Rachel Buffett was in the California Superior Court building when the Grand Jury convened to indict Dan. Although she was prepared to testify, senior deputy district attorney Matt Murphy decided not to have her address the Grand Jurors. “Now, Rachel Buffett is on my witness list,” he told them. “I don’t think at this point, I am going to call her, after all. I think that she may…” He carefully adjusted his words. “Well, depending on how things go, she is here now, but we will see how that goes. She may need an attorney.”
Like Steve Herr, Murphy, as well as the detectives who’d been covering the case, suspected that there was much that Rachel didn’t want to reveal. And that meant that the former Disneyland princess was in a good deal of trouble herself.
On November 20, 2012, Rachel received a phone call from police, asking if she could meet with them to sign some papers. She arranged a rendezvous at a shopping center. But the moment that she arrived, she was placed under arrest.
Rachel had been “within the focus of this on-going investigation for the past two years, and has been previously … interviewed by detectives,” Lt. Paul Dondero of the Costa Mesa police investigations bureau explained in a statement. “Detectives compared information obtained in those interviews with information gleaned from interviews of other witnesses, as well as additional aspects of the investigation, and determined there was probable cause to arrest Rachel Buffett.”
Allegedly, she cried and asked about the statute of limitations. She was apparently told that there was no statute of limitations for murder.
Bail was set at one hundred thousand dollars.
“I sat in jail for six days, through Thanksgiving weekend, before anybody could get ahold of the district attorney’s office and find out exactly what I was being charged with,” she complained on the Dr. Phil show. “I ended up being in there three weeks. I was charged with three felony counts of accessory to murder.”
For Steve Herr, the case finally appeared to be moving forward. Not only was Dan in custody, but now his fiancée was, as well. On December 13—seven months after Dan’s indictment—some of the same players returned to the Superior Court building for a pretrial hearing to consider whether the pretty twenty-five-year-old actress manufactured a number of tales to help Dan—in the words of the district attorney’s office—“avoid and escape from arrest, trial, conviction and punishment for the felony.”
Once again, lead detective Jose Morales outlined the circumstances of the double homicide: the discovery of Juri’s body in Sam’s apartment, Steve’s 911 call, and Dan’s confession at the Costa Mesa Police Department.
But rather than simply rehashing what had been discussed at Dan’s indictment, law enforcement hoped to convince Judge Kazuharu Makino that Rachel was entangled in the plot.
Morales explained that, on May 27, 2010, Dan told detectives that he’d murdered Sam the previous Friday: “He … had lured him over to the theater base so he could help him move some furniture, some, I believe it was theater props. He shot him twice in the head and took his belongings, his wallet, his identification, his bank card, and drove, took his car and drove out to the city of Long Beach, where he picked up Wesley.
“He instructed Wesley to remove money from the ATM using the bank card.… He returned to his apartment and later, sometime in the evening, he went to the show with Rachel.”
The investigator was referring to Dan and Rachel performing in a production of Nine hours after Sam was killed. Following the show, Morales said, the couple went home. It was in the apartment they shared, detectives testifed, that Dan used Sam’s cell phone to send the texts that led to Juri Kibuishi’s death.
“He pretended to be Sam … texting Julie, asking her to come over,” Morales said. “He didn’t really go into big detail about, you know, each text message that was sent.”
Satisfied that the detective had appropriately explained the system that Dan used to ambush Juri, Murphy asked Morales to set the scene inside the apartment. “[Dan] said … that he was using Sam’s cellular phone to text Julie,” the detective replied. “Rachel was on the couch with him, trying to fall asleep.”
Did that mean that Rachel knew what Dan was trying to do?
She told detectives that she was oblivious to his lethal designs. After she and Dan returned from the play, Morales said, Rachel asserted that “they popped in a movie”—Men in Black—and an episode of Family Guy, to be precise, “and went to bed, and didn’t give any details about what they did.” Reportedly, Rachel also went on Facebook around this time, responding to a message Juri had sent earlier. Rachel also scanned ads for topless dancer jobs, hoping a stripping gig would bring in funds that the couple hadn’t been able to earn through any other means.
But investigators claimed that, in one of their interviews, Rachel said she never realized that she and Dan were in financial trouble. The excuse seemed laughable when police learned that the couple had already been evicted from another apartment and were about to be ejected from the Camden Martinique complex.
According to detectives, on the night that Juri was killed Rachel “could not remember whether she used a computer or anything else,” Morales stated.
“Did she ever say that after they got back, Mr. Wozniak left the apartment for a period of time?” Murphy asked.
“No. She didn’t tell us that.”
“Okay. And again, just so the court is clear—in Mr. Wozniak’s confession, they got back from the show and he had been using this cell phone to lure Miss Kibiushi to the apartment, right?”
“Correct.”
