Part 5: Ashley finds the freedom to fall — and to discover her destiny

I met Ashley for the first time in March 2015 at a Noodles & Company in Indianapolis.

Ashley wore trendy clothing and immaculate makeup. When she stood up, I was struck by how petite she was. I’m 5 feet, 1 inch tall, and I tower over her. She told me later that she is 4 feet, 6 inches tall.

During that first meeting, Ashley was friendly and articulate but distant.

Her adoptive father Craig Peterson had arranged the meeting. He initially reached out to me about an article I'd written, then shared bits of Ashley's story. Before we met, he warned me that Ashley was “extremely fragile” and living “in her own private hell.” Ashley had been diagnosed with what she described as a cocktail of psychological disorders, some of which were a result of childhood trauma she suffered while in the foster care system.

Ashley had been taken from her birth mother at 2 years old, sexually abused at 7, used as a political pawn at 8 and abandoned by her adoptive mother at 10. She struggled to fit into a home with five other children. She felt like an outsider as she went through more than a decade of fights, hospitalizations, rape and other sexual encounters with older men.

When I met Ashley, she was 24 and Craig remained her legal guardian.

Over a series of interviews spanning two years, Ashley and I explored some of the most challenging experiences of her life.

Craig said his daughter had improved since he put her in a condo he owned a mile from his house. Ashley would later describe the condo as a haven.

“I needed that transition to be able to start seeing myself,” Ashley told me. “Because before that, I just saw a blur. I didn’t see the future. I didn’t see the past. I didn’t see the present. I didn’t care. I didn’t think I needed to. I didn’t think I was important enough.”

Ashley said she began to believe in herself.

Craig secured a $56,000 settlement from the Indiana Department of Child Services, which enabled him to help pay for the condo and dialectical behavior therapy for Ashley. DBT is a form of therapy that teaches participants how to better interact with others by regulating their emotions and managing emotional trauma rather than attempting to escape it.

Craig said the therapy seemed to help. Now, when Ashley got emotionally stuck, he said, it would last part of a day or overnight rather than two weeks. It was the kind of progress he said he had hoped for back when his daughter was in middle school. Instead, she was often misdiagnosed or placed in programs that worked for a while but were never sustained long enough to succeed.

Throughout interviews, Craig acted as Ashley’s gatekeeper and informal spokesman. He sometimes jumped in when I asked Ashley a question or prompted her to remember certain things. He was trying to be helpful, but I left some interviews feeling as though I understood more of his perspective than hers.

While they sometimes disagreed during interviews, I didn’t realize that tension was building between Ashley and Craig.

Ashley shares her feelings

Ashley sometimes compared herself to her younger brother Andrew. He is a Special Olympian. He gives speeches arranged by Craig, who maintains a blog called “Adopting Faith: A Father’s Unconditional Love.” Articles have been written about how Andrew is more than his diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome. Ashley is proud of him, as well as of her own brief appearance in a documentary film made about Andrew’s journey.

In one interview, Ashley said Andrew was the light and she was the darkness. With Ashley's permission, Craig shared Ashley’s journal entries with me. In them, she described grappling with feeling worthless.

“All through my life, I felt like a black sheep, unwanted and forgotten,” she wrote.

Ashley also described what it felt like to pretend to fit in with those around her.

“I hide and mask my emotions so well, and have for as long as I can remember, to escape and abandon my true pain and rage inside,” she wrote. “Fake, happy feelings and smiles only last for a few weeks, but for that time I feel normal — yet forced.”

During that time period, Ashley admitted, she was lying to herself. Contrived happiness is a trick she plays to let herself believe that she is fine. But it doesn’t last.

“I just sometimes have to escape from my hell deep inside me,” she wrote, “but the hell inside still seeps out like smoke under a door. I fire vinim (sic) and hate for no reason to whoever is around. I have even been called evil. I feel evil inside like a shadow that wants to take form.”

Ashley also said she felt like a burden. The time Craig spent trying to help her was time he wasn’t spending on her brothers, who had complex needs of their own.

Mostly, Ashley dreamed of peace. And freedom.

