Left: Joseph C. Roberts (Alameda County); Right: Rachel Elizabeth Imani Buckner (GoFundMe). Inset: Roberts in 2018 (via ABC News/Nightline).
Shocking new details have emerged in a gruesome murder case out the San Francisco suburbs where a man allegedly killed his longtime girlfriend – and onetime fiancée – before dismembering her body.
Joseph C. Roberts, 42, stands accused of murdering Rachel Elizabeth Imani Buckner, 27, whose bagged remains washed up alongside the shoreline of Bay Farm Island Bridge in Alameda in late July.
The Alameda Police Department arrested and charged Roberts in early September after identifying the scant human remains discovered in plastic bags sealed with duct tape. A three-day preliminary hearing recently revealed evidence that led the judge overseeing the case to set the matter for trial.
The hearing began last week.
On Monday, APD officer Michael Tangataevaha testified 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.
On Tuesday, 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.
Buckner’s body was found, but her head, hands and feet were missing. The defendant was arrested, police claim, after DNA revealed the woman’s identity and linked him to the disposal of her remains.
“Joseph’s DNA was on the tape that wrapped her body, which meant he was aware she was dead, he was aware she was dismembered, and he took an active role in wrapping her body, concealing it in plastic garbage bags,” the affidavit of probable cause reads.
During the hearing, Roberts’ attorney Anne Beles said there was no evidence of a homicide.
“Nothing was shown to the court that this person died by foul play, as macabre as it may be,” the defense attorney reportedly said. “The court has no evidence that this person died as a crime. Every day this woman’s killer is out there.”
Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Teresa C. Ortega disputed that characterization.
“A black bag was wrapped around the body that clearly had the defendant’s DNA,” the prosecutor said. “It’s clear it wasn’t a suicide.”
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Beles also argued that APD Detective Robert Hansen was biased against her client and quickly suspected him of Buckner’s murder to the exclusion of other suspects due to his gender.
“Would a woman be charged?” she asked rhetorically before answering her own question in front of the judge. “Not a chance.”
Buckner, a young mother and spoken word poet, met Roberts at San Francisco’s Golden Gate University School of Law. The law school classmates eventually struck up a tumultuous romance. In 2022, Buckner and Roberts allegedly broke into a residence owned by the woman’s family and assaulted her relatives.
“To anyone that got to know and be around Imani, she was a beautiful and radiant light,” her mother wrote in a GoFundMe dedicated to preserving her legacy. “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 Jackson, 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 Jackson 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.
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