“And then, he left and went and committed the murder of her. Is that right?”
“Correct.”
“And then, returned to the apartment?”
“Yes.”
But, according to Rachel, she could not recall her fiancé departing or coming back to the bedroom after Juri had been killed, stripped, and sullied with an obscene message. Rachel would tell the Daily Pilot, an Orange County newspaper, that, by the time Dan committed the crime, she’d fallen asleep.
“I told … [detectives] I can’t really remember” what occurred that night, Rachel would say in a TV interview. “I usually go to bed pretty quickly after coming home, maybe pop in a movie. I was speaking [in general terms], trying to tell them what happened because I didn’t remember at first.”
Law enforcement was less than persuaded. “She told us a story we know not to be true,” Det. Sgt. Ed Everett told the Daily Pilot. Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas suspected that Rachel was trying not only to absolve herself from any wrongdoing but protect her fiancé as well. “In particular, that … statement is meant to give Dan an alibi,” Rackauckas said. “They would be in bed at the time of the second murder.”
Rachel would deny doing anything to excuse Dan’s actions.
The first time that she heard anything about a murder, she maintained, was at the end of the cast party after the Saturday night performance of Nine at the Hunger Artists Theatre. That’s when she said that both she and Dan were contacted by their neighbor Dave Barnhart, who’d run into Steve Herr in Sam’s apartment and discovered that a homicide had occurred. According to Morales, Rachel claimed to have been told that “something was happening … [Dave] wouldn’t relay what was happening, but … their presence was needed back at” the Camden Martinique Apartments.
Yet the couple’s friend Chris Williams—who’d tell police that he saw a man he believed to be Sam leaving for the Liberty Theater with Dan—claimed that Rachel seemed unusually emotional twenty-four hours earlier, following the Friday night performance. After spending part of the afternoon with the couple, Chris decided to see their show that evening. “He thought that Dan had done a great job and texted him” about his exceptional acting, Morales testified. When Chris watched Rachel onstage, though, “he didn’t think that she was going to get through the show,” Morales said, “because she had been crying throughout the whole show or at least during her crying scenes. She had been crying after the show.
“They got together before Dan and Rachel left [the theater].… Chris had talked to them about their performance, and Rachel had stated that the tears were real tears. And … it wasn’t because of the show. It was because of everything that had gone on during the day.”
While Rachel didn’t elaborate, law enforcement believed that this statement suggested that she was already aware of Sam’s murder. “It indicates she knows something,” prosecutor Matt Murphy would later theorize before adding sardonically, “It could be because she’s marrying [Dan]. Who knows?”
Another actress in Nine, Cynthia Lee, contributed to the suspicions about Rachel’s behavior. “She said that on Friday … she saw Miss Buffett,” Morales said, “that she appeared to be sad and distant, and that she was sitting on a trunk adjacent to the stage area. Mr. Wozniak approached her and he tried to kiss her, and she turned away from him. [Cynthia] … thought that it was odd because … they were always together and he would always kiss her before a play … to wish her well, but on that evening, she turned him away.
“… During the play, there was a scene where Miss Buffett was supposed to be upset. But normally, throughout all the plays preceding this evening, she had never cried before. But on that particular night, Miss Buffett was crying during one of the scenes. And after … the scene was over, she continued to cry and was trying to compose herself.”
Even for an actress who took her roles seriously, the behavior seemed intense. Cynthia told detectives that Rachel was “a wreck” the entire night.
The next evening—after Juri had also been lured to her death—Rachel arrived at the theater characteristically late, at 7:15 p.m. In the dressing room, Cynthia and Rachel sat across from each other, separated by a small partition. “Miss Lee said they were so close that she could reach over and touch her if she wanted to,” Morales said. “And she could see Miss Buffett sitting down.… She was putting on makeup, and she continued to be kind of sad.”
Because of her mood the night before, Cynthia was worried that something was truly wrong and asked how the pretty blond actress was feeling.
According to Morales’ report, Rachel responded, “My friend is missing. I think she’s missing. I think she’s dead. I think my friend did it.”
To stress that Rachel indeed understood exactly what Dan had perpetrated, Murphy asked the investigator when Juri’s body was discovered.
“Miss Kibuishi was discovered on Saturday night around midnight,” Morales replied.
“Okay. So midnight after seven fifteen? Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. And was there some big search going on? Was there flyers being posted, anything like that, regarding missing persons, that you’re aware of?”
“No.”
In other words, if the recollections of Chris Williams and Cynthia Lee were accurate, Rachel knew about the crimes before she said that she did. This alleged elasticity with the truth led some of her detractors to believe that Rachel was not just an accessory to the crime but a co-conspirator. A few wondered if she’d been in the apartment when Juri was killed.