Reconnecting with Ashley

Despite hours of interviews and more than 1,000 pages of records I had collected, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I still didn’t know Ashley. Not really. She seemed to be holding back.

In 2016, my focus shifted to an investigation into USA Gymnastics, and Ashley and I lost touch.

Through Craig, I learned that Ashley had moved to Atlanta and was doing well. She had a job. An apartment.

I asked for her phone number in July 2017.

“Let's hold off on Ashley until we are both clear on the direction of any conversations — which likely will retraumatize her,” he said.

A couple of weeks later, he provided her number. Ashley agreed to let me visit to interview her and shadow her at work.

Ashley and I coordinated last-minute details on Aug. 23, 2017, the day before my trip. “I’m a little nervous, but now I’m excited,” she said in one text.

‘Something May Be Up with Ashley’

The plane rumbled to a stop just after 11 a.m. Aug. 24, 2017, at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

Unbuckling my seat belt, I leaned down to grab my iPhone from the black nylon computer bag under the seat in front of me. As I powered it on, my mind raced to what lay beyond the jetway.

In less than two hours, I would see Ashley again.

It would be my first time interviewing her without Craig there.

As I waited for the 14 rows in front of me to clear out, I typed in my cellphone passcode and pulled up my work email. Scrolling quickly, I stopped at an email that Craig had sent while the plane was in the air.

Its subject line: “Something May Be Up with Ashley.”

“Good morning,” the email from Craig began. “After coming out of the doctor with Michael, I had two message[s] from a correctional facility in Georgia. Not sure what is going on, but Ashley may be in trouble. We texted last night around 9:15pm, so not sure what could have happened. She was very anxious about your arrival - with her sense of shame high. I hope she didn't fall apart. She didn't respond to my text this morning.”

I fired off a quick reply: “We just landed. I am supposed to meet her in a bit. I'll let you know.”

IndyStar photojournalist Mykal McEldowney and I picked up our rental car on Aug. 24, 2017. As Mykal drove to the planned meeting spot, a Ruby Tuesday in Lithia Springs, I tried to find out — in Craig’s words — what was up with Ashley.

An error message popped up when I ran Ashley’s name through Cobb County’s inmate locator using my phone.

We were scheduled to meet at 1 p.m.

The clock ticked. 1:01 p.m. 1:04 p.m. 1:10 p.m. 1:15 p.m. Still no Ashley. I sent her a quick text: “Hey, just checking in. Are you on your way?”

No answer.

I grabbed my laptop to search jail records. This time when I ran Ashley’s name I got a result.

She had been arrested at 12:42 a.m. and booked at 1:58 a.m. in the “intake pit” in Cobb County on a Douglas County warrant.

I spent the next two hours on the phone with various law enforcement agencies.

A Douglas County official agreed to let me interview Ashley the next day.

‘Now my goofy butt’s in jail’

Mykal and I waited in the magistrate’s courtroom, an impromptu meeting spot approved by jail personnel. There were three well-used chairs. The white walls were bare, except for a TV for teleconferencing and an 8 1/2-by-11 sheet of paper listing bond amounts.

With a buzz and a click, the second of two secure doors swung open.

Ashley poked her head into the room.

“Hi,” she offered sheepishly.

The 27-year-old shuffled in, wearing a khaki-colored jumpsuit with half-inch metal button snaps down the front and "Douglas County Prisoner" emblazoned on the back. The jumpsuit gaped open near Ashley’s waist, where one of the snaps was missing.

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Ashley Peterson makes her way back to her cell inside the Douglas County Jail in Douglasville, Georgia. (MYKAL MCELDOWNEY/INDYSTAR)

She also wore neon orange socks and black sandals. Tufts of her hair stuck out on the sides. Self-consciously, she tried to smooth it down. She noticed Mykal’s camera.

“Oh my God, you’re going to tape me looking like this?” she asked. “It’s OK. It’s not y’all’s fault.”

Ashley said she wasn’t upset about being arrested. She knew the warrant had been out there. She was just embarrassed that the arrest happened when it did. She was glad Craig had emailed me about receiving messages from the jail.

