OAKLAND — A former darling of the #MeToo movement was found guilty Monday of killing his fiancée inside their Pleasanton apartment and dismembering her in a bathroom with power tools.
Joseph Roberts, 43, was silent as the jury’s decision was read in an Oakland courtroom. Jurors found him guilty of second-degree murder in the July 2023 killing of 27-year-old Rachel “Imani” Buckner, a recent law school graduate whose mangled torso was found wrapped in a plastic bag and bound with duct tape on an Alameda shoreline.
In the gallery, Buckner’s relatives sobbed at a verdict that capped a grisly monthlong trial, which included a pained and detailed examination of Buckner’s mutilated corpse.
The jury returned its verdict on its third day of deliberations. Roberts faces 15 years to life in prison when he’s sentenced on June 14.
During the trial, prosecutors painted Roberts as a “master manipulator” who dodged numerous complaints of domestic violence in the year and a half before Buckner’s death, all before taking to Tinder and simply going on with his life after the July 2023 slaying.
It was a portrayal that Roberts’ attorneys derided as a smokescreen for the uncomfortable reality that all of the evidence against him was circumstantial. As a result, his attorneys said, jurors were left with mere “speculation” as to how Buckner died, and whether Roberts actually killed her.
Authorities alleged Roberts killed Buckner on July 14, 2023, in their Pleasanton apartment, which they shared while attending law school together at the Golden Gate University. About a week later, a passerby found Buckner’s mangled torso stuffed inside a black plastic garbage bag that was bound with duct tape near the Bay Farm Island Bridge in Alameda.
While her head, hands and feet were never found, investigators spotted a bone fragment containing Buckner’s DNA in the couple’s bath drain, near large bottles of cleaning chemicals. The body itself contained partial cuts from “false starts” where Roberts’ saw snagged on a bone.
“Look at Imani’s body,” Deputy District Attorney Colleen Clark told jurors during her closing argument. “That is the body of a murder victim. The way he dismembered her, the way he cut her body.”
Clark questioned the decision by Roberts to dispose of carpets in the apartment, particularly after the couple owed $80,000 in back rent and fines, and was on the verge of being evicted. Phone records show Roberts traveled to Alameda near the area where Buckner’s torso was found, Clark said. Later, Roberts used Buckner’s phone to quit her job so that their boss at Jo-Ann Fabrics wouldn’t become alerted to Buckner’s disappearance.
Yet in a painstaking, two-hour-long closing argument last Wednesday, Roberts’ attorney offered a point-by-point rebuttal to the evidence that prosecutors presented to the jury, calling it all “conjecture.” The attorney, Annie Beles, seized on the fact that none of Buckner’s blood was found in the couple’s kitchen, bath, freezer or car, and only a “miniscule” amount was found in the bedroom, Beles said. Roberts’ DNA was also not found on her body, which was not swabbed by investigators, she added.
With no one coming forward to offer eyewitness testimony of who killed Buckner or who disposed of her body, the case amounted to “speculation after speculation after speculation,” Beles said.
“It’s not about what might have happened, and it’s not about what could have happened,” Beles told the jury during closing arguments Wednesday. “It’s about what has to be proven, right?”
The case cast a new light on the Pleasanton Police Department’s handling of domestic violence claims, with Clark deriding the officers there for being “charmed” by a man who was so obviously lying about abusing Buckner. Prior to the trial’s start, prosecutors detailed some 17 reports of loud screams, bangs and thumps at the apartment — all of which led to the same “fruitless” result, prosecutors claimed. That’s because police officers would leave after a few knocks or because Buckner insisted she was fine and told officers to leave.
“The police let him get away with (lying),” Clark said during closing arguments. She focused on one report in particular, where Roberts claimed two cellphones in the apartment were his, moments after saying one belonged to Buckner. “They’re up there chit chatting, laughing, talking to him about golf and allowing him to continue to abuse Imani.”
Buckner and Roberts met while studying law at Golden Gate University. But after falling in love with him, Buckner began cutting off friends and family, at Roberts’ behest, Clark said. By July 14, 2023 — the day prosecutors believe she was killed — there was no one in her life besides Roberts, she said.
During their relationship, Roberts penned an op-ed for USA Today, decrying the #MeToo movement by saying that he’d been falsely accused of sexual assault. Betsy DeVos, the former U.S. Secretary of Education under President Trump, used Roberts as an example as she championed rolling back Obama-era protections for alleged victims of sexual assault on college campuses.
Roberts was elected in 2020 to serve as a delegate in the San Francisco Republican County Central Committee, and openly talked about how sorority members at Savannah State University in Georgia wrongly accused him of sexual harassment.
Staff writer Nate Gartrell contributed to this report.
