Despite hard to ignore evidence of her role in the murders of two Coast Community College students, Rachel Buffett this week received a relative slap on the wrist punishment of 32 months in the local jail.
In September, an Orange County jury found Buffett guilty of lying to Costa Mesa Police Department detectives as they investigated the gruesome, 2010 killings of Sam Herr and Julie Kibuishi.
Superior Court Judge Sheila Hanson told a pale-looking Buffett, who had been beaten by other inmates prior to her sentencing, that she’d purposely concocted lies to mislead police.
Buffett’s plight is far less severe than what’s facing her ex-fiancé, Danial Wozniak, who now lives on California’s death row inside San Quentin State Prison.
She’d faced a potential state prison punishment of nearly four years.
Before deputies hauled her back to the Orange County Jail, Buffett—the onetime community theater actor—endured listening to emotional statements from relatives of the victims.
Investigative journalist Linda Sawyer, who intensely studied the killings and exposed previously unknown facts that undermine the government’s official version of events, believes Buffett should have been held accountable for more serious charges.
But at a post-sentencing press conference, veteran homicide prosecutor Matt Murphy defended his filing decision and ridiculed Sawyer as well as media outlets that publicized her work which has been aired on iHeartRadio’s popular Sleuth podcast.
Go HERE to more background on the Buffett controversy.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.