“I just knew he would get a hold of you because that’s all I was thinking, like so now they done flew all the way out here. Now my goofy butt’s in jail,” she said. “This is the part of the story I really wasn’t fixing to tell you, but this is my life. So I do make poor choices all the time even though I know what the outcome is going to be. That’s just what I do.”

Reminders of control

I asked Ashley why she moved to Atlanta. Almost immediately, she started to cry.

She told me the condo Craig secured for her had begun to feel like a prison.

Ashley was in her 20s, yet her father had been her legal guardian and controlled all of her finances. When she earned a paycheck, it went directly into an account he managed. She had to ask permission to do almost anything.

It’s demeaning, she had told a psychologist, to have to ask Craig for money for “sexual hygiene items.”

Ashley said Craig would sometimes hold up the guardianship or suggest she may have to leave the condo when she didn't do things the way he wanted her to. She came to believe Craig placed her in the condo so he wouldn’t have to worry and so she would help out with her brothers.

Eventually, everything around her — including the furniture — became a reminder of Craig’s control. She asked him for money from the $56,000 DCS settlement to buy furniture of her own. He told her no. He tried to model how to handle money. He wanted her to save it. Even after he agreed to let her buy furniture, her frustration remained.

“I had people always saying, ‘Listen, you wouldn’t have what you have if it wasn’t for your white dad with all his money,’” Ashley remembered. “And I looked around, and I was like, ‘Yeah, you know, you’re right. I didn’t have any of this before I went and got my settlement. I didn’t have, I didn’t have anything. This is all because of him.’ So a part of me always resented that. Like, well, I must not be nothing if you got to come in and do everything for me.”

shley gains control of her own destiny

Ashley eventually told her father she wanted the guardianship removed and found a pro bono attorney willing to help.

At first, Craig resisted her request. He considered guardianship a safety net with which he could protect her. He later weighed that concern against Ashley’s perception that he was an overbearing and overinvolved parent.

“Although there's a part of me that doesn't want to undo this, there's another part of me realizing that I do need to walk away so then there might be some hard lessons to be learned,” Craig said.

On April 19, 2016, while my colleagues and I were immersed in the gymnastics investigation, Ashley and Craig filed a joint petition to terminate the guardianship. It was granted a month later.

At 26 years old, for the first time in her life, Ashley could control her own destiny.

Ending the guardianship changed the dynamics of her relationship with her father.

“Now he can’t throw up that guardianship paper every time I do something or don't do it the way he think I should do it or whatever,” Ashley said.

‘Snap, crackle, pop’

That summer, Ashley’s former adoptive father Earl “Butch” Kimmerling — the man who sexually abused her as a child — was released from prison. He had served less than half of his 40-year sentence.

Butch’s wife, Sandy, who had rejected Ashley, accepted him back into her life.

For a lot of reasons, Ashley wanted to leave Indiana. One of them, she said, was she didn’t trust herself to live nearby when Butch got out.

“Let me just get as far away as I can just in case I do snap, crackle, pop,” she said.

She wanted to move to Atlanta. It was the only place Ashley had ever been on her own. And she thought lots of black people were doing well there.

Then, in August 2016, Ashley and Craig had another argument about money. She wanted to change her Social Security deposits to go into her account rather than his.

I’m grown, and I’m asking for something that’s mine, she argued. Why should you care?

That’s it, she said Craig replied in frustration. You’re just going to have to go.

Ashley knew he didn’t mean it. He had said those words before. But she was sick of her father holding the condo over her head. And Ashley, who had once been abused by her white foster father, wondered what role race played in his behavior.

In the moment, Ashley said she thought, of course white people would never give a black person something and really let it be theirs. “Of course they’re going to keep their hand on it some kind of way,” she said, “just to put you in your place, just to let you know basically, ‘Yeah, I did that for you. Don’t you forget. You owe me. Every time I call, you’d better pick up the phone. Every time I need you about your brothers, you’d better be there.’”

She told Craig, “You know what, I’ll be gone by Friday.”

Ashley put most of her things in storage, packed the rest in her car and headed south.

‘My backbone is gone’

Ashley checked into a hotel in the Buckhead district of Atlanta. For the first time, she realized hotels cost $150 a night.

