by Tonya Craft
The thought made me sick. The thought that my own daughter had undergone such a physical exam when I knew nothing had happened to her made me even sicker.
The looming September trial date set everything into high gear, and in many ways, my P.I., Eric Echols, and I were like the dynamic duo of research and investigation. He was the one out there pounding the pavement and knocking on doors—doing work that I wasn’t allowed legally to do—while I worked on my laptop, sifted through documents, and did the organizational work it took to set up interviews and decide many of the avenues we would pursue. Eric was dogged in his pursuits, and he believed in me with all of his heart. I couldn’t imagine a better partner in crime—or in my case, a better partner to help undo the crimes that had been committed against me.
He was one of the most valuable members of my team.
I guess I should’ve seen it coming.
Chapter 34
“Tonya,” Eric said, “you won’t believe what just happened.”
“What?” I said.
I’d never heard Eric sound shaken before.
“I tried to serve Sandra the subpoena, and she stood in the middle of the road, screaming at me and blocking my way,” Eric said. “Then she came over and tried to take my phone. She slapped me in the face through my open window!”
“She also called me a ‘black bastard,’” he said.34
“She what? Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not okay!”
“I am so sorry, Eric!”
“I recorded the whole thing on my phone,” he said. “I’m definitely going to file a complaint against her.”
Eric’s words sent a chill right down my spine.
“I got her on video. I had my phone running the whole time. She’s done.”
The fact that Eric had captured Sandra’s behavior on camera would be evidence enough to get the cops and courts to do something in almost any other county. But in Catoosa? The whole thing worried me. I didn’t want any more problems. I didn’t want anyone on my team to have to fight any more fights than we were already fighting.
Lo and behold, a court date was set for a hearing on whether or not to issue an arrest warrant against Sandra Lamb. It happened quickly. Almost too quickly. I felt those chills again when Eric gave me the news. I felt like something was up.
Sandra walked into the courtroom a few days later without an attorney by her side. I wasn’t there. I was told what happened by a number of my supporters who were present for that hearing and by Eric himself. What they all corroborated was the judge came in and said they were there to discuss a matter concerning an arrest warrant for Sandra Lamb, and Sandra stood up and said something to the effect of, “Oh, I didn’t realize it was for me. I thought it was a warrant for his arrest,” and she motioned toward Eric. “I don’t have an attorney,” she said.
That was when, according to what I was told, the judge dismissed Sandra Lamb from the courtroom. He ordered everyone else to clear the courtroom as well—except for Eric. Once everyone was gone, two detectives came in, slapped handcuffs on Eric, and arrested him.
Eric Echols was charged with three counts of intimidating a witness.35 Oddly enough, it wasn’t Sandra Lamb whom Eric was charged with intimidating. It was Jerry McDonald, Kelly McDonald, and Chloe McDonald.
Eric had interviewed Jerry twice during the month of July, once on July 15 and once on July 23—the day before his run-in with Sandra Lamb. Jerry had submitted to those interviews of his own free will, and those interviews were recorded and transcribed.36 As far as I understood, Eric barely had any contact with Kelly. She had come to the door when Eric stopped by the house to deliver a subpoena for our custody case in Tennessee, and that was it. As far as I knew, he’d had no contact with Chloe at all. And yet he was forced to sit in a jail cell until his poor wife could get the money together to bail him out.
Worse? After this happened, Eric made a decision not to do legwork on my case anymore. I can’t say what happened behind closed doors, but Eric refused to come back to Catoosa County for many months after he was put in jail and his bond was posted. He led me to believe that they would not bond him out unless he agreed not to work on my case any further, and I was very apt to believe him based on what I had experienced.
I was horrified. I was concerned about Eric, of course, but I couldn’t help but be scared about what it might mean for my case.
“If there’s no indictment before trial, we might still be able to put him on the stand,” my attorneys assured me. “We’ll just need to be careful. They could attack his credibility because he was arrested. Or they could use this against you, to try to claim that you were attempting to intimidate witnesses by sending a man out to do your legwork.”
“Are you serious?” I asked.
The whole thing left me shaking with fear. This small-town justice system was even more frightening than I’d wanted to let myself believe. Seeing how quickly a key member of my team was dispatched sent a very powerful message my way: I needed to put more eyes on my case. I thought, The FBI should know what’s going on here. So should the attorney general. So should the governor. So should the press.
Once word spread about Eric’s arrest, we couldn’t find another P.I. to work for us anywhere. Nobody wanted to come near my case with a ten-mile pole. Suddenly, I was left with no one to do the legwork I needed. My team had lost one of its pillars.
