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

by Tonya Craft

  So every time I glanced over to their side of the courtroom, I had to suffer a glimpse of that man’s face.

  Part of me wondered if I knew too much. Maybe this would be easier if I was blissfully ignorant. Maybe I’d read about too many of these cases. Every time I felt like we were doing okay, I immediately went back to thinking that I would be blindsided by a guilty verdict in the end. Maybe Sherri was a better witness than I realized. Maybe the jury heard the “pain” in her voice and took it as real. I told myself I needed to keep my emotions out of it. I needed to stay focused. I needed to take notes and pay attention to every word. I needed to remind myself that all that mattered were the facts. All that mattered was the truth. We weren’t going to prove my innocence by proving that Sherri Wilson was out to get me. If we were going to prove my innocence (which I very seriously doubted), we would do it by proving that it didn’t happen, it couldn’t have happened the way they said it happened, and it simply didn’t make sense.

  Lucky for all of us, it seemed the State’s next witness did a whole lot of that work for us.

  “The State calls Sandra Lamb,” Chris Arnt said.

  Sandra Lamb came strolling up to the witness stand in a pair of dark tan slacks and a fashionable sweater that tied down low around her waist, over a blouse that was unusually conservative for her, based on my prior observations. Her hair looked freshly done, with blond highlights streaked over her dark brown hair. She wasn’t somber and sort of meek or nervous looking like Sherri Wilson had appeared to me. She actually smiled a bit as she took her oath to tell the truth, and after introducing herself directly to the jury as “the mother of Brianna Lamb,” I could see her sucking in her cheeks, as if she were trying to hide a smile or stop from laughing.

  They spent the first few minutes of Sandra’s testimony talking about how she knew the Wilsons and how she knew the McDonalds. They spent the next few minutes talking all about Brianna’s movie roles and trying to make the point that neither film she was in dealt with any kind of “sexual” abuse—seemingly ignoring the fact that the films dealt with abuse and neglect of other sorts. The next few minutes were dedicated to her involvement in my wedding plans.

  Then it got interesting. Sandra started talking about a time when I called her up to tell her that I thought Ashley was being sexually abused over at Joal’s house—by Sarah.

  Sandra talked about the conversation we’d had about this subject as if it were real. As if that call or that conversation ever happened.

  “I said ‘What?’” Sandra testified on the stand. “And you still let her go over there? She’s like, ‘Well.’ And I said, ‘It would be a cold day in hell before my child would go, I don’t care. If I thought my child was being sexually abused at her dad’s … she wouldn’t go back.’ And she said to me that it is very hard to prove ‘female-on-female abuse.’ Tonya told me that.”

  Chris Arnt asked her when that conversation happened.

  “It was when Brianna was in kindergarten,” she said. Arnt tried to narrow down whether it was the fall of 2005 or the spring of 2006 of that school year, and Sandra didn’t hesitate for one second. “I would say 2006,” she said.

  So two full years before I had any inkling that anything might be going on at Joal’s house? Two full years before Ashley mentioned anything to me about showering and shaving? She’s telling this courtroom that I thought Ashley was being sexually abused in Joal’s house way back when she was four years old? And I didn’t do anything about it? Joal and Sarah weren’t even married until December of 2006.

  The ADA then moved on, asking Sandra when she first learned that something had happened to Brianna.

  “It was toward the end of her second-grade year,” Sandra said. “And honestly, I don’t remember what made her start talking about playing girlfriend and boyfriend, and that Ashley had wanted her to play girlfriend and boyfriend. And I said, ‘Well, Brianna, you know that’s not right,’ and she said, ‘No, but Ashley told me if I didn’t that she would tell her mommy, that Brianna wanted to and that her mommy would believe Ashley and then that Brianna would get in trouble.

  “I actually called DFACS, it was May, around the 19th, and I actually called because I actually thought Ashley was being abused by Sarah. I wasn’t really talking to Tonya anymore at that time,” she said.

