Mindless slaying takes father bound by love for his children to the woman who wanted him dead

PITTSBURG – Ambushed in his sleep by a trio of amped up killers running high on meth, Ernest Ibarra never had a chance, said the first to roll over and turn state’s evidence.

“They said he put up a helluva fight, for a while,” said the investigator compiling and comparing transcribed pages of interviews with a ring of suspects spinning accounts passing blame in a circle.

“If his wife had come clean when the first officers arrived, he might still be alive,” said Titus County Sheriff’s office detective Chris Bragg. Beaten, taunted and pistol whipped, by then Ernie Ibarra was being driven through Pittsburg by his kidnappers.

Within an hour he was left half naked and dead in undergrowth bristling with briars where he’d fallen at the edge of a bayou on the southeast edge of Camp County. It was sometime after the 2:08 a.m. February 20, 2015 call to 911. He died with a gunshot in the back of his head.

Because the kidnapping was at Monticello, in Titus County, and the murder in Camp County, the case involved multiple jurisdictions.

Within six hours, two suspects were arrested at Titus County Regional Medical Center, where they’d gone for breakfast with a friend. One guided authorities to the swamp as winter mist began turning to cold rain.

“If it hadn’t come together so fast, we might not have closed the case,” said Titus County Detective Wayne Minor, who photographed the crime scene. “Rain set in the next day and Lake of the Pines came up four feet over the place we’d found him. It was a wet year and the water level didn’t go down for months.”

That was a Saturday. Samantha Wohlford, Mr. Ibarra’s wife, spent most of the day wriggling in an interrogation room where the concocted story of a home invasion was unraveling.

In Camp County’s district court in September, she was the last of four to be convicted of murder.

Four days after the murder, Pittsburg police nabbed the last of perpetrators with a pocket full of meth and cash on the Brookshire’s Grocery parking lot.

Ernie Ibarra was 29.

Born on Christmas day, he weighed 7 pounds, 5 ounces, said his mother, Randa Floyd.

“They brought him to me in a little red stocking,” she said. Watching him grow up, she saw in him both herself and his father.

“He was the best of both of us,” she said. He took pleasure in being useful. “I remember one day when a neighbor was out mowing. It was hot so he went over and asked if he could mow. The way he was, he gave without expectation of return.”

With a wife and a blended family of five children, he worked two jobs to make ends meet, days at a bat manufacturing company and nights slinging pizza with “Mama Sandy’s” crew at Little Caesars.”

“That’s what everybody working here calls me,” said Manager Sandy Contreras, a boss tuned in to the extended family style of employee relationships at the restaurant.

Ernie made time for people when she had none, she said.

“As young as he was, he had maturity had a heart for kids angry at the world,” she said. “When life isn’t fair he’d tell them that was no reason they couldn’t do better.

“One year at Christmas, home life for one of the girls working here fell apart,” Mrs. Contreras said. “She had three daughters.

“One of our guys got a bicycle for the youngest. I got a cell phone for another. Ernie was an artist and he liked the third daughter best because she wanted him to teach her to draw. He spent a hundred bucks buying her a sketch set he probably couldn’t really afford because none of us were going to let them go without Christmas.”

Nights he wasn’t on the schedule, he came by if he happened to be out.

“The night he was killed he showed up just after nine,” Mrs. Contreras said. “I remember the time because he’d called to tell me he was heading to get me a mocha frappe and I told him he’d never make it because Hastings closed at nine. He was grinning ear to ear when he came in with my coffee.”

He was looking for Ms. Wohlford and their children that night. She wasn’t responding to his texts.

Out with friends destined to become killers before daybreak, Wal Mart security footage later showed they’d been shopping, buying home made enchilada makings. She took the children along when they made a run to Franklin County to buy meth.

They’d talked about planting drugs on Mr. Ibarra to get him busted and shipped out, “setting the man up with dope, how we could do that. Bla bla bla,” Johnathan Sanford testified at Ms. Wolford’s kidnapping trial in Titus County. Mr. Sanford made a deal and testified for the prosecution.

