by Tonya Craft
That final hearing would determine a whole bunch of details about the evidence we would and would not be allowed to present at trial. It seemed like such a backward thing to have to argue to get more evidence into a trial as a defendant. From what I understood, the way trials normally go is that the prosecution argues to get all of their evidence in—the more evidence the better—while a defendant tries to get evidence excluded in order to keep the jury from hearing something that might be damaging. In our case, we wanted the jury to hear as much evidence as possible, because we felt the evidence all pointed to my innocence. It was the prosecution that seemed to be trying to keep evidence away from the jury’s eyes and ears. It was sickening to me. I couldn’t wait for Doc to make his arguments and hopefully put a scare into them about what they’d face in the courtroom.
Then it didn’t happen. The prosecutors had a “conflict,” so the hearing was postponed. Doc would have to wait, but Cary, Scott, and Clancy did as well as they could given what we were up against.
By the time we were ready to fly Doc down for the trial, money was so tight we realized we didn’t have the funds to do it. Doc had tons of files that needed to come with him. The shipping expense alone was going to be hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. We weren’t sure what we were going to do.
Then word got out to supporters in my church, and lo and behold, someone offered to let us borrow their beautiful custom van to drive up to Michigan to pick up Doc and his files. David and I decided to make that trip together, and we could hardly believe the generosity. It wasn’t until we started driving that I happened to open the glove box and find an envelope with my name on it. The envelope was stuffed with a beautiful note of support—and a bundle of cash. There was enough money to cover our gas up and back, and hotel rooms if we needed it, and meals—just about anything we’d need and then some.
I cried like a baby. I still do not understand the generosity and the outpouring of love from the community in the face of the horrible things I’d been charged with. There is no one that can tell me that God wasn’t directly involved in that spirit of giving. He was there.
Doc rode with me in the van while we talked strategy the whole way back. David flew back because he could not be privy to the information we were sharing. The man that could save my life was in the van with me. The man who held my heart flew miles overhead to adhere to the rules of criminal procedure.
Chapter 44
Just days before my trial was set to begin, a family tragedy struck that none of us saw coming. A tragedy that would require every ounce of Attorney Scott King’s attention. Out of respect for his family, I’m going to leave the details of that tragedy out of this story. The details were never reported in the media. I’ll just say that it was one of those times when you wish the whole world would come to a standstill.
Temporarily losing a key member of our legal team at such a late date made it impossible for me to mount my defense. It was an argument we felt the court could not deny, and we were correct. Judge House postponed the trial to the end of the current session in Catoosa County. The trial would start on April 12. We all hoped it would be enough time for Scott to deal with the matter as best he could and rejoin us. I needed him. He knew that. We all wanted him to be there.
The month’s delay did put an extra strain on our finances. By the time we were through waiting, we couldn’t afford to put my team up in a hotel or to rent office space for a headquarters, so my parents generously offered to give up their house for the duration of the trial. We turned their home into a makeshift “war room.” Each attorney could have his own bedroom. We cleared out the furniture in the living room and set up a big conference table just off the kitchen. We took the photos and decorations off the walls and hung up a big bulletin board, a white board, and my timeline. We had all sorts of friends and family over to help us move all the equipment and furniture in and out. We brought in an office-sized copy machine, a fax machine, and computers, and really turned that old family home into a live-in legal office.
My dad would stay at our house with David, while my mom and I both holed up with my parents’ neighbors across the street, Karen and Walt. They offered me a guest bedroom in their lovely home. They gave me my own key. That bedroom was just upstairs from Karen’s hair salon. Karen hates it when people make this comparison, but it was just like something out of Steel Magnolias, with the old-fashioned hair dryers that come down over your head, and the swivel chairs, and everything all done up in tasteful Southern fashion. As April came around, I started sleeping there almost every night. It saved me the drive from our house every morning, and it gave me my own private place to escape. It was perfect. It was just one more example of the love and support I had all around me.
Finally, the whole team was in place at my parents’ house—including the addition of a top-notch jury consultant named Denise de La Rue. We stayed up almost all night on April 11, going over everything one more time.
My attorneys gave me all kinds of last-minute pointers and advice about what to do and not do in the courtroom during those final hours. Mostly they reminded me to keep my emotions in check: “But don’t be too cold.” “Don’t be too emotionless.” “You want to show the jury that you’re human.” “But you don’t want to show too much emotion or the jury could be turned off …”
It was honestly too much information for any one person to take, so I nodded and let it go. I already knew I couldn’t go in there and make a fool of myself. I knew I didn’t want to come off as a crazy person. The less flailing about I did, the less angry I looked, the more I behaved as I normally would, the better off I would be. I finally resolved inside, I will just be me. Nothing more, nothing less.
Finally, I told everyone that we ought to get some sleep.
Other than Clancy, the members of my team weren’t of the same faith. None of us went to the same church. Cary and Scott are Jewish. Doc often demeaned my faith, calling Christians “simpleminded.” I believe it takes a stronger person to believe in something or someone bigger than yourself, but regardless: I asked all of them to say a prayer that night.
