The one-time fiance of a convicted double-murderer “lied” to Costa Mesa investigators as they tried to unravel her boyfriend’s “diabolical” scheme to frame their friend, a prosecutor told jurors Wednesday, but the defendant’s attorney said she helped police solve the case.
Rachel Buffett, 31, is charged with three felony counts of being an accessory after the fact for allegedly lying to police as they zeroed in on Daniel Patrick Wozniak during the May 2010 investigation into the killings. If convicted, she could face three years and eight months in prison.
Wozniak, 34, was sentenced to death in September 2016 for the dismemberment murder of 26-year-old Samuel Eliezer Herr and the fatal shooting of 23-year-old Julie Kibuishi.
Wozniak and Buffett were local community theater actors who met in 2005, but didn’t start dating until a couple of years later, Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy said. The two were planning a wedding and honeymoon while Wozniak was developing and then executing a scheme to kill Herr for his money and then set the victim up for a rape and murder of his friend Kibuishi, the prosecutor said.
The couple had chronic “money woes” and faced eviction mostly due to lengthy periods of unemployment and because their thespian careers did not pay, Murphy said.
Herr was a neighbor of Buffett and Wozniak at the Camden Martinique apartments in Costa Mesa and they struck up a friendship with Herr and his close “platonic” friend Kibuishi, Murphy said. Herr was back home after a tour of duty in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, attending classes at Orange Coast College across the street, so he could return to the military and reach an officer’s rank, Murphy said.
Herr, who was “frugal,” had squirreled away about $62,000 and Wozniak, with his mounting financial worries and inability to pay for his nuptials and honeymoon. targeted Herr’s bank account, Murphy said.
Wozniak lured Herr to the Liberty Theater on the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base on May 21, 2010, under the ruse to help move furniture and shot him in the head twice and left his body there, Murphy said. That evening, Wozniak starred with Buffett in a community theater’s production of “Nine” in Fullerton.
After killing Herr, Wozniak used the victim’s cell phone to try to lure one of Herr’s female friends over to his apartment to further his scheme of framing Herr for her murder so he could have time to dismember Herr’s body and explain why he was missing, Murphy said. That woman, however, was moving to Hawaii and didn’t have time for a visit with Herr, so Wozniak turned his attention to Kibuishi when she texted Herr to see how he was doing, Murphy said.
Wozniak, pretending to be Herr, said he was upset about something and needed her help and she promised to come over, Murphy said. Wozniak met her at Herr’s apartment after the show and said he was worried about Herr and said he needed to show her something in his apartment, Murphy said.
While in Herr’s apartment, he shot Kibuishi twice in the head and then cut off part of her jeans and pulled down her underwear and posed her in a way to deceive investigators into thinking it was a sex crime turned deadly, Murphy said. He wrote “all yours, (expletive) you” on her shirt and left, Murphy said.
On the afternoon of May 22, 2010, Wozniak returned to the theater and went about sawing off Herr’s head and arms and then buried them in shallow graves in El Dorado Park in Long Beach, where wildlife uncovered the body parts, Murphy said.
While investigators focused on Herr as the suspect in Kibuishi’s murder, Wozniak duped a 16-year-old boy he had previously mentored as an actor into using Herr’s ATM card to make cash withdrawals so Wozniak wouldn’t be seen in bank surveillance videos, Murphy said. The boy thought he was helping Wozniak recover money for bail bondsmen, Murphy said.
Wozniak and Buffett were two months behind in the rent and Buffett had spent 15 hours in the days before the murders working to borrow enough money to bail Wozniak out of jail for failing to appear on a drunken driving charge, Murphy said. The two borrowed money from a new friend, Chris Williams, who was friends with a castmate in the show, Murphy said.
Williams waited in Buffett’s apartment with her for a few hours as Wozniak was out to get cash to pay back Williams, Murphy said. Wozniak was dismembering and trying to hide Herr’s body at the time and had his teen friend get $400 out of Herr’s bank account, Murphy said.
At the couple’s performance the night before, Buffett, known to be a “cold actress” who had trouble summoning up theatrical tears, cried throughout the performance and backstage, Murphy said.
And when Wozniak returned home with the $400 to repay Williams, he got into an argument with Buffett, “who wore the pants in the relationship,” and an “uncomfortable” Williams left, the prosecutor said.
When Williams texted her later to assure her they could repay the rest of a $2,000 loan later, she responded, “something to the effect, `I’m not worried about the money, I’m worried about something new,” Murphy said.
During questioning of Buffett, as investigators began to unravel Wozniak’s deception, she claimed she didn’t know who had loaned the couple the money, Murphy said.
Buffett, who by this time had been told that police suspected Wozniak of both murders, assured them she was being “completely honest. But for two hours, she proceeds to be completely dishonest,” Murphy said. “She dodges, she’s ambiguous.”
Buffett frequently “change(d) her stories,” and details, Murphy said. “She didn’t tell them about critical parts of the investigation.”
Later, when Buffett learned from Wozniak’s brother that the killer had asked his sibling to hide Herr’s backpack with the murder weapon inside, she told the friend who was with her that she would call the police as soon as she gave Wozniak a heads-up, prompting the friend to call police, Murphy said.
Wozniak’s brother ultimately pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact and cooperated with authorities. Tim Wozniak threw the evidence over the fence of his parents’ home in Long Beach and police found it, Murphy said.
Buffett’s attorney, David Medina, told jurors in his opening statement that Wozniak is a “monster, a psychopath and a liar” who frequently fibbed to Buffett about his ability to earn an income because he thought she was “out of his league” and was desperate to hang on to the relationship.
“You’re going to have to decide, did Rachel Buffett intend to help her boyfriend get away with murder or did she help Costa Mesa police solve the murders?,” the defense attorney said.
Buffett “voluntarily” met with investigators and was a “star witness,” Medina said. “She gave them boatloads of damning evidence.”
He said Buffett helped investigators track down the crime scene of Herr’s murder in Los Alamitos, then gave police a “treasure trove” of physical evidence in Herr’s backpack.
“She also got Dan (Wozniak) to confess to the crime” in a call he made to her from his jail cell that authorities recorded, Medina said.