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

by Tonya Craft

  “Well, what would be the significance of the cops leaving that out?” Doc asked her.

  “It didn’t fit with their theory,” she said.

  I could sense the temperatures rising at the prosecution table. The fact that she so publicly reprimanded their investigative behavior was astounding. The legal world would jump all over it—and so would the media. There were bloggers who are known as “watchdogs” in the legal community who turned all of their attention to my trial at that point and who used Dr. Aldridge’s testimony as a chance to spotlight questionable behavior in Catoosa County.

  As Doc turned his questions again to a hypothetical case of a therapist with a mental illness, Chris Arnt stood up, slammed his legal pad loudly on the desk, and objected, asking to approach the bench. The media went nuts for the drama. The fact that The Today Show kept a crew in town meant other national media outlets started following suit, too. My parents and attorneys started fielding calls from producers trying to pin down an “exclusive” first interview with me when the trial was over. I already knew who my first interview was going to, and I was oblivious to most of these other goings-on until long after they’d happened. Whenever we were done with preparations at night, I’d lock myself in the bedroom at Karen’s and try to make myself disappear.

  From my understanding, it was the first major trial in this part of the country that had ever played out in real time over social media, and I was glad to have so many eyes watching over my case. I suppose that could be one of the great saving graces of our justice system someday—that even judicial systems in small-town corners of America can’t hide behind an iron curtain of anonymity anymore. Not that it seemed to be having much of a positive effect on the behavior of anyone in my trial. It’s definitely not enough just to make this stuff public. People have to get active and make their opinions known. People need to voice their displeasure by voting out the DAs and others who make a mockery of the justice system.

  The sad fact is it will take a lot more than a little bad publicity to change this system.

  Airing dirty laundry doesn’t make it clean.

  Chapter 58

  Just to hammer it all home, we put one more nationally recognized expert on the witness stand the next morning: Dr. William Bernet, professor emeritus of psychiatry from the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center in Tennessee. He had testified in more than 400 trials and was about as highly published, quoted, and regarded as anyone could possibly be in the area of forensic interviews of children in alleged sexual-abuse cases.

  Dr. Bernet’s studies found that the way a child is interviewed is often one of the most telling indicators of whether or not the alleged abuse actually happened. “Ninety-five percent of what matters is what was said,” he told that jury—and in his reviews of the children’s interviews, just as Dr. Aldridge had testified, he found far too many faults to believe that the children’s interviews hadn’t been tainted in a major way by their parents.

  “You’re saying that parents wanted to hear their kids were abused?” Doc asked him.

  “No, I think they wanted to get to the bottom of it,” Bernet answered.

  He wasn’t advocating a “conspiracy” but instead stating the fact that widespread evidence of parental influence was present in the pages of those interview transcripts. The parental influence had been ignored in Detective Deal’s “shoddy investigation,” he testified. The result of that “shoddy investigation,” he said, was the terrible consequence that led to this very trial.

  So how did the children get drawn down a path of pointing a finger specifically at Tonya Craft? Doc asked.

  “Inept interviewers, inept therapist,” Bernet said.

  Judge House didn’t like that much. He told the jury to ignore Bernet’s comment. Still, Bernet’s own studies show that kids can have false ideas implanted in a single, relatively short interview if that interview isn’t done correctly. These kids had endured multiple interviews, had multiple parental influences, and had “therapy” influences drilled into them for the course of a year or two, and Bernet pointed to that as a huge mistake.

  The really sad part was that all of that “ineptness,” he said, was what led these children to falsely believe that I might have actually done something to them.

  Dr. Bernet seemed to speak about this subject in a manner that was as close to an objective truth as a person can get. Isn’t the truth all that matters here? I thought.

  It angered me to think that Len Gregor had questioned my friends on “which of Tonya’s truths” they believed. There isn’t more than one truth, I thought. There is truth, and then there isn’t.

  All I had wanted, all I had expected from the law enforcement officers and judges and prosecutors and everyone else in the system from the beginning was for them to conduct a fair search for the truth. Not a truth. The truth.

  For all the notes I’d read, all the places I’d traveled to, all the fretting I’d done to prepare ourselves to show a jury the negative and potentially tainted influence that Laurie Evans had on all three of these children, that woman came into the courtroom and basically buried herself in her own “ineptness” (to borrow a word from Dr. Bernet).

  First of all, since she was the court-ordered therapist to all three accusers, I wondered if it struck anyone on the jury as strange that our side called her to the witness stand. It soon became clear why the other side hadn’t wanted her up there.

  It took Doc a full half hour to get one answer out of her. The question was simple, about when she was first informed that Judge Williams in Tennessee had filed an order to have her removed as my children’s therapist. Doc tried to help her by giving her the actual documentation, just as we had done in this very courthouse once before, but it took her forever just to flip through her own pages of notes and records. Even after reading a specific note about a date or a time from a transcript or a motion filed by the guardian ad litem during the December 11, 2008, hearing that Laurie herself had attended in this very courthouse, she couldn’t answer a simple “yes” or “no” about seemingly anything.

