OAKLAND — A jury will soon decide the fate of a Pleasanton man accused of murdering his fiancée inside their apartment, dismembering her with power tools and dumping her body before simply continuing on with his life.
Joseph Roberts, 43, was once a darling of those who oppose the #MeToo movement after he penned an op-ed about being falsely accused of sexual assault. Today, he’s on trial for allegedly murdering 27-year-old Rachel “Imani” Buckner, whose mangled torso was found along the Alameda shoreline last July.
“Look at Imani’s body,” Deputy District Attorney Colleen Clark told jurors during her closing argument Monday. “That is the body of a murder victim. The way he dismembered her, the way he cut her body.”
Clark’s lengthy argument painted a picture of an abusive relationship with escalating violence that ended with a homicide she admits she can’t fully describe.
Buckner’s head has never been found and her torso provided forensic examiners with no insight into exactly how she died, though her death was ruled a homicide. That fact has been seized on by Roberts’ lawyers, who argue that without a specific cause of death there can be no conviction for second-degree murder.
“What was proven to you? Nothing,” said one of Roberts’ attorneys, Annie Beles. Looking square at the jury, she added: “You don’t know — you don’t know — how this woman died. And if you don’t know that she was killed, and that she was killed by Joseph Roberts, you must acquit Mr. Roberts of this crime.”
Clark saved some of her harshest words for the Pleasanton Police Department, who were called to the home numerous times by neighbors, reporting loud screams, bangs, thumps and other obvious signs of domestic violence. The officers who responded regularly failed to act, letting Roberts get away with obvious lies, and allowed themselves to be “charmed” by a “master manipulator,” Clark said.
“The police let him get away with (lying),” Clark said, referring to a time 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.”
On another occasion, Roberts claimed Buckner was showering when the police arrived, and the officers told them they would leave if she appeared and told them everything was OK. Roberts closed the door, and a fully clothed and dry Buckner came out roughly 30 seconds later, then told officers in a subdued manner that she was all right. The officers left, having effectively instructed Roberts “how to get away with further abuse to Imani,” Clark said.
The pathway to a murder verdict, according to Clark, requires delving into the grotesque evidence that Roberts dismembered her body in their Pleasanton apartment and dumped her torso in Alameda. A bone fragment containing Buckner’s DNA was found in their bath drain, near large bottles of cleaning chemicals and the body itself contained partial cuts from “false starts” where Roberts’ saw snagged on a bone, Clark said.
The prosecutor also questioned why Roberts would strip and dispose of carpets in the apartment, noting 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. But when he did so, he used a particular word, “assignment,” which Buckner had never used to describe her job before, but Roberts had, Clark said.
“The defendant’s phone often betrayed him and helped solidify his guilt in this case,” she said.
Yet Roberts’ attorneys warned jurors Wednesday morning against accepting all those details about the Pleasanton Police Department as a mere smokescreen for the lack of evidence on exactly who killed Buckner.
“We are not on TV, this is not sensationalism. This is about what facts have to be proven to you,” Beles said. “This is a wholesale attempt to create a motive, to create a narrative that is salacious and sensational.”
Over nearly two hours on Wednesday morning, Beles meticulously sought to poke holes in nearly every morsel of evidence in the case, calling it all “speculation and conjecture.”
None of Buckner’s blood was found in the kitchen, bath, freezer or car, and only a “miniscule” was found in the bedroom, Beles said. Roberts’ DNA also was not found on her body, which was not swabbed by investigators, she added.
The area where her body was discovered was busy with passerby — raising questions about how someone could dump a body there. In fact, Beles emphasized, all of the evidence was circumstantial, as no one came forward with eyewitness testimony of him killing Buckner or disposing of her body.
“It’s all speculation after speculation after speculation,” said Beles, before imploring the jury to remember that “it’s not about what might have happened, and it’s not about what could have happened. It’s about what has to be proven, right?”
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.
Jurors began deliberations Wednesday afternoon and are expected to continue Thursday morning.
