The Serial Killer's Apprentice

by James Renner

  Amy’s ashes are buried beneath those of her mother in West Berlin, Wisconsin.

  Chapter 13

  The Serial Killer’s Apprentice

  The Assuredly Unsolved Murders of Krista Harrison, Tina Harmon, and Debbie Smith

  The march to the Death House is silent.

  Phil Trexler makes his way across the parking lot with the rest of the media, walking quietly along, imagining what comes next. Trexler is there as a representative of the Akron Beacon Journal. He has written about the man, Robert Buell, the rapist, the child killer, for the paper. And he has come here, to Lucasville, to watch him die.

  The Death House is separated from the visitors’ center—where a nice spread of fresh danish and coffee was set out for the reporters as they waited—but the walk is not long enough. And as Trexler passes the funeral director’s car, the gravity of the moment sinks in.

  Trexler and the other reporters are ushered into the Death House, into a small room bisected by a partition. Three men sit on one side, holding hands. This is the family of Krista Harrison, who was abducted, raped, and murdered in 1982, when she was 11 years old. This is her father and her brothers. On the other side of the partition is Buell’s attorney, Patricia Millhoff, and his pastor, Ernie Sanders. The reporters can stand on either side of the room, but the partition is there so the victim’s family does not have to make eye contact with those who have come to support the murderer in his final moments. Everyone faces the front, where a glass window overlooks an empty gurney.

  On the other side of the glass, someone closes a curtain, obscuring the hospital bed for a moment.

  Patricia Millhoff begins to cry. Ten minutes ago, she had to tell Buell that his stay of execution had not been granted. Buell had prepared for this—he’d already had his “special meal,” the single, unpitted olive—but Millhoff had been hoping for some luck. She’d gotten to know Buell well since becoming part of his legal team, fighting to overturn his conviction. As the appeals process fizzled out and the execution date drew closer, her visits with Buell had become less about law and more about simple human interaction. They usually discussed the morning’s Diane Rehm show or what books Buell was currently reading into a recorder for blind people. After the prison refused to allow Buell to donate his typewriter to other inmates, he willed it away to Millhoff, along with his TV.

  “If you did it, and you admit it, it will help everybody,” she had told him, in private.

  “I didn’t do it,” he had replied.

  The curtain opens. Buell is there, now, lying on the gurney. He is strapped down, facing the ceiling. His shirt is tucked in. He appears calm. An IV tube snakes out of his arm. The tube disappears behind a wall, where the executioner stands, waiting for the signal.

  Trexler watches Buell’s Adam’s apple bob up and down. Up and down. Counting off the last seconds like a swallowed metronome. The reporter is struck by the absurdity of a healthy man being led into a room to die.

  In the Death House, it remains silent except for the sound of the reporters’ pencils scribbling notes on pads of paper.

  Sitting there, Ernie Sanders, Buell’s pastor, believes he knows who really killed Krista. It’s something they’ve talked about at length. “You were right all along,” Buell told him the last time they met.

  Seventeen years earlier Buell had written to Sanders and asked him to visit to talk about forgiveness. Buell had a lot to confess—the rapes of two women, at least—but Sanders’s God has grace enough for that. Grace enough to forgive even the murder of the child, he told Buell. But Buell had never confessed to that one. And in Sanders’s mind, he didn’t have to.

  It is time for last words. Buell has some for Krista’s family. “Jerry and Shirley, I didn’t kill your daughter,” he says, even though Shirley is not there. “The prosecutor knows that . . . and they left the real killer out there