As the summer dragged on, I continued to mark the days on my calendar—noting just how many days I’d gone without seeing Ashley: 433, 434 … Not one of those days grew less painful than the one before it. All I wanted was for the trial to arrive so I could show the world the truth and hopefully see her again. Yet I also dreaded it every second, mostly because I still didn’t know what we were preparing to fight. We hadn’t received any discovery from the DA’s office yet that summer.37
Because of that, we weren’t ready to go to trial in September. There was just no way. We still didn’t know what exactly we were defending me from. We hadn’t seen so much as the girls’ interviews with the detectives. We didn’t want to let the DA’s office know we weren’t fully prepared. They might have pressed to go to trial as soon as possible. But through some careful negotiations and discussions between attorneys, both sides wound up agreeing to postpone the trial until the next court session. That next session wouldn’t happen until March 2010.
Because my attorneys had previously filed a motion for a “speedy trial,” the law in the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit said we would have to have a trial within three of the rotating court sessions. We had already passed by one session without a trial in July, immediately following the indictments and my second arrest. So by skipping the September session, the court would have no choice but to put me on the calendar and get my trial scheduled for that next session in March. Period. There was no way around it. It was one of the first definite anythings I’d experienced during this whole entire process.
It broke my heart to think I’d have to wait that long to try to clear my name, but I also knew that we needed that time in order to continue to build my case.
It broke my heart even more to consider the possibility that the court might not let me see Ashley before that trial. I couldn’t think about it. I just couldn’t. The punishment felt too cruel to be plausible. Once again, I put my faith in the powers that be. I prayed that someone in power would see how wrong the court had been to keep me from Ashley for so long. There has to be someone, somewhere in the system, who can see how wrong it is for Ashley, too!
I couldn’t blindly trust a system that had failed me so many times, however. I had to continue taking matters into my own hands. So I sat down and did some more research. One night I stayed up late on my laptop, reading up on a case in Bakersfield, California, in which a whole bunch of people went to prison based on allegations of child sexual abuse that were later overturned. It was awful. These people spent years in prison before they were finally exonerated. One of them was behind bars for twenty years befo
re they got out.
A documentary called Witch Hunt had been made about the case, produced and narrated by Sean Penn. I ordered several copies of the DVD on the spot. I needed to know what went wrong in that case so I could keep it from going wrong in mine.
Chapter 35
“I need to go to California,” I said.
“What for?” David asked.
“Remember that documentary I told you about? About the Bakersfield case?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it came in the mail yesterday and I watched it last night. And then I watched it again. It’s unbelievable, David. The film showed how these people went to prison based on horrendous interviews and detectives who had an all-roads-lead-to-Rome attitude, and a hysteria overtook those parents, and how the convictions were eventually overturned because the California Innocence Project and the attorney general dug into it and pulled apart the files and broke down the interviews with the kids and showed how the parents had coerced them, and the detectives had gone right along with it, and—”
“Yeah, but what do you need to go to California for?”
“To see that attorney general. I guess he’s a former attorney general now, but I need to talk to him to find out what convinced him to look at that case in the first place, and what it was that made him look into it. Because when I go to the attorney general in Georgia to show him my case, I want to have my ducks in a row and know what’s going to catch his attention, like—”
“Do you really think an attorney general in California is going to talk to some unknown woman from Georgia?”
“I don’t know, but I have to try.”
“Why don’t you just call him up on the phone, then?”
“I can’t just call him, David. It won’t work. It’s like with Doc. When you’re dealing with somebody that promi—”
“That’s just crazy talk,” David said. “There’s no way you’re going to get in to see somebody like that, and we can’t afford it anyway. I gotta go.”
He shut the door just a little too hard for my liking on his way out.
Maybe it was crazy. I guess it sounded crazy. It didn’t seem crazy to me.
Two days later David informed me that he had to go away on a business trip for a couple of days. He had to see a client, he said—in California.
“Well, I’m going with you,” I said.
David could tell just by the way I was looking at him that he wasn’t going to convince me otherwise. When we realized that David had accumulated enough frequent flier miles for me to make that trip free of charge, I took it as a sign.
I didn’t ask David what part of California he was flying to. California’s an awfully big place. But it turned out that David’s client was located in Carlsbad, California, no more than what looked like a thirty-five-minute drive from the offices of the very man I aimed to see.
True to the cliché, LA traffic was horrendous. It took us several hours to make what should have been a forty-five-minute trip from the airport to the address I’d Googled for former attorney general John Van de Kamp. The drive out and back to Carlsbad would be just as bad. But we did it.
