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

by Tonya Craft

  My friend Jennifer gave me a different sort of support around that same time: She gave me a key to her town house. Jennifer is single and lived nearby with her sister. She told me I could stay at her home anytime I needed to. I could come and go as I pleased. Anytime, day or night.

  There were times that fall when the motor home grew icy cold, and at 2:00 A.M., when I couldn’t take the cold anymore, I’d jump into my SUV and drive over to Jennifer’s just to lie on that couch and warm up.

  I’d always hated being cold. I couldn’t stand it. Now I felt cold on the inside and out, and I hated it even more.

  Chapter 26

  I glared at David. I kept glaring at him across the conference table. It was the first time he’d made eye contact with me since that night at the restaurant when he’d laughed and walked away, and now he sat there with this confused, uncomfortable look on his face, as if he didn’t understand why I was glaring.

  David’s deposition took place in a conference room at attorney Larry Stagg’s office on November 5. Stagg, the man David hired to represent him in the divorce, also happened to be Sandra Lamb’s family attorney. Coincidence? We were set to depose Sandra Lamb on the very same day that Stagg was set to depose me. In truth, my biggest concern wasn’t any of those depositions. My primary purpose for being there wouldn’t come until after all three depositions were over.

  Cary King began by asking David a bunch of financial and personal-information questions—the kind of stuff you’d expect in a divorce. But it didn’t take long for Cary to switch gears and ask if David was aware of the criminal charges that were pending against me down in Georgia.

  Of course he’s aware, I thought. He’s been talking to Sandra the whole time, and I have my suspicions that he’s been talking to Joal, too.

  The thing was, when we asked whom David had been talking to about the charges, he said that he had talked to two detectives. I had forgotten that the detectives said they talked to David on the day they rang my doorbell. I had never confirmed whether or not that actually happened. “The police called me and needed me to come in and answer a few questions,” he said, “and I went in, ’cause I didn’t have anything to hide.”

  David doesn’t like to get caught up in anything. He doesn’t want to pick a side. He prefers to stay out of arguments. That can be a good trait to have. It’s not a good trait when you’re trying not to pick a side in defense of your wife who’s just been accused of molesting children.

  Contrary to what those detectives told me on my front porch, David denied telling the detectives, “I think she’s a child molester.”23 But he also didn’t say, “She didn’t do this!” He didn’t openly defend me. It was more like he was trying to ride the fence on the questions. David said he told them I was a good mom, but when they asked why he had left me, he told them that I hadn’t been giving him enough attention. In fact, he said I’d been paying too much attention to Ashley because I was upset about something that was going on over at Joal’s house (a red flag that the detectives completely ignored).

  Cary tried fishing around for some more details about how the investigation around me began, but we could tell pretty quickly that David didn’t have a lot of information to share. As far as how much he had been talking to Sandra, or to Joal, I couldn’t tell. We still hadn’t gotten a hold of his phone records at that point, so all we could do was take his word for it. He said that he had spoken to Sandra on “quite a few” occasions and that he had only spoken to Joal “to see how the kids were doing.”

  What? I thought. He can’t stand Joal!

  I knew there was no way he would ever call Joal just to “see how the kids were doing.” It didn’t make sense. And if he cares so much about the kids, why isn’t he making a declaration about my innocence? Or my guilt, for that matter, if he believes I’ve done something?

  When we asked for David to get more specific about how many times he had talked to Sandra, he said it was “too many times to count.” Just as I suspected. But when we asked what they talked about, he said he didn’t remember. Isn’t that convenient!

  David’s deposition wrapped up with me feeling like I’d learned almost nothing and without my getting the satisfaction I wanted to get from looking him in the eye. I was frustrated. I don’t know what I had envisioned happening exactly, but I definitely envisioned something more than that.

  My own deposition came next, and David’s attorney seemed to focus on asking me questions that were only tangentially related to the divorce. Almost everything seemed to focus on the charges against me and seemed to be fishing for information about what I knew and didn’t know. I answered honestly—all the while knowing that they would try to use anything I said against me if they could.

  All I thought about the whole time was that David, my husband, still looked like he was more confused than angry or hurt or guilty or any of the other emotions I thought he’d exhibit that day. He was still in that room, sitting down at the far end of the table now.

  It wasn’t until we took a small break and everyone else filtered out of the room that he looked at me and said, “So, how you been doing?”

  “Excuse me?” I spat. “I think you know exactly how I’ve been doing!”

  David didn’t bother asking anything else after that. He left the room and had a little powwow with his attorney. When we all came back from break, David’s attorney asked me, “How is it that you think David should know how you’ve been doing?”

  “Because he’s been talking to Sandra Lamb and Joal Henke,” I said.

  The attorney seemed suspicious when I said that. He asked how I had known that. He even implied I had already looked at David’s phone records.

  “No,” I said. “I just know my husband.” Both David and his attorney seemed taken aback by my response. The rest of that deposition went round and round, and none of it mattered to me. I barely remember what they asked me.

  We all took a break for lunch, and when we came back in, that was when I laid eyes on Sandra Lamb for the first time in months. I was completely taken aback by the conservative attire she wore to that deposition. I’d never seen her in anything so conservative for as long as I’d known her. Clearly she was ready to put on a show for the camera, I thought.

