BobGW, you're not the only one experience this. In the past year or so, Google has updated their internal algorithms on how they deal with links to sites. If your site has a low quality or even toxic (bad) links pointing to your website from other sites, your site's rankings will go down. And in many cases, you're not going to get any sort of warning messages or messages from Google in Google Webmaster Tools.
If you do have unnatural links that violate their guidelines, then they may send you a message, and in that case they'll ask you to file a reconsideration request after you've cleaned up the links and made good attempts to get those links removed.
The good thing is that it doesn't sound like you've received any sort of penalties--the rankings have gone down algorithmically. That doesn't mean that you don't need to evaluate all of the links to your site and get the low quality links removed.
I would look at all your links (you can use Open Site Explorer, ahrefs, or Majestic SEO or a combination of those to find the links) and review them with a fine tooth comb. Not all of the bad links will be shown in Google Webmaster Tools. You'll need to look at other tools to gather the link data.
Get rid of the ones that are low quality and get new fresh quality links and your site's rankings should come back.