David Cauley
Appearances
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
He comes from a rough family. His dad and uncle had been in trouble with the law, probably in somehow related to some kind of minor narcotics trafficking. Ernie himself had been to prison, but at this time, he was clean, he was working two jobs, he was supporting the family.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
There's other things where they're supposedly saying things about, because of your dad, somebody was taken from us and now we're going to take somebody from him and that's going to be you. And Ernie says, how do I get out of this? What do you want? And they said, well, if you got $20,000 and Ernie laughs, you know, he doesn't have $20,000.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
And so they punch him some more and, you know, he offers up, well, you know, my grandparents have money. We could go break into their house. I would get you money from their house. We can steal some jewelry or something.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
Two deputies went to the north end of the county where his dad would have lived to make sure that there's not more things happening there.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
And then investigator Chris Bragg took Samantha to the sheriff's department so that she could be talked to further.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
It's the middle of the night, working towards morning. They are still running down these other leads, trying to, if something can be done fast, to find Ernie. That's what they're trying to do. So while that camera's running, she takes a nap.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
There's a dry erase board on the wall. Every once in a while, she'll stand up and write on the dry erase board, where's my husband? And then turn to the camera and do this shrug, irritated face thing.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
She doesn't inquire about her kids. She doesn't ask to be with them. She does, on occasion and throughout her interview, inquire about her husband. But it's not, there's something acting about it. There's something fake about it. What's the last time you fired you?
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
It's not like you would expect for something to have happened so horribly to someone you love and to you. And then just to be... I don't know, more of putting on a show and less of a real emotion.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
She had a few hours in the interview room. The sheriff came in, got frustrated with her, tried to talk to her a little bit, and then eventually says, you know, I think you're lying. I think you know something.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
She finally says something like, well, what if I know something and I don't even know that I know it?
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
And then that kind of opened the door for her to reveal the things that set all of the dominoes in motion.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
They push her a little bit. And she said, well, I met this guy, Johnny Reb. That's all I know him as at the hospital. And some things were said about Ernie. And he was saying and she makes his voice, you know, tries to mimic him and says, well, you know, a man shouldn't treat a woman that way. And he seemed really upset about it. But what if he decided to do something on his own?
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
And she says, and in fact, he's picking her up at the hospital right now, and he's using my car to do it.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
So she met Jonathan Sanford and Jose Ponce at the hospital with Sharla. And it was there that Samantha went on and on about her abusive husband and that sort of thing. And how Jonathan said, you know, a woman shouldn't be treated that way. And I would never treat a woman that way. And anybody who does doesn't deserve to live or whatever.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
There were an older set of twins from a prior relationship. And then with Ernie, she had a child and then another set of twins. But Ernie basically raised those kids, the other two, as if they were his own.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
I mean, Jonathan Sanford would be the most hardened criminal out of the bunch. He had been to prison. He had been to prison for sexually assaulting his teen-year-old male cousin, probably a sociopath at the very least.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
The sheriff, Aaron Baxter, investigator, with the sheriff's department and John Livingston go to the hospital and they see two guys leaving and they see the two guys kind of separate once law enforcement's there. And the sheriff yells out, Johnny Ram and Sanford pauses or turns. And then within seconds, they grab hold of those two guys. So Sanford is almost like, well, I'm calm.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
Sanford had been to her house before to pick up some baby stuff that Charlotte could use. So Charlotte was Samantha's friend who was pregnant and at the hospital to have her baby.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
I do think that they did beat him pretty severely. Jonathan Sanford eventually said, Ernie put up a pretty good fight when they first drug him out of bed. He said, until I hit him in the head with a pistol. And then that pretty much subdued him at that point.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
And I asked Sanford, you know, you weren't afraid he was, you know, going to run off. Y'all weren't, as y'all were like rifling through his truck. And Sanford's like, no, he wasn't going anywhere. His breathing was labored. You could tell things were broken and there was internal fluid. And Sanford didn't say it quite eloquently, you know, but basically there wasn't much fight left in him.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
