OAKLAND — A Pleasanton man was sentenced Tuesday to a minimum of 15 years in prison — and possibly the remaining of his life — for a murder that an Alameda County judge called “one of the most heinous crimes I have ever seen.”
“The inhumanity of your actions is beyond my comprehension,” Judge Scott Patton said, addressing 43-year-old Joseph Roberts directly. “There are people who should not be allowed to walk freely in our society, and you are one of those people.”
Roberts stared ahead in silence as Patton announced his verdict for the beheading of Rachel “Imani” Buckner, 27, whose mutilated body was present in a garbage bag near the Bay Farm Island Bridge in Alameda in July 2023. A jury later Roberts found guilty of premeditated murder After authorities say he killed Buckner in her Pleasanton apartment and severed her head, hands and feet with power tools – none of which were ever found.
Friends and relatives described Roberts in court Tuesday as a manipulative man vulnerable to extreme outbursts of violence. They claimed he once punched and kicked Buckner's grandmother so hard that she broke an arm and suffered a brain injury. They then claimed he took out his anger on his fiancée and systematically isolated her from her family.
Several of Buckner's relatives and shut friends expressed fear and anxiety at the concept of Roberts ever being released from prison, calling him a “dangerous” man who had imposed “a reign of terror” on Buckner and people round her.
“This has been an absolute nightmare for me and my family,” Buckner's grandmother, Miriam Benford, said in an announcement read by one other relative. “None of us are safe when he is on the streets. He has desecrated our lives. He should never be free.”
Buckner's mother, S. Jamila Buckner, lamented that Rachel's preschool-age daughter still screams, “I want to go to my mommy, I want to go to my mommy.”
“She's only four years old and she's had to try to understand the complexity of her mother's death,” said S. Jamila Buckner. She recounted how the girl kept considering out loud about how her mother died and kept asking herself, “Did her heart stop beating?”
Roberts didn’t speak in the course of the sentencing. His attorney, Annie Beles, said the court had no discretion in determining the length of Roberts' prison sentence and expressed “hope for peace” for all involved, including the couple's families.
Roberts and Rachel Buckner met while studying law at Golden Gate University. During their relationship, Roberts wrote an editorial for USA Today denouncing the #MeToo movement, claiming he was falsely accused of sexual harassment while in college. Betsy DeVos, the previous U.S. Secretary of Education under President Trump, cited Roberts for example when she advocated for the rollback of Obama-era protections for alleged victims of campus sexual assault.
At the identical time, prosecutors suspect Roberts of brutally beating and abusing Rachel Buckner.
In the lead-up to the murder, Pleasanton law enforcement officials fielded about 17 reports of loud screams, thumps and punches coming from the couple's apartment. But those calls yielded little results, as Pleasanton police normally left the couple's home after only just a few punches, prosecutors say. In other cases, Buckner insisted she was high quality and told officers to depart.
According to authorities, Roberts killed Buckner in her Pleasanton apartment in mid-July 2023. Prosecutors said Roberts then went on a Tinder dating spree and went on along with his life as if nothing had happened.
Investigators later discovered a bone fragment with Rachel Buckner's DNA within the couple's bathtub drain, next to large bottles of cleansing chemicals. The body itself showed partial cuts from “false starts” where Robert's saw got caught on a bone, in response to court testimony.
On Tuesday, Rachel Buckner's family and friends focused on the life that was ending – that of a loving mother who seemed destined for a promising profession as a lawyer. All of this might have happened, they are saying, if she had never met Roberts all those years ago in law school.
“He took my firstborn child away from me,” said S. Jamila Buckner. “I felt like everything inside me had been ripped out of my soul.”
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