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

by Tonya Craft

Thorne pressed, “How come she screamed at y’all?”

  “I don’t know. She just screamed and told us to go to our room,” she repeated.

  Thorne kept on her, trying to find out what I may have told her about those men on my porch, and “anything” that happened. Ashley answered: “I didn’t even know who they were,” she said, referring to the detectives. “Not until my dad told me.”

  We weren’t supposed to be discussing the case with the kids. Didn’t the detectives tell me that my ex-husband had “no knowledge” of what was happening that Friday? Was that all a sham? Was it a lie? Were these people tainting my children against me from the moment they were out of my home? And had my ex been interrogating his own daughter?

  Thorne excused herself to go talk to somebody she “works with.” Ashley put her feet up on the chair and started sucking her thumb—an annoying habit but something she did on a regular basis. Thorne left her alone in there for what seemed like a very long time.

  When she finally returned, Ashley said, “Why can’t I leave now? It’s been too long.”

  “You can in just a minute. We’re almost done,” Thorne told her. “I’ve just got a couple more questions because I’m kind of confused on something, okay? Now you do know that … that you’re not in trouble, right?”

  Ashley immediately seemed to get upset again, which made me get upset watching her.

  “Ashley, you’re not in trouble, and I’m not going to ask you about that again, okay?” Thorne said—I think she was referring back to the boyfriend-girlfriend game questions that got Ashley upset in the first place. “But you’re not in any trouble, okay? Okay? Uh, I’m just kind of confused on something though. So can you help me?”

  Ashley responded through tears and wails so big that you couldn’t understand a word she was saying. But Suzie Thorne did not stop. How can she continue to grill a six-year-old little girl like that?

  “And you told me your mom put medicine on your bottom because it was hurting? Because your tummy was upset and you said that … that you told [your dad] that she touched your vagina?” Thorne said.

  “She did,” Ashley said through tears.

  “Huh?” Thorne said.

  “She did,” Ashley repeated.

  “She did, okay. But why did she touch your vagina?” Thorne pressed, even though she had gotten a clear answer about this before.

  Bawling her little eyes out, Ashley said, “She just did. I don’t know.”

  “You said she just did. You don’t know why?”

  “Uh-uh,” Ashley cried. “No, I don’t know why.”

  The interview kept going and going. Eventually, Thorne asked, “Where were your clothes?”

  “I said … I already told you.”

  “You said that when she put medicine on your bottom that … that she pulled them down,” Thorne said.

  Well, that’s not true at all! Ashley said she pulled them down herself and then pulled them right back up!

  “Okay, when she touched your vagina …” Thorne continued.

  Ashley was beside herself at this point, just squalling at the repeated questioning. “THEY WERE PULLED DOWN. IT WAS THE SAME TIME WHEN I HAD MEDICINE!” Ashley yelled.

  “It’s okay, calm down, all right. But did … what I need to know is …”

  “I don’t want to,” Ashley cried.

  “Ashley, I’m sorry that you’re getting upset, okay? And I’m not trying to …”

  “I want to stop,” Ashley said firmly.

  “I’m not trying to upset you, okay?”

  “I don’t want to talk,” Ashley repeated.

  “Are you scared that … are you scared that you’re going to get somebody in trouble?” Thorne said.

  “No, I just don’t want to talk,” Ashley repeated, again.

  “Okay, well sit up for just a second and we’ll be done, okay?”

  “I don’t want to,” Ashley said.

  Thorne tried again and again to get her to calm down and then finally asked, “Do you have any questions for me?”

  Ashley, still crying, said, “No.”

  And at that point, I cried, too.

  I went to Scott and Cary’s office that day expecting to cry. I expected to be sad. Yet none of us expected what we saw on those DVDs. We expected to hear a litany of horrible things that those girls said had happened. I expected to hear charges and accusations to come flying out of their mouths—specific charges that we’d have to specifically refute. Instead, there seemed to be no specific accusations of aggravated sexual assault or any sexual assault at all. Not a one.

  For a moment I allowed myself to think, Let’s get this dismissed! There’s nothing here that warrants these charges! You can’t have an indictment based on something that somebody said—when they didn’t even say it!

  Scott was more thoughtful. He said, “We will file a demurrer. We’ll file a bill of particulars. We’ll file motions to try to get the particular indictments thrown out.”

  He then reminded me who we were dealing with and what I’d already been put through. “The problem is, it won’t work,” he said. “This happens all the time. Prosecutors pack on charges. It happens every single day.”

  Cary and I both knew Scott was right. The truth didn’t seem to matter to the court now. All that mattered was the fight.

  “Well, this system sucks,” I said. “I’m sitting here with seven indictments against my own daughter, and she said nothing.”

  Scott stayed focused on the trial. He’s a trial attorney. A good one. “Look, this is a good thing,” he said. “This crap is not what we were expecting. We can use this. A jury is going to see right through this. We were expecting children full of emotions and all kinds of details. That’s what a jury will be expecting, too.”

  As far as I was concerned, there was nothing good about any of it.

  Chapter 37

  I stayed overnight in Atlanta, and the next morning we went through the follow-up interviews that unfolded in the days and months after those first interviews.

  First up was Chloe’s second interview, which happened one day after the first warrants for my arrest were issued. For this interview, Chloe again sat down with Detective Tim Deal, and she immediately spurted out a new story—saying that she’d been touched “inside the panties.”

  Detective Deal asked Chloe why she hadn’t said anything about it during the first interview, and he asked her if it was because she was “nervous”—a notion that Chloe agreed to. Deal then excused her for not telling the truth if she was nervous. Does it matter that when I watched that video, I didn’t see any outward sign that Chloe was nervous during her first interview at all?

  Deal immediately pulled out a diagram of a naked child, pointed to the vaginal area, and basically started offering her options: “on top of your clothes or under your clothes?” “in or out?” “front or back?”—and on numerous occasions, this little girl chose both options. She simply repeated back the words that he used: “On top and under,” she said. “In and out,” “front and back.” Deal never asked for details or specifics. Chloe had revealed what appeared to be an uncanny ability to remember every detail of getting her tonsils out in her last interview. It makes no sense that he wouldn’t ask her to reveal the details of her stories in this interview. It seems pretty obvious to me that Chloe has no details to share because nothing actually happened!

  As the DVD continued, Deal pressed Chloe about whether she had seen me touch Skyler and Brianna, to which she answered, “Yes.” Then a few questions later, she said she “didn’t see.” She added that she couldn’t remember where she was or whether she was in the bedroom where Brianna and Skyler were during the “sleepover” (which neither Brianna nor Ashley corroborated), and she plainly contradicted herself by saying that Ashley was in the bedroom and then saying that she wasn’t in the bedroom. Yet Deal never asked her to clarify any of her statements.

  Deal then finally asked what seemed to be a very straightforward question of Chloe: to te
ll him where Ashley was while I was supposedly touching Skyler and Brianna.

  Ashley was “walking with her mom,” she answered. So we were taking a walk. Outside.

  How can I be inside molesting two girls in the bedroom while I’m simultaneously outside taking a walk with my daughter?

  Finally, Deal asked Chloe if the reason she didn’t tell him the whole story during their first interview was because she forgot or because she was afraid. And again, Chloe seemed to take both options: “I was afraid and I forgot everything,” she said.

  I could not help but to note that Chloe, just like Brianna, had “memories” come back to her after spending time with her mom between interviews.

  So why was she more comfortable this time around? Perhaps because of one very important detail that Chloe told Detective Deal during that interview: “Mom said if I done good I could go get a toy.”

  Sometime later, we’d receive the summaries from each of these interviews as part of discovery. Not surprisingly, the interview summary Deal provided to the DA’s office didn’t mention anything about Chloe being rewarded with a “toy” if she “done good.” In fact, none of the interview summaries by the detectives or the other interviewers included any details whatsoever that might have pointed toward parental influence or to my innocence. Those details were simply left out.

  The statements that we considered to be evidence of coaching and the overall outlandishness of the accusations got worse as Brianna Lamb came in for what amounted to a third interview, conducted on June 4, 2008, and then a fourth interview that was conducted almost a whole year later, on April 1, 2009.

  The third interview was conducted by Suzie Thorne, the same woman who’d interviewed Ashley. The interview was filled with new stories of just how “mean” I was to Brianna in all sorts of different ways. I wasn’t just mean to her at Ashley’s birthday party. I was “mean” to her because I would never feed her when she came to my house, she said. I was “mean” to her when I pulled her into the hallway at school because some other kids had been calling my daughter “Willy Wonka” in class. She and Ashley weren’t in the same grade, let alone the same class. I was “mean” to her when I wouldn’t let her watch TV and made her leave the room when she stayed over. There were TVs in the kids’ bedrooms, as well as the living room, and the bonus room, and any kids that were over were welcome to watch TV anytime. She also complained that I made her watch TV with bad words (not true) and drove too fast and that one time I told her that she had a weird eye color. What?! Oh, and after getting questioned and questioned during the first two interviews about whether I ever said anything about her mom, she added a new bit of “meanness” I supposedly uttered: “She would tell me that my momma was mean and that my momma didn’t love me.”

  The interview was filled with contradictory statements that were never questioned. For instance, during the first interviews, Brianna said more than once that this whole thing had allegedly occurred when she was in kindergarten. In the third interview, she said more than once that it happened when she was in “first grade.” Yet the oddest contradiction was probably her answer to the “where it happened” questions. In the first interview, she said “it” only happened in the kitchen. In the follow-up interview, she talked about taking baths at my house and how I’d “scrub her real hard” on the stomach. Then in the third interview, Brianna reiterated, “She would only do it in the kitchen …”

  I didn’t hear Suzie Thorne or any of these interviewers ask anything that sounded like a logical follow-up question about any of this contradictory material. There was never one question about who else was in the home when these events allegedly happened. In all of Brianna’s stories about being at my house, there was no mention of the fact that Tyler would have been there. Or David. Or the Potter kids, whom I used to babysit every day. Or anyone else. The interviewers never asked, and Brianna never offered. In fact, unless they gave her an “option” question full of scenarios to choose from, Brianna answered open-ended questions, such as “Did anything else happen?”, with the most fantastical stories. She spoke about searching and searching all over for me one day and how she couldn’t find me anywhere, only to finally find me out mowing my lawn. My entire lot in Chickamauga was less than half an acre, and it’s open with no trees. It wouldn’t be hard to find me. And I don’t recall Brianna ever being present when I went out to mow the lawn. She talked about me working out while she was there, in “short shorts” and a “tank top,” and telling her that was how I get strong so I can “hurt people.” (What?) She talked about jumping on the trampoline and how I forced her to do a back handspring, and she hurt her back. There’s no record of any injury. Even Sandra didn’t bring up any such incident. It didn’t happen.

  After sitting through three interviews in eight days, after answering ninety questions, Brianna Lamb never made an accusation of digital penetration. There was no mention of any penetration of any kind. So how is it that her name appeared on three of my arrest warrants? And how could those arrest warrants be labeled with charges of “aggravated” sexual assault?

  Brianna’s fourth interview happened eleven months after that third one—eleven months of potential parental influence and “therapy” at the hands of Laurie Evans.

  The interview was conducted by a woman who hadn’t been part of the case before. A woman named Holly Kittle. So what were her qualifications for the unbelievably sensitive and important job of videotaping interviews with children for the CAC? She had a BS in anthropology. She’d worked as a forensic assistant conducting autopsies for about six years. Then she took a five-day training course called “Finding Words” that apparently told her all she needed to know about dealing with cases of alleged child sexual abuse.44

  A five-day course.

  Kittle spent the first few minutes of the interview discussing seemingly unrelated events with Brianna, until eventually Brianna said something about being upset at school and needing to be pulled out of her classroom.

  “Why didn’t you feel good?” Kittle asked.

  “Well,” Brianna said, “last night I told Mommy something that the Evil One did …”

  “The Evil One.” That was me she was referring to. Kittle apparently already knew this because she didn’t ask who “the Evil One” was. After nearly a year of therapy, this little girl is referring to me as “the Evil One”?

  “What did you tell her?” Kittle asked.

  “I told her one time I was taking a bath, well, she was giving me a bath and she stuck her finger up my butt. And she wouldn’t say anything. She would always just not talk when she did it and see, like, when her daughter, Ashleigh”—Ashley’s name was spelled incorrectly throughout the transcript—“was in the bath she wouldn’t do it because she would always wash me first and then Ashleigh would get in the bath and she would do it … see, like, if I was in the bath she would wash me until Ashleigh would come in there and then she would give Ashleigh a bath. Well, anytime me and Ashleigh took a bath together, she wouldn’t do it. So … I don’t know if she did it to Ashleigh because she would always wash me first. Anytime Ashleigh would be in the bathroom she wouldn’t do it. And so, and so, so I don’t know if she did it to Ashleigh, but that’s the thing she did to me.”

  Kittle responded to that flurry of words in what seemed to me to be a very nonchalant tone: “And you said that she stuck her finger up your butt … Tell me more about that.”

  “Well, see, I didn’t … she just automatically started doing it. And so I don’t know … and then that’s … and she would sometimes also stick her finger up my private”—at this point, Brianna made a motion with her arm, kind of pointing upward with her hand out in front of her body and face, above the tabletop—“and that’s all she would do to me in the bathtub, but that’s all she used to do in the bathtub.”

  “What is that?” Kittle asked, referring to her hand motion.

  “I don’t know. She just did that. I don’t call it anything,” Brianna answered.

  �
��Did that go inside your private or outside your private?”

  “Inside,” Brianna said.

  Brianna had been asked similar questions a total of twenty-three times before that moment and had answered “outside,” “out,” or “on top” every single time—until this time.

  “When she did … when she did that inside your private, what did it feel like?” Kittle asked.

  “It … I didn’t like it. Before she did it, she said that you can’t say anything. And so …”

  “What did you say when she said that?”

  “She covered my mouth,” Brianna said. “I couldn’t say anything.”

  “What did she cover your mouth with?” Kittle asked.

  “Her hand.”

  A number of questions later, Kittle asked Brianna to specify which hand I used to cover her mouth.

  “Uh, left,” Brianna answered.

  “And then, where was her right hand?”

  “It was behind her back.”

  “What?” I said out loud right in Scott and Cary’s office.

  Kittle went right on: “Did she do anything else with her right hand?” she asked.

  “Uh-uh,” Brianna said. As in, “no.”

  I grabbed my head with both hands. “So, do I have a third hand growing out of my belly button or something?”

  The whole thing made my brain hurt. Brianna’s words made no logical sense to me at all. How could a person have one hand on her mouth, another behind their back, and be putting a finger in her behind or into her private at the same time?

  Kittle asked Brianna about why she hadn’t said anything about this before now, to which Brianna replied she was “scared” she would “get in trouble.”

  “Who were you scared you would get in trouble from?” Kittle asked.

  “My mom,” Brianna answered.

  She apparently wasn’t afraid of getting in trouble with me. She was afraid of getting in trouble with her mom.

  “When this happened in the bathtub, were you in her class?” Kittle asked, switching the focus right back to me, Miss Tonya, “the Evil One.”