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( narrator ) Tonya Ford was a divorced mother of three.
Her kids come first, before anything.
Her new husband, David,
was a divorced father of three.
When Tonya first told me about David,
I mean, she was just so happy.
But their marriage wouldn't be so happy.
David Ford had had numerous affairs.
He really liked women.
I mean, he considered himself a ladies' man.
But then, after 14 years of marriage,
his affairs came to an abrupt end.
The bullet came through his head
and went out his eye.
Was it a jealous husband ?
There was a note that said,
you know, "I told you to leave Mary alone."
Or had his long-suffering wife finally had enough ?
Captioning made possible by OXYGEN MEDIA, L.L.C.
February 10, 2009.
It was a little after 1:00 in the afternoon
when Taylor County, Kentucky EMS
received an urgent 9-1-1 call.
The caller was 35-year-old Tonya Ford.
She was very upset, as I imagine anyone would be.
You come home and find that your husband
had been shot
and was bleeding and appeared to be dead.
Within minutes, sheriff's deputies
were on the way to Tonya's house,
approximately 10 miles outside
the small town of Campbellsville.
I don't think that any homicide
is a usual-type crime for an area around here.
There's-- it's basically a small, peaceful county,
a small, peaceful community.
We are very tight knit.
If you don't know everyone,
you know someone who knows everyone.
And in this instance,
the victim was very familiar to the lawmen
rushing to the scene.
David Ford was a well-known police officer
in the neighboring town of Lebanon, Kentucky.
( man ) He wasn't a big guy in statue,
you know, he was kind of slim,
so we always joked
and we called him Barney Fife, you know.
David was like the friendly officer
where he would arrest somebody
and by the time he got them to jail,
they're chummy friends with one another.
But someone apparently held a grudge
against the popular police officer.
Once sheriff's deputies arrived at the scene,
they found David's lifeless body on the floor
in front of the family's computer.
He was shot in the back of the head
while he was sitting at his computer.
Nearby, among the clutter on the desk,
the police found what could be a crucial clue.
There was a note that was left near the body
and it said, you know," I told you to leave Mary alone.
"I warned you.
You don't listen."
According to what Tonya told
the sheriff's deputies at the scene,
Mary was the woman David was leaving her for.
It was a pending divorce, it just--
the process hadn't started through the legal system
at that point.
She knew that David had a girlfriend, Mary,
over in Lebanon.
She was not happy about that.
Although, as Tonya told the investigators,
neither was Mary's husband.
Born in 1973, Kentucky native Tonya Simpson
was no stranger to family drama.
Her parents divorced when she was still a small child.
She didn't have a close relationship
with her birth mother and was raised by a stepmother.
Tonya wasn't close to her father, either.
( man ) Her own dad beat the crap out of her.
He starts drinking and he gets crazy.
So it wasn't much of a surprise
when Tonya left home at an early age.
She got married when she was 17,
she was pregnant with her first son.
They got married and moved out
and she worked for a while.
She worked at Fruit of the Loom, just took care of her baby.
Two more children quickly followed,
along with a divorce.
And by the time she was 20,
Tonya was a struggling single mother of three.
She jumped from job to job to job.
Um... so I wouldn't say
she had a steady income coming in all the time.
She's worked at Frost-Arnett.
She's worked at Sonic in and out.
Um, she's worked at Amazon a little bit of time
while I was there.
In 1994, however,
things seemed to look up when the 21-year-old
first met David Ford.
( Ashley ) When Tonya first told me about David,
I mean, she was just so happy.
He made her so happy
and she just talked and talked and talked about him.
A 26-year-old factory worker from Campbellsville,
David was rural Kentucky to the core.
( man ) Whenever you would see David,
he would, uh, probably would have a cigarette in one hand,
a Mountain Dew in the other
and just grinning from ear to ear
and... probably a few choice words would come out of him
every now and then.
( Darrell ) He loved NASCAR and he used to tape it.
And I would try to call him,
"Hey, David, you know what happened ?"
"Don't you dare tell me," and stuff and I would aggravate him.
Like Tonya, David was divorced
and had two children from his previous marriage.
The marriage didn't work but they always stayed friends.
David also had a third child with another woman
and by the time he and Tonya married on Valentine's Day 1995,
they had a fourth on the way.
( Darrell ) They had a church wedding.
I didn't understand why,
'cause she's in a wedding gown about to pop.
