NASHVILLE — To most of Middle Tennessee, theirs are the faces of accused killers, but one person sees them differently.

The person who raised Zach and Dylan Adams, coached their ball games, threw birthday parties, took them on beach trips now sees her two sons charged in the murder of Holly Bobo.

“No mother thinks their kid is a killer. Do you really think you could look at the evidence and say Zach and Dylan didn’t do this?” a reporter for WSMV-TV, Channel 4 asked Cindy Adams in an exclusive interview.

“I can say that. I can say that they didn’t do this,” Cindy Adams replied.

Cindy Adams knows what you’ve heard: How the TBI says they have evidence, how investigators say Dylan Adams actually admitted to the crimes, even how Zach Adams once shot her, and she’s never talked about any of it until now.

“I think I’m ready to do this,” Cindy Adams said.

So how does it happen? How do the brothers in happy, childhood photographs end up with mug shots, charged in the most notorious crimes in Middle Tennessee?

Cindy Adams thinks about that a lot.

Zach Adams, charged with the kidnapping and murder of Bobo, once had so much promise.

“He was basically a straight-A student. He actually excelled in sports,” Cindy Adams said.

And Dylan Adams, charged with kidnapping rape and murder, was a people pleaser.

“Dylan is the type of person where, you dangle a cookie in front of him and you want him to do something, you know, he’s going to do,” Cindy Adams said.

The two brothers were close friends, but their mother said that changed after she divorced the boys’ father.

Zach Adams got into drugs, meth mostly, and a life of crime. In fact, police were constantly being called out to his house.

Zach Adams sounds erratic on a 911 call from 2012.

“I know what he wants me to do. He wants me to hit him so he can put me in jail. I ain’t gonna do that,” he said on the 911 recording.

Cindy Adams said she sent Zach to rehab three times as a minor, and it all came to a head one night when he came over to her house demanding money.

He ended up shooting his own mother in the knee.

“I don’t remember who called 911 because I was in shock, but I do remember him tying my leg off and helping me until paramedics got there and him just crying and saying, ‘Mama I didn’t mean to do that. Mama, mama.’ You could tell that he had just come back to his senses because when he first walked through that door he was someone I didn’t even know,” Cindy Adams said.

Dylan Adam’s path was troubled too. He moved out to live with his father, Timothy Adams, who ended up dying in a car crash. When that happened, Cindy said Dylan, who had already started dabbling in drugs and hanging with the wrong crowd, spiraled even more out of control.

“Do you blame yourself at all?” WSMV asked Cindy Adams.

“You know, as a parent, you go back and you just, you know, you look at every aspect of their life and you’re just like, ‘What could I have done different? How could I have changed this? How could I have been more present,’ Yeah, daily, I mean daily, I beat myself up over this,” she said.

Cindy Adams moved to Georgia. She remembers hearing about Holly Bobo’s kidnapping on the news in 2011; how a man dressed in camouflage escorted her into the woods as she was trying to leave for nursing school.

Cindy said while she and her boys weren’t close with the Bobos, they knew of Holly and felt concerned.

“I was praying daily for Holly and, you know, I even asked my boys, ‘Do you know anything? Do you know anything? Have you heard anything?’ ‘No mom, no mom,’ and at one point, Dylan told me he didn’t even know Holly. He said, ‘I don’t even know Holly.’” Cindy Adams said.

Then came the news: her oldest son Zach was charged with the crime.

“I mean you’re just, there’s no words. There’s no words,” she said.

With two young sons with criminal backgrounds, how could Cindy Adams believe they’re innocent?

Cindy doesn’t mince words. She said her two sons are thieves and drug addicts whose lives revolve around getting their next fix, but she said they’re not focused or clever enough to plot a murder.

“Look at his rap sheet. I mean Zachary cannot even go out and steal a deer stand without getting caught,” Cindy Adams.

And she said he’s not secretive enough to get away with it.

“When more than one person knows about something this horrific that happened, you know, and you’re talking about drug addicts, how did they keep that quiet?” Cindy Adams said.

Cindy knows that Dylan made a statement to investigators that they say implicates him and his brother Zach. It’s never been made public, but Cindy has heard it.

“In this statement Dylan is trying to tell his story as to what happened, and you’ve got this TBI agent saying, ‘Don’t you mean this? Don’t you mean it happened like this?’ And, ‘No Dylan, it went down like this.’ And you can honestly tell at the point that Dylan, I can as his mother, he gave up. He’s like, ‘OK, if that’s what you said, OK,” Cindy Adams said.

Cindy said for those who have watched the Netflix series “Making a Murderer,” her son is the equivalent of Brendan Dassey, the character accused of murder.

In the series, Dassey is portrayed as being mentally challenged and coerced.

“If it had gone down the way that Dylan described it, they would have blood in that house. They would have found DNA in that house. They would have found hair in that house. They would have found a fingernail. They would have found something that placed Holly in that house. There’s no chemical cleanup in that house. There’s no nothing that ever indicated that Holly has been in that house, but if you listen to Dylan’s story, and I’m not going to go into everything he says, but it’s pretty graphic. There’s no way they would not have found something,” Cindy Adams said.

So what did the TBI find? What evidence do prosecutors have in this case?

We haven’t seen the discovery, but Cindy Adams said she has and she said you’ll be shocked by what they do and don’t have against her sons.