2002: Robert Anthony Buell
September 24th, 2019 Headsman
Robert Anthony Buell, a former Akron city planner, was executed by lethal injection on this date in 2002.
He’d been condemned for abducting 11-year-old Krista Lea Harrison from a park in July 1982, raping, and strangling her to death. It wasn’t until an adult woman escaped his captivity and went to police that he came into focus for the case, and the evidence against him in that pre-DNA moment was sufficiently circumstantial that Buell continued to insist his innocence all the way to the end. Even his final words were a plea of innocence addressed to Krista Lea’s parents: “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. So that some good may come of this, I ask that you continue to pursue this to the end. Don’t let the prosecutor continue to spin this out of focus and force them to find out who really killed your daughter. That’s all I have to say.”
He didn’t have many takers, particularly after a posthumous DNA test years after his execution also incriminated him in the abduction and murder of 12-year-old Tina Harmon — a crime for which he was long a suspect but never prosecuted.
His last meal was a single black olive. (Perhaps a tribute to hanged kidnapper Victor Feguer?)
On this day..
- 1947: Yoshio Tachibana, ravenous - 2020
- 1788: Levi and Abraham Doan, attainted Tories - 2018
- 1815: St. Peter the Aleut, the martyr of San Francisco - 2017
- 1986: Adolf Tolkachev, the Billion-Dollar Spy - 2016
- 1482: Richard Puller von Hohenburg and Anthony Mätzler - 2015
- 1651: Marubashi Chuya, Keian Uprising conspirator - 2014
- 1537: Jurgen Wullenwever, Burgermeister of Lubeck - 2013
- 1830: Stephen Simmons, the last executed by Michigan - 2012
- 1896: Four in New Mexico, in three different towns - 2011
- 1858: Qualchan - 2010
- 1749: Antonio Camardella - 2009
- 1652: Captain James Hind, royalist highwayman - 2008
Entry Filed under: 21st Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,Kidnapping,Lethal Injection,Murder,Ohio,Rape,USA
Tags: 2000s, 2002, dna, robert buell, september 24