  Arnt asked why she had stopped talking to me, and that was when the storytelling really got started. She told the jury that by the time my wedding reception was over, she’d discovered that I “wasn’t the person” she thought I was. She said she had a problem with me at the Walker County Gala in November 2007, but then she never specified what the problem was. She then described the goings-on at Ashley’s January 2008 birthday party (which Sherri had testified contrary to there being any problems at the party), and said that was when our friendship ended.

  So our friendship was over, but she was calling DFACS about my daughter being molested by Sarah Henke? She and Joal didn’t even know each other.

  Arnt kept things moving quickly.

  They dug into the whole “sex” and “kissing” sidewalk chalk incident with Skyler Walker, only Sandra said it was three words that Skyler wrote: “sex, love, and kissing.” She testified about asking Brianna all about it back at their house, in her bedroom, while she stood in the bathroom. “Brianna was kind of shaking, and I thought, Something else has happened to her,” she testified. So she asked her if anything else had happened. “She said, ‘Yes.’ Ashley used to touch her in her privates …”

  She testified to telling Brianna she hadn’t done anything wrong and asking yet again if anything else had happened. “To be perfectly honest, I thought Brianna was going to say that Tyler Henke, Tonya’s son, had been a part of this.”

  Don’t you dare drag Tyler into this now. I was so mad.

  “Is that what she said?” Arnt asked.

  “No. She said that Miss Tonya had done stuff to her. She was, like, hysterical at that point. And I was in total shock. In total shock. That was the furthest thing ever from my mind. I would’ve never thought that was what she was going to say to me,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  She then said she gave Greg, her husband, the DFACS card and told him to call them right away. “We were both in shock. I can’t even explain the shock,” she said. Brianna was “hysterical,” and yet, at some point in the next day or two or three, Brianna insisted that she wanted to talk to Sherri.

  Okay, so now we’re going to get a connection to that Sherri conversation on the driveway, I thought. But they never actually connected the dots. They never explained why Sandra was saying all of this happened before Brianna talked to Sherri, while Sherri had said that she was the one who first told Sandra all the awful things Brianna had told her about what I’d supposedly done to her.

  Instead, Sandra said DFACS called her back and said that it would have to be handled by a detective. “They told me not to ask her another question, not to say anything else to her,” Sandra said.

  She said Brianna talked about “Miss Tonya” doing the hand thing, pressing her fingers together, pointed upward. She also said that Brianna was afraid that Sandra “was going to get hurt,” because “Tonya had threatened to ‘kill’” her if Brianna ever said anything. Sandra couldn’t remember when Brianna said either of those things.

  Sandra kept biting her bottom lip and shaking her head and rolling her eyes as she talked about Brianna having nightmares ever since that time. “She would kick and say, ‘Don’t touch me, don’t touch me.’ You could look at her, like you give kids a stern look, and she’d say, ‘Don’t look at me like that … That’s what Miss Tonya used to do!’”

  They began talking about Brianna’s therapy with Laurie Evans, through which it became apparent that Brianna “has a real problem with the color yellow,” she said. Brianna was still in therapy with Laurie, she confirmed. “She said that that was Tonya’s favorite color, and she just hated the color yellow. They have worked on that issue. She doesn’t have as big of a problem [
now],” she said in response to Arnt’s questioning about it. “Honestly, it triggers at different times. We may be at a restaurant and there’s a yellow-colored crayon on the table and she breaks it in half. And other times she doesn’t.”

  We had all seen Brianna coloring with a yellow crayon in her very first interview—when all of this was freshest in her mind. That just seems completely made up right there. I wrote a note about that and passed it to Scott.

  Sandra then went on to talk about the times she caught Brianna masturbating.

  “She would sit on the floor, sometimes she would sit like Indian style, and sometimes she would sit with like her legs behind this part of her body, with like her privates touching the floor. I was like, ‘Brianna, what are you doing?’” she said. Brianna wasn’t using her hand, she was fully clothed, she was just contracting her muscles, she testified.

