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

by Tonya Craft

  “At that point I asked, ‘Well, how did she touch you?’ And she demonstrated for me. She stood up, and she put her hand between herself, and she started rubbing herself. She started rubbing her vagina, up and down, [in an] up and down motion,” he said, standing up and acting it out for the courtroom in a very dramatic manner, moving his hand up and down and up and down between his legs. It didn’t look sexual to me. It looked painful.

  Scott got up and immediately asked Joal about our “uncontested” divorce, which Joal basically agreed was actually quite contentious. He then asked Joal about the fact that nowhere in his divorce petition did he ever mention female-on-female videotapes or my alleged “incident” with Jennifer. He asked Joal about the fact that he didn’t mention those alleged incidents in the emergency custody petition he filed after the detectives rang my doorbell, either. He asked Joal if he ever mentioned any of that, at any time, until he came into this courtroom—despite the fact that it would have been important for the court to know and for the detectives to know when he first met Detective Keith and Brandon Boggess in early June of 2008. He asked Joal why he never even brought it up in the hours of depositions we’d put him through in the Tennessee custody dispute over the course of the previous year.

  “We asked you to share every complaint you ever had against Tonya as a mother,” Scott reminded him, and Joal agreed that all of that was true.

  So Scott finally asked my ex-husband why he hadn’t mentioned it in all of that time, and Joal said—I kid you not—that he’d just remembered it that morning when he was on his way into court.

  We could hear the media folks laughing from the room next door. The judge was furious. To some people, it was funny. To me, it was sickening.

  Scott went on questioning Joal for quite a while, as he did most witnesses. It seemed to me that he showed pretty clearly that Joal’s story had changed over the course of the last two years. It seemed filled with holes in his memory. It appeared to be filled with new memories that he’d suddenly remembered at various points along the way. We put his phone records into evidence, showing dozens upon dozens of calls between those other families around the time of my arrest and in the months following my arrest, and hundreds of calls with Sandra Lamb alone. We didn’t use the word “conspiracy.” We didn’t allege that he and Sandra Lamb and Sherri Wilson had done any of this because they were out to get me. The goal was to show the jury that these parents had acted hysterically, and that their hysteria and clear hatred of me influenced their decision-making abilities. We believed that we could illustrate them questioning their children in a way that would influence the children’s answers, and maybe even plant false memories in these kids’ heads. I, of course, felt that there were darker motives behind much of it. We just didn’t want to lose the jury by talking about those motives—especially since they would be free to draw their own conclusions from the factual evidence we were putting into the record.

  All I ever wanted was to be able to present the facts and let the jury decide.

  Chapter 55

  The prosecution put the principal of Chickamauga Elementary up on the stand, plus two teachers from that school, all of whom wound up testifying that they’d never witnessed any inappropriate behavior between me and any children.

  Brianna’s third-grade teacher got up there and talked about Brianna masturbating in her classroom. She said she’d called Sandra Lamb in to talk about it, and Sandra told her that “Tonya” had taught those things to her daughter.

  I started to wonder if there was anyone Sandra didn’t spread rumors to.

  My team expected that the prosecution would rest their case by the end of that long afternoon. But instead, they said they were planning to call some more witnesses at the start of the following week.

  What else are they still holding on to? I wondered.

  The first witness they called Monday morning was Holly Kittle—the interviewer who’d conducted Brianna’s fourth interview back on April 1, 2009. Kittle got up there and started talking about certain studies. She seemed to show some knowledge that the previous interviewers had not. Then Doc stood up and ripped that knowledge apart. Under his cross-examination, she testified that she had never read those studies or articles until the prosecutors gave them to her to read. Her overall lack of knowledge about the field of child interviews seemed just plain embarrassing.

  Doc went after her personal connections with Len Gregor and Chris Arnt, too, noting that she was Facebook friends with both of those prosecutors. He brought up the fact that Holly had “liked” Arnt’s Facebook comment about my defense team back in January—the one that called them “insane.”

  When Doc asked her why she “approved” of that post, she tilted her head a little and gave him what I would describe as a bit of attitude. “Well, I can say that for six years I worked for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, I’ve worked death-penalty cases, I’ve worked high-profile cases, I’ve worked cases that have made national media,” she said, giving a little side glance to the jury, “and I had never in my career seen anything like this before.”

  Doc paused for a moment.

  “So, what has that got to do with whether the defense lawyers are ‘insane’?” he asked her. “Anything?”

  “No,” she said, putting her head down—meekly, I thought—and averting her eyes.

  Doc then went in for the kill, pointing out all of what he’d deemed points of “suggestion” during the interview she’d done with Brianna Lamb. He also pointed out the fact that she couldn’t name the authors of any research in her field or describe the findings of any studies in the research in her field.

  She had heard of the Michaels case in New Jersey, she said. She seemed real proud of her knowledge, too—sitting up tall and talking really clearly. When Doc asked her what forensic interviewers had learned from that case, she turned to her left, looked directly at the jury, and started what sounded like a lecture about it with an air of confidence.

  “Well,” she said, “I think the thing to remember with the Michaels case is that, um, he was not convicted, and the children never gave a disclosure in their forensic interview.”