She felt free. Then she fell apart.

“I just went into the hotel room, had the rest of my little stuff in the car and I just broke down in tears because I just felt alone — a feeling that I didn’t even think I was capable of feeling,” Ashley recalled, sobbing. “I felt alone. I felt like, ‘OK, my backbone is gone.’ You know? And I did it to myself.”

She said her first night in Atlanta was a wake-up call.

“Sometimes you just get so mad and you don’t even realize what you're doing until after you did it,” Ashley said.

She talked to Craig on the phone.

“Well, maybe you just need to pray,” he told her. “Maybe you just need to do something to get yourself more grounded.”

Ashley filled out job applications online and snagged a job pretty quickly. The job meant she could secure an apartment, which meant stability. That stability is what I expected to witness when I came to Atlanta in 2017 and found her in jail. But more than a year before my trip, it had already begun to unravel.

A series of poor choices

For years, Ashley had been driving without a license. She had four prior convictions in Indiana for doing so when she was issued a ticket in Georgia and received probation.

“It paved the way for me to make more poor choices off of that,” she said, “because it just pissed me off so bad I just wasn’t even thinking anymore. Like hold up, I was trying to go home. What are you talking about, probation?”

Ashley attributes her repeated mistakes to fetal alcohol syndrome, which can affect reasoning and judgment. She also said she can cycle through 20 emotions a day and never knows how she will feel, which she said made adhering to the terms of court-ordered probation difficult. 

In the months before my trip, Ashley failed to meet the terms of probation or show up for court hearings. She gave police a false name. And she was wanted on an outstanding warrant.

The night before my flight, Ashley went to smoke a blunt with a man staying in the Econo Lodge at Six Flags in Austell, Georgia. They argued. Police were called. She was arrested on that warrant. The man was also arrested.

“I was sitting there, like, ‘Jesus, why today?’” Ashley said.

‘I just can’t fall correctly’ 

During our interview at the jail, Ashley said incarceration forced her to confront what she was doing to herself.

“We have to look within and understand that sometimes in becoming a victim, you can also become the problem,” she said.

Ashley reflected on her complicated relationship with her father. She said Craig was right about her problems with money, making good choices and showing self-worth. But she vacillated between appreciation for all her father had done for her and resentment for his propensity for control, which in some ways prevented her from learning life skills.

“Every time I turn around, there’s safety nets,” Ashley said. “I just can’t fall correctly. And so I think part of me wanted to try it on my own, just to see. Because at the time, like I said, I had ideas that weren’t quite right. You know, I thought, ‘Well, if he’s just out the way, then maybe I'll be able to do things on my own.’ That’s not what happened.”

‘My gut says she’s MIA’

After Mykal and I returned to Indiana, Craig kept me in the loop on Ashley’s situation. In a series of texts, he told me Ashley lost her job while she was incarcerated. She became homeless. Low on cash. Overwhelmed.

She stayed with a friend.

On Sept. 27, 2017, Ashley left me a voicemail, and we later spoke. She said she was ready to talk again. I booked another trip for the middle of October.

In conversations before the trip, Craig told me Ashley was back on the street, but seemed OK. He booked a hotel room for Ashley for the night Mykal and I would be there. We would pick her up.

The day before our trip, Craig reached out and said Ashley wasn’t responding to his texts. I hoped she would show up at the hotel where we had agreed to meet.

I called Ashley when Mykal and I landed in Atlanta. A rapid busy signal buzzed in my ear. I sent her a text. No answer.

Mykal and I hoped her cellphone was just out of minutes.

Mykal was optimistic. I was less so. I ran Ashley’s name through inmate locators for nearby jails. Her name didn’t show up on any of them. Mykal guided our rental car, a black Nissan Altima, to the Residence Inn in Buckhead. We looped through the parking lot. No Ashley. I walked inside. Still no Ashley.

Craig and I exchanged a string of texts. He canceled the hotel reservation.

“Why did you cancel it?” I asked. “Check-in isn’t until 3 p.m.”