Tonya and David's son Austin
was born that June, bringing their total to seven.
There was never a dull moment, never.
I mean, it was always something to do,
always something different going on.
And despite being a blended family,
Tonya, David and their seven kids
generally got along well.
She's like the type of mother
like, she's also your mom and your best friend.
The same was true of David.
( girl ) David would jump on the trampoline with us,
and David would have water balloon fights with us,
and just act silly and go to the parks with us.
That didn't mean there weren't struggles, however.
With her Tonya's children plus Austin living at home,
and David's three children living with their mothers--
the couple worked hard to support everyone.
( woman ) She was two cubicles down from me,
and I made fun of her because her whole cubicle
was nothing but all seven kids.
He worked over at Jamestown
and worked factories--
provide for his family.
A good worker.
However, David always dreamt of something more
than factory work.
He always wanted to be a police officer.
He kept checking with all the police stations.
Nobody would hire him, nobody would hire him.
I told him, I said, "David, until it's over, keep trying.
You got nothing to lose."
It wasn't until 2004, at age 35,
that David finally realized his ambition--
in a small way.
( man ) He started with Bradsfordville PD,
which is a small, one-police officer city.
A year later, he was hired by
the police department in Lebanon, Kentucky,
a town of 6,500.
We have a force of about 17 officers.
And, despite his late start,
David quickly became one of the most popular officers
on the force.
He was fair and treated people,
you know, the way they should be treated
and people respected him for it.
He'd always take a whole stack of badges
to give to all the children
and when they saw David coming,
they would, like, run after his police car.
David's kids loved their dad's new job, too.
( Brooklyn ) I remember one time he let me ride in the back of the cop car
and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
I was like, I bet all these people think
I'm getting arrested, like, I just thought it was so cool.
But while being a policeman was David's dream,
Tonya wasn't exactly thrilled.
Being a small-town policeman didn't pay well.
And that eventually led to friction.
A lot of issues were with money.
She spent more money than they made
so she lived beyond her means.
So there was a lot of arguments with that.
Money troubles weren't all the couple argued over, however.
He really liked women.
I mean, he considered himself a ladies' man,
let's put it that a way.
David wasn't the only one
who believed he was a ladies' man.
Apparently, quite a few women did, too.
David Ford had had numerous affairs
over the course of the years.
Something around seven.
The pattern was always the same.
David would get a new girlfriend
and, after a few months, move in with her.
He left her at least six,
if not seven times in that 14 years.
But once he moved in,
David would quickly tire of his new fling.
He would go off and do his thing
for a few weeks and he would come back home.
David always come back home.
I mean, he wanted to, you know, go
and have his little flings
or I don't really know what to call them.
But Tonya was his home.
And Tonya-- amazingly--
appeared to accept the arrangement.
He'd always come back home
and she'd always welcome him back.
And she pretty much adapted to that life.
( Linda ) The fact that she had the will to be able
to put things aside and take him back time and again and...
I admired her for being able to forgive him so many times.
But was everyone else as forgiving ?
Early in 2008,
strange notes started showing up on David's car.
( Brandon ) They would just say things like, you know,
"I know what you're doing,
"I know where you're at, I know where you're going."
David didn't know who was leaving the notes
and often felt like he was followed around town
while he was working
and then when he would get off work,
which kind of left him paranoid.
The fact that the notes became threatening didn't help, either.
The last couple of months, the letters got more and more
specific, saying, you know,
"Something bad's going to happen to you
"if you don't stop what you're doing.
I'm not going to tell you again."
Naturally, David became concerned.
On one occasion, he'd even borrowed security cameras
from the department
and set them up in his driveway.
He was trying to figure out who was leaving these notes.
But as soon as David set up the cameras,
the notes stopped appearing,
and that led David's coworker Brandon Blair to believe
Tonya was the one behind them.
( Brandon ) The only body knew that the cameras were in there was me,
her, the kids in the house, and David.
However, when Blair shared his opinion with David,
he dismissed the idea.
( Brandon ) He didn't believe it.
He didn't want to believe it.
You know, he didn't want to believe Tonya would ever do
anything to harm him.
Whoever was writing the notes,
David certainly didn't heed their warnings.
Rather than end his string of affairs,
in January of 2009,
he moved in with yet another new girlfriend,
a woman named Mary Ramos--
she'd recently left her husband to be with David.