  “Well,” Doc corrected her, “by the way, it was a she.”

  Kittle looked confused.

  “Margaret Kelly Michaels,” Doc said.

  He tried to get her to clarify whether Margaret Kelly Michaels had been convicted or not, and she didn’t answer with any certainty at all. Doc pointed out that Margaret Kelly Michaels was wrongly convicted and spent years in prison based on interviews filled with what he referred to as leading questions and clear examples of contamination of children’s memories—just like the interview Holly Kittle did with Brianna.

  Kittle showed no comeback or attitude for that.

  The State’s next witness was Jerry McDonald, Kelly’s husband—and Chloe’s father.

  Jerry always seemed like a real nice, hardworking guy to me. There are people who just seem sincere and who have a way about them that makes you like them. Jerry’s one of those guys. His work as a paramedic with a flight service is a testament to who he is, and when I could separate myself from the fact that I knew there was no truth to the allegations he was up there talking about, I could see that this man was hurting, and I could see that his testimony was heartbreaking.

  His descriptions matched Chloe’s story line on the witness stand pretty well. He described Chloe having nightmares after coming home from a “Halloween party” at my house, and her not wanting to go to school anymore. He testified that it wasn’t until May 2008 that his wife called him and asked him to meet her at the CAC, because Chloe had alleged some child-on-child touching, which eventually escalated into allegations that “Tonya” had touched her as well.

  “We didn’t know what to think,” he told the court. “It was just mind-blowing.”

  Jerry went on to say that he didn’t question his daughter about any of it because he wasn’t comfortable with it. He said he didn’t want to move forward wit
h any prosecution, but that his wife, Kelly, did. Jerry also testified, in front of all of those people, that he had suffered at the hands of a child molester when he was young.

  “I know what it’s like for people not to believe you,” he said.

  Jerry broke down on the witness stand. He started shaking and crying as he described asking his daughter whether she was “one hundred percent sure it happened,” and his daughter “stopped and looked me dead in the eyes,” he recounted through tears, “and said, ‘I know it did, Daddy.’

  “I told her, ‘That’s all I need to know.’”

  After Jerry took a short break to compose himself, Clancy Covert stood up for the cross-examination. It was the first time Clancy spoke in the whole trial, and he did great. He was confident but familiar, without being pushy. He handled Jerry just right, I thought.

  I also thought that my case was all over. I was sure that Jerry’s tearful, heart-wrenching testimony alone would put me in prison.

  Jerry admitted under cross-examination that if he could, he would go back in time and do things differently. He said he would have talked to me directly about Chloe’s allegations. He recalled telling my private investigator that he didn’t want to be a part of “this thing.” He said he meant “the trial” when he said those words, but it sure made me wonder if he meant something more—especially since he testified that it was Kelly who told him that he “had to” be a part of the investigation whether he liked it or not.

  Clancy then handed Jerry a transcript of his daughter’s first interview with Detective Tim Deal. He cued up the DVD, turned up the volume real loud, and asked Jerry to confirm what his daughter said in the portion of the interview marked “inaudible” on page 5.

  Jerry McDonald, Chloe’s own father, confirmed what we’d all heard on that tape. He confirmed that what his daughter said was, “My mom told me which is which and where they touched me.”

  To me, Jerry looked surprised by it. He testified that he had never seen that interview tape before. He tried to explain what Chloe said on the tape, saying Chloe might have meant that her mother told her what her different body parts are called. But when that little girl’s dad confirmed that Chloe had said her “mom” told her “where they touched me,” I felt like it sent a powerful message to the jury.

  Lastly, Clancy asked him whether any investigator for the prosecution side had ever spoken to him about his daughter’s story. Jerry answered, “No, sir.”

  After a couple of quick follow-up questions by Len Gregor, the prosecution rested their case.

  After eighteen witnesses and weeks of testimony against me, the onslaught was over. My attorneys immediately filed a motion to drop sixteen of the twenty-two counts against me. In our opinion, even after all of those witnesses, the State had shown no concrete evidence to support any charges of “penetration,” Scott argued. Scott also tried to get the judge to dismiss the five counts that accused me of abuse during a time period before I lived in Catoosa County.

  Chris Arnt stood up and argued that it didn’t matter if some of the charges had occurred outside the county—they still fell within a statute of limitations.

  Scott was impassioned, he was thorough, and I was positive that his arguments met the letter of the law. But Judge Brian House didn’t even take one minute to consider our request. He denied the motion right there on the spot. He said the State had presented enough evidence to move forward with all twenty-two counts.

  And so it continued. Just like that.

  Judge House ordered a break, I conferred with my attorneys, and twenty minutes later we began our side of the fight for everything I am.

  Chapter 56

  The prosecution started their whole story with the sidewalk chalk incident that supposedly began at the hands of my friend Kim Walker’s daughter, Skyler. So that was where we started, too. From our perspective, there were some pretty major differences between the way Sandra Lamb remembered that story and the way Sherri Wilson remembered that story. Kim herself got up there as our very first witness and recalled a story that was significantly different from either of those women’s recollections.

