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

by Tonya Craft

  As the lawsuit against the rest of them kicked into high gear, it became a constant source of anger and bitterness for me. The feeling of wanting some kind of justice for the pain those people had brought on my family, that overwhelming urge to see those people pay for what they’d done, was all-consuming—and at times, overwhelming.

  I talked to Cary about all of it. I had questions about who it was we had listed in the lawsuit. I had questions about the action we could and could not take against the detectives and various officers of the court whom I felt were the true perpetrators of the crimes against me. Finally, he set me up with a meeting with a top civil attorney to go over every detail of what was to come in what was sure to be a long, drawn-out case bombarded by intense media interest and months, maybe years, of throwing daggers at others.

  The fact was, no matter how we looked at it, there seemed to be no way to make the judges, detectives, prosecutors, and those responsible pay, in any way. They were all protected by “the system.” The more it was explained to me, the more it seemed unlikely that we’d be successful in our pursuit of the other court-appointed therapists and such, too, simply because “the system” protects its own. That meant the most vulnerable parties in my lawsuit were the families of the children who’d been presented as my accusers.

  That didn’t sit well with me. At all.

  I remember asking that civil attorney and Cary and everyone I trusted, “If the people who are responsible are not the ones I can hold financially responsible, who am I really harming with this lawsuit?”

  The way I saw it, hurting those families would hurt those kids. I felt that the system had already abused those children by putting them through this ordeal, and I did not want to be a part of abusing those kids in any way.

  On top of that, the entire process was taking me to a very angry place. I felt a physical weight on my shoulders, a pressure in my head, a twisting in my gut. I didn’t want to be focused on punishing anyone else. I didn’t want to be focused on making anyone pay, no matter how “right” or “just” that intention may seem. What I wanted to focus on was my own kids and my own family.

  All along I had prayed that there might be something positive that could come out of this horrible situation. Pursuing the lawsuit didn’t feel like trying to do something positive at all. It almost felt like I was trying to make something worse out of an already horrible situation. That just didn’t seem right to me.

  The more I prayed about it and the more thought I put into it, the more the answer to my forgiveness question became obvious.

  I called Scott and Cary and told them to drop the federal lawsuit.

  “Drop the whole $25-million thing,” I said. I sat in the quiet of my house, with my eyes closed, with Candy Cane and Buddy cuddled up to my lap, and I forgave all of those people who hurt me. I forgave Sandra Lamb and her husband, Greg. I forgave the Wilsons. I forgave the McDonalds. I forgave Judge House. I forgave Judge Van Pelt. I forgave Len Gregor. I forgave Chris Arnt. I forgave Tim Deal and Stephen Keith. I forgave Laurie Evans. I forgave the women who conducted those terrible interviews and exams with the kids. I forgave everyone in the whole system who had wronged me and those children.

  I had never blamed the girls. Brianna, Chloe, and my daughter, Ashley, had not done this on purpose. It wasn’t their fault. So in their cases, there was nothing to forgive.

  I will never let go of the belief that justice needs to be served. The judges and prosecutors and detectives who in my opinion moved forward without the required evidence, who accepted conflicting stories from witnesses, who seemed to manipulate their summations of evidence and interviews and charges to fit their desired outcome—all of them will someday get what’s coming to them, whether it’s getting fired or getting put in jail. I have no doubt that the attorney general, the FBI, and more will have a field day in Catoosa County eventually. (As of the writing of this book, the entire Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit was under review for conduct in other cases.)

  Maybe they won’t get the justice they deserve based on my case alone. Maybe it’ll happen in some other way. It may not come until they meet their maker. But it will come.