He had actually left Tonya and they split up.
He had somebody else.
She knew he had somebody else.
He told her, "I have somebody else.
"I am leaving you.
We are done."
And Tonya, as forgiving as always,
appeared to be okay with that.
( Kathy ) They were going to raise Austin
and be civil to each other
and just be good parents
and that's what he believed.
I referred to it as a part-time separation.
David Ford would spend several nights a week
in Marion County when he got off work
with Mary Ramos, but would return home
and stay at his residence in Taylor County
on his regular days off,
which were Tuesday and Wednesday.
He spent the night there on the couch.
The awkward arrangement
was mostly so that David could spend time
with the couple's son.
David loved Austin and, yes, she did respect that.
She wanted Austin to have his daddy,
you know, no matter what.
However, not every trip to Tonya's
was for the sake of his son.
On Tuesday, February 10th,
David drove over to Tonya's early,
at around 11:00.
( Israel ) He had a tax appointment that day at 12:00 noon,
which would be the reason for him
traveling back to his home to get the documents
that were located in a folder in that bedroom.
Once in the bedroom, David sat down at the computer
to go over the family's taxes,
but it would be the last thing he ever did.
Coming up: Tonya calls 9-1-1.
And sheriff's deputies zero in on a suspect.
( narrator ) Campbellsville, Kentucky.
February 10, 2009.
It was a little after 1:00 in the afternoon
when 35-year-old Tonya Ford called 9-1-1
and reported that her husband had been shot.
She was very emotional on the 9-1-1 call
and appeared to sound on that call
as a woman who had just found her husband shot.
Tonya told the dispatcher she had no idea who might have
wanted to harm her husband, David,
a local police officer.
But she did say that their marriage was in trouble.
Obviously, the initial suspect
would be the person who found him,
which was his wife, Tonya Ford,
and the fact that they were in the process of a divorce
makes her also a potential suspect.
Had the pending divorce taken a deadly turn ?
Once sheriff's deputies arrived at the scene,
they found David's lifeless body on the floor
in front of the family's computer.
Physical evidence at the scene put David Ford
sitting at the computer,
using that computer at the time that he was killed.
David had been shot once in the back of the head,
execution style.
The bullet came through his head and went out his eye.
It struck the computer monitor.
And fell a-- somewhere in the proximity of that computer.
The investigators searched inside the smashed monitor,
but they were unable to find the spent round.
( Israel ) It was removed from the scene by the shooter
in an attempt to keep from identifying the gun
that fired that projectile.
The killer had left some clues behind, however.
Just a few feet from David's body,
the police found a single .40-caliber shell casing.
That casing was able to, in some...
to some degree narrow down the scope of the type of gun
we were looking for.
But the most puzzling clue was a crudely written note
the killer had apparently left next to David's body.
The note was written in very large...
font, kind of like a kindergartener
would write or something.
It read: "I told you to leave Mary alone.
"U were warned.
U don't listen."
The note ended up being
a very important piece of the evidence.
But first, the investigators
had to identify the mysterious "Mary."
Questioned at the sheriff's office
in Campbellsville, Tonya told the police
that the note was most likely
a reference to Mary Ramos, David's new girlfriend.
However, according to Tonya,
this particular crisis was more complicated than most.
When she started seeing David,
Mary Ramos had also been married.
Asked about the breakup of her marriage,
Tonya said it was relatively amicable.
Although, according to Tonya,
David still came around regularly to see their son
Austin and to help out around the house.
In fact, Tonya said that's why David had been in the house
when the shooting occurred.
As far as what Tonya had been doing that day,
she told the investigators
she had spent most of the morning out,
in Campbellsville.
She had been in town, running errands at various locations.
She provided me with several businesses that she had went to
that day and the order in which she visited them.
Then, according to Tonya,
she'd come home at around 1:00
and found her husband.
However, it would take more than Tonya's tears
to exclude her as a suspect.
Back at the crime scene, the investigators had just found
another critical clue in the bedroom where David died.
It was the box for a handgun--
an empty box.
The gun wasn't in it...
and that was coincidentally a .40-caliber firearm,
which was consistent with the shell casing that was found.
That night, the empty box, the shell casing and the note
all went to the crime lab for testing.
So did the Ford family's computer,
which the investigators hoped would narrow down
David's time of death.
We wanted to examine that hard drive to find out
when the last user imputed activity
occurred on that computer.
