Samantha Wohlford plotted the murder of husband Ernest Ibarra with 3 other men: The Body and the Blogger on ID

One night in February 2015, three men, Johnathan Sanford, Antonio Ponse, and Octavious Rhymes, went to the home of married couple Ernest Ibarra and Samantha Wohlford in Mount Pleasant, Texas. They had one objective in mind; to murder Ernest.

They dragged a sleeping Ernest out of his bed and started beating and pistol-whipping him. They allegedly tied up his wife, Samantha. The three men then abducted Ernest leaving his wife behind.

Titus County deputies responded to the 911 call and immediately started a search for Ibarra with minimal information; they had no descriptions of the attackers and didn’t know the vehicle they were driving. They began questioning the alleged victim, Samantha.

Police very quickly started to notice holes in Wohlford’s tearful description of the three masked intruders. After only a few hours, police ascertained that she actually knew the three men and that they were even driving her car, a Chevy Equinox. It turned out that Samantha had all the information the police needed to help locate Ernest; she had just been withholding it.

By that stage, it was already too late; Ernest Ibarra was already dead. The three men had taken him to a remote woodland and executed him.

Acting on information from Samantha, police were able to arrest Sanford and Ponse the next morning. On gathering more evidence, investigators decided they had enough to charge Samatha Wohlford with aggravated kidnapping and murder due to her role in planning her husband’s death. Sometime later, Rhymes was also arrested under the same charges.

Sanford and Ponse pleaded guilty to the crime, and each received 50-year sentences. Rhymes was handed 23 years for the kidnapping and a further 75 years for the murder. Meanwhile, Samantha Wohlford sentenced to 50 years for the kidnapping and 99 years for the murder.

See the details of the case on The Body And The Blogger at 10/9c on Investigation Discovery.