Sanford agrees to quickly to show them where the body was and to show them where the gun is. He's not asking for anything for his benefit. He just is agreeing to do it. The sheriff driving Aaron Baxter in the backseat and Jonathan Sanford in the front passenger seat just go where Jonathan tells them to go.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
They get out to the middle of this bayou wooded area, and it is also in the middle of nowhere. And Jonathan, you know, takes them to the edge and they see this path. And officers walk down there and go a little ways and they see the body of Ernie, naked except for his blue boxer shorts, lying face down in the leaves and the briars and the underbrush and shot in the back of the head.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
Right after this, it started raining, and it rained for weeks. And if they had not found the body when they did, it would have ended up in some bayou in Louisiana because that area flooded, and that would have been the end of it.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
I think when she came back in for that second interview, she thought she had everybody fooled.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
So when Bragg was first interviewing her, he asked, can I see your phone? And she says, yes. So she gives him permission to see her phone. And he steps out just in the doorway of the interview room. And with his phone, he takes as many pictures of various screens on her phone. Recent text messages between her and her husband. He takes pictures of those.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
He takes pictures of recently added contacts and just does as many as he can. He doesn't know what he's looking for, but he hopes to catch something, and he in fact does.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
Unbelievable. February 19th of 2015, these people are all acting as a group. They're using Samantha's car. They're all hanging out together. At one point, Sanford, Lacona Slayton, Jose Ponce, and Octavius Rimes are all at Walmart stealing groceries with Samantha's kids using Samantha's car while she's at the hospital. So they had a plan.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
First plan was to go to Octavius Rimes cousin in Mount Vernon and buy some meth and use that to set up Ernie so that he would go to prison and get him out of Samantha's life. Then as the night went on, they were all together. They were together at Octavius Rimes house. Jose Ponce was cooking enchiladas with the groceries they stole from Walmart.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
And it was during that period of time, Jonathan said the plan changed and the plan changed. for them to kidnap Ernie, make it look like a burglar and kidnapping, and to kill him. And that all Samantha had to do was leave the door unlocked, and that would be their answer.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
So Samantha called her mother, who was in a town about an hour and a half away. And Rosie called her sister, who was about 10 minutes away. And so her sister and her sister's boyfriend just came straight to the house.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
There's also messages between Samantha and Octavius telling them what law enforcement is doing, telling them to get rid of Ernie's phone because it's being pinged, telling them that law enforcement has located the phone. And so to ditch the phone and move.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
All four were charged with the aggravated kidnapping in Titus County and the murder in Camp County. And so from a charging standpoint, what that does is give us... Two bites of the apple. It also let sentences be stacked because the cases would not be tried together. Also, except for Sanford, nobody probably had the history that it would require to get the death penalty.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
He and Jose Ponce both pled guilty to all the charges, and they each received 50-year sentences on each one to run concurrently.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
In going into Samantha's first trial, I felt like, you know, the Titus County Sheriff's Department had done such a thorough job that I had everything I needed. Biggest fears were just, you don't know what a jury's going to do. You don't know how they're hearing the story you're telling.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
The plan was for them to take Ernie out into the woods and shoot him with this one firearm that they carry around. They have to kind of pass between them. At one point, Jonathan said he changed his mind and he was going to slit Ernie's throat, but he didn't get to because Ponce shot him first.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
When Sanford testified, you feel like you were watching evil. I think the feeling through the jury and all of us is, oh, my goodness, there are horrible people walking around Walmart with us. And you don't want to think that our little communities have that sort of thing.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
And you see it and it's like, oh, my gosh, you know, they've seen the surveillance of him in Walmart gathering up stuff, gathering groceries. And it's like, well, this is somebody you pass in the aisle and he doesn't care that somebody died. He doesn't care about his part in it. And he would have rather have slit the guy's throat and shot him in the head. But, you know, that's the way it goes.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