However, even without those test results,
a picture was beginning to emerge.
For starters, that David's killer apparently used a weapon
that was already in the house
argued against the idea that he'd been shot by
a jealous husband.
There was no forced entry into the home.
And then there was the fact that
David's killer had apparently caught the off-duty cop
completely off guard.
If there had been an intruder
in the house, he would have turned--
he had a weapon-- he would have tried to defend himself,
which means whoever was in the house
he had to have been comfortable with.
Someone like his soon-to-be ex-wife, perhaps ?
She was a strong initial suspect.
However, despite their suspicions,
the investigators had no real evidence against Tonya.
So once the interview was over, the authorities let her go.
Although, according to David's brother,
the investigator gave her a warning first.
I remember standing there with her,
and he was looking her straight in the eye.
He says, "Tonya, if you did do this,
you better get a lawyer."
The next day, the police looked into
Mary Ramos' estranged husband
and quickly crossed him off the suspect list.
There was no way he could have killed David.
He was at work that day,
he was "alibied" by a supervisor and by a time card,
which also uses a thumbprint to scan in and out.
Police also cleared David's mistress, Mary,
who had a solid alibi.
Tonya's alibi, however,
that she had been out running errands
at the time of the ***,
would take a little longer to nail down.
She provided me with several businesses that she had
went to that day
and the order in which she visited them.
She said she went to the Tobacco Shed
and bought two packs of Misty Lights,
a lighter, um, she said she went to Sonic
where she worked and saw her sister
and her sister's mother-in-law,
she said she then went to McDonald's,
had lunch and then went to her family's
aunt and uncle's place of business
called Lumpkin's Auto,
which is a... an auto salvage-type place.
A combination of receipts,
witnesses and store surveillance cameras confirmed Tonya's
visits to the Tobacco Shed and McDonald's.
There was evidence and eyewitness statements
that put her there shortly after 12:00.
Other witnesses confirmed her stop at the salvage yard
and, finally, Tonya's sister told the police
that she had stopped by the Sonic
in Campbellsville at around 11:00.
She was at Sonic probably about five 'til 11:00
to maybe five after.
She come up there and got a cup of coffee.
That cup of coffee at Sonic
proved to be the crucial stop in Tonya's itinerary.
Because when the crime lab finished testing
the Ford family's computer,
they determined that David most likely died shortly after 11:00.
( Israel ) The last user inputted activity
occurred at 11:16 eastern time,
so that essentially gave us our approximate time of death
for David Ford.
And that meant that if Tonya
was having coffee with her sister at the Campbellsville
Sonic at 11:05,
it was all but impossible for her to be David's killer.
Town is about 15-20 minutes away.
Coming up: The investigators try to break Tonya's alibi.
It's not a GPS location.
It doesn't pinpoint exactly where you are,
but it tells you an area.
But can they also break Tonya ?
And new evidence comes from an unexpected source.
( narrator ) On February 13, 2009
lawmen from across Kentucky gathered
for the funeral of David Ford.
I would say there's three to...
three to 500 police cars there.
I've seen big funerals,
but I've never seen one like that.
And I started thinking,
David's probably laughing-- "Told you I was popular."
A police officer in the small town of Lebanon, Kentucky,
David had been killed three days earlier.
And it was just like having a--
losing a brother or a family member.
A law-enforcement family is a close-knit family.
David's immediate family wasn't quite so close, however.
He and his wife, Tonya,
were separated at the time of his death.
There was talk of a divorce.
No divorce had been filed
and the process hadn't started.
So it wasn't too surprising
that Tonya remained stoic during the funeral service.
Even when they brought him out and put him in the casket
and was playing "Taps" there
or whatever it was or "Amazing Grace"
at one time and bagpipes--
I mean, that will bring tears to your eyes and she still didn't.
Or was there another explanation ?
That's what David's closest friend from the force believed.
( Brandon ) The entire police department
made the procession around to the casket
and said something to her.
I couldn't do it
'cause I knew she was the one that killed him.
Tonya's sister may have provided her with a convenient alibi,
but that didn't mean that Blair believed it.
Instead, he was convinced that the mysterious note
found near David's body--
the one warning him to stay away from Mary--
pointed to Tonya as the killer.
This was something that had also occurred in the past,
whenever there were difficulties in their marriage.
They would just say things like, you know,
"I know what you're doing, I know where you're at."