  She seemed to put on a show for the attorneys, too: Just before we started, Cary came to me and said, “Tonya, I know you didn’t do anything, but Sandra’s attorney asked that you not sit next to her.” Apparently Sandra was worried that she might feel compelled to do me physical harm if she had to sit too close to me.

  That was fine by me. She sat down at one end of the table with her attorney to her left, and I sat at the other end, basically directly across from David. That was the first time I noticed David looking at me with these sort of puppy-dog eyes. As if he felt bad for me. I couldn’t read his exact emotion, but it almost seemed pitiful.

  Sandra kept shooting me looks the whole time we were in there. My attorneys later wondered aloud if Sandra and David were having an affair. I told them they were nuts, but I understand why they might have interpreted the combination of David’s looks and Sandra’s attitude in that manner. She kept shaking her head at me, tipping it from side to side like some teenage girl trying to show some attitude to a rival in the hallway at school.

  At times, Sandra seemed distracted from the questioning. Some questions had to be asked more than once. It looked to me like she was losing her train of thought. I’d see her look at David rather than look at the questioner. Her testimony directly contradicted some of David’s testimony from just an hour earlier, too—including how many phone calls they’d made to each other. David had testified it was “too many to count,” while Sandra testified it was “at the most once a month,” which would have meant a total of about five times.

  The funny thing was, I felt kind of sorry for Sandra. It was strange to feel that alongside my anger toward her, but it was the truth. I felt sorry that her whole world seemed to be such a mixed-up mess.

  As we all
stood up to leave the room at the end of that long day, I walked right up to David and said, “Can I talk to you a second, just you and I?” Sandra appeared visibly agitated, but David said, “Sure,” and the two of us went into a private room upstairs and closed the door.

  This was it. It was the moment I had been praying for. I needed to look him in the eyes, to tell him I love him, and to let him know I didn’t want a divorce. I knew that if he could look me in the eyes and tell me that he wanted a divorce to my face, I would sign the papers and walk away, knowing that I’d done everything I could to save my marriage.

  “I want to read something to you,” I said, and I read him a letter and a poem I’d written just for that occasion. I basically laid my whole heart on the table. I let him know that I had been praying for him to come back. After I read it, I told him straight up, “I love you. I don’t want this divorce. I had to file my side of it in order to fight for me and Tyler and Ashley and to get Sandra in here for a deposition. I know you think I’m being difficult, but I’m doing what I have to do in order to fight for my kids. I love you. I’m going to look you in the face and say that so you know it, and if you still want a divorce, it’s yours. I’ll give you anything you want. If you want this ring right now, you can have it.”

  The attorneys knocked on the door a few times during all of this: “Y’all okay in there?”

  I wasn’t sure if we were okay or not. David didn’t say much at all. He looked as if he were in shock or something. He didn’t seem emotional but didn’t seem unemotional, either. When I was all done talking, I felt kind of stupid. I’d poured my heart and soul out to him and he just stood there looking at me and didn’t say anything.

  We left without a hug or even a handshake.

  “Oh, Tonya,” Cary said in the parking lot. “He still loves you. Did you see the way he was looking at you?”

  I felt really confused. David didn’t say, “Yeah, let’s sign the divorce papers; it’s over.” But he didn’t say, “I love you, too.” So I didn’t know what to do.

  Those depositions happened on a Friday. On Saturday, I slept. On Sunday, I woke up and ran on the treadmill. “Okay, God,” I prayed. “I can’t take this anymore. If this is supposed to be over, just let it be over. If not, then let me know that we need to reconcile!”

  I went to church that morning. When the choir was singing, there were volunteers up at the front and you could go up there and pray with them. I wound up praying with a man whom I’d never seen before and who clearly didn’t know anything about my situation. Even the media reports hadn’t mentioned my pending divorce, so there was no way he could have known.

  I went up to the rail and I told him, through tears, “I’m just having a really, really rough time. I’m confused about some things. If you can, just pray for peace because I’ve got none in my life right now.”

  That’s when he stopped me and said, “I really feel like I’m supposed to tell you something.”

  I looked at him.

  “I am a reconciliation coach for people who are on the brink of divorce,” he said. “What I do is help couples reconcile. I feel like I’m supposed to tell you that.”

  “What?” I said. It really freaked me out that he used the exact word I’d been praying about: “Reconcile.” Wow, God. You really did it this time.

  I thanked that man and walked away wordlessly. When I left church, I told Diana all about it. I prayed that night and woke up absolutely convinced that I needed to follow this lead. I remembered that man’s name was Brad, so I tracked him down through the church directory, and I called him, and I set up an appointment for Tuesday. That was when I told him my whole story. His jaw just about hit the floor. “That’s you on TV? I heard about that story!” he said.

  The reconciliation I’d prayed for was here. I knew it. I felt it. I let that word and this connection fill me up with hope. I desperately wanted Brad to give me an answer, to tell me how to make it happen: “God wants you to do A, B, and C!” He didn’t do that, of course. Nothing’s ever that simple. We just talked and he prayed with me, and he told me that I “would know what to do.”

