by Tonya Craft
We also wanted to loosen up some of the other restrictions—especially the part that said that I couldn’t come in “indirect” contact with anyone under eighteen. Our argument was that my record was entirely clean, and that I was a schoolteacher, so the restriction would affect my employment. He planned to argue that I had never been arrested, let alone accused of hurting anyone ever before. It was therefore unfair that I was being punished and faced the potential loss of my employment, my sole source of income, when I hadn’t been convicted of any crime. And that was exactly what was going on, too. I’d already received word from the superintendent at Chickamauga that they were planning a termination hearing based on these allegations.
We would also argue that the part about indirect contact should be removed completely and the part about being around other “minors” should be modified to say that I couldn’t be “alone” with any minors. I understood that restriction, as much as I hated it. I could see why it made sense, given the charges. Intellectually, at least, it was palatable—and it was certainly fairer than what that judge had ordered initially.
A few minutes before we were scheduled to go in, my attorney asked me to “sit tight” so he could go speak to Judge Van Pelt before we got started. I said, “Okay.”
I sat there. And sat there. A good ten or fifteen minutes went by. I kept looking at my watch. The hearing was supposed to have started already. Clancy went inside to see if anything was happening, and he came out a few minutes later to tell me that my ex, Joal Henke, and Sandra Lamb were both in the courtroom.
“What?” I asked him. “What are they doing here?”
“They’re sitting right next to each other, whispering and giggling. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think they were a couple.”
I was flabbergasted. Joal and Sandra didn’t even know each other. What are they doing in that courtroom together?
I got all fidgety and panicky. I didn’t know what to do. Should I go in there? What happens if I’m not in the courtroom on time? Will that hurt my case? Where is my attorney?
Then all of a sudden, my attorney came out.
“Well, that’s that,” he said. He kept on walking.
“What do you mean, ‘That’s that’? Don’t we have to go in?”
“Nope, it’s all decided.”
I grabbed up my purse and my notebooks as quickly as I could and tried to follow him. “What do you mean? When can I see my kids?”
“He left it at Four Points but bounced the ultimate decision back to Tennessee.”
“So nothing changed?”
“Not really.”
He would not stop moving. He headed down the stairs as I hurried after him.
“Well, what about the other part? What about the indirect contact?”
“He left it in there. He loosened it a bit, but it’s still there. Look, I’m sorry it didn’t work out the way we wanted, Tonya. Call me Monday morning. I’ll have a copy of the bond in my hands then, and we’ll discuss it, all right?”
I’d followed him all the way down the stairs and out the front door to the sidewalk while he said all of this. Then he jumped in his car and drove off. I was dumbfounded.
How could all of that happen when I wasn’t even present?
In meeting after meeting, I’d felt that this attorney had been dismissive of my feelings. I tried to ignore it, as women are so often forced to do, but I felt small around him, like I wasn’t being heard. Just a few days earlier, in the middle of all of this awfulness, he’d handed me divorce papers from David without any warning. Without so much as a simple “I’m sorry.” How can someone who shows so little sensitivity for my situation and my emotional state possibly fight for me?
The moment at the courthouse was the last straw. In the middle of everything else I was going through, I now had to find myself a new lawyer. Pronto.
Devastated doesn’t begin to describe my emotional state after that bond modification went south on me. I felt homeless and imprisoned at the same time. I felt like I didn’t have anybody fighting for me anymore, except for Clancy, and there was nothing he could do about anything on the Georgia side of my ordeal. I felt lost and alone. I needed my husband. I’d laid eyes on the divorce papers. Actually held them in my hands. They were real. David believed the marriage was over. Yet, I lay there in that stupid motor home and prayed to God to bring David back to me.
“Please, God,” I prayed again and again. “Please, let us reconcile.”
On Monday, as promised, my attorney gave me a copy of the bond modification, and I just stared at it for the longest time. It didn’t make anything simpler. All it did was make things more confusing and more convoluted. Instead of being one paragraph now, it was two pages long. The first page looked like this:
“So, the court gave me the right to fight for my kids up in Tennessee, but then gave itself the right to oversee whatever happens and to put new restrictions on me if it doesn’t like what Tennessee decides?” I asked.
The attorney said I was reading that correctly.
This is the second page:
It was also signed by my attorney, and then there was a third page that was signed by the DA, Buzz Franklin. The whole thing just flabbergasted me. First of all, it said over and over that “the parties agree,” when I wasn’t even present. I didn’t agree to any of this! I’ll admit I was grateful that the court was going to allow me to attend family functions and that the order made at least a little bit more sense when it talked about having indirect contact with children, but it was still pretty vague. It seemed to me it was still open to interpretation—that if I wasn’t “prompt” enough in removing myself from a minor’s presence, then someone could have me arrested. It still begged the question of what would happen if one of my friends’ kids happened to answer the phone if I called. In fact, this seemed to clarify that I couldn’t have direct or indirect contact by “any means of communication.” That made me extremely nervous, and my attorney’s assurances that those scenarios wouldn’t lead to my arrest didn’t set my mind at ease at all.
I walked away from that meeting knowing what I had to do.