“I can always rebook something,” he replied, “but I don’t want to lose my certificate that I graciously used for her. The hotel has a message for her to call me.”

He had little faith she would show up. And he wasn’t panicking about where she was spending the night.

“My gut says she’s MIA,” Craig said via text. “I’ve lived with these ‘surprises’ for 15 years. In (sic) sorry you’re now involved. She can figure out a way to call.”

My search for Ashley began in earnest.

We checked her social media accounts and every former address we had for her. I called court and police officials. I ran her name through inmate locators.

I didn’t tell Craig this, but the only other places I could think to call were the coroners’ offices. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. If that was what had happened to her, it could wait one more day.

“Any news,” Craig asked that night.

“None,” I replied. “I’ve done almost everything I can think of.”

I left Atlanta without finding Ashley.

Ashley contacted me months later to apologize for disappearing. She said she was preparing to begin speaking publicly about trauma, and she wanted to know if I still wanted to share her story. I said I did. We stayed in touch.

‘I have to do what I have to do’

The next time I saw Ashley was in July 2018. Mykal and I met her at a motel off Fulton Industrial Boulevard in Atlanta.

She lived in room 35. The air conditioner unit was purring when we walked in, a nice reprieve from the Georgia heat. The TV volume was low, with cartoons on the screen. Paint peeled off the walls in some areas, and there was a stain on the small round wooden table and on the carpeting. The bottom of the table was dirty, and a phone sat underneath it on the floor. The knob on a closet door hung askew.

Ashley kept her clothes neatly folded in a black suitcase against the wall — a silent reminder not to get too comfortable. She’d sold her car to remove the temptation to drive without a license. She paid her rent every day, so she could leave whenever she wanted.

Ashley had been living here for a few months. It wasn’t much, but it would have to suffice until the apartment she wanted opened up.

The room cost $65 a day, or roughly $2,000 a month. There was no weekly rate.

Ashley worked part time, but she said her three days a week wasn’t enough. She said a friend covered the rest.

“He helps me out, but I have to do what I have to do,” Ashley said.

It’s different, she said, because she likes him.

“I’ve done it before where, you know, you're just looking at the guy and I would never touch you on a rainy day,” she said. “But since I need the money, ‘OK.’ And all the time you're like, ‘Oh, ew, gross. Don't touch me, stop.’”

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Ashley Peterson sat on her bed inside her room at the Airway Motel in Atlanta. (MYKAL MCELDOWNEY/INDYSTAR)

‘No Shame, Know Shame’

That Atlanta trip was the first time I felt like I was meeting the real Ashley.

Sharing such intensely personal details took courage.

In Atlanta, I saw the Ashley who was a caring friend. The loving sister. I sat with her in church, where tears streaked her cheeks as she prayed. I listened to her frustration with a society that makes it difficult for people to come back from mistakes.

She created a mission statement: “No Shame, Know Shame.”

After Mykal and I left Atlanta, Ashley attempted to take another step toward healing. She confronted her past. She and Craig had already revisited significant locations in Anderson. She’d reconnected with her biological mother Kim Guiden and stood by her side in the hospital.

Now she craved closure for what Butch and Sandy Kimmerling did to her so many years ago. Ashley hasn’t spoken to Butch since his 1999 arrest for abusing her. She hasn’t spoken to Sandy since shortly after the older woman gave Ashley away.

Back then, Ashley said she needed the money to pay her phone bill, storage and housing. But those acts of survival took something from her.

“When I said that when an adult touches a child and it takes their soul and their innocence, let me tell you what it do when you do it to yourself,” Ashley said. “When you sell yourself out every day. Every day. Every day. Every day.

“It do a lot more than being molested, I'll tell you that much. Because when you, when you do something to yourself, the level of shame and guilt is times 10.”

Ashley said she doesn’t have to do that anymore. But others do. She also told me she’d struggled with her health but is now taking care of herself. She has since moved out of that motel and is back in Indiana.

Sandy messaged Ashley once in 2013 asking to meet, but Ashley wasn’t ready then. She sent Sandy a Facebook message last fall.