  I left that Tuesday meeting and did nothing but pray the whole night.

  On Wednesday, my friend Jennifer picked me up to take me to the gym for a proper workout, like we used to have in the old days.

  In the car, I started to wonder, Do I let it go? David hadn’t contacted me. Not a word. I’d poured my heart out to him and he hadn’t so much as sent me a text in response. Yet on that day, in my heart, I felt like God was telling me, “You need to call him.” I know when it’s God talking to me because I argue with him. Usually what he wants me to do is not what I want to do myself. No! David needs to be the one to call me! I argued. There’s no way I’m calling him first!

  I thought I might text him or something, but I swear I had this overwhelming feeling telling me, “You need to call him and you need to call him right now.”

  As we pulled into the gym parking lot, I told Jennifer, “I need to make a phone call. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Jennifer would have taken my phone away if she’d known I was calling David. I watched her walk in. I dialed. David’s phone kept ringing. I prayed I’d get his voice mail. That would have been a whole lot easier than talking to him directly.

  He picked up.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He said, “Hey.”

  “How you doing?”

  It was really awkward.

  “Is there any way that we could sit down and talk?” I asked.

  He said, “Yeah.”

  He said he had a fishing tournament on Saturday and said he’d call me after that. Then we kind of said “bye” and hung up. He didn’t sound real excited about it. In fact, his tone really bothered me. But I decided to wait. The ball was in his court now.

  On November 14, 2008, my parents sat in a parking lot, waiting at a designated meeting area to pick up Tyler and Ashley. They were so excited. Joal had finally agreed to a court order in Tennessee to let the children see their grandparents. At first he had agreed to let me see the children as well, but then he went out of his way to have the Georgia court step in to stop it.24 I would have to wait until a December 11 proceeding at the court in Ringgold, Georgia, to fight that order, and the fact that my parents were about to see my children without me that day was the only thing clouding their spirits—until the seconds, minutes, and hours passed with no Joal and no children.

  Joal never showed. My parents called me. Devastated.

  I called my attorneys. My parents called their attorney. We were compelled to get the court involved yet again. Their lawyer and my lawyers had to file the first of multiple contempt charges against Joal in Tennessee. He would continue to ignore various court rulings over and over.25 Here I was facing life in prison for a crime I did not commit in Georgia, and yet it seemed to me that Joal could blatantly ignore court orders without fines or jail time, and no one in the system seemed to care.

  I waited all day that Saturday. I waited until dark. The fishing tournament was clearly long over. David never called.

  I told Tammy what was going on and she came over and dragged me to Outback Steakhouse. Jennifer came to meet us, too. I was thankful for their support at a moment when I felt like my husband had rejected me all over again.

  I fell asleep that night crying and praying for this chapter of my life to just plain end.

  Then on Sunday—a full week after my moment in church with the reconciliation coach—David finally called and asked if I still wanted to talk.

  I took a deep breath and said, “Yes.”

  I decided to bring a tape recorder with me to David’s house that day. I loved him, but I didn’t trust him. Not yet. I had gone out and bought myself a little digital tape recorder. I carried it just about everywhere I went. I’d leave it running in my purse whenever I talked to someone. Sometimes I’d find a way to hide it in a pocket. Sometimes if I was wearing the right kind of shirt, I’d stick that li
ttle digital recorder right in my bra. I bought an adaptor and recorded every single phone call I had with anyone who had anything to do with the case. When one tape recorder got full, I’d buy another, and another. Then I learned to download the files to my computer and to back them up online. Sometimes I’d run two or three tape recorders at the same time during important meetings.

  I also read up on the laws concerning taping conversations. There are some states, referred to as “two-party states,” which require people on all sides of the conversation to be aware that a conversation is being recorded. It’s illegal to record somebody’s conversation that you’re not a party to in many states. That’s just plain spying. So I never did that or anything close. Instead, I only recorded my own conversations with others, and I only did so in so-called “one-party states.” Lucky for me, Tennessee and Georgia are both one-party states—which means as long as one party to the conversation (like me) knows it is being recorded, no one else has to know, by law.

  Having tape recordings of as many of my conversations as possible would give me the backup I needed, in case anyone tried to twist my words or use a conversation against me in some way. If I could have, I’d have started wearing a little video camera on a necklace to record everything I did and everywhere I went, just to make sure nobody could make up any more lies about me.

  Recording my husband may seem like an awful thing to do. For me, at that time, all I was doing was protecting myself. I still didn’t really know which side David was on.

  I drove myself up to his beautiful house in Soddy Daisy. We said hello and walked into the living room. He lay back on his old couch, which was one of the few pieces of furniture he still had in that place, and I sat on the carpeted floor—and we talked. Once again, I told him that I loved him. He didn’t respond in the enthusiastic way I’d hoped, but since we were talking, I decided to tell him absolutely everything that had happened to me. Turned out, there was a lot that David didn’t know. He was pretty oblivious to what was going on with me. He cried for me. We cried together. Somehow we even managed to laugh together. He hugged me. He held me. And the next time I said “I love you” on that very same afternoon, he answered: “I love you, too.”