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I have enough information to write a confident brief on this case.Robert A. Buell's habeas petition relates to his 1984 conviction and death sentence for the sexual assault and murder of eleven-year-old Krista Lee Harrison, who was kidnapped from a ballpark in Marshallville, Ohio on July 17, 1982, and found dead six days later in a remote area of Holmes County, Ohio. Robert Anthony Buell was an American child murderer, serial rapist, and former planning department worker from Akron, Ohio, convicted of the July 17, 1982 murder of 11-year-old Krista Lea Harrison. He was arrested after a separate kidnapping and torture victim escaped and identified him, leading investigators to fiber and other physical evidence tying him to Krista's murder. On April 4, 1984, a jury convicted him, and the trial court sentenced Buell to death on April 11, 1984.
Buell's direct appeals to the Ohio Court of Appeals and Ohio Supreme Court were denied, a 1987 post-conviction petition was denied and affirmed on appeal, and in 1992 he filed a federal habeas petition, with a stay of execution granted to allow further state review. Buell came close to dying in 1996, awaiting a court decision until 17 minutes after the scheduled execution, when a delay was upheld. His federal habeas appeal was ultimately denied by the Sixth Circuit in 2001. Remarkably, in 2010, eight years after his death, he was found to have also raped and murdered 12-year-old Tina Marie Harmon in 1981 — the crime for which an innocent man, Herman Ray Rucker, had originally been wrongly convicted and later exonerated.
Beyond this Forensic Files-style podcast episode, the case has drawn substantial true-crime coverage, including detailed write-ups on forensic and execution-focused sites, death-penalty watchdog reports, and Wikipedia entries for both Buell and the murder itself. His case was cited by Amnesty International in advance of his execution, and it remains a frequently referenced example of fiber evidence and post-conviction DNA linking a killer to additional unsolved child murders.
Robert Anthony Buell is no longer alive. Buell was executed by lethal injection on September 25, 2002. His time of death was 10:30 a.m. He maintained his innocence to the end; his final statement declared, "Jerry and Shirley, I didn't kill your daughter. The prosecutor knows that... and they left the real killer out there on the streets to kill again and again and again." No retrial, exoneration, or commutation occurred — his death sentence was carried out.