David Cauley
speaker
61 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
David Cauley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He and Jose Ponce both pled guilty to all the charges, and they each received 50-year sentences on each one to run concurrently.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think she told Jonathan Sanford and Octavius Rimes, don't worry about me. I'm an actress. I can convince anybody of anything.
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.
Judge Ralston stacked those sentences so she will have to make parole on the aggravated kidnapping before she ever starts serving the murder sentence.
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.
Showing 41–60 of 61 · page 3 of 4
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