And, as Blair told the Taylor County investigators,
the letters had recently become threatening.
Every one of them said if they don't stop,
something bad's going to happen.
Blair also told the investigators
he'd suspected that Tonya was the source
of the threatening notes--
and that David had dismissed the idea.
He didn't believe Tonya would ever do anything to harm him.
But when the crime lab tested the note,
they found evidence that just might back up Blair's theory
that Tonya was the author of the mysterious warning.
When it was tested for fingerprints,
it did have Tonya's fingerprint on it.
The fingerprints alone weren't enough
for an arrest warrant, however.
They could have been easily explained away
because it was a piece of paper
that came from the printer of her computer.
And then there was the fact that Tonya had an alibi--
her sister and a coworker said she had stopped
at the Sonic drive-in in Campbellsville
shortly before the shooting.
It was around 10:50 to 11:08.
And since the crime scene was almost 20 minutes away,
that basically made it impossible for
Tonya to be David's killer.
Time of death
was determined to be in the area of 11:16.
Of course, Tonya's alibi
for the shooting was entirely dependent upon the witnesses
from Sonic--
one of which was Tonya's sister.
( Ashley ) She was at Sonic probably about
five 'til 11:00 to maybe five after.
She come up there and got a cup of coffee.
It wasn't unusual.
She always come up there.
Was it possible she was mistaken
or even deliberately covering for her sister ?
Hoping for a firmer time line,
the investigators turned to Tonya's cell-phone records.
That was very helpful when establishing
someone's whereabouts,
especially when the two places that...
they're either suspected of being at
or claim to be at are miles apart
and serviced by different cell towers.
It's not a GPS location.
It doesn't pinpoint exactly where you are,
but it tells you an area.
And the area Tonya was in at around 11:00 on February 10th
wasn't anywhere near the Sonic.
At 10:59, in the middle of Tonya's supposed stop
at the Campbellsville Sonic,
David had called Tonya's cell phone.
But that call hadn't routed to Tonya's phone
through one of the two towers in Campbellsville.
Instead, it had pinged off a tower
just a few miles from her house.
If she had been in Campbellsville,
which she said she was
at the time that he was killed,
then her cell phone...
would have received calls from those Campbellsville towers
and it did not.
Then, a few minutes after David was shot,
Tonya had made a call.
Once again, it had routed through the tower
near her house.
At 11:20, she made a call to her sister
and was still in that area of her home.
The 10:59 and 11:20 phone calls
that both had her in the same geographical area
as the residence, not in Campbellsville
because in between that she didn't have time
to drive in to town and back to make those two calls.
The investigators believed they now had proof that Tonya
had been near home when her husband was murdered.
And on February 20th,
they brought her in for questioning.
But if the investigators expected
Tonya to break when confronted with the new evidence,
they were sorely mistaken.
She became very adversarial,
very agitated
and at that point did not want to cooperate.
Tonya denied being involved in David's ***.
And when the investigators kept pushing,
she became defiant.
However, despite Tonya's demand that the authorities
"take her to court,"
she wasn't under arrest just yet.
We didn't want to get ourselves
into the position of indicting someone
that we did not have sufficient evidence against.
In particular, the prosecutors worried whether
the complicated technical evidence from
the cell-phone records
was enough to secure a conviction.
( John ) The case is a circumstantial-evidence case,
there's no eyewitness saying that,
you know, saw Tonya with the gun,
shoot him in the back of the head.
Therefore, the prosecutors held off
on arresting Tonya,
hoping something else would surface.
It seemed like a lifetime, to be honest with you,
because, you know, you-- you're wanting justice
and you're wanting this to come to a closure.
And since the police had shared the information revealed by
Tonya's phone records with David's family,
they found the wait particularly trying.
I was just kind of getting frustrated.
Why is it taking so long ?
Tonya tried to move on.
She and her children remained in Campbellsville,
but nearly the entire town knew she was a *** suspect.
Everybody knows somebody
and they know something about it.
And it's like everywhere you go,
somebody's always looking at you.
After nearly a year and half of gathering evidence,
prosecutors felt as if they had enough for
the grand jury to issue an indictment.
And on October 20, 2010,
Tonya Ford was arrested for her husband's ***.
A lot of people just were
waiting for the state police to get enough evidence
to charge her... really.
Although, in a strange twist,
some of the strongest evidence against Tonya
wouldn't come until after her arrest...
and it would come from a totally unexpected source.