  Kim testified that when Sherri Wilson called her that evening, Sherri told her that Skyler had “written the word ‘sex’ in sidewalk chalk.”

  Kim said, “I asked her how she used it, in what context … and she said that she had written a little boy’s name, a little girl’s name, had drew a heart and written the word ‘sex.’”

  Kim and her husband, Joey, were already on the way to Sherri’s house to pick up their daughter when the call came in. Sandra and Brianna were already gone by the time they arrived. Sherri walked them down by the pool to show her that sidewalk-chalk drawing. Sure enough, Kim testified, it had a little girl’s name, a little boy’s name, a heart, and the word “sex.”

  That was very different from the words “sex” and “kissing” that Sandra and Sherri described. When questioned about the difference, Kim said very plainly that the word “kissing” wasn’t there—and it couldn’t have been there because her daughter wouldn’t have been able to spell that long a word at her young age. Skyler had just finished kindergarten when this incident happened, she said.

  When it came to the word “sex,” Kim testified, she told Sherri that “she may have heard it from her [older] brother, my son, Evan.” That was when Sherri told Kim what she’d heard from Sandra Lamb: that Chloe and Ashley had been playing a “boyfriend-girlfriend game,” and that Sandra thought Kim had better ask Skyler about it.

  Sherri’s husband, DeWayne Wilson, arrived home around that time, Kim recalled, and the adults took their conversation out to the deck—where the conversation “basically became a Tonya-bash,” Kim explained. Instead of talking about any alleged child molestation, Kim testified that the Wilsons stood there calling me a “bitch” and “whore,” and claimed that “Tonya” called their child “stupid.”

  For the first time, Kim was able to articulate the way Sandra and the Wilsons “hated” me to that jury. She testified that Sandra Lamb made threats to her after that day, trying to force Kim to make Skyler press charges against me. She even described a time when Sandra said she wished I would “die a slow death.”

  The prosecution’s cross-examination didn’t put up any sort of a factual counterpoint to call Kim’s statements into question. They didn’t do anything to call Kim’s character into question, either. I suppose they might’ve had a hard time doing that, since Kim’s statements and stories had been consistent from the beginning—and because those prosecutors and investigators had never actually interviewed Kim Walker themselves before that day.

  Instead, the ADA got up there and pressed her on why she refused to bring her daughter in for a second interview. Kim testified that it was because she believed her daughter when she said that “nothing happened with Miss Tonya.” She didn’t want to put her daughter through the “trauma” of a second interview.

  Kim added that if she had been asked to do an interview on the topic herself, she gladly would have done so. But the investigators never asked.

  I was surprised how little the prosecution seemed to fight back against Kim’s words. Maybe they know they can’t refute them. I was also surprised at how quickly it all went. Kim was all done, and court recessed until the next morning.

  Once my defense witnesses started talking, the whole trial felt like it’d crested a hill and rolled forward without any brakes on.

  I’m not sure if something changed overnight, or if the prosecution had been preparing all along to grill our next witness with an entirely different demeanor than the way they’d questioned Kim, but when we called my friend Dee Potter to the stand, things turned ugly.

  This was finally Cary King’s moment to shine. Unfortunately, the prosecution interrupted him pretty early in his direct examination of Dee and objected to Cary asking about some simple background material concerning my interactions with other kids. Cary got really offended and got into a bit of a spat with Len Gregor ove
r the whole thing, right in front of the jury.

  I pitched a fit later that night when we all got back to the house. “Anybody on my side that acts inappropriately in front of that jury, you’re fired,” I said.

  “They pissed me off!” Cary argued.

  I said, “Cary, don’t you think I’m pissed off in there? If I can keep it together, you can certainly keep it together.”

  He eventually apologized for it, and that was the only moment when anyone on my team would break the rule of decorum I set. I knew that keeping our cool would matter to the jury—and I knew so doubly when the other side started interrogating Dee on that stand.

  Instead of countering all of the factual information we’d given them about how often Dee and her kids were over at my house or vice versa, or how Dee never saw Brianna or Chloe at my house during any of those extensive time periods, Len Gregor stood up and asked Dee if she had ever observed my “intimate sex life.”

  “No, sir,” Dee said. Dee kept her cool. She answered everything with “yes, sir,” or “no, sir,” even when Gregor asked her if she or her husband had ever had sexual encounters—with me.

  He asked Dee if the two of us had ever been naked in bed together!

  We never could have prepared Dee to answer such questions because we never imagined this line of questioning. She denied anything of the sort, of course. Then Gregor started asking her about how important my appearance was to me—specifically whether I was a “narcissist”—and a whole series of questions that implied that I was a heavy drinker.

  Cary finally stood up and objected, calling it an “assault on the defendant’s character.”

  Judge House allowed the questioning to continue.

  Gregor’s next question was, “Do you think Brianna Lamb is a slut?”

  On direct, Dee had described seeing Brianna dance in what she considered an “inappropriate manner” during my wedding reception. A bunch of people witnessed that behavior from Brianna.63 She was basically pole dancing by the pool to the song “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas.