If Rachel was convicted on all three charges of accessory after the fact, she would have to defer her acting aspirations for as much as three years and eight months. That was the maximum sentence that she could receive in the event that she was found guilty on every count.
Shortly after her arrest, she’d vigorously pleaded not guilty. She told the Daily Pilot that she was perplexed about why she’d been charged with anything at all.
“You go over it in your mind. ‘How could I possibly give someone wrong information?’” she said. “I was trying to be helpful and give them every conception in my mind.”
Although they were trying to be circumspect in what they disclosed to the media about the case, members of law enforcement found it difficult to mask their contempt for Rachel’s excuse. Like Steve Herr, a number of investigators suspected that she might have been guilty of more than what the charges indicated. Despite their efforts to prove this, though, they were unable to support the theory.
“By the time we finally got to the point where it seems it’s going to be pretty clear additional evidence isn’t going to come out,” Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said, “it was decided Rachel could only be charged with accessory after the fact.”
Behind bars, Rachel struggled. “It’s hard to eat when your stomach is in knots,” she told ABC News.
Despite the accusations, she maintained that she blamed her circumstances completely on Dan Wozniak: “I’m innocent. It was like the person I loved never really existed.”
Indeed, she was so appalled by the nature of the crimes that she appeared to share Steve’s view of how Dan should be punished. “I think they are very justified in going for the death penalty,” she said of prosecutors. “You can’t believe anything a sociopath tells you. He did fully confess.”
Yet some wondered if it was Rachel who was showing some form of anti-social personality disorder. When she mentioned her affection for Sam and Juri, Rachel sounded strangely like Dan on MSNBC’s Lockup: “They were just amazing people, and I’m sorry such evil has occurred.”
Nonetheless, Rachel’s brother Noah—who’d also been arrested as an accessory—insisted that his sister was speaking from the heart and the hostility leveled at her was misdirected. Had she been involved in anything of this magnitude, he assured people, he would have known. “We tell each other everything,” he said. “She wouldn’t lie to me.”
In an interview with LA TV station KTLA, Noah referred to Rachel’s former job at Orange County’s best-known landmark. “Rachel is a Disney princess,” he declared, speaking for his family. “She’s our little princess.”
The notion that the police would handcuff the sweet-faced blonde and place her in a cell alongside methamphetamine dealers and gang members both stunned and disheartened the family. And, like the Herrs and the Kibuishis, Noah was frustrated that the case had the potential to linger in the courts for years “We’re still kind of in shambles,” he told the news platform Patch, “just waiting for a very slow system of law to get in gear.”
Out of all of Rachel’s siblings, her bond with Noah seemed to be the strongest. And he contended that this enabled him to provide insights about his sister that others couldn’t. “I’ve known her since she was a baby,” he argued. “She just wasn’t part of anything like this.”
From his perspective, Noah believed that law enforcement was targeting Rachel because of her relationship with Dan. “It’s a little unnerving to see what they’ll try to pull out of thin air,” he said.
It was a position that Rachel’s attorney, Ajna Sharma-Wilson, was also espousing to the press, describing Rachel as, “in essence, collateral damage of Dan Wozniak.”
But Steve had no sympathy for the young woman he’d grown to perceive as a manipulative actress, who may have had more in common with Dan than she was willing to admit. “I would assume it’s a strong case,” he told Patch. “They wouldn’t have charged her if it wasn’t.”
Immediately after her arrest, the family began lobbying for a deduction of Rachel’s one-hundred-thousand-dollar bail. The Buffetts’ finances were spent, Noah said, and they hoped to raise money online. “We all want to see our sister come home,” he said. “She had no idea what was going on.”
Two days before her pretrial hearing—after twenty days in the Orange County Jail system—Rachel was released on a reduced bond of fifty thousand dollars. It was near midnight when she passed through the door and was whisked to her family’s house. “She’s feeling okay,” Sharma-Wilson told Patch. “She’s happy to be back with her family again, and she’s very thankful for her family and community for supporting her during this.”
Exactly which members of the community were standing behind Rachel was uncertain. But she realized that she couldn’t rely on Noah and other loved ones to evaporate the cloud of suspicion that hovered over the actress—particularly after Judge Kazuharu Makino’s ruling at the pretrial hearing. There was going to be a long battle ahead, and Rachel needed to drive a greater wedge between herself and the man accused of slaying Sam Herr and Juri Kibuishi.
After participating in a number of small news stories, Rachel made a dramatic decision to appear on a national TV show and take her case to people who had never heard of Costa Mesa, the Liberty Theater, or Daniel Patrick Wozniak.