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

by Tonya Craft

  “What is going on?” I asked my team.

  Judge House called the jury in. He asked the prosecution to call its first witness. Then Chris Arnt stood up and said, “The prosecution calls Brianna Lamb.”58

  From what I’d learned, it seemed that in most of these types of cases, the prosecutors would save the children for the end—so their words would be the last words the jury heard. I was floored to see one of the children so early on. I wasn’t emotionally prepared for it. At all.

  It was the first time I had laid eyes on Brianna in person since whenever I’d last passed her in the hallway at Chickamauga Elementary, all the way back in the spring of 2008. She came in wearing her Sunday best, a white dress, with her hair all done up nice. She carried a doll that seemed to be dressed like her, and she kept her head down, solemnly, as she walked in escorted by a designated adult and took her seat on the witness stand.

  Brianna was nine now. She was visibly older than she’d appeared even in that last videotaped interview from April 1, 2009. She was remarkably composed as the prosecution asked her a few questions and basically had her repeat her allegations against me for the jury. She didn’t get upset. She didn’t cry. In fact, she smiled and seemed relaxed. She just sat there and spoke like it was just another day in her life.

  The most shocking part to me was the fact that the prosecution asked her so few questions. It was over in no time. There were very few specifics asked of that child whatsoever. I think the prosecution wrapped up in less than ten minutes, then all of a sudden it was Doc’s turn to cross-examine her.

  Doc got up there and started pretty much where the prosecution left off. He asked Brianna what she thought of me, as a teacher and as a person, and Brianna answered that she didn’t like me. He asked her about the abuse and pushed for more detail than the prosecution had pushed for on that stand. She told that jury, very distinctly and graphically, that I had fondled and violated her in the bathtub at my house. She said quite clearly that “in the bathtub” was the “only” place where I’d ever touched her.

  Doc then shifted gears and did what he does best—putting his PhD in child psychology to good use. He developed a rapport with Brianna very quickly and spent a whole lot of time talking to her about her modeling and acting career. His questioning went on and on, for hours, with frequent breaks so Brianna wouldn’t get exhausted by it all. He got her to talk all about the sorts of classes she’d taken and the type of acting she’d done and how she’d worked on memorizing lines and how proud she was of the work she’d done in the two movies she’d acted in.

  By the time he circled back to the charges against me, Brianna was talking freely—and all of a sudden her story changed. Brianna started talking about the alleged abuse and said it happened “in the kitchen.” When Doc pressed her to describe how I’d touched her, her story changed on that front, too. She described the alleged abuse entirely different than she’d described it the first time.

  “Are you sticking to that story, or are you going to change it?” Doc asked her.

  “I don’t know,” Brianna answered. She seemed puzzled and she thought about it for a moment before responding. “Yeah,” she said, “this is right.”

  The jury was absolutely stone-faced. Not one of those people blinked an eye, shook a head, shrugged a shoulder, let out a sigh—nothing. I had no idea if they realized the depth of what just happened. I had no idea if they caught it. I had no idea if it would matter. All I could think was what some of those jury members must be thinking: Any way you look at it, this little nine-year-old is up there recalling memories of how Tonya Craft fondled her. So what if it was in the kitchen? So what if it was in the bathroom? So what if her memory isn’t clear? The fact that this girl remembers being fondled by Tonya Craft must mean it’s true.

  Doc circled around again, this time going after the statements Brianna made about not liking me. He showed Brianna some of the gifts that Brianna and her mom had given to me when she was in my classroom and the cards that she had signed for me, telling me how wonderful I was and what a great teacher I was—reminding her that she wrote “I love you!” on those cards.

  It was a very stark contrast to the “I don’t like her” statements Brianna made at the beginning of her testimony, and she didn’t have very much to say about it. So Doc let it rest.

  He then asked Brianna if she remembered anything else about the “creepy” things Miss Tonya did to her, and Brianna answered: “No, but I do remember she used to mow the lawn and she’d wear really short shorts and a sports bra whenever she was mowing.”

  It struck me as such a bizarre thing for a little girl to say. A lot of women dress that way doing yard work in the Georgia heat.

  Brianna’s testimony was cut short late that afternoon. It came to light that one of the alternate jurors on my case was the husband of a woman who worked at Chickamauga Elementary. She was a teacher. Once I heard the name, I knew exactly who it was. I had never met her husband before or I would’ve spoken up during jury selection.

  How can the husband of a teacher I worked with be sitting on this jury? Clearly that man didn’t disclose his affiliations during voir dire. This man’s wife could very well have alliances with certain families involved in the allegations against me, which means he’s probably friends with them, too! So someone with a clear bias against me basically snuck himself onto my jury?

  It caused enough of a ruckus that Judge House decided not to continue Brianna’s testimony that day. We adjourned. So here we were at the end of day three of my trial, and all we’d heard were opening arguments and the partial testimony of the first witness. I was frustrated. Exhausted. And so was everybody else on my team.

  We all went back to my parents’ house that night wishing for nothing more than a little normalcy the next day. All we wanted was the chance to present our case and to start showing that jury the truth.

  Chapter 49

  Just as surely as Walt made me coffee every morning (to which David joked, “Hey, Walt! You’re gonna make me look bad!”), and just as surely as David drove us in and helped to truck all of our file boxes into the courtroom every morning, my father showed up bright and early to help and then took a seat in the very front row just behind me in that courtroom. Every single day.

  David walked in with us beforehand and wished me well every morning, and as soon as testimony ended, he’d walk back in, put his arms around me (if I let him, depending on my emotional state), or lean over and smile and show me his love and support. The camera actually caught some of this on the third day and they wound up showing it on the news as background video while one of the reporters was talking. It was a really sweet moment that camera caught, and a lot of my friends took notice of the way David looked at me and the way he acted toward me. After all that time, I think some people who’d questioned why I’d gone back to him started to glimpse just how much love there was between us.

  The fourth day started with Brianna on the witness stand again, dressed in her Sunday best once more, with her hair done just so. Only this time, Doc played Brianna’s original videotaped interviews for the jury while Brianna sat there. He noted how Brianna kept changing her story and asked her why she was doing that.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  He asked her whether the interviewer in each of those interviews had maybe put ideas into her head.

  “I don’t know,” she answered.

  He asked her about whether her mother had talked to her about what to say in those interviews.

  “I don’t know,” she answered.

  He also asked her “when” she had first told anyone that Miss Tonya had put her fingers together and put her whole hand up inside of her privates. Remarkably, Brianna remembered. She was in the hallway, walking out of the interview with Suzie Thorne, she said, when she suddenly remembered that incident and told her about it.

  The fact that she might have made that accusation outside of the videotaped interview, yet was never brought back inside to put
it on the record, was a big deal. We were all blown away by it. We’d need to confirm what she’d said at some point later in the trial, when her mother was on the stand or when interviewer Suzie Thorne was on the stand.

  We’d get back to that.

  Overall, though, Brianna’s lack of memories was more compelling at that early stage of the trial. The result of Doc’s questioning, especially when coupled with the videos that showed her changing her story and her ever-evolving hatred of me over the course of the year, seemed devastatingly obvious to me.

  Is it obvious to the jury? I wondered.

  I expected the prosecution to call Chloe or Ashley to the stand after we wrapped with Brianna and got back from lunch. I thought they were going to lay it on thick, all at once, so the jury would see all three girls right away. But they didn’t do that. All of a sudden the camera got turned back on and the courtroom filled up with spectators. And Chris Arnt called Sharon Anderson to the stand.

  Sharon is the certified sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) who performed physical examinations on all three of the girls. With the prosecutors’ help, she walked the jury through the process of the physical exams, and they showed pictures of all three of the girls’ privates on a big-screen television mounted to the wall. It was awful. I went right back to that sick feeling I had the first time I read Nurse Anderson’s reports and could not hold back my tears. Cary handed me tissues.

  As Anderson described what she saw as “suspicion of abuse” in Ashley and “strong suspicion of abuse” in Brianna, I had the sense that the jury believed her. Why wouldn’t they? On the surface, Anderson seemed extremely qualified. She’d performed hundreds of these exams. She’d gone through specialized SANE training. She spoke in seemingly exact terms about her findings and about the hymen tissue and the way it was “rolled” and such in both Ashley and Brianna. And when it came to the question of how Chloe could have been abused without any physical signs of abuse showing up, she told the jury, “Because some of the touching and some of the things done to children don’t leave any problems—they just don’t leave any signs behind.”

  It wasn’t until Doc got up and started questioning her that even a hint of doubt seemed to get raised. Doc talked in scientific terms about what it means for a child’s vagina to appear “normal.” He asked her how many “normal” vaginas she had compared them to. She didn’t have an exact answer. He asked if she had looked at pictures and medical journals, and she said yes. Then he asked her again, how many children was she comparing Brianna and Chloe and Ashley against in order to determine that they were not “normal”? She said there wasn’t an exact number, so Doc asked her to be general. Was it 500 children? 1,000 children? 10,000 children? To what was she making her comparison about what was “normal” and what showed “signs of abuse”?

  Anderson’s answer was that she was basing it on her training and basing it on a comparison against other children she had examined over the years.

  Anderson was a gray-haired woman who had been at this job for quite some time. It seemed like a valid way to do those exams to a layperson like those folks on the jury. It wasn’t until Doc started citing some major studies in the field that showed an incredibly wide range of hymen tissue that was “normal” in young girls that the atmosphere in the room started to shift. Doc asked Nurse Anderson if she had read those studies.

  “No,” she answered.

  He asked her if she had read certain books that were standards in the field.

  “No,” she answered.

  He asked her if she read up on the latest medical journals and studies that had been released in the years since she completed her SANE training.

  “No,” she said.

  He went round and round with her and determined, without a doubt, that she had not read the latest studies or even some of the greatest studies that serve as the centerpieces of her field.

  Those studies showed, he said, that “normal” could mean many things. Even a layperson understands that some girls’ hymen tissue can be entirely missing for no immoral or abusive reason whatsoever. Girls lose their hymens from horseback riding and bike riding and gymnastics. Girls could simply be born with the tissue missing or shaped in a variety of ways. He pointed out that the position the children were placed in during the examination caused the vaginal area to look different than when the child was in a normal position, and Anderson concurred. Finally, he called into question whether the rolling and erosion of hymen tissue that Anderson had seen in two of these girls could have been caused by anything other than sexual abuse—to which she very hesitantly, after hemming and hawing, agreed.

  Doc had done it. In the course of his questioning, he had called into doubt the only “physical evidence” the prosecution had for my alleged crimes. I was extremely impressed with his performance that day, and I just hoped and prayed that the jury was paying enough attention to see the truth.

  Back at the war room that night, I realized we had a problem. We were all taking notes during the trial—writing down the questions we had or ideas we needed to follow up on—and none of those notes were organized enough to follow once we got back home. So we sat down and took a few minutes to develop a system. We color coded questions, thoughts, and suggestions and matched them to each of the three girls’ cases. We made sure to write our notes on colored Post-it notes so we could simply tack them onto the assigned attorney’s folder for follow-up or to use during cross the following day, or the following hour, or whatever the case may be. It made a world of difference almost immediately and allowed our conversations to flow with some coherence, rather than exploding into a flurry of unrelated questions and concerns covering eight hours’ worth of testimony. It shocked me sometimes that these top-notch attorneys hadn’t developed a system like this already, but I was happy that we came up with something that worked for us.

  Next, Chloe McDonald walked into that courtroom looking almost exactly like Brianna: white dress, hair done up, carrying a doll and a stone for good luck. The prosecution got up and once again talked to this accuser for about ten minutes. Half that time was spent establishing who she was, where she went to school, and the fact that the therapist had given her that stuffed animal to help her feel “safe” at night and when she came into the courtroom that day.

  Chloe didn’t like sitting on the witness stand, so they let her move to the first row of the gallery, just behind the prosecutors’ table. She sat there—and completely changed her story. She went from “it was something that happened one time” to saying it happened something like twenty-two times. It was a crazy number she came up with, and when Doc got up and developed a rapport, he asked her where she got that number.

  “Well,” Chloe said, “me and my momma were praying on it last night, and I just remembered when we prayed on it.”

  Doc spent a couple of hours that morning showing the jury her taped interviews—conducted by Detective Tim Deal—and asking similar questions to the ones he asked Brianna about why she’d changed her story. Chloe said that when Detective Deal kept asking her the same questions, she changed her answer because she thought she had answered “wrong” the first time.

  Just like Brianna, she didn’t show any emotion when she talked about the details of my supposed abuse. She said it like she was talking about going to school that day.

  Doc had made a big point during his cross-examination of Brianna to note that she was rewarded with a “spa visit” for one of her interviews. He was able to highlight a similar moment with Chloe, when she revealed during her interview that she was going to get a toy if she’d “done good.”

  Doc had also turned a spotlight on Brianna’s admission that her mother had questioned her about what happened with “Miss Tonya” multiple times and that she believed what her “momma told her” about some other things, too. We weren’t able to highlight those sorts of moments with Chloe while covering her interviews, because there weren’t any. To me, that was a problem. I made a note to myself to go back over her int
erviews and to listen to them again, just in case there was anything we missed. There were an awful lot of “inaudible” moments in her transcripts. I decided those moments deserved a closer listen. If nothing else, our showing a jury at some point later that those moments weren’t really “inaudible”—no matter what they said—might show some of the basic incompetency I felt had taken place in the investigation.

  I tried to focus on that as Chloe wrapped up and left the room. I tried not to think about what was coming next. I felt like crying long before the prosecutors ever stood up to call her, and I could feel the tears well up immediately when Chris Arnt stood and said, “The State would call Ashley Henke …”

  There was nothing I could do to stop those tears from falling once my daughter walked into that room.

  Chapter 50

  Ashley didn’t even look like herself. I could hardly believe how much she’d grown up. She was six when I last saw her. She was eight now. The difference between my just-out-of-kindergarten daughter and this girl at the end of her second-grade school year was devastating. She’d sprouted right up. I’d always thought she might be taller than me someday, and she was well on her way. She looked so much older.

  That wasn’t all that bothered me, though. My baby girl didn’t seem to sparkle like she used to. She seemed troubled to me. She seemed distant. Void. She’d requested that she not have to look at me, and we’d all made adjustments so I wouldn’t be in her direct line of sight. They put a folder up in front of her on the witness stand.

  My God, what have they done to her?

  She came in wearing another of those white dresses, too, all “Sunday best”–looking with her hair done up. Ashley would never have worn a dress like that by choice. Ever. What are these prosecutors trying to do?