  “Did you ever ask her where she learned to do that?” Arnt asked. Do kids normally learn to do that from someone else? Is that how it works? Can they just make a statement about child behavioral issues without any kind of reference to back it up?

  Sandra let out a big puff of air and said, “I did. She said that’s what Miss Tonya had taught them to do—her to do,” she said, correcting herself with an exaggerated eye roll.

  According to her testimony, it was some time after she got caught masturbating in a classroom in third grade that Brianna then told Sandra about an incident she hadn’t yet mentioned. In fact, it was when Sandra walked in on Brianna touching her “anus” when she was getting out of the tub that Sandra said, “What are you doing?”

  She testified, “And she started crying, and then she said, um, ‘When Miss Tonya would put us in the bathtub,’ that that’s what she would do to them. That she would have soap on her hands and stuff and that she would stick fingers up their bottoms.

  “The next day she had therapy, and I called the Advocacy Center and said, ‘Brianna has remembered something else.’ And I didn’t question her a lot more about it because I knew she had therapy and I had already been told not to question. So, when we got to the Advocacy Center for her therapy, they were going to do like a taped interview.”

  Sandra claimed she had never seen any of the interviews with Brianna. Then Arnt said, “That is all the questions that we have at this time, Your Honor.”

  Scott popped up and walked over to the podium instantly.

  He started by asking Sandra if she was a “caring mom” and if she would ever put her child in a situation that she thought was unsafe. She answered yes to the first question and no to the second question, of course. As any mother would.

  He then worked very hard to try to pin her down about just how often Brianna spent the night over at Ashley’s house and when.

  “I couldn’t give you a number,” she said.

  Scott pressed her. “More than ten?”

  “Yes,” she said, shrugging her shoulders and shaking her head.

  “So if Brianna told us it was only one time, she would be mistaken?”

  Sandra agreed that one time would be incorrect. She also said that she was never concerned about Brianna staying over at my house, adding that she had no indication that anything might have been wrong after she stayed at my house—ever.

  Asked to describe whether Brianna showed any behavior that concerned her, Sandra said, “I had never had a little girl, but she would tell me that—if she got mad or got in trouble or anything—she would tell me that I didn’t love her, and she wanted a new mommy because I didn’t love her, and I had no clue where that came from. I never associated it at that point with anything else.”

  “But you do now?” Scott asked her.

  “Yes, I do now,” Sandra said, sternly.

  “But she would only do that when she would get in trouble?”

  “I guess when I may have spoken sternly with her.”

  Scott confirmed that those were the only times when Brianna would act out toward Sandra—when Sandra had spoken sternly to her or gotten her in trouble.

  I don’t think Sandra realized how important that statement was.

  Sandra could not recall on that witness stand when she first let Brianna sleep over at my house. Scott pressed her for specifics, like whether it was soon after we met or during the first half of Brianna’s kindergarten year, and she just repeated, “I have no idea. That wasn’t something that I kept track of.”

  She visibly tensed up and appeared to get upset when Scott pressed her for specifics. Scott tried to ask her about what she’d told us on the record back in our depositions, and she got what looked to me like a nasty look on her face. She interrupted Scott. “You should allow me to finish my answer,” she said, and she pointed a finger at him and stared at him.

  “As soon as I’m done with my question, I will,” Scott said.

  The basic point Sandra eventually made was that her daughter spent the night at my home in Chickamauga when Brianna was in kindergarten and that she stopped spending nights at my house “at some point during the first grade.”

  I wasn’t living in that house during Brianna’s kindergarten year.

  Sandra looked over at the prosecution table during this questioning. Her eyes kept darting over to them, and she even gave them a little shake of her head, which to me looked like she just couldn’t believe the questioning.

  Sandra couldn’t pin down how many times she had come to my house to drop Brianna off, or to pick her up, or how many times I’d dropped her off after a sleepover.