It was strange driving through LA, knowing it was the land of Hollywood, where movies are made—and where Brianna Lamb had actually been cast in a role in a film that came out in 2008. The year after she was in my kindergarten classroom, Brianna spent part of several months filming a horror movie. It was a pretty big deal. In it, she played a little girl who had been abused by her mother. She played a part in another film a year or so after that as well, in which she played a little girl in a foster home. I tried to convince myself that the fact that Brianna had played the part of an abused girl for the cameras was just a coincidence—but the irony of it all struck me pretty hard as we sat in traffic, surrounded by all sorts of Hollywood-looking people in their fancy BMWs and Mercedes.
I approached the security desk in that LA high-rise with the same techniques I’d used to get into Doc’s humble office in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“I’m trying to save the lives of my children,” I told the security guard, and I held up my pendant with their pictures on it. That seemed to give him pause.
“Hold on one minute, ma’am,” he said.
The security guard put me on the phone with the former AG’s assistant. She invited me up to her office. I showed her my pendant, and she said she’d get back to me.
I walked into that lobby the next morning carrying my binders and notebooks, and the security guard remembered me the moment I walked in. “I don’t know how you did it, but I am glad you got an appointment,” he said, guiding me toward the elevator.
Former AG John Van de Kamp was more than I could have hoped for. Polite. Insightful. Courteous. The Bakersfield case had unfolded more than twenty years earlier, yet I asked him all kinds of questions about it, and he answered every one of them. He asked all kinds of questions of me, too, and he looked at my binders full of timelines and highlighted interviews from some of the witnesses we planned to call in my defense—and then he gave me some advice on what to focus on.
In the Bakersfield case, children testified against their neighbors, against adult role models, and even against their own parents. Based on the documentary, it seemed that detectives and prosecutors, and in some cases family members, didn’t so much ask questions of the children to find out if anything had happened to them but instead told them what had happened to them and then forced them to testify to those lies. With some of the kids, it wasn’t so blatant. The interviewers simply used a lot of repeated questions and leading questions to get the children to give them the answers they wanted to hear. It was awful. Some of the children themselves started to crack in the years following the convictions. Some of them even came forward on their own and tried to get the convictions overturned at the local level. Still, the convicted adults—including some of those kids’ own parents—rotted in prison anywhere between twelve and twenty years before their convictions were overturned. The only reason they were overturned even then was because of the involvement of a group called the California Innocence Project and because of Mr. Van de Kamp’s crusade to see justice properly served once he took a look at the case.
The worst part of the whole ordeal, to me, was that some of the children who had been forced to testify were grotesquely affected by their involvement. According to the film, their participation was no fault of their own. They were just little kids, so the blame clearly lay with the adults and especially the people in power in the Bakersfield legal system, but the guilt that those children placed on themselves led to drug problems later in life, attempted suicides, and more.
I shuddered to think of the destruction that had already been done to my own children. I silently said a prayer for them even as I listened to Mr. Van de Kamp. I said prayers for Brianna and Chloe, too. No child should be put through this, I thought.
Mr. Van de Kamp helped reassure me that the fight was worth fighting. He showed me that by focusing on the facts, by focusing on the transcripts and tapes of the actual interviews with the children, and by analyzing the types of leading questions the detectives and prosecutors likely used in order to come up with these indictments, I would have a shot at convincing a jury that I was, in fact, an innocent woman. It was a long shot, he admitted. It would not be easy. But still, I had a shot.
Just that little bit of encouragement alone made the whole trip worth it.
Mr. Van de Kamp also gave me another bit of advice before I left. As much as he hated to admit it, he said, it would be a good idea for me to get some national media attention on my case. That spotlight would help keep the judges and attorneys in line. The fact that the eyes of the country would be on them might make them think twice before pulling anything fishy, he said.
That was right in line with the thoughts I’d had about getting “more eyes” on my case.
I went back to Tennessee emboldened, convinced I could walk through any door I wanted to. So I walked into the office of the attor
ney general of the state of Georgia—and his assistant wouldn’t let me talk to him.
“Everybody says they’re innocent,” he told me. “Come back after your trial.” He did not even look at any of the documents I had so carefully organized.
I walked straight into the office of the governor, too, though I never did get in to see him, either. I had friends and supporters who made a relentless number of calls to both the AG’s office and the governor’s office on my behalf after that, requesting that they take meetings with me. They called so often that when I would call to try to set up an appointment, they would ask me to “please” make my supporters stop calling.
I would say, “Well, why don’t you just see me for fifteen minutes, and I promise the calls will stop.” It was all for naught. But I didn’t let that deter me. I figured that even if I didn’t get in, even if they didn’t take any action, those high-powered people now had my case on their radar. They knew who Tonya Craft was and could never deny they had heard of me or my case.
David sold his bass boat.
It was worth more than two cars put together, and he spent more time and money caring for that thing than he did any other possession he owned. Fishing was his retreat. His solace. His sport. And he sold that boat so I could continue my fight—and continue my travels.