He said they’d met on Valentine’s day, five days before the night of the murder. Unemployed, Mr. Sanford testified he’d been out of prison for seven months. He was living between places. He said in the five days he’d known her he’d been to her house a couple of times, that she’d let him use her car, that he’d kept the kids for her.

He said she complained about her husband, “just the normal things. The husband being abusive, anything like that. Normal things most females complain about,” Mr. Sanford testified.

The night Mr. Ibarra brought Mrs. Contreras her frappe, they spoke in passing about his problems with his wife.

“The big thing was the kids,” she said. “They were talking divorce. Nights he was working she was blowing up his phone. You could hear her screaming, threatening him. Once when she was on a rant, he handed me his phone. When I told her to quit calling she accused me of having an affair with him.”

Ms. Wohlford schemed.

“The day after he handed me that call, I got the call from corporate. They came up and questioned us about her allegations about an affair. It was crazy. It was just another lie and my guys got it. They told us if she ever set foot in the store when Ernie was working to call the cops,” Mrs. Contreras said.

The summer before, Ms. Wohlford called authorities, accused Mr. Ibarra of abuse and got a restraining order.

She manipulated.

“Then she called Ernie and asked him to come home,” Mrs. Contreras said. “Then she called deputies. He was in the shower when they arrived to arrest him for violating the restraining order.”

At the Titus County sheriff’s office, the restraining order generated Mr. Ibarra’s first contact with Detective Chris Bragg.

“Other than talking about work and his kids, he had nothing to say,” Detective Bragg remembers. “He didn’t accuse Samantha and at the same time he refused to defend himself.”

He talked more to his boss at the pizza place.

“He wasn’t blind,” Mrs. Contreras said. “He’d been with Samantha long enough to recognize her for what she is. He wanted out and the whole thing came down to his fear of losing his kids.”

Working odd jobs through school, he went to work on the production line at D-Bat in Mt. Pleasant after graduation.

“He could fix computers,” said his mother, Mrs. Floyd. “He worked some for computer repair shops. I remember him telling me about working on computers at the hospital. He was just smart – he could figure things out.”

By the time D-bat sold, he was working in the office. When they dismantled the shop he set up the manufacturing equipment at a new location in Talco and began drawing his pay from the Mine Bat Company.

“That was when they caught onto his art and he began doing their graphics work,” Mrs. Contreras said.

Two of the killers took plea bargains. His mother attended every day of the trials of Ms. Wohlford and Octavious Rhymes.

“I’m so grateful to those juries,” she said. “The winner in the courtroom was David Colley – he did such a wonderful job.

An attorney for the state, Mr. Colley works in the office of District Attorney Chuck Bailey.

“Law enforcement, the Titus and Camp County Sheriff’s Departments, made a thorough investigation and gave me a lot to work with,” Mr. Colley said. “And I took my advice and direction from Mr. Bailey, who had already put the cases together before assigning them to me. It was a group effort.”

Ms. Wolford was a friend of the woman at the hospital who’d checked in for a cesarean. She was also “my girlfriend at the time,” Mr. Sanford testified.

Their second connection was the Pittsburg Elm Street residence of Octavious Rhymes. Mr. Sanford’s brother in law, Jose Ponse, was living in the back yard in a tent with his girlfriend in the days leading up to the murder.

Titus County Sheriff’s department Detective Wayne Minor worked weeks putting together a time line, watching hours of security camera footage from trips to Wal Mart and hospital visits.

“They were all such unremarkable people,” he said. Ms. Wolford was the catalyst fusing them together in “a crazed explosion of violence.”

The first reference to killing Mr. Ibarra came during a smoke break in the hospital parking lot the afternoon before the murder while they were considering a plan to set him up for a drug bust.

“It was kind of thrown out there jokingly that we could kill the guy,” Mr. Sanford said.

