PLEASANTON – Joseph Roberts had publicly called himself a victim of the #MeToo movement, only to later be charged with murdering and dismembering his fiancée.
Now, weeks before he is set to go to trial, prosecutors have detailed more than a dozen potential red flags where police were called to investigate domestic violence or abuse at the home he shared with the woman he allegedly killed in a brutal way.
Each of the “numerous” instances — 17 in all — had the same “fruitless” result, for varying reasons, prosecutors say. Sometimes, police officers would leave after a few knocks at the 4857 Willow Road apartment door. Other times, 27-year-old Rachel “Imani” Buckner would insist she was fine, flatly tell the officers to leave, or blame herself for whatever had taken place.
New court records filed by Alameda County prosecutors now detail the potential missed warning signs in the months before Buckner vanished, before her dismembered torso turn up along an East Bay shoreline. Roberts, her 43-year-old fiancé, has been charged with murder and his trial is set to start in early April.
The new government documents say the following:
Buckner was spotted multiple times with bruises, scarring and burn marks, including at hospitals and her apartment. Neighbors reported hearing a man screaming expletives and a woman’s frantic apologies at all hours of the day. They heard slamming and thuds. The walls would shake.
One woman said she called police to the apartment numerous times. The man who lived above the couple said he and his wife were too frightened to confront his neighbor, but would drop heavy objects on the floor with the hopes that the loud noises would somehow calm things down.
“(The upstairs neighbor) would hear the victim begging, pleading, crying, gasping and telling the defendant to stop,” Deputy District Attorney Colleen Clark wrote. “He would also hear the victim apologizing, trying to get away and saying ‘leave me alone.’ ”
Annie Beles, the lawyer representing Roberts, has filed her own motion saying prosecutors are attempting to exceed the limits of the state’s evidence code in order to beef up an otherwise-flimsy murder case. Of the 17 instances outlined by prosecutors, only two contained actual allegations, and one was an incident where Buckner was ultimately placed in a mental health hold at a hospital, Beles wrote.
“All other factual allegations are speculations and conjecture that domestic violence occurred,” she wrote.
Prosecutors have revealed they intend to bring in a wide range of evidence — a recounting of police calls to the Buckner-Roberts’ home, a cadaver dog handler, an expert on domestic violence and DNA experts expected to testify that Roberts’ biological material was found on the garbage bag containing Buckner’s torso and arms. They’ve said that the evidence of Roberts’ alleged domestic abuse will not prejudice jurors any more than the unavoidable claim that Roberts killed his fiancée, then beheaded her inside their home.
Some of the materials cited by prosecutors are heart-wrenching. They include a journal entry written by Buckner while under psychiatric care in early 2022. Reflecting on her life, she apparently saw two options for herself at the time: In the first scenario, Roberts would show up with her daughter from a previous romance and they’d continue on together.
“Role: Docile, loving, obedient. A broken in pet,” she wrote, according to court records. “I do not take charge. I am his slave.”
The other option, she said, would be to run away to Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, or Senegal and leave her life behind. Once abroad, she’d ask people there for help.
“Let them know I need help and healing and that my confused mind abandoned my child and ruined my life all for trusting the wrong man,” she wrote.
Roberts and Buckner met in 2019, at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, when she was six months pregnant with her daughter.
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.
Roberts moved into Buckner’s San Ramon childhood home, but they eventually got an apartment together in Pleasanton. Soon, family and friends say they stopped hearing from Buckner; when her best friend attempted to show up unannounced, she was rudely rebuffed by Roberts, according to prosecutors.
In February 2022 — a month after Buckner was placed in a mental health hold — Roberts and Buckner allegedly showed up to reclaim Buckner’s daughter from her family’s San Ramon home. In the process, Buckner’s mother and grandmother alleged that Roberts attacked them, laughing as he did so, then called out: “OK, Imani, I’m done.” The pair were later charged with burglary, elder abuse and assault in Contra Costa County and accepted misdemeanor convictions through a plea deal.
In the ensuing months, Buckner allegedly told her public defender on two separate occasions that she had deliberately taken a lethal dose of pills, but police and emergency responders intervened both times. Later, in June 2022, Pleasanton police received a dropped 911 call from the apartment; when officers responded, Roberts told them they couldn’t speak to Buckner because she was showering. When they insisted, she showed up a few seconds later — fully clothed — and told them she was fine, prosecutors said.
On July 24, 2022, officers came to the apartment for a report of a man chasing his girlfriend; Buckner told them that she tripped and fell, hurting her knee. Roberts refused to talk, stating that he distrusted police. Four days after that, Buckner went to the hospital to report being attacked by two masked assailants, but couldn’t explain burn marks and scarring at “different levels of healing” on her body, prosecutors said.
Police found her with burn marks again the next month, after they discovered her hiding in a closet at the home; Roberts had claimed she was gone, prosecutors said. The next event listed by the prosecution came weeks before her death, when a neighbor reported seeing Buckner outside, nude, with scratches all over her legs. Police arrived, said they lost sight of her, and left after no one answered Buckner’s apartment door.
In June 2023, a month before Buckner’s dismembered body was found, she showed up at a hospital again for pain in her arm, hip and head. Medical professionals noted she “adamantly will not discuss events surrounding her injuries,” and that she was “not alone,” court records say.
In fact, prosecutors argue that Roberts had completely isolated Buckner from friends, family members and her aspirations for a career in law — so much so that all fingers pointed to him as her one possible killer.
“The defendant’s isolation of the victim is necessary to show that she had no one to turn to for help and no one else around her who could be responsible for her untimely demise,” prosecutor Clark wrote.