  “I’m not sure that I follow the question,” she said, even when Doc took it real slow to make sure she got it all.

  Laurie Evans couldn’t “recall” even the simplest details, such as whether she had been sworn to tell the truth at her own depositions with my attorneys on December 30, 2008. Doc had to show her a transcript to confirm that she’d been sworn in. Doc then asked her to read from a portion of the transcript of that deposition in which my attorney Scott King had asked her, “Have you ever had a complaint filed against you by a patient or family member of a patient?”

  “No,” she had answered. “Not that I’m aware of.”

  Scott had followed up. “Have you ever been treated for any mental illness or psychological disorder?”

  “No,” she had answered.

  “Have you ever been treated for depression?” Scott had asked her.

  “No,” she had answered.

  Doc stopped her right there in the transcript. He then asked her whether her answer to the psychological disorder question was “true.” Evans sat there and thought about it for a few seconds, pointing her eyes up to the ceiling, before finally answering: “For me, yes,” she said.

  “What do you mean by that?” Doc asked her, as her mouth broke into a crooked smile.

  “What do I mean by that?” she echoed back to him.

  “For you, yes. Do you have a truth that’s different from other people’s truths?” Doc asked.

  “No,” she said. “When I was thinking of mental illness, I was thinking of something like bipolar, schizophrenia, those kind of mental—chronic mental illnesses.”

  “But this says any mental illness or psychological disorder, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, that was what it says,” she answered.

  “So when you said no … that wasn’t quite right, was it?” Doc said.

  She pondered that again, for a very long pause, before shaking her head a bit and saying, “
I’m not sure.”

  Her entire testimony went on this way. Questions about her PTSD led to nothing but confusing answers.

  I was hoping we’d pull some real “aha!” moments by putting that woman on the stand. Instead, all we got from an entire day’s worth of testimony was reinforcement of that very apt description Bill Bernet had already placed on her.

  For the life of me, I cannot figure out how that woman keeps her job, and how on earth she’d been allowed to serve as the therapist for all three of my accusers. Why had the court listened to her recommendations? Of all people?

  We’d been at this trial for just about four straight weeks—and by the end of that day, we’d gone through all of the witnesses we wanted to call except for two: my husband, David, and me.

  My attorneys didn’t want me to take the stand. “It’s too risky,” they said. “Len Gregor is too much of a loose cannon. He could throw anything at you up there!”

  My parents didn’t want me to subject myself to that torture. David didn’t want me to do it, either.

  I just plain wanted the chance to speak the truth from my own lips. “I’ve waited two long years to look into the eyes of those jurors and tell them that I did not do this,” I argued. I also thought there was a very important point the prosecutors had been making along the way, and I was very afraid they would turn it against me if I didn’t get up on that witness stand myself.

  The seemingly unexplainable questions about whether so many of our witnesses were aware of the Truth for Tonya campaign and websites, to me, seemed like a weapon they were getting ready to use. I had a bad feeling that if I didn’t get up on the stand and speak, they would call that into question during closing arguments. I could just picture Len Gregor in that exaggerated Georgia drawl he put on when he talked real loud, saying, “Tonya Craft has a website. Tonya Craft has a Facebook page dedicated to her cause. Tonya Craft had the audacity to go on TV and talk all about her innocence, and all about the ‘truth.’” Legally, the prosecution isn’t supposed to draw attention to the fact that a defendant doesn’t testify in their own defense. It’s not supposed to matter. But who would stop him from mentioning it? Judge House? Ha. I could imagine that question loud and clear: “When it came time for Tonya to speak her mind here in the courtroom, where was she?”

  I couldn’t let the jury think that I didn’t respect them enough to get up there and speak directly to them. Plus, I didn’t think there was one thing left in the world that they could throw at me that would break me down any more than I was already broken.

  When I stood up and that verdict was read, I wanted to know that I had done everything I possibly could have to fight back. I needed to know that not one stone was left unturned. If I got convicted and hadn’t taken the stand, I never would have forgiven myself—and I told that to my attorneys.

  Scott and Doc and Clancy and I got into a very heated argument about it.

  “You cannot testify,” they said.

  “If you testify, you’re going to wind up going to prison.”

  “I did nothing wrong!” I said. “You cannot keep me off that stand. I need to talk to that jury.”

  “If you testify, then you’re going to sign something saying that we’re not accountable if something goes wrong.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  I was in the fight of my life and suddenly fighting worse than ever before with my attorneys, who I felt were trying to cover their own behinds. Everyone around me wanted me to listen to their advice. I was the only one left to stand up and go against them, and I don’t know if it was my gut, or my stubbornness, or my resolve, or if it was just plain God, but I was not going to stay silent. In the end, on what felt like the last night before we’d have to make up our minds for certain, I simply would not budge.

  “I am getting on that witness stand,” I said. “There’s no more arguing. There’s no more talking about it. So get yourselves ready.”

  I broke the screen door off its hinges as I stormed out of my parents’ house.