That evening, after making the drug buy in Franklin County, murder was an ongoing topic of conversation on the ride back to Pittsburg where Mr. Ponse was making enchiladas in the kitchen of the Rhymes house, where a decision was made while Mr. Sanford talked to Ms. Wohlford.

“I asked her what she thought about it if her husband did die,” he testified. “She asked me if I was serious about it. I said, ‘All you’ve got to do is leave your front door unlocked.”

They drove Ms. Wolford to the home at Monticello around 10 p.m., let her and the children out. Mr. Ibarra had given up his hunt for his wife, come home after delivering a frappe to his boss and gone to sleep. The killers drove back to Pittsburg and took enchiladas to the hospital for Mr. Sanford’s girlfriend.

Once, Mr. Sanford had been at Ms. Wolford’s place when Mr. Ibarra came home from work. He was introduced as the boyfriend of their mutual friend in the hospital.

“I told him I just got out of prison and what not,” Mr. Sanford said. “He said he had to go to another job or something and left.”

After delivering enchiladas, they drove to Monticello about 1 a.m. The door was open.

“If you’d gotten there and the door had been locked, would you have taken that as a ‘no’?” Prosecutor David Colley asked.

“Probably not,” Mr. Sanford said. “I was already there and high.” On the way to Monticello, Mr. Sanford, Mr. Rhymes and Mr. Ponse smoked the meth they’d originally planned to plant on Mr. Ibarra.

What plan there was involved staging the scene to make it look like a break in and kidnapping. Ms. Wohlford was left tied to a chair. Following an hour of savagery, Mr. Ibarra was loaded semi conscious into the car. Mr. Sanford went back in for cigarettes and discovered the first frayed edges of their threadbare plans.

Ms. Wohlford had called for help from relatives two counties away to give her accomplices time to escape. Instead, that call triggered a call to an aunt who’d called to say she was minutes away. The aunt made the call to the sheriff’s office.

On his way out, Mr. Sanford thought to kick in the door that had been left open for them to lend credibility to the story of a forced entry.

Hearing that account when deputies called him to the scene, Detective Bragg made note that the lock hadn’t been broken when the door was smashed. He said Ms. Wohlford had once had bit parts in a pair of low budget zombie movies, that her claim to fame was being an actress, that she’d convinced the killers she could spin a convincing account for the cops.

“Her story was falling apart while she was still telling it,” he said.

Shortly after 7 a.m., she twisted her tale into new light, saying she might have known the identity of the intruders, that she might have met them at the hospital.

By then, Mr. Rhymes was driving a relative to an out of town doctor’s appointment.

Mr. Sanford and Mr. Ponse had gone out for breakfast and a visit to the hospital where they were met by Titus County Sheriff Tim Ingram and two deputies.

“They were coming out as we were going in,” said the Sheriff. “We split them up the minute we arrested them. The minute I had him alone, I told Mr. Sanford Samantha had given him up. Before I could get out of the parking lot with him, he was talking.”

Shortly, he was leading them to Sand Crossing, a lonely road wending into the bayous of Cypress River bottom on the upper end of Lake of the Pines where they found Mr. Ibarra, a location drawing in Camp County authorities.

Deputies found Ms. Wohlford’s text and call records had been suspiciously erased when they asked to check her phone.

Released after fingering her accomplices on Saturday, on the strength of cell phone texts supplied by her cell phone carrier and connecting her to the three men she’d implicated, Ms. Wohlford was arrested the following Monday.

Mr. Rhymes was on the run for one more day, before Pittsburg Police Lieutenant spotted him at Brookshires.

All have been convicted of kidnapping in Titus County and murder in Camp.

Sanford and Ponse took deals for 50 years.

Mr. Rhymes and Ms. Wohlford went to trial. He drew just short of a hundred years in prison. She got more.

“The theory is, when you take off your uniform at the end of your shift, you leave your work with it,” Detective Minor said. “This one – I think we all wore it home. It was so tragic, so mindless.”