The City Planner

Robert Anthony Buell worked for the City of Akron’s planning department and lived in Wayne County, Ohio. On October 29, 1981, twelve-year-old Tina Marie Harmon disappeared near Creston after buying ice cream on the way to a friend’s house. Her body was found five days later. Two local men, Herman Ray Rucker and Ernest Holbrook Jr., were convicted of her murder in 1982 on witness testimony alone and sentenced to life.

On July 17, 1982, eleven-year-old Krista Harrison was taken from a park in Marshallville by a man in a dark van. She was found dead six days later in Holmes County. Unusual orange carpet fibers on her body matched those from the Harmon case. The break came in October 1983, when a 28-year-old gas station worker escaped from Buell’s Doylestown house after being abducted and tortured. Police found his van, lined with bright orange carpet, and a roll of the same carpet at his home.

Rucker was acquitted at a retrial in June 1983, and the charges against Holbrook were dismissed in May 1984; a key witness was later convicted of perjury. In April 1984 a jury in Cleveland convicted Buell of Krista’s murder, and he was sentenced to death. He denied killing her to the end and was executed by lethal injection on September 25, 2002. In 2010, DNA testing tied him to Tina Harmon’s murder.