In August of 2011,
while Tonya was awaiting trial for ***,
the Kentucky State Police
conducted an unrelated sting operation in Lebanon,
the small town where David had worked.
The drug enforcement unit
was performing a controlled buy.
And one of the women snared by the sting
turned out to be Tonya's own mother.
( Israel ) She was identified as Linda Williams,
Tonya's birth mother.
During the sting, Tonya's mother
did more than just sell drugs, however.
Making small talk with the undercover informant,
the conversation turned to Linda's daughter Tonya
and her troubles with the law.
Linda told the undercover informant
that the case hadn't gone to trial.
But then she went on to say
that Tonya had confessed to her.
According to Linda,
Tonya had called her a few days after the ***
and admitted to shooting David.
Arrested for selling drugs,
the investigators questioned Linda
the next day about David's ***.
And Tonya's mother,
perhaps hoping cooperation would get her
out of the drug charge,
confirmed her earlier statement about
her daughter's confession.
Coming up: Tonya's case goes to court.
Our strongest evidence was the cell-phone technology.
And the prosecution's star witness
turns out to be a wild card.
( narrator ) On August 20, 2012,
39-year-old Tonya Ford finally stood trial
for the *** of her estranged husband, David.
A small-town police officer,
David had been shot in the back of the head
while going over the couple's taxes on the family computer.
And that was no coincidence,
according to the prosecutor's opening statement.
( Tim ) Based on our time line,
it seemed that she set this up
a week or so before,
set up a tax appointment so that her husband
would come to the home,
so he would sit at the computer desk
and be working there
with his back turned to her.
As proof that it was Tonya who had shot her husband,
the prosecutors claimed that her
cell phone use placed her in the vicinity
at the time of the ***.
The prosecution's case was based on the time line
that the detective created,
based on cell-phone records
and receipts of where Tonya
supposedly was at a specific time.
Some of our strongest evidence
was the cell-phone technology.
In its open, the defense argued that,
while the cell-phone records could place Tonya
in the vicinity of the ***,
they couldn't put her at the scene of the crime.
( Calen ) Their case really said, you know,
these cell phone towers can overlap.
That was really their defense.
We knew that they would
make a point about that
and we knew we couldn't put her at the house
necessarily based on the cell-phone records.
That same point had resulted in
the almost two-year delay between David's ***
and Tonya's arrest
and the additional two-year delay
before her trial.
The challenge from the prosecution's standpoint
really was taking all of this circumstantial evidence
and being able to lay that out for the jury.
The authorities had held off,
hoping for some break that could
help tie all the circumstantial evidence together.
And in August of 2011,
a year before Tonya's trial,
that break had unexpectedly come,
thanks to an unrelated sting operation
by the state police's drug enforcement unit.
While selling pills to a police informant,
Tonya's mother, Linda Willams,
had made some surprising small talk.
( Angie ) She had told a confidential informant
in a drug buy that Tonya had called and confessed
to her that she had committed the crime.
Tonya called her and said, "Mom, I just snapped.
I killed him."
Arrested on drug charges,
Linda had told the investigators the same story.
She, again, indicated that she was at home
and received a call from her daughter, Tonya Ford.
She called to tell her mom that she,
you know, killed David
by shooting him in the back of the head
and had a lot of the specifics about the situation.
But would she repeat those same specifics in court ?
When the prosecutors called Tonya's mother to the stand,
her testimony didn't exactly go as planned.
And when the prosecutors pressed Linda about what she'd
previously told the police
and their confidential informant,
she said she'd made the entire thing up.
Much to my surprise, when she came in to testify
she testified that she lied.
I could tell that the prosecution
was very flustered by that, which they should've been.
However, the prosecution's case wasn't entirely sunk.
They still had Linda on tape.
That allowed me to impeach her
through a prior inconsistent statement
by playing both the previous drug buy
as well as those interviews.
The jury got to make up their own mind,
who they believed,
whether she's telling the truth or not.
The prosecutors figured they'd managed to contain the damage.
But when it was the defense's turn to cross-examine Linda,
Tonya's attorney did his best to take advantage of
her mother's dramatic reversal.
He said, "I had a lot of questions to ask you,
"but I didn't know you were going to come here
and tell the truth."
Tonya's mother wasn't the only member of her family
backing her up, either.
