Years before actress Rachel Buffett was convicted of helping cover up a horrifying double murder, a former friend says she heard a disturbing comment that made her cut Buffett out of her life for good.
And just weeks later, two people in their social circle were dead.
Buffett, the former fiancée of convicted killer Daniel Wozniak, was planning her bachelorette party in the spring of 2010 when she allegedly encouraged her friend Audrey to take ecstasy.
Audrey wasn’t interested.
That’s when Buffett allegedly made a remark Audrey says she has never forgotten.
“Well, if I slipped it in your drink, you wouldn’t know about it,” Buffett allegedly told her.
Audrey, who is speaking out about the case in Investigation Discovery’s A Killer Among Friends, said the comment immediately set off alarm bells.
“I really believed Rachel would have drugged me at her bachelorette party because she thought it would be fun,” Audrey told Fox News Digital.
For Audrey, it was the final straw.
She ended the friendship.
One month later, Juri “Julie” Kibuishi, 23, and U.S. Army veteran Samuel Herr, 26, were murdered in a gruesome plot that would eventually expose one of Southern California’s most notorious true-crime cases.
Buffett was never accused of personally carrying out either killing or helping Wozniak commit the murders.
But years later, prosecutors convinced a jury that she deliberately lied and misled investigators after the killings in an attempt to protect her fiancé.
In 2018, Buffett was convicted on two felony counts of being an accessory after the fact and sentenced to two years and eight months behind bars.
Audrey said her friendship with Buffett and Wozniak had already become increasingly uncomfortable before the murders.
“When Rachel and Dan would get mad at each other, and they were drunk, they’d yell at everyone,” she recalled.
Wozniak had yelled at Audrey before, she said, but the alleged drugging comment finally pushed her to walk away.
Buffett later reportedly texted Audrey, still asking her to be a bridesmaid and inviting her over.
But Audrey was done.
The two women had originally met while studying theater in college, and Audrey remembered Buffett as someone who initially seemed carefree and magnetic.
“I just remember her being fun and bubbly,” Audrey said. “I thought, ‘That’s the type of person I want to hang out with.’”
Through their circle of friends, Audrey also met Kibuishi, a dancer, and Herr, an Army veteran.
Her memories of them couldn’t have been more different.
“I just remember them being delightful, funny, warm and loving,” she said. “They were good people. You could tell they were good people.”
At the time, much of the group’s attention was focused on Buffett’s upcoming wedding to Wozniak, a community theater actor.
The couple planned to marry on May 28, 2010.
They never made it to the altar.
One week before the wedding, Herr and Kibuishi were killed.
Herr’s father, Steve Herr, became concerned after his son stopped answering calls and failed to show up for a planned visit.
He went to his son’s Costa Mesa apartment and let himself inside.
At first, nothing seemed unusual.
Then he entered the bedroom.
Kibuishi’s partially clothed body was inside. She had been shot in the head.
Herr was nowhere to be found.
Audrey said the news was almost impossible to process.
“By then, I wasn’t invited to the wedding because I stopped being friends with Rachel and Dan,” she said. “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.”
She wondered whether something involving alcohol had spiraled horribly out of control.
“I thought, ‘What did they get themselves mixed up in?’” Audrey recalled. “Maybe they got drunk. Maybe they got blackout drunk.”
Investigators initially suspected Herr may have killed Kibuishi and then disappeared.
But that theory quickly began falling apart.
Someone was still taking money out of Herr’s bank account.
Police eventually traced withdrawals to teenager Wesley Freilich, who told investigators that Wozniak had given him Herr’s ATM card and instructed him to withdraw cash.
Authorities arrested Wozniak at his bachelor party.
During questioning, he repeatedly changed his story before finally confessing.
When investigators asked why he had committed the killings, Wozniak gave a hauntingly simple answer.
“Money and insanity.”
Prosecutors said Wozniak murdered and dismembered Herr as part of a plan to steal $62,000 the Army veteran had saved from his military service.
They said he then lured Kibuishi to Herr’s apartment, killed her and staged the scene in an attempt to make it appear that Herr had murdered her before fleeing.
The case became even more shocking when authorities revealed what Wozniak allegedly did after killing Herr.
Hours later, he went onstage and performed in the musical Nine at a community theater.
Audrey said she later learned Wozniak had been buried in credit card debt.
“That’s a poor excuse,” she said. “There’s no excuse to do what he did.”
Despite having already ended her friendship with Buffett, Audrey said she called her after Wozniak’s arrest.
She said she wanted to express sympathy to a woman who had just learned the man she planned to marry was an accused killer.
Audrey did not get the response she expected.
According to Audrey, Buffett accused her of reaching out simply because she wanted attention.
“You just want to talk to me because you want your five minutes of fame. You don’t really care about me,” Buffett allegedly responded.
Audrey was stunned.
“Is that what you are thinking right now?” she recalled wondering.
“It was mind-boggling. There was such a disconnect,” she said. “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 consistently maintained that she had no advance knowledge of the killings.
“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,” she told NBC’s Dateline.
But prosecutors argued that what Buffett did after the murders was criminal.
She was arrested in 2012 on suspicion of being an accessory after the fact.
Authorities accused her of lying to detectives, dodging questions and changing her story while investigators were trying to uncover what Wozniak had done.
Prosecutors also pointed to disturbing internet searches allegedly found on Wozniak’s computer, including queries about loading a shotgun and hiding a body.
Wozniak was ultimately convicted of murdering Herr and Kibuishi and sentenced to death in 2016.
Buffett was convicted two years later and sentenced to 32 months in jail.
Audrey said one mystery still bothers her today.
After she ended her friendship with Buffett, she received text messages from Buffett’s phone.
But she now wonders whether Buffett actually sent them.
“Were they really from her? Or did Dan use her phone?” Audrey said. “I don’t know.”
More than 16 years after the killings, Audrey says the entire nightmare left her with a permanent lesson about the people she allows into her life.
“It’s OK to be nice and respectful to people without inviting them into your life,” she said.
Then she recalled a line from the musical Into the Woods that now carries a much darker meaning for her.
“Nice is different than good.”
The case is revisited in the A Killer Among Friends episode “Staging a Murder,” airing Aug. 10 on Investigation Discovery.