Actress convicted as accessory after double murder made disturbing remark before killings, former friend says
A month before Juri "Julie" Kibuishi and Samuel Herr were murdered, Rachel Buffett was planning her bachelorette party when she encouraged a former friend to take ecstasy, according to the woman, Audrey.
"Well, if I slipped it in your drink, you wouldn’t know about it," Buffett told her, Audrey claimed.
Audrey, who also recounts the exchange in the Investigation Discovery true-crime series, "A Killer Among Friends," said it was the last straw.
"When Rachel and [her fiancé] would get mad at each other, and they were drunk, they’d yell at everyone," Audrey recalled to Fox News Digital. "Of course, he’s yelled at me when he was drunk before. But it wasn’t until that night that I decided to end our friendship."
Audrey said Buffett’s remark about secretly drugging her didn’t feel like an empty threat.
"I really believed Rachel would have drugged me at her bachelorette party because she thought it would be fun," she said.
Audrey walked away from the friendship. Buffett later reached out by text, inviting Audrey to be a bridesmaid and asking if she could come over.
About a month after Audrey ended the friendship, Kibuishi was found shot to death in Herr's apartment, while Herr was missing.
Buffett, an actress, was not accused of carrying out the murders or helping her then-fiancé, Daniel Wozniak, commit them. In 2018, an Orange County, California, jury found her guilty of two felony counts of being an accessory after the fact after prosecutors accused her of lying to and misleading investigators.
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Fox News Digital reached out to Buffett for comment about Audrey's allegations. The case is explored in the episode "Staging a Murder" airing Aug. 10.
"Rachel and Dan loved each other, but they also got on each other’s nerves," said Audrey. "It was fine when they were sober, but then when they got drunk, they were always more aggressive. They would argue and fight. I remember one time when he was drunk, I yelled ‘F--- you’ to him, and I threw my shoe at him, hitting him in the back."
Audrey’s friendship with the couple wasn’t always tumultuous. She met Buffett in college while they were studying theater.
"I just remember her being fun and bubbly," said Audrey. "I thought, 'That's the type of person I want to hang out with.'"
At a party, she crossed paths with mutual friends Kibuishi, a dancer, and Herr, a U.S. Army veteran.
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"I just remember them being delightful, funny, warm and loving," said Audrey. "They were good people. You could tell they were good people."
The buzz among the friend group was Buffett's engagement to Wozniak, a community theater actor. They planned to get married on May 28, 2010. A week before the wedding, Kibuishi and Herr were killed.
Herr's father, Steve Herr, became worried because his son wasn't answering his phone and had failed to show up for a planned visit. He went to his son's apartment and let himself in. Everything appeared normal until he reached the bedroom and discovered Kibuishi's body. She was partially clothed and had been shot in the head. Herr was missing.
"By then, I wasn’t invited to the wedding because I stopped being friends with Rachel and Dan," said Audrey. "I told her I didn’t want to be in the wedding. But when I heard the news, I was so confused. My brain couldn’t wrap around the idea of what happened."
"I thought, ‘What did they get themselves mixed up in?’" said Audrey. "Maybe they got drunk. Maybe they got blackout drunk."
At first, police thought Herr had killed Kibuishi before fleeing. But that theory began to unravel when investigators discovered someone was still withdrawing money from Herr's bank account.
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Police traced the transactions to teenager Wesley Freilich, who told investigators that Wozniak had given him Herr's ATM card and instructed him to withdraw money. Police arrested Wozniak at his bachelor party. After repeatedly changing his story during questioning, Wozniak confessed. Asked why he committed the murders, he replied, "Money and insanity."
"From what I found out, he was racking up tons of credit card debt," said Audrey. "That’s a poor excuse. There’s no excuse to do what he did."
Despite their falling out, Audrey said she called Buffett after Wozniak's arrest.
"Even though I had completely lost trust in her as a human, I was still expressing sorrow for the difficult hardship she must have been going through, knowing that the love of her life that she was going to marry and spend the rest of her life with did something atrocious," she said.
"It’s a life-shattering thing to have happened. But then she responded, ‘You just want to talk to me because you want your five minutes of fame. You don’t really care about me.’"
"Is that what you are thinking right now?" said Audrey. "It was mind-boggling. There was such a disconnect. I was completely taken aback by that reaction. To me, that is not the reaction of a woman who just found out her fiancé was a murderer."
Buffett has maintained that she had no advance knowledge of the murders.
"We were close for so many years," said Audrey. "No matter what I thought, I was still going to treat her like a human being. At that point, it had only been a few months since we ended our friendship."
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Prosecutors said Wozniak killed and dismembered Herr as part of a plot to steal $62,000 he had saved from his military service. They said Wozniak then killed Kibuishi and tried to frame Herr for her murder. Hours after killing Herr, Wozniak performed in the musical "Nine" at a community theater.
"I’m innocent, and that’s what hurts me most in this whole situation is they’re trying to say I’m something I’m not," Buffett told NBC’s "Dateline."
In 2012, Buffett was arrested on suspicion of being an accessory after the fact. Prosecutors later said she lied to police and misled investigators while trying to protect Wozniak.
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Wozniak was sentenced to death in 2016. In 2018, Buffett was sentenced to 32 months in jail following her conviction on two felony counts of being an accessory after the fact.
Audrey said she still wonders who sent the text messages she received from Buffett's phone after their friendship ended.
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"Were they really from her? Or did Dan use her phone? I don't know."
The experience also changed how Audrey chooses her friends.
"It's OK to be nice and respectful to people without inviting them into your life," she said. "I [remember] the quote from 'Into the Woods': 'Nice is different than good.' And I think that is something to think about when you're out there making friends. Nice is different than good."