Chapter 20
When you no longer have your work, your home, or your family—when you’re no longer taking the kids to school, cooking, cleaning, getting groceries, running around to sports, or making plans for next week or next month or even tomorrow—there are a whole lot of empty hours in the day that get consumed by whatever you’re thinking about. For someone whose life is going on as planned, having none of those things might seem like a dream. Like a vacation. It’s not. It’s a horrible, horrible way to exist, especially when you’re consumed by the fear that you’re going to spend the rest of your life in prison—and worse, not ever be able to see your children again.
The only way I could function was to focus on tasks that needed to get done. And the task that needed doing the most as July came around was to find myself a new lawyer. I made calls and read articles and looked up “Georgia’s best lawyers” online. I even tried to set up an appointment with Bobby Lee Cook, the attorney who inspired the TV show Matlock. But another attorney seemed to be running his practice in Lafayette nowadays, and it turned out that one of the four judges who serve Catoosa County was Bobby Lee Cook’s daughter. The potential for small-town conflicts and cronyism made me too uneasy to pursue it. The thing that had worried me most about my local attorney was a distinct feeling that he wasn’t strong enough or aggressive enough to go up against these other locals that he dealt with every day. It wasn’t a personal thing. I just didn’t feel that his advice or his tepid stance or any of his actions thus far had been beneficial for me or my case. I needed an attorney with enough distance and autonomy and backbone to fight, and fight hard.
I finally reached out to two Atlanta-based attorneys named Cary and Scott King. They were a father-son team who came highly recommended. I called them as soon as I heard their credentials, and while their weekdays were full, Cary King heard my urgency and agreed to
come into his office on a Saturday so I wouldn’t have to wait. I liked him already.
I asked if Clancy could come to the meeting with me, and Cary didn’t have any problem with that. He said it might be helpful to have him there. I liked that answer, too.
Clancy gave me some more homework before that meeting: to create separate timeline folders dedicated to each of the families involved in the allegations. So that meant a timeline folder dedicated entirely to Brianna Lamb—detailing when I’d first met Sandra and Brianna, and every time I could remember that Brianna had been to my house or that Ashley had been to their house for a sleepover, etc. Same for Kelly and Chloe McDonald. Same for the Wilsons. Clancy was absolutely convinced that if we could put all of this together, we could prove to a court that the abuse described in those warrants couldn’t have happened—no matter what dates they put on them. What each of those detailed timelines would show was that I simply couldn’t have been alone with Chloe or Brianna for more than a few moments, ever. Almost anytime I was around either of them, there were other witnesses present. The timelines would also show the completely normal relationship I had with my daughter and show just how much time David and Tyler were in the house with the two of us as well.
I spent the better part of that week entirely focused on creating those timelines and putting them into separate binders. I pasted calendars all over the walls of the motor home to help me visualize the dates and keep everything straight. I stayed up almost forty-eight hours straight that Thursday and Friday before the meeting with Cary to get it done. It felt good to be working and accomplishing something that I felt would help my case.
Our appointment was at Cary’s office down in Atlanta on July 11—exactly one month after my arrest. It was intimidating at first, walking into a gigantic high-rise and trying to find their office. But I got a good feeling the moment I walked through their door.
Cary King had a gentlemanly look about him, with glasses, dark wavy hair, and a salt-and-pepper beard. Although he’s not nearly old enough to be my grandfather, he had a sort of grandfatherly way about him. He seemed experienced and sure of himself and caring in a way that felt genuine, not forced. He listened deeply to what I had to say. And believe me, once I got going, I would not shut up. I told him all the ins and outs of everything that had happened, from the very beginning.
I was right in the middle of it when we heard someone else come into the office. It was Cary’s son and business partner, Scott, a balding man in his thirties with a shaved head and a confident stride about him. Scott just happened to stop by that morning, but Cary called him in. “You have got to hear this,” he said. “She couldn’t make this stuff up!”
I went back and started at the beginning, and Cary listened to my entire story again with a deep sense of caring and worry for me as I talked about the detectives ringing my doorbell, my arrest, and the fact that I hadn’t seen my kids for forty days and forty nights. Scott listened just as closely but seemed more incensed by the minute. It felt like he wanted to knock those detectives’ teeth in for the way they’d handled this case. I got the distinct feeling that he wanted to kick Joal’s teeth in, too. I liked his fire.
I had done enough research to know that Cary and Scott had handled cases involving allegations of child molestation in the past. I wasn’t sure exactly how many of those cases they’d handled, but considering how incapable I felt my previous attorney was, I already felt better in their hands. I liked the fact that they were based in Atlanta, a solid two-hour drive and a cosmopolitan world away from Chickamauga. And I really liked their tenacity.
I think the thing they listened to most clearly was my resolve to clear my name. I didn’t just want to “win my case” and get my kids back. I wanted everyone—my kids included—to know that I did not do this. My local attorney once told me that in order to win my case in court, “we’d only need to get one jury member.” A lot of defense attorneys feel that way: As long as there’s “reasonable doubt” and one jury member goes your way, you get a hung jury. To some attorneys that is a victory. Well, I didn’t just want to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I didn’t do this. I wanted to prove beyond any doubt that I didn’t do this.
