t imagine a more difficult job, I thought. The trauma of that, day in and day out, must do something to a person.
Of course, I also thought, If you messed up these interviews with Ashley and Brianna this badly, how many other times have you done that? How many children have you traumatized? How many other families have you helped to destroy?
The prosecution actually went ahead and showed the entire videotaped interview with Ashley while Thorne was on the stand. I had to sit there and endure that videotape of my daughter. Again. They played it all the way through her crying and protesting that she wanted to leave at the end, and I supposed that they wanted the jury to see that as an example of the “breakdowns” that these girls supposedly had when they were talking about the abuse at my hands. At least, that was how Len Gregor had presented it in his opening argument.
When Doc got up to question her, he took a similar approach to the one he’d taken with Sharon Anderson. He went back through Thorne’s educational history and training on dealing with child sexual abuse. He asked her about some well-known studies on the ins and outs of child interviews, none of which she was familiar with. He asked her about some well-known false-allegation cases that anyone in the field should be aware of, including the Michaels case in New Jersey, which was one that I read about online in some of my very first Google searches because it was so well-known and well documented. Thorne testified that she hadn’t heard of it.
He then took Thorne line by line through her interviews, and the discussion got pretty heated at times. He tried to make her admit that she was the one introducing ideas in the interviews: terms like “good touch” and “bad touch.” He pointed out the fact that she had grilled Ashley “sixteen times” to see if she had anything else to say, even though she said “no” each and every time.
Thorne countered that she wasn’t trying to introduce ideas into the girls’ heads; she was simply trying to get information. The prosecution made a point of saying that everyone’s interview techniques are different, but Thorne simply didn’t seem to be able to refute what Doc was saying.
It went on for a very long time, and I hoped the jury was getting the gist of it all—without getting so tired that they’d have some kind of a backlash reaction to the flood of information and detail.
Then Doc finally came to the crux of the Suzie Thorne problem: When it came to Brianna Lamb’s accusations, she hadn’t captured everything on tape. In fact, it wasn’t revealed until the trial, right there in that courtroom, that Brianna’s most egregious accusation—the mysterious charge of “penetration” that led to my first arrest—had originally been made to Suzie Thorne. It was just after Brianna’s June 4, 2008, interview when Brianna supposedly made the assertion that I’d put my fingers together and stuck my whole hand up inside her privates.
“That wasn’t videotaped. It should have been videotaped and followed up on, but it wasn’t. That was my fault,” Thorne said on the witness stand.
“It sure should have been videotaped,” Doc said in a tone that came pretty close to a reprimand, “because that’s a major felony that you say, and she said, that she’s not talking about [on the tape].”
“You’re correct,” Thorne said.
“Major felony!” Doc added.
“You’re right,” Thorne said with a contrite look on her face.
Thorne went on to testify about how it supposedly happened. She said Brianna had already gone back to her mother after the interview was all over. Then Brianna wandered back to Thorne’s office all by herself, she said, to tell Thorne that she’d “forgot to tell her” that Tonya had stuck her whole hand up inside her vagina.
Her story about the details of that moment didn’t match Brianna’s testimony or Sandra’s testimony. But it turned out that wasn’t the biggest issue.
Thorne testified she “thought” that a “deputy” who was present was writing down the accusation, but she clearly had no idea where that documentation had gone—which to me made it sound like maybe it never really existed. We asked who that officer was, and she said it was Detective Stephen Keith. The personal friend of the Wilsons, I thought. The man who started this entire investigation. A man whom the prosecutors have still not called to testify.
Doc pointed out that the prosecution didn’t present any documentation for that charge in the entire case history. It is the law that any accusation of child molestation must be videotaped in the state of Georgia, he noted. Doc made the point that there was no good reason that Thorne couldn’t have immediately taken Brianna back in front of the camera and asked her about the incident on the record—but for some reason, she didn’t do that.
Thorne didn’t have any good explanation as to why.
My team and supporters might have thought that Sandra Lamb’s testimony was a turning point in the trial, but that was a bigger turning point to me. That revelation in that courtroom, which took all of us by surprise, called into question the very reality of the penetration charges for which I had been arrested in the first place, and at the very least called into question whether that accusation was properly obtained.
I sure hoped the jury was letting that revelation sink in.
More than that, I hoped the prosecutors were letting it sink in. Aren’t making up charges or arresting someone on undocumented charges both FBI-investigation-worthy offenses? Couldn’t an ADA get disbarred, or even arrested, if that’s what happened?
; Most of all, I hoped Judge House was paying attention. Is he going to ignore this, too?
Given the disclosure that just happened in that courtroom, he had every reason to stop the trial and to dismiss Brianna’s penetration counts of the indictment right there. He should have been the one to demand an investigation into why that accusation wasn’t videotaped, why no written documentation of that accusation was put into the record, and how that nonvideotaped accusation had been allowed to move forward as a part of my original arrest warrant.
But he didn’t do it.
I thought I was gonna scream. I held it in. I listened to my attorneys. They said we would request a dismissal of those charges when the appropriate time came. Not now, but later.
That night we decided to try to get all of Suzie Thorne’s testimony thrown out, since she seemed to have knowingly broken protocol by not videotaping Brianna’s accusation. But when it came to the rest of the charges, for now, we’d just have to go on breaking down the prosecution’s case as best we could—and once again hope the jury paid more attention to the law than the officials in that courtroom whose job it was to uphold it.
Chapter 53
There wasn’t a chance of me sleeping that night. I was fuming.
I still had my friend Jennifer’s key that she’d given me way back when I was staying in the motor home. She continued to tell me that her door was always open. So I grabbed some of my files and my trusty black laptop and I drove over there to find some solace on her downstairs sofa.
For days I had been thinking that I hadn’t spent enough time micro-analyzing Detective Tim Deal’s interviews with Chloe McDonald. So I sat on the couch in the middle of the night and listened to those tapes on my black laptop with the volume up loud and my headphones plugged in. I listened and listened, and every time there was an “inaudible” in the transcript I pushed pause and wrote down what I heard. It was actually pretty easy. Whoever did these transcripts wasn’t very good at their job.
