Murder of Krista Harrison

On July 17, 1982, eleven-year-old Krista Harrison was collecting aluminum cans with a friend in a park in Marshallville, Ohio, about 100 yards from her home. A witness, her companion, reported that a man aged roughly 25 to 35 with shoulder-length hair drove up in a brown or dark red van with round rear-side windows, forced Harrison into the vehicle, and drove off. Volunteers searched Marshallville for her, and investigators initially anticipated a ransom demand, but none came.

Six days later, Harrison's remains were found in an advanced state of decomposition next to a shed in the woods off Township Road 464 in Holmes County, near Loudonville, Ohio — about 35 miles from the abduction site. She had been strangled and sexually assaulted with a vibrator, and a plastic bag had been wrapped around her legs. Because of the state of decomposition, her father Gerald Harrison had to confirm her identity. Items found near the dump site included a Budweiser towel, a bloody car-seat box, a wad of her hair, gloves, a plaid shirt, and jeans. Examination indicated her body had been exposed to high heat, likely from being inside a vehicle during summer weather. She was buried at Maple Grove Cemetery in Marshallville.

Investigators found nutmeg or orange-colored polyester carpet-type fibers on Harrison's body and the towel at the scene. Similar fibers had been found eight months earlier on the body of 12-year-old Tina Harmon, who had been raped and murdered in the same county; a different man had already been convicted on circumstantial evidence in that case and was incarcerated at the time Harrison was abducted, leading investigators to consider that Harmon and Harrison were victims of the same offender. The plastic bag around Harrison's body was traced to a Pioneer, Ohio factory that produced packaging for a specific type of black car seat sold briefly through Sears mail order; only 23 buyers in northern Ohio were identified, though none matched the van description at the time.

A $10,000 reward was offered, and composite sketches were circulated, but no arrest occurred for a year. In 1983, Robert Anthony Buell, a 43-year-old state of Ohio employee, kidnapped, shaved the head of, shocked, beat, bound, and raped a 28-year-old gas station manager in Damascus, Ohio; she escaped after roughly twelve hours and alerted police. Investigators compared carpet fibers from Buell's van to those found on Harrison and found them a likely match; Sears records showed Buell had purchased the same type of car seat used in the packaging found at the dump site. Paint on jeans near the site matched paint on Buell's residence, and spray paint in his garage matched paint on the recovered box. A fingerprint on the plastic covering Harrison's body did not match Buell's.

Buell pleaded no contest to the abduction and rape of the adult victim but denied involvement in Harrison's murder. He was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death in 1984, and was executed by lethal injection in 2002. He was never charged in the murder of Tina Harmon, though later DNA testing in 2010 matched him to that crime scene. Wax found on the body of another victim, 10-year-old Deborah Kaye Smith, matched candles Buell owned. Former journalist James Renner has suggested in his writings that Buell's nephew may have played a role in the murders and has linked the case to the unsolved killings of Barbara Barnes and Amy Mihaljevic.