  That was the point I reached in early December of 2010, eight months after my trial ended. That’s pretty much where I am today, too. People still need to be held accountable, and I’m taking steps to make sure that happens. I spent the entire year after my trial continuing to do research. The thing was, after being in such a powerfully focused state of awareness for two years, obsessing over every detail, losing sleep, fighting every minute of every day—it was difficult to slow my body, brain, and heart back down to a normal pace. So I used that energy. I used that drive. I poured almost as much effort as I’d poured into trial preparation creating a 1,200-plus page PowerPoint document that breaks down and analyzes everything that went wrong in my case. The entire “perfect storm,” in a readable, understandable document that shows everything that I felt was done improperly (and perhaps illegally) in the “shoddy investigation”—and everything that I felt was done incorrectly (and perhaps illegally) in the courtroom.

  I’ve given a copy of that PowerPoint to the FBI in Georgia. It is now up to them to take the next steps. I didn’t do it vengefully. I’m not doing anything out of bitterness. But I am doing something. Things need to change. The system needs to change. If it takes me twenty-five years, mark my words, the system is going to change.

  Chapter 68

  Christmases aren’t very pretty in Chattanooga. I don’t remember it ever snowing on Christmas my whole life. But when we woke up that Christmas morning of 2010, everything was covered in a fresh blanket of snow. I could not have ordered a more perfect Christmas morning from God himself. It was a gift, and we all knew it. David and Ashley and Tyler and I wound up running outside, throwing snowballs at each other, and sledding down the little hill in our front yard. Ashley actually climbed into a sled with me, and when we knocked into the curb and tumbled into the street, the two of us laughed and laughed.

  My parents came over and we cooked a full turkey and ham dinner. Tyler helped make the homemade gravy. Ashley helped me cut up the vegetables and put the corn in. It was absolutely perfect.

  That night as she stepped into her bedroom, Ashley said, “That was the best Christmas ever.”

  She still didn’t tell me she loved me. But for the first time in a long time, I think I felt it a little bit.

  I didn’t wallow in the Christmases I’d lost with my children. I didn’t think about them once that entire day. I was just so thankful to be where I was. Just to be there. Instead of sitting around looking back and having sad feelings, I filled up with thankfulness and gratefulness like I’d never known.

  It seems my children had been told that it wasn’t okay to love me. That was not easy to overcome. Both Ashley and Tyler were convinced I was going to prison and they were never going to see me again. I think they both found ways to disconnect in order to protect their hearts. Tyler’s thing, still, was he would not call me “Mommy.” He wouldn’t call me Tonya, either. It was always “you” or “hey.” It was horrible. It was gut wrenching for me.

  Then one day, sometime after that wonderful Christmas, Tyler said, “Mommy, can you grab my …” whatever it was that he’d left somewhere, as kids tend to do. It was completely nonchalant. I’m not even sure he noticed he said it. But from that day forward, I was “Mommy” again.

  Even now, Tyler’s in his mid-teens, and we’ll be at a ballgame and he’ll say, “Mommy, can you go get me a Powerade?” He’s well past the age when most kids, boys especially, stop calling their mothers “Mommy.” But it’s the sweetest thing. I try not to make a big deal out of it because I don’t want it to ever stop.

  Tyler had said some awful things to me when he was feeling angry. But I completely understand where his anger came from, and I felt it had grown from the confusion and things he had been told. So I forgave him for it. It wasn’t hard to forgive him at all. He’s my son. Forgiveness is a gi
ven.

  The hardest person for me to forgive, and the only person I didn’t forgive that December, was my husband. With David, the fact that he’d abandoned me and the fact that he was (for lack of a better word) in “cahoots” with Sandra Lamb for a while—using her attorney in our divorce proceeding, allowing himself to open up to her in dozens of long phone calls—absolutely killed me. Those were the last things I ever expected from him.

  Yet as the days went by, I watched him with my kids. The three of them are as close as can be. I saw the way he continued to look at me with those eyes that Cary noticed way back in our deposition. And eventually, I forgave David, too. I hope he forgives himself someday. Maybe he already has. I’m not sure. I don’t ask him about it. I don’t need to. I know that he loves me with all of his heart. And I love him with all of mine. The forgiveness has just made everything better between us.