Reaching for the lowest bar was not acceptable to me. Cary and Scott made it clear it wasn’t acceptable to them, either. They actually sat there at that very first meeting—on a Saturday, mind you—and went through the timelines I brought in. They paged through the two-inch binder full of motions and orders from the criminal and custody hearings we’d already been through. They praised me for my hard work and praised Clancy for coming up with the idea of making those timelines in the first place.
Then Cary asked me point-blank: “Did you do this?”
“No,” I said.
“Did you do any part of this?”
“No.”
“Did you do anything that could be misconstrued as this?”
“No!”
I wasn’t clueless about what could or could not be misconstrued as the improper handling of a child. I taught school. I’d had training on these matters. I was more aware than the average person, and I applied those lessons in my daily life. If Ashley had friends with her when we went to the pool, I wouldn’t even wrap a towel around them because I wouldn’t want anything to be misconstrued. I worked at a daycare center when I was in college and we always made sure someone else was present whenever we changed a diaper. I had not done one thing that even remotely resembled inappropriate touching with any of these girls or anyone else. I was sure of it.
Toward the end of the meeting, Cary looked at me and said, “I believe you. And you know what? They’re going to know I believe you.”
There are things in life you just know. It’s a peaceful feeling when it happens—this very intense peace that you feel, like, “Okay, this is it.” With Cary and Scott, it was just a fit. I never questioned if they were right from that day onward. I knew they were right. It wasn’t all rainbows and roses. We’d get into some major disagreements in the coming months and fight like family around the dinner table. But in my heart I felt God had brought me to them.
On Monday I typed up a letter dismissing my former attorney. He wrote back to me a few days later. He kindly returned most of the retainer we’d given him, and I knew he didn’t have to do that. I was grateful. He said he was “very disappointed” that I didn’t have more faith in him. I wanted to write back and tell him what I really thought. But I didn’t. It wasn’t worth any more of my anger or my time. To use an old cliché, I had bigger fish to fry. My parents wrote yet another check in order to retain Cary and Scott, and I finally felt like I was building a top-notch team of cooks in my metaphorical kitchen.
Chapter 21
The rest of the scorching month of July was spent prepping for my job-termination hearing in Chickamauga on August 15; continuing to fight for the right to see my children under “normal” circumstances; continuing to fight Joal to let the kids see my parents, their friends, and anybody else they’d been ripped apart from (in addition to myself); and trying to make sense of the absurdity of my imprisonment in the motor home in Diana’s driveway. There were times when I needed to take a shower when Josh was home, and that poor boy would wind up standing around in the blazing sun in the yard while I went inside the house to clean up. How long is this going to go on?
It was during this period when I first learned that my children were being forced to see a court-ordered therapist named Laurie Evans. Evans worked at the Children’s Advocacy Center, right next door to the courthouse in Ringgold. This one therapist was seeing my son as well as all three of the little girls who were involved in my case. I’m no expert, but that seemed absurd to me. Wouldn’t the prosecution want independent verification of what those girls were supposedly going through? Why would they want to have to rely on one therapist to make the case for all three girls?
One of the first goals my new team of attorneys set was to gather all the information we could get our hands on in order to fi
gure out what was really going on behind the scenes. We wanted transcripts of each of my accusers’ interviews. We wanted to see the actual videotapes of those interviews—and we knew they were required by law in the state of Georgia to videotape any interview with a child. We wanted phone records from the detectives and from the accusers’ parents. But we wouldn’t be able to even request any of those things until after an indictment came down. So we went above and beyond the criminal case and used my divorce case with David to subpoena phone records from David and from Sandra Lamb. We used the custody case in Tennessee to subpoena phone records from Joal and Sarah, too, and started putting paperwork in motion to demand depositions from the parties in each of those cases.
My attorneys warned me that the process would not be a quick one.
The only saving grace seemed to be my upcoming termination hearing. I know that sounds funny, but with the way the school district had filed their case against me, they had opened the door to the calling of witnesses. We prepared subpoenas to send to Sandra Lamb, the Wilsons, the McDonalds, to David, and more. We also planned to subpoena teachers and colleagues to testify that there had never been any problems with me and that in fact I was a great teacher and an asset to the community. But a big part of what we hoped to gain during that termination hearing was knowledge about the criminal allegations, of which we still knew so little.
My heart broke every time I thought about my classroom. The superintendent specifically forbade me from going onto school grounds or participating in the usual routines of my employment whatsoever that summer. They wouldn’t even let me back into my classroom to pick up my things. I had hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars’ worth of supplies I had purchased with my own money in that classroom. David had bought me a beautiful set of cabinets and a new desk for that room as a gift, which I cherished. Knowing that I couldn’t touch any of those things opened a hole in my heart almost as big as the hole I had for the belongings that still sat in my home—all those little objects and photos that provide a sense of comfort and familiarity in the place where you live. I hoped that by bringing in all of those witnesses and making my case in front of the Chickamauga School Board, they would at the very least see the mistakes of their ways, put me on administrative leave until the case was finished, and perhaps let me in after-hours to pick up my things.