  Chapter 59

  The anticipation over whether I might be getting ready to testify hit a frenzy point on trial day nineteen. A whole slew of people showed up at the courthouse. Perfect strangers tried to get into the courtroom. Tons of supporters had somehow spread the word to wear yellow just to support me. There were yellow shirts everywhere.

  We still had one more witness to get through before I took the stand, though.

  David walked in wearing a blue and white striped shirt with a button-down collar over a plain white T-shirt, all neatly tucked into his light-colored khakis. He looked good. I was so nervous for him as he took his oath that I worried I was visibly shaking.

  Scott was the attorney we’d chosen to do the direct examination with David. The two had a good rapport, so it felt like the right choice. In a way, David was our last line of defense, and we still had plenty of hurdles to jump over.

  I prayed he’d stand strong no matter what came his way.

  At the start, David talked about how much he loved Tyler and Ashley and how he got to see them just about every other weekend now. He relayed to the jury that they always had a good time, whether playing ball or playing video games or eating together. He also echoed the words of some other witnesses, in that Ashley would ask about me often: “‘How’s she doing?’ Things like that,” David said. “General questions.”

  “Does she ever say, ‘I don’t want to see my mom again’?” Scott asked.

  “Never,” he said.

  He talked about me, and how much he loves me, and how we first met. He answered Scott’s questions plainly about our separation, and explained that it had nothing to do with the case against me. He blamed himself. He said he was the one who “gave up” on the marriage—that I “never gave up” on him.

  He testified specifically that Brianna Lamb had never spent the night at my house in the whole time he’d known me. His whole testimony was very matter-of-fact and easygoing. Scott questioned him about whether I had given any kids a bath (other than Ashley), and David said plainly, “No.” Continuing with the bathing questioning, he asked whether Ashley would ever be sent to Joal and Sarah’s house for visitation all dirty and smelling bad, with “matted hair.” David looked truly surprised to hear something like that and said he’d never seen Ashley appear that way—“ever.”

  Scott worked through all of the various terrible things that people had said about me during the trial. He even asked David about some of the more outlandish allegations that seemed to come out of nowhere, like whether or not I ever wore a thong bikini.

  “No. She doesn’t even own a thong bikini,” he said.

  Scott asked whether I liked or kept pornography around the house.

  “No! I get in trouble if I say ‘damn.’ There’s not gonna be any porn,” David said, eliciting a few laughs in the room.

  David answered “no” to all of those crazy things. Poor David had been forced to sit in the hallway on a hard wooden bench for all those weeks. He hadn’t been able to listen to any of the testimony, and I wasn’t allowed to talk to him about any of the testimony. So all of this stuff was truly a shock to him. I think anyone watching him could tell he wasn’t putting on a show. He wouldn’t be capable of putting on a show, anyway. David is who he is. You can read the plain truth on his face.

  He spoke the plain truth about our wedding reception, which the prosecutors had attempted to turn it into some sort of an awful example of what kind of a person I was. He talked about the fact that at one point, he and I jumped in the pool. At one point I tripped and fell by the pool and skinned my knee, when Greg Lamb was chasing me around. He admitted openly that I had too much to drink that night and got sick all over the Lamb’s carpet. He didn’t think any of it was a big deal—because it wasn’t.

  Scott then asked him about the friendships that the prosecution kept trying to paint as something more.

  “Did you think she was having an affair with Mike Potter?” Scott asked.

&nbs
p; “No.”

  He asked him whether he thought I’d had an affair with Dee Potter.

  “No,” David said.

  “You ever joke about it?” Scott asked. “Or—”

  “No,” David insisted. He reasserted that we were all just “good friends.”

  David answered a whole slew of other questions aimed at backing up our earlier assertions about what really happened at my house with sleepovers and various visits from other children. Most of all, I think what he did was firmly establish his view of me, as the wife and mother and teacher I truly am—or at least was. It was quite a thing to watch my husband get up in front of all those people and say how he felt. It was about as public and moving a proclamation of his love for me that any man could make.

  Scott sat down.

  That was when some new fireworks began in that courtroom.

  Len Gregor stood up and started asking a series of hypothetical questions that seemingly had nothing to do with David whatsoever. He did so in a loud, angry-sounding voice. For instance, he asked David if he knew from therapy evaluations that “yellow” was something that caused psychological harm and was a trigger for a child; and if he knew that, whether David would approach a child on the witness stand, wearing a yellow tie, flipping some yellow legal-pad pages in front of that child, and telling the child to look at a photo of Tonya Craft in a yellow dress on the screen.

  “I don’t understand,” David said.

  Is Len Gregor insinuating that Doc somehow tried to intimidate Brianna while she was on the stand because her mother said she’s terrified of the color yellow? That’s absurd. There are yellow legal pads all over the courtroom. Doc’s tie may have had a pale yellow background that day in court, but it certainly wasn’t some purposeful weapon used to harm a child. Gregor got so animated about it that he accidentally smashed his hand into the big TV monitor mounted on the wall. I thought he was going to break it.