  One night, sometime in the first part of 2011, Ashley allowed me to come into her bedroom and tuck her in. I had been praying for that for months. Soon afterward I asked if it was okay to read to her, and she let me read from the corner of the bed. One night at a time, I asked and she allowed me to sit just a little bit closer, until finally she let me sit propped up on a pillow right next to her, just like I used to.

  When I was all done reading a few nights after that, I said the words I always said: “I love you, Ashley.”

  “I love you, too, Mommy,” she said right back. It came out of her mouth just as naturally and easily as it had before they took her away from me.

  Of course I started crying.

  “Ashley,” I said, “I really appreciate you saying that.”

  “Mommy,” she said, “I’ve always loved you.”

  I gave her a great big hug. And as I held Ashley in my arms, I knew that those particular tears would never fall from my eyes, ever again.

  “I know you have,” I said to my daughter. “And I’ve always loved you, too.”

  I was finally, finally, all the way back home to my baby girl.

  Epilogue: Revelations

  The ripple effects of forgiveness are too numerous to count.

  In the five years since the trial ended, I have been blessed with more revelations and positive interactions with unexpected individuals than I ever could have imagined.

  It started just after my children came back, toward the end of 2010. The foreman from my jury reached out to me and asked if he and a group of jurors could come see me. I made some coffee and welcomed them into my home with open arms.

  The conversations that followed that day were tearful, as you can imagine, but also filled with some shared laughter, and some shared understanding the likes of which no one else in the world will ever understand. We all went through that trial together. They were thrown into it with no warning, no idea what they were going to encounter in that courtroom—but then they went through every bit of it. Every emotion, every heartbreak, every hatred, everything that I had encountered and that those three girls had encountered, and that my friends and family had encountered. The jury experienced all of it compressed into four and a half weeks. Talk about an emotional ride. I had never considered just how taxing it was on them emotionally. Intellectually, yes. I can still only imagine the pressure they must have felt, holding a woman’s life in their hands, and those children’s lives in their hands, and, really, as Doc put it in his closing, the strength and foundation of that whole entire community in their hands. But I didn’t realize how emotionally involved they would become, and how much they would grow to care about those girls, and about this case.

  The news tended to report on my case as a “community divided.” Sure, we all agreed it was divided. But it wasn’t cut down the middle. To me it was like there was this whole great big giant community that supported me, that saw what a miscarriage of justice this whole trial was. And then there was a small, powerful, vocal minority that appeared to want to see me burned alive. At all costs. They got so far into it that they just wanted to win.

  The jury seemed to understand all of that. But that’s not the reason they voted “not guilty.” They said they were moved by the merits of the case itself. They said they were moved by the facts. They were moved by the expert testimony. They were moved by the conflicting stories of the little girls. They were moved by the conflicting stories of the mothers involved. And they were extremely moved to act because of the arrogance displayed by the prosecutors, they told me.

  In short, they said they were moved by the truth.

  They also said they were not moved by the media. They were not moved by the “Truth for Tonya” campaign, which they would not have known anything about had the prosecutors not kept sticking it in their faces. They all followed orders, they said. They didn’t watch the news. They didn’t Google “Tonya Craft” on their laptops in bed at night. They didn’t discuss the case with their families. This was a solid group of individuals who actually said a prayer together every day before they walked from the holding room to the jury box.

  These same jurors said they’d offered to go talk to Chris Arnt and Len Gregor about the case after the verdict. It never happened. Imagine how much Chris and Len could learn from those people. Why would a prosecutor who lost a major case not want to find out why they lost? I’ll tell you why. Arrogance. They thought the jurors were tainted by the media. They weren’t. They thought the jurors were “manipulated” by the experts and the fancy schooling of Doc and his courtroom tactics. They weren’t. In fact, just the opposite was true.