She testified and her position was that she had taken Ambien before she went to bed. And so she had no recollection of sending any text messages. She can't say that she sent them. She was going to say that probably she did not send them. That doesn't sound like something she would do.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
The problems with that were the timing of those text messages were captured pretty closely with her holding her phone, doing something on her phone and the timestamp on Durant's body cam for the first text message she sent where she told them to ditch phone and move.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
after her boyfriend, we'll say, cleared the house. He went in with his firearm, made sure nobody else was there, and at that same time, they're calling law enforcement.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
She supposedly knew the damning nature of the text messages because she told a fellow inmate, well, I just met with my lawyer and I could get out of this if it weren't for the text messages.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
So by the time she testified, they had heard from at least two, maybe three different males who she had gone to and either asked for a gun or done this spiel about my husband's so mean to me and all this. And I think that's why this case came about was because she happened to say that to the right people.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
I think she told Jonathan Sanford and Octavius Rimes, don't worry about me. I'm an actress. I can convince anybody of anything.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
I don't think that he was really abusive towards Samantha the way she portrayed it to be. I think at this point in his life, he was just working hard, trying to take care of this family without any help from her. In the end, Walford's performance fell flat. Then she got up there and she did her little fake cry and she did her little acting and nobody bought it.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
Judge Ralston stacked those sentences so she will have to make parole on the aggravated kidnapping before she ever starts serving the murder sentence.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
Ernie's mom struggled hard. I mean, she was kind and grateful and listened to what I had to say. But she had a real emotional difficulty with the fact that her son was, you know, murdered for no reason except for this horrible woman that he had aligned himself with.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
Samantha's mother very quickly took possession of the kids and would not let Ernie's side of the family see them. She basically just took them out of their lives and it broke their hearts.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
Samantha is basically relaying the story and it gets relayed to law enforcement, which is that somebody had broken into the house, had pulled her and her husband out of bed from a sleep.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
And as they continued to beat him, they put her on her knees in front of him. They would say things like, you know, this wonderful woman that you have, this beautiful woman, do you deserve her? You don't deserve her. Things like that. They continued to use her to taunt him, basically, while they were beating him.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
She told them they were all wearing black. They had black masks. They had black gloves.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
So that house is about as secluded as it can be for Titus County. It's surrounded by acreage, and I mean, it's just out there in the middle of nowhere. So there was nobody who would have heard anything.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
There's not going to be any kind of surveillance, neighbor surveillance or anything unless, you know, I guess you could happen to cross a game camera that somebody might have put up. But those aren't going to be things that anybody's going to be able to see or know about.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
Chris Bragg, he was the lead investigator. And when he arrived, the first thing he noticed was that supposedly the door had been kicked in. But when there's a burglar with somebody kicking in the door, popping it open with a pry bar, it usually busts out the frame around the backside of it. There's some amount of wooden damage to that wood, and that was not the case here.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
He thought that it was maybe made to look like a home invasion that actually wasn't.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
And she had this big elaborate story of how, you know, why didn't they take your phone? Well, they didn't take my phone because I hid it. Oh, how did you hide it? Well, whenever they tied me up and left me alone, I somehow used my mouth to toss it over into this box of junk.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
And then whenever they left, I scooted over to the junk and fished it out with my mouth and flipped it open and pressed the most recent call, which was my mom.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
And in that little room was a TV, which was on, and the five kids asleep on the floor on basically pallets. There was some kind of dumbbell or weights like holding the door closed.
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
She asks him, what is it you're carrying? Is that a Glock? Can I see it? While her kids are somewhat sometimes crying out in this closet right beside them, coughing, do you not, when this has just happened to your children's father, you have a child crying out, don't you go in there and hold it and cradle it and tell it everything's okay?
Anatomy of Murder
Behind the Mask (Ernest Ibarra)
No, she's just sitting there asking to see the officer's gun.