Robert Buell was executed by the State of Ohio for the murder of Krista Lea Harrison
According to court documents Robert Buell would abduct eleven year old who would be sexually assaulted and murdered. Krista Lea Harrison body would be found six days later
Robert Buell would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Robert Buell would be executed by lethal injection on September 24 2002
Robert Buell would insist he was innocent until his execution
Robert Buell Photos
Robert Buell FAQ
When Was Robert Buell Executed
Robert Buell was executed on September 24 2002
Robert Buell Case
The state put a man to death by injection Wednesday for raping and strangling an 11-year-old girl 20 years ago. Robert Buell, 62, was executed for killing Krista Harrison. State and federal courts turned down last-minute appeals based on objections to the hypnotizing of witnesses at his trial. It was the state’s fifth execution in three years. His time of death was 10:30 a.m. The state said Buell gave a one-minute statement.
A handful of protesters were outside the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility on Wednesday. Tom O’Brien, 38, a graduate student in social work at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said his research convinced him the death penalty is inherently unfair. “I saw the injustices that were prevalent throughout the system, and said I need to take a stand against it,” he said.
Prison officials said Buell awoke at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday and had a breakfast of bran flakes and a glass of milk. He spent time listening to the radio in his cell. He ate his special meal at 4:06 p.m. Tuesday — a single black, unpitted olive, Dean said. Prison officials researched, but failed to find, any significance in the request.
Buell came close to dying in 1996. He awaited a court decision until 17 minutes after the scheduled execution, when a delay was upheld.
Outside the prison, seven protesters set up posters with the photos of the four men executed since 1999, with candles ready to be lighted on the ground. A poster to the side held a picture of the slain girl, Krista Harrison, with a white silk rose attached. Some were among small groups of death penalty protesters who had gathered Tuesday in Cleveland and Akron, including Kathy Soltis, a member of the Cleveland Coalition Against the Death Penalty. The number of protesters have shrunk since the state switched to daytime executions, Soltis said. Also, Buell is a “less sympathetic figure,” she said, because the victim was a child and Buell is not mentally ill.
Krista was abducted from a park across the street from where she lived in the village of Marshallville on July 11, 1982, as she collected aluminum cans with a boy. Her body was found six days later. Buell, a former Akron city planner who lived in the nearby town of Clinton, claimed he was innocent and that there was no eyewitness or DNA evidence connecting him to the crime.
Prosecutors argued that evidence for his 1984 conviction was overwhelming. It included fibers on Krista’s body that matched fibers taken from carpet in Buell’s van and blue and tan paint found on men’s jeans dumped at the crime scene that matched paint found in Buell’s home. The crime went unsolved for 15 months until a 28-year-old woman who was abducted at gunpoint and raped and tortured at Buell’s home escaped and ran to a neighbor’s house. The details of the assault led to his arrest for Krista’s death.
Buell pleaded no contest to rape and other charges from the attack on the 28-year-old and the abduction and rape five months earlier of a 29-year-old woman. He was sentenced to 121 years in prison for those crimes. Buell was later named as the chief suspect in the slayings of two other girls and identified by other victims of sexual assault in northeast Ohio.