  The jurors I spoke with said they were offended by the way Len Gregor raised his voice and flailed about. They were offended by the way both of the prosecutors attacked certain witnesses, especially female witnesses, with unfounded accusations of lesbian affairs and unseemly threesomes in Las Vegas hotel rooms—none of which had anything to do with whether or not I’d molested those girls.

  They weren’t “fooled” into thinking I couldn’t have done it because I had a detailed timeline showing how busy I was. They weren’t “fooled” into thinking I was innocent because I came in some sort of a “pretty package.”

  The truth of the matter is they weren’t fooled by the shenanigans of the ADAs. Toward the end of the trial, and especially in closing arguments, when Len Gregor started misquoting witnesses’ own testimony, the jurors noticed.

  There was a jury member who said she wished she could look at me toward the end of the trial and give me a thumbs-up or something, to let me know it was going to be okay. They all agreed they could see how terrified and worried I was.

  I thanked them for not doing that. I thanked them for remaining stone-faced. I thanked them for being more professional than Judge House or the prosecutors. I thanked them for giving me back my life.

  In the end, the trial left many of them filled with fear. One member of the jury said he doesn’t let kids sit in his lap anymore because he’s afraid somebody’s going to misconstrue something.

  “That’s awful!” I said. None of us should have to feel that kind of fear in our daily lives. But I shared with them my own ongoing fears. I shudder every time a friend asks me to drive their kid somewhere without another adult in the car. I know they trust me. I just don’t want anyone to misconstrue anything ever again. I haven’t used Facebook because I know that anything I write there could be “used against me in a court of law,” even though I know there will be a time I will have to reach out publicly.

  I spilled coffee all over the kitchen counter one day, and I started writing a text to David, saying, “I think I’m losing my mind!” But I never sent it. I erased it, because I don’t want a written record floating around that might be used as evidence that I’m “losing my mind” if someone takes me to court over something. It’s awful. But I don’t let any of that fear overwhelm me. I deal with it. Little by little. Day by day.

  I think they appreciated hearing that.

  A whole year later, one of the jurors ran into my mom’s neighbor Karen at church. She remembered her from th
e trial. “How’s our girl doing?” the juror asked of me.

  The fact that an unbiased juror could walk through those courtroom doors, go through a trial like that, and come out thinking of an accused child molester as “our girl” is a testament to the good that exists in people’s hearts. It truly is. I cried when Karen relayed that story to me. I tear up just thinking about it now.

  About a year and half later, Jerry McDonald and I got the chance to sit down with one another. I had heard through the small-town grapevine that Jerry and Kelly went their separate ways after the trial ended. They eventually got divorced. By the time he came over to join me and David for dinner at the house, on a night when the kids weren’t home, he had a new girlfriend. She was lovely. David grilled up some hamburgers and we sat down to eat, just small-talking and chitchatting.

  Finally I looked at him—this man who’d cried on the witness stand and broke everyone’s heart, including mine—and I said, “Jerry, I really want you to look at me and tell me that you think I did this, or that you think I didn’t do this. Do you believe it?”

  He started crying.

  “No,” Jerry said. “I know you didn’t. And I’m so sorry.”

  I started crying, too. To know you’re innocent is one thing. To hear it from the father of someone who’d accused you is something else. It was overwhelmingly emotional, for both of us. We both sobbed right there in my kitchen.

  I could tell the weight of it had sat on him the way the weight of the charges had sat on me before the trial. Maybe it wasn’t quite that heavy, but it was heavy nonetheless.

  Once we broke through that wall, Jerry admitted to basically everything that I knew in my heart. He said he now believed that Kelly had pushed Chloe into saying those things. He was confused about it back when it happened. He said he didn’t realize what his wife had done. The abuse he had suffered himself might have clouded his judgment and his ability to see the truth, he said. He desperately wanted to come talk to me about it and ask me what happened for himself, he said, but Kelly wouldn’t let him. She was his wife, and he chose to believe in her.