“Just pray for the truth,” I told them.
I walked across the street in the darkness. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours before sunrise, and I prayed as I walked under that sky: God, I don’t know why I’m going through this, but I thank you for staying with me. Thank you for watching over me. Thank you for bringing my team together and giving us all the strength we need. Thank you for watching over Tyler and Ashley. Thank you for watching over all of us.
I made my way through the shadowy outlines of Karen’s salon and into the quiet bedroom, alone. I closed the door and lay down on the bed with all of my clothes still on—absolutely terrified that my last days of freedom were now upon me.
Part III
The Fight
Chapter 45
I woke up at 5:00 A.M. I took a hot shower. When I came out of the bedroom, Walt had made me a whole pot of coffee right there in the salon. He had a mug already poured for me.
“Good luck, Tonya,” he said.
“You know we’re here for you,” Karen added.
“Thank you,” I responded. My head felt heavy.
I walked across the street, and everybody was buzzing and rushing around like the house was a hornet’s nest that’d just been hit with a thrown stone. My mind started racing, going over checklists, making sure we had everything we needed. All of a sudden it was time to go. David, who was a witness and wasn’t allowed to be privy to what went on in that house, came in only at the last minute to help us load all the files into my parents’ van.
“You ready?” Doc said.
“Ready as I’ll ever be, I suppose.”
I didn’t feel ready. Not at all. After all the time I’d spent ripped away from my kids, just praying for this day to come, I suddenly felt like I needed more time. I started racing through the list of people who I never talked to in my travels. I wanted to dig back into my la
ptop and read every line of every false-allegation case I’d ever found.
“Tonya,” David said. I’d apparently been standing there quite a while without moving or saying anything. “Honey, it’s time to go.”
As we stepped out of David’s truck, the cameras were everywhere. One girl with a still camera walked right beside me and jumped in front of me occasionally, just snap-snap-snapping away. She apologized for having to do that, and I said, “I understand, it’s your job.”
We went in through the back entrance and up the same elevator in which I’d previously been forced to face the back wall, to the familiar hallways under the fluorescent lights where so many awful twists of my fate seemed to have played out over the course of the previous two years. Only this time, we made our way into the main courtroom toward the front of the building. The biggest courtroom in the whole place.
Despite opposition from the prosecutors, Judge Brian House had agreed to media requests to place a camera in the courtroom throughout the trial. That morning, he made the decision to keep the camera off during jury selection. A few verbal spats ensued. I believe he even wound up fining one of the media crews for shooting footage on the front lawn. The media was restricted to sitting in a separate room just off to the side of the courtroom as it was, where they would watch the proceedings on a little TV. The publicity of it all seemed to be ramping up everyone’s emotions, and the general stir in the air made me even more nervous than I already was.
A trial doesn’t start with the slamming of a gavel and the calling of the first witness the way it does on TV. It starts agonizingly slowly and methodically with any last-minute motion hearings and perhaps the most important part of the whole thing: jury selection.
The court called in a special jury pool for my trial. They seemed to want to make sure they found jury members who hadn’t read any of the press coverage, and clearly that wouldn’t be easy. When I saw that group of hundreds of people, I thought the fix was in. I saw people I recognized, some of whom I thought might be friends with the Lambs and the Wilsons. I saw Joal Henke’s father, my former father-in-law, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. He was mixed right in with that whole group that we were somehow supposed to whittle down to sixteen—twelve jurors plus four alternates. (My understanding is there normally would only be one, maybe two alternate jurors, but Judge House decided we ought to select four, just in case.)
A couple hundred of the potential jury members were dismissed in the first hour, mostly because they had obligations that wouldn’t allow them to sit for a potentially long trial. It was amazing to think that my life was on the line, but there were people who seemed to feel that they were too busy to be bothered fulfilling their civic duty. It sure changes your view of “jury duty” when you’re sitting in the defendant’s seat.
Incredibly, Joal’s father and some other familiar faces were still there after lunchtime, so I was very glad we would have the right to remove certain potential jury members from the pool during “voir dire”—the Q&A portion of the jury selection process that literally means “to speak the truth.” Paying attention to whom we let through, and whom we removed, was crucial. That was why we’d hired a jury consultant. We didn’t want to get it wrong.
The first thing that happened in front of all of those people that day was the prosecutors read all twenty-two counts of my indictment, one by one. I had to sit there next to my attorneys, under the stares of all of those Catoosa County citizens, and listen to the prosecutor read all of those statements. The individual counts don’t say the word “alleged.” Each and every one of those charges say “Tonya Craft did” commit those grotesque acts to those girls. How is that not tainting the jury pool right there? I wondered. How is that not setting them up with a bias from the beginning?
The selection process was slow and tedious. Both Chris Arnt and Len Gregor seemed to be serious during the whole procedure. They appeared dark and cold. Doc was different. He came off like some kind of a mad professor. It’s not that he wasn’t serious. He was. But there was something about the way he spoke to the people in that room that appeared to make them feel more relaxed. I could see it, and I’m sure everyone in that room could feel it.
Much to my surprise, Doc brought up some pretty specific details during voir dire. For instance, he spoke about the fact that Brianna Lamb had played the part of an abused child in two different films. He wondered if anyone had seen those films and seen her performance. It was part of the strategy.
One woman raised her hand and wanted to be called up front. She gave her “voir dire” directly to me: “No offense, Miss Craft, but there is no way that if a child says it—I don’t care what anybody else says, I’m going to believe it.” That woman was removed from the jury pool “for cause,” but all I could think was, How many of the other jurors are harboring that same feeling and just not admitting it?
There were more than a hundred potential jurors left by dinnertime, and all of those candidates filled out written questionnaires that were put together by the legal teams on each side.
It took a long time to get to that point. Judge House called a recess until the following morning—so we were able to take those questionnaires back to my parents’ house that night and review them in tremendous detail.
Denise and I stayed up all night long sorting through every questionnaire and making notes on all of the jurors we hoped to pick—and those we wanted to do everything in our power to exclude. The bulk of the decision-making was all done by us two women.
Denise and I agreed that we wanted jurors who were well educated, who could listen to experts and discern which people actually know what they’re talking about and which people don’t. All I wanted were potential jurors who could put two and two together. Jurors who could potentially see the facts through a forest of what we believed to be lies.
The next morning, it took less than two hours to whittle the pool down to seven men and five women. I looked at those perfect strangers along with the four alternates and thought, Those people hold my life in their hands. They hold my children’s lives in their hands. No matter what I do or say now, it’s all in their hands.
All I kept praying was, God, please raise them all up to this task.
Chapter 46
The Truth for Tonya website, the Facebook page, the media coverage, the bumper stickers—none of those things were to be discussed in front of the jury, according to a pretty stern warning we received from Judge House during a pre-trial motion hearing. He didn’t issue a specific order on those subjects, as far as I could tell, but we were all under the impression that those topics were out of bounds. Talking about public opinion wasn’t a part of our strategy anyway, so we didn’t really fight that point. But then another issue came up and a “jury-out” hearing became necessary just moments before we were set to start the actual trial.
We learned that the prosecutors planned to use some statements of mine from the day my doorbell rang, May 30, 2008—statements that were made after I had contacted an attorney and therefore “invoked my right to counsel,” at which point it is now my understanding that the detectives should have stopped asking me questions. Suddenly, the jury was sent out of the room and we found ourselves in the middle of yet another hearing. Oddly enough, the ADAs wound up calling Detective Tim Deal to the stand to discuss his version of how things were handled on that day, which provided a brief glimpse of what was about to unfold in front of the jury.
Deal took that stand and described me not just as “upset” but “irate” on that day, saying that I got on the phone and was “yelling” about him and Detective Keith trying to force me to sign something. He then spoke about “not being welcome on the property” and said that he and Detective Keith went out and “waited by the curb” when Mr. Boggess came into my house.56
He talked about the “safety plan” that I signed that day and described it as a “non-binding” agreement.
It was downright surreal to hear that man talk. It was as if he w
ere talking about somebody else, because almost none of what he described was as I remembered it.
When Scott got up there to cross-examine him, Detective Deal said that he didn’t mention any children’s names specifically when he first came and knocked on my door. He said he wasn’t aware of any allegations made by Ashley at that time. Then, just a minute later, on that very same witness stand, he said that he specified to me that my daughter was one of the people the allegations had come from. What? And how did I know to call Kim Walker the day they showed up if they had never mentioned her daughter’s name?
Is this how the whole trial’s going to go?
“It was early on in the investigation,” he said. “Detective Keith gave me a quick overview and summary of the case, but I’d only been involved for one day. And I wasn’t present for the original interviews that occurred on the 27th. And, you know, out of respect for her position, just like I would a minister, or law enforcement, I really hoped that these allegations weren’t true—until the evidence appeared to become so overwhelming that probable cause existed that indicated it had happened.”
It was almost impossible to bite my tongue.
He went on to make more statements that confused me, saying on one hand that he was not aware that my attorney had left him messages at his office, because he wasn’t in his office. Then he said that the second time he came back to my house, with Mr. Boggess in tow, that he told me that I had “invoked” my right to counsel. Does he not remember telling me on the phone that he didn’t “work for” my attorney and didn’t care about anything that my attorney said? He certainly didn’t tell me anything about invoking any rights. I had no idea what my rights were that day.
In a way, I guess that last-minute hearing was good practice for me. I sat in my seat, with Doc to my right and Cary, Scott, and Clancy to my left at the defendant’s table, on the left-hand side of the courtroom. It gave me a little time to absorb the green-carpeted, wood-paneled surroundings—and to get used to holding my feelings in as much as I could.