If anyone in the district attorney’s office subscribed to this concept, it was not the version of events that the prosecution presented in the courtroom. Rather than depicting Rachel as a direct participant in the bloodshed, they portrayed her as an accomplice who undercut the investigation by providing data that were deliberately untruthful.
In the eyes of investigators, that was damning enough.
Rachel, Morales said, maintained that between ninety minutes and two hours after Dan left the apartment with Sam he came home. “She said … he had money with him,” Morales said, “that he was still acting very weird. It looked to her like he was going to have a heart attack. They … went to the pool, tried to relax, but then, he said he had to go to his parents’ house.
“His explanation was he had to go talk to his parents, or try to reconnect with his family.… Then, he said something like, well, he needs to go to his parents’ house to get some childhood memories. At which point, he took off.”
More than a half hour passed, Rachel told Morales, before Dan called again and reported that his parents weren’t home and he was unable to enter the house. “He had left the keys behind in the apartment. So he came back. When he came back, that’s when he picked her up and went to the show.”
This was a contradiction of Chris Williams’ account of lounging in the apartment with Rachel until Dan returned from his journey with Sam and repaid a loan. In fact, the four hundred dollars that Dan paid Chris was likely the first withdrawal made from Sam’s account after his murder.
“Does Miss Buffett mention anything to you about Chris Williams being in the apartment?” Murphy asked the detective.
“No, she does not.”
“… Does she say anything to detectives—you or anybody else—about him paying Chris Williams back at the apartment?”
“No, she didn’t.”
When Dan told detectives about his whereabouts that day, he initially described Sam stopping at the apartment before the two left to run some errands. Dan claimed that they’d been accompanied by one of Sam’s friends—a person Dan characterized to his friend Jake Swett as a nameless male in a black baseball cap. After Dan’s arrest, however, Morales said that Dan “told detectives that he wanted to be honest, and there wasn’t a third person.… He wanted us to know that he had lied about this third person.”
This reinforced Chris Williams’ statement about Dan and Sam leaving the apartment complex alone. Why, then, did Rachel tell Det. Sgt. Ed Everett that she’d seen the stranger in the baseball cap?
She also informed investigators that she had another piece of information that might be helpful to the case. According to Morales, this occurred after her first interview, at approximately 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., on May 27.
“You finish your interview with her in the early-morning hours,” Murphy asked the detective, “and you, did you drive her back to her apartment?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Okay. And when you drove her back to the apartment, did she say anything to you at that time, as you were walking through the parking lot?”
“Yes, she did.”
“What did she say?”
“We were just having a conversation about her going back to see her parents and whatnot, where she was going to go after the interview, and she said something. She [asked] … whether or not we had looked into Sam’s background because he had been involved in something like this before.”
She was talking about the fatal beating of Byron Benito by a large mob—a crime for which Sam had been arrested and later acquitted.
“I asked her how she had come across the information,” Morales said. “And she said that Sam had been talking about it in the Jacuzzi.”
With Sam missing—after Juri was found dead in his apartment—it seemed that Rachel was implying that her neighbor might have a propensity for murder.
In a later interview, she’d also contend that Sam had an uneasy relationship with his family—a detail that both police and prosecutors noticed. On June 9, 2010, four days after searchers finally discovered Sam’s head, Rachel told Morales about an exchange she’d had with Sam on the balcony just outside her apartment. “She told us that during that conversation that she was aware that Sam had lent Dan one hundred dollars and that if Dan couldn’t pay it, [the] one hundred dollars would be considered a wedding gift,” Morales said. According to Rachel, “during the time that they were on the patio, he continued and said that he was having family problems. He wouldn’t go into what these problems were. She noticed that … he looked like he was down, and said that he was going to see his folks for the weekend.”
Apparently, Rachel wasn’t aware that Sam regularly met his father to work out, eat dinner, and socialize with friends. Nor could she have realized that the allegation about family problems would be broached during Dan’s Grand Jury hearing.
“During the course of your investigation,” Matt Murphy asked at the time, “did you learn any information that Mr. Herr was having any sort of family problems?”
“Yes, we did,” Morales answered.
“Okay. What information did you receive?”
“That he was not having family problems.”
Now, Murphy and Morales were together at another proceeding, arguing that Sam’s supposed issues with his parents were invented, first, to guide Juri to her death and, then, to mislead investigators. And, the way law enforcement saw it, Rachel was just as guilty of deception as the man she’d intended to marry.
“When she tells police that she had a conversation with Sam Herr on the balcony, and he said that he was having problems with his family, that echoes the exact ruse that Wozniak was using to lure Kibuishi over there that night,” Murphy insisted in front of Judge Makino. “There’s no confusion about it.… The court has evidence, heard evidence, that’s absolutely not true. That’s part of the ruse.”
Still, Rachel would continue to assert that her greatest transgression was picking the wrong guy.