When the defense started presenting its case on
August 22nd, they called Tonya's sister,
Ashley Simpson, to the stand.
Ashley testified that, less than ten-minutes
before the shooting occurred,
Tonya was at the Campbellsville Sonic,
some 12 miles from home where David was busy
doing their taxes.
You know, we talked a little bit,
you know, we didn't--
it wasn't a long, drawn-out conversation or anything,
but, you know, she got her coffee and we talked.
They did attempt to challenge the time line
that we had created
regarding the events that occurred that day.
Then, when Tonya's sister finished,
the defense called a long string of family members
as character witnesses for the mother of four.
( Calen ) His appeal was really to the jury's emotions, I think.
They-- they put a lot of friends
and family members on the stand
to try to evoke compassion for Tonya.
Chief among those witnesses were Tonya's children
from her previous marriage.
( John ) She's a mother of four,
they have one common child who's 17 years old,
great-looking kids
and, you know, we knew that, it would break
the jurors' hearts to think about those kids
being without a mother.
Her kids come first.
She would think of, you know, Austin
growing up without a father.
There's no way she would-- she would do that to him.
Tonya and David's son Austin also testified
in his mother's defense.
( Austin ) My mom, I love her to death,
like, she's my top person in my world.
And when someone can try to blame
all this on my mom,
like my dad's side of the family,
I don't want nothing to do with them.
That was very difficult to hear.
He was very emotional, as he should have been.
She was very emotional watching him.
I noticed that.
And that was hard I think for the family too,
just that their child was brought to testify
on behalf of his mother
so that he wouldn't lose her too.
But would Austin's testimony earn the jury's sympathy ?
Not if the prosecutors had any say.
In their closing,
the prosecutors reminded the jurors
to stick to the facts of the case.
Even if it was true.
( Bryan ) She was a great mother.
I'm not going to fight that.
I wasn't even-- I wouldn't even
disagree with that, you know.
But it still doesn't make her a great wife.
Still doesn't mean she didn't pull the trigger.
Coming up: Tonya braces for the jury's verdict.
And she said, "I know I didn't do it
and I know that they're gonna see that."
But will she get the outcome she expects ?
( narrator ) Campbellsville, Kentucky.
August 24, 2012.
It was 11:00 on Friday morning
when the jury announced it had reached a verdict
in the *** trial of 39-year-old Tonya Ford.
Accused of killing her husband,
a small-town police officer named David Ford,
a conviction could mean a life sentence
for the mother of four.
The range of penalty on this offense of ***,
which is a class "A" felony in Kentucky,
was 20 years to life.
Despite the risk,
Tonya appeared confident of an acquittal.
She said, "I've got more faith in this system
"than any of the rest of you all do.
"I know I didn't do it
and I know that they're gonna see that."
Tonya may have had reason for her confidence.
In a statement to the police,
her mother, Linda, had claimed
that Tonya had confessed to killing David.
She called to tell her mom that
she, you know, killed David
by shooting him in the back of the head.
But when she took the stand for the prosecution,
Linda had reversed herself,
claiming that her original statement had been a lie.
"I just made this up because I wanted to see
how far the police would take it."
Now Tonya's fate hinged upon which version of the story
the jury believed--
what her mother had said on tape
or what she'd testified to in court.
I don't think that her testimony was significant to the jury,
it was highly entertaining,
but it was not significant.
Tonya was crushed by the outcome.
And her friends and family were just as stunned.
I was just speechless.
Like, at that point, I just had nothing to say
because I was so shocked.
On the other side of the courtroom,
David's fellow officers were confident
justice had finally been done.
The department was elated, was happy.
I mean, everybody was high-fiving each other.
But the high fives ended once the judge announced
Tonya's sentence.
So why shouldn't she get life ?
She killed a father of four boys.
She killed a stepfather of three.
She killed a son.
She killed a brother.
She killed a uncle.
A cousin.
A friend.
And last but not least, she killed a police officer.
For Tonya's friends and family,
the fact that she received the minimum sentence
was a small victory.
But it does little to dampen their pain.
I don't want my mother to have to miss out
on everything that
her life still has in store.
And the young man whose lost both a father and a mother ?
He remains hopeful that he'll get at least one of them back.
Maybe in a year or two
after we get all this appeal done,
then she'll get out and we can actually live our life
that we've been wanting to live for the past four years.
Captioning made possible by OXYGEN MEDIA, L.L.C.