By Scott Harvey, Associated Press
Rains County – Four friends have been sent to prison for the bloody ambush of a Texas family in a massacre plotted by a lovesick 16-year-old girl.
Charlie James Wilkinson and Charles Allen Waid were sentenced in Emory Tuesday to life in prison without parole for the March 2008 killings of Penny Caffey and her two sons in their rural East Texas home.
Authorities say Caffey's teenage daughter, Erin, and the 20-year-old Wilkinson spent weeks planning to kill the girl's family because they were forbidden to date.
The parents were shot while they slept, and the house was torched. Only Caffey's father survived, crawling out of his burning home after being shot five times.
Erin Caffey and 19-year-old Bobbi Johnson, who also pleaded guilty, have also received lengthy prison sentences. Caffey, under a plea agreement reached Friday, received two life sentences and an additional 25 years in prison for her role in the crime. Co-defendant Bobbi Gale Johnson, named in the affidavit as an accomplice who did not use a weapon, was sentenced to 40 years in prison.