“If possible, I would like to get together and talk and gain closure to the past?” Ashley wrote. “I’ve been healing. I’m becoming an advocate against sexual abuse. I have a few questions. I would appreciate the chance to ask them. I’ve been on a 3 year healing journey after trauma based therapy and need to have closure to have forgiveness. Also that I would like my childhood photos. Thank you for taking the time to read. Looking forward to hearing back.”

Sandy never replied.

I asked Butch and Sandy to speak with me for this series. Both declined to be interviewed.

“Honey, everything we have to say is behind us,” Sandy told me when I visited the couple’s home.

Sandy said she didn’t want to hear what the series was about.

“We’re done,” she said. “It’s all over.”

‘All disabilities deserve respect’

But it isn’t over. Not for Ashley.

Her story did not end simply because it no longer fit the narratives others wanted to tell.

Ashley was more than the girl described in child welfare records, police reports and court files. She was more than the darkness she described in her own journal entries.

Ashley said she wanted to tell her story to help others.

She said societal systems are often ill-equipped to deal with the complexity of issues that manifest from trauma. And people too often talk as if there are simple solutions. Pick yourself up. Get over it. Let it go.

Ashley said she’s heard those refrains all too often. Because the emotional damage caused by trauma is invisible, people often assign blame rather than offering support.

“I believe people empathize with people with visible disabilities more than they do someone like me who looks normally balanced,” Ashley wrote to me. “People do not understand the difference of a physical, intellectual or emotional disability. They are all extremely different and should be treated as such. … All disabilities deserve respect and understanding.”

Earlier, Ashley told me trauma is difficult to talk about and that most depictions of it are not raw enough to reflect reality. “It’s never really as honest as it should be,” she said. “I wanted to bring the 100 percent truth to the situation so that people understand if you do want to adopt a child with trauma or if you are a person with trauma … once it’s done, it’s done.”

No longer did Ashley think she could be “fixed.”

Trauma, she said, lasts forever. Others hurt her. She hurt herself. She hurt others.

But she could learn and make herself better.

“It’s just something that you have to learn to deal with,” Ashley said, “just like if you got a leg chopped off, you have to learn how to still move around regardless of it. You can’t sit there, ‘Ugh, my leg’s gone. Forget life.’ You just can't do that, you know what I mean? And that’s just what I want people to understand and remember because when you give up on yourself, who else can help you?”

Ashley’s story is important, not because it is extraordinary, although aspects of it are; but because countless others across the country must navigate their own trauma, long after society assumes justice has been done.

Trauma affects our families, our neighborhoods, our schools, our criminal justice system, workplaces and virtually every other aspect of life.

“A lot of people that go through what I go through, we walk around with a chip on our shoulder. We do think, you know, people owe us this, owe us that, because nobody was there for us then,” Ashley said, adding that trauma affects everyone. “Because if you don't look at it any other way, people who are out here committing crimes to other people, they were a victim one time.”

‘Everybody just has an ending’

Now 29, Ashley still struggles with anger and trust. She and Craig still argue from time to time, but she says he is always there for her. She realizes she and Craig have both done the best they could do.

She told me she’s in the middle of her healing journey. She’s more independent.

She wants to be an advocate. She’s already spoken at one conference. She wants to do more. She dreams of opening a home care business called No Shame to Cleaning, a play off her personal mission statement. Eventually, she imagines the company employing former sex workers.

Ashley, who spent so long running from her past, is now talking about a future focused on others.

“So is that your happy ending?” I asked. “Building that business, speaking to other people?”

“I would not say a happy ending,” she replied. “I would say it’s an ending.”

“Is there a happy ending?”

“No,” she said. “No. I — no. No. What is that? No. Everybody just has an ending. Like what?”

“They don’t have happy endings?” I asked. “There’s no white horse riding off into the sunset?”

“I don’t think there’s no bad ending,” Ashley answered. “I don’t think there’s a good ending. I just think everyone’s destined to have their whatever it’s going to be. So we all just work toward that, and that’s what it is.”

Call USA TODAY reporter Marisa Kwiatkowski at (317) 444-6135. Follow her on Twitter: @IndyMarisaK.

[This story was originally published by the IndyStar.]