TRUE CRIME EXCLUSIVE PART 2: Diving into the Samantha Wohlford murder case with 'Influencers Who Kill' author Madison Salters

**Lauren Barry** (0:02)
This is a True Crime Exclusive Interview from The On Deadline Podcast. We're talking to author and journalist Madison Salters, author of Influencers Who Kill, a true crime collection, real stories of online fame and fatal consequences.
I'm your host, Lauren Barry.
Have you ever been scrolling on TikTok or Instagram and found yourself fascinated by an influencer? Maybe their life seems absurd or chaotic, or maybe it seems too perfect to be true. Well, it just might be. In her book, Salters details nine horrifying true crime cases linked to the flashy and sometimes captivating world of influencers over the past two decades.
These cases include Yuka Takaoka, a Japanese bar hostess who went to prison for a non-fatal stabbing. Naseem Agdam, the YouTube headquarters shooter. Snow the Salt Queen, a cosplay shooter who maintains their innocence. David Katz, a shooter who targeted a sports video game tournament. Samantha Wohlford, a mommy vlogger who was convicted of kidnapping and murder. Randy Stair, also known on YouTube as Andrew Blaze, who shot and killed his supermarket coworkers. Trey Sessler, known on YouTube as MrAnime, who pled guilty to murdering his family members. Pika Erik-Ovinen, a YouTuber from the early aughts and perpetrator of one of Finland's few school shootings. And Abigail White, an OnlyFans model who was sentenced to life in prison for stabbing the father of her children to death. In this episode, we'll have a special focus on the Samantha Wohlford case. We also discussed the growing impact of social media on all of our lives. Here's my talk with Madison Salters, author of Influencers Who Kill.
Among the cases that Salters covers in her book is the Samantha Wohlford case. Wohlford was a mommy vlogger who was sentenced to 99 years in prison in 2017 for the killing of her husband, Ernest Lee Ibarra.

**Lauren Barry** (2:42)
One that I was interested in a little bit from the list was the Samantha Wohlford case, because I think it touches on a lot of interesting stuff. Of course, she's the influencer. Her husband was a gamer, which is also kind of, you know, adjacent to the influencer lifestyle.
What do you think that case kind of reveals about these themes that we've been talking about, the intersection between attention and violence?

**Madison Salters** (3:15)
That case was by far the hardest for me to write personally, because while she did hire three men to kill her husband, essentially, it was very clear that this person, to some degree or another, was abusive towards her five children as well, which was tough because her whole thing was being a mommy blogger. What this really revealed to me was the toxicity of trying to have a persona that doesn't necessarily fit who you are. One of the things I always say, having a background in investigative journalism, and especially when you're intaking stories from multiple different angles, you're going to find that the facts, quote unquote, don't match up. People will swear they remember something one way and the facts won't match. So I always say, believe what you see, not what you hear, and Samantha was really devastating. Her entire influential spear was about how much she loved her children, and yet she was smoking during her pregnancies. There were snippets of her saying, you think that my children's birth would be the happiest time in my life, but no, it was kind of a bummer. It was kind of a letdown. The happiest moment of my life was when I cheated on their father with this guy. I invited to sleep in my house with my children before even knowing who he was. He was a hitchhiker. She was endangering her children. She was doing mommy blogs where in the middle of it, she would have her children go away even though they were throwing up or using a plugged-in device that they shouldn't have been using, just really horrific stuff. And she was also interested in true crime, but particularly what she was interested in was violence against children. She did a lot of segments on the horrors of violence against children, but then really harped on what had happened to those kids and was clearly reading up on this sort of stuff in a way that maybe wasn't healthy. She didn't like that her husband was a gamer. She was, in my opinion, a narcissist who had a very bad problem with pathological lying.
She said she entered the Maxim Gamer Competition, but then was calling women who did gaming all sorts of horrible names. She said she only entered because her brother was dying. Her brother seems to be just fine from everything I found. Her husband had an online romance between his character and another character. They got married, and she was so mad about it that that's why he married her in real life was to stop that, that jealousy. But ultimately, this idea that she had to be a mommy bogger became her sort of reason for existing. But this is somebody who's so unqualified to be a mommy bogger. She was not even qualified to be a mother in some respect. She has a video on the Wayback Machine, which I had to use quite a bit, where literally she was smoking and saying she had no vices while being pregnant and saying her doctor had told her that cutting back to only like one or two a day was so noble of her.