  She seemed to be forgetting that in her initial calls to DFACS, she told the person who took the call that Brianna had never spent the night at my house after the end of her kindergarten year. Scott pointed out that fact to Sandra. We had the written records of that call. She still said she didn’t remember saying that.

  Scott asked her whether Brianna ever seemed “nervous” or “apprehensive” or “scared” around me in all the time we were together, and she answered “no” to every one of those questions.

  Then there was a turning point in Sandra’s whole demeanor. Scott asked about the fact that Brianna really seemed to like me in kindergarten and wondered why Brianna would in later interviews say that she “hated” me during that school year. Sandra took a big long pause, and rolled her eyes a little, and started to use her hands when she spoke: “I can tell you right now if you ask me to tell you one thing about Tonya that’s good, I couldn’t tell you anything—although I know I felt good about her in kindergarten. Brianna right now has no good feelings about Tonya.”

  “I understand,” Scott said. “Y’all call her ‘the Evil One,’ right?”

  “Absolutely,” Sandra said.

  “Absolutely!” Scott repeated back to her.

  “We’re healthy, we can say her name is Tonya, but, um, the Evil One is just much easier for us.”

  “Talk about her rottin’ in jail, right?” Scott said.

  “Objection,” Arnt called out.

  “Sustained,” Judge House said.

  At that point Sandra scrunched her face up and looked at the prosecutors and shook her head, with a shrug and an angry-sounding laugh. She looked tense on the stand and from that point forward she appeared much more combative. She answered Scott’s questions with what seemed like attitude to spare, whether she was confirming her daughter’s presence in a series of photos in my classroom, or talking about Brianna’s acting abilities, or talking about the cards and gifts she’d given me proclaiming just how great a teacher she thought I was before any of this started.

  The thing was, along the way, Scott got her to confirm that Brianna was always smiling and relaxed around me and choosing to come into my classroom and visit me after school. Brianna was perfectly normal around me all the way up until that moment when I’d spoken “sternly” to her during Ashley’s birthday party in January 2008.

  Scott also got her to confirm just how much Brianna was out of town while she was working on movies during part of the same time period when they were allegin
g that she’d stayed at my house and I’d “done” these horrible things to her.

  He managed to do all of that before lunch, and I don’t think Sandra had any idea how much conflicting information she’d just shared in front of that jury.

  By the time we got back from lunch, Sandra seemed even more annoyed at the whole thing. She snapped at Scott’s questions any number of times, right from the start, and she even looked at Arnt and whispered, “I’m sorry,” after one of those instances.

  As Scott continued walking Sandra through the entire timeline of how much time I spent with her and with Brianna, including at my wedding, she made a big point of telling that courtroom that the only reason she let me spend my wedding night at her house was because I was too drunk to drive home. As if it were a last-minute decision. She also mentioned the big stain on her carpet from where I’d thrown up. All the while, all she really was doing was confirming that Brianna was around and that not for one minute did she act scared of me. In fact, just the opposite.

  Even in 2008, Brianna was playing softball that spring, and Sandra testified that she would run into me at the Chickamauga ball fields through May of that year. Scott asked her how often she would see me, and she said, “I have no idea.” He asked whether it was once a week, or twice, or more, and she adamantly answered that she had “no idea.”

  “Do you have any memory problems, ma’am?”

  Sandra looked dumbfounded. She didn’t answer.

  “Have you been diagnosed with any problems with your memory?” Scott repeated.

  “Are you kidding?” Sandra said.

  “No, ma’am,” Scott said.

  “No, I haven’t,” she said, staring at the prosecutors. Her jaw grew so tight it looked like her chin might break off. Someone on their side of the courtroom even let out a big audible gasp, like they were horrified that Scott would ask such a thing. There would be a time later in the trial where someone on my side of the courtroom gasped, and Judge House stopped everything to have them thrown out. He didn’t do that when folks gasped on the prosecution’s side.