Left: Joseph C. Roberts (Alameda County). Right: Rachel Elizabeth Imani Buckner (GoFundMe).
The California man convicted of murdering his girlfriend and chopping up her body before dumping the remains in the San Francisco Bay will spend the next 15 years to life in prison.
A jury in May found 43-year-old Joseph Roberts guilty of second-degree murder in the death of Rachel Elizabeth “Imani” Buckner, 27. Alameda County Superior Court Judge Scott Patton issued the sentence on Tuesday.
According to prosecutors, a passerby called police on July 20, 2023, after finding a suspicious black garbage bag along the shoreline near the Bay Farm Island Bridge. Alameda police officers found a dismembered body inside. Because the victim’s head, feet and hands were missing from the body, it took cops until Aug. 30 to confirm Buckner’s identity through DNA testing.
Investigators found Roberts’ DNA on the duct tape used to wrap the garbage bag that had Buckner’s body inside, prosecutors said.
Roberts and Buckner met at Golden Gate University Law School in 2019 and lived together in an apartment in Pleasanton. Prosecutors say Pleasanton police officers responded to their apartment multiple times for welfare checks and domestic violence calls. Roberts never reported his girlfriend missing despite the fact they lived together. Cops arrested Roberts in September.
Second-degree murder was the “maximum charge” he could have faced because prosecutors could not prove that the murder was premeditated, they said in an email to Law&Crime. Patton explained to the packed courtroom during the sentencing hearing that the case was complicated when the medical examiner determined the manner of death as homicide but could not pin down a cause, the Pleasanton Weekly reported. Still the facts of the murder were brutal, he said.
“Mr. Roberts, in my decades working in the criminal justice system I have seen a lot of heinous crime and also a lot of tragedy,” Patton reportedly said. “Imani’s killing is a heartbreaking tragedy … your crime is one of the most heinous crimes I have ever seen.”
Several of Buckner’s family members made victim impact statements.
“He tore my first born child away from me first by turning her against me and making her believe that she was not loved, that I didn’t care about her, that I could not be trusted, that I was the enemy,” S. Jamila Buckner, Rachel Buckner’s mother, said, according to the outlet.
Authorities arrested Buckner and Roberts in 2022 for allegedly breaking into the home of Bucker’s mother and assaulting her family. At the time, Roberts allegedly called Buckner his fiancee.
Her mother said she could feel her daughter’s pain.
“When he beat, tortured, murdered and dismembered my daughter, I felt like my insides were ripped out of my very soul,” S. Jamila Buckner reportedly said.
As Law&Crime previously reported, Alameda police officer Michael Tangataevaha testified at an evidentiary hearing last year that a search of the couple’s apartment immediately following the defendant’s arrest revealed that the carpets had all been removed from the unit in the recent past, according to a courtroom report by the San Francisco Chronicle. Only the carpet padding remained, the officer said.
Another investigator testified about the immediate search of the apartment after Roberts was arrested, the paper reports. Annie, a dog trained to smell blood, decaying tissue, and bones first ran to a mop in the kitchen and alerted, her handler testified. After that, Annie ran down the hallway and stopped and lay down at the foot of the couple’s bed. Then, Annie went into the bathroom and alerted her handler to something near the bathtub. Investigators then found what they termed possible blood marks on the bathroom door and ceiling. Annie also, however, stuck her head in the washing machine but did not alert, her handler testified.
A search warrant for Roberts’ phone records showed his phone called connected with Buckner’s phone on July 13, about a week before the passerby found the body, officers said. Roberts had Buckner’s phone and used it long after she died, officials said. He also allegedly had her car. Officers noted that Roberts communicated with at least three other women since then.
Buckner’s mother started a GoFundMe to raise money for funeral expenses.
“To anyone that got to know and be around Imani, she was a beautiful and radiant light,” her mother wrote. “She had an infectious spirit that you could not help but smile when around and gravitate towards. A graduate of Howard University for her undergraduate studies and a recent graduate from Golden Gate University with her Juris Doctorate, Imani was an accomplished woman on her way to being an exceptional professional. She was at the beginning of her life and her journey and had so much more life to live.”
In law school, Roberts made a name for himself — nationally — as a cause célèbre for the administration of former President Donald Trump in its efforts to cast the #MeToo movement as a witch hunt targeting innocent men.
In 2018, around the time Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh‘s nomination was temporarily sidelined by Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of attempted rape, media outlets like ABC News profiled Roberts, who served in the U.S. Navy, as a man falsely accused of sexual harassment.
“Rather than investigate, the school suspended me — no questions asked — the very day the first accusation was made,” Roberts wrote in an op-ed published by USA Today. “It was just weeks before what would have been my graduation.”
Then-Department of Education secretary Betsy DeVos held Roberts up as a model case for why she rescinded Title IX protections for alleged victims of sexual misconduct.
“This young man was suspended via a campus-wide email which declared him a ‘threat to the campus community,’” DeVos told a crowd at George Mason University in September 2017. “When he tried to learn the reason for his suspension, he was barred from campus. … This young man was denied due process. Despondent and without options or hope, after five years of sobriety, he relapsed and attempted to take his own life.”
Roberts’ GOP-aligned star rose so high that he was elected to serve on the San Francisco Republican Party County Central Committee. One of the defendant’s top priorities, he said in a candidate questionnaire in March 2020, was to “support the local police department.”
“I am a law and order candidate,” Roberts wrote.
Alberto Luperon and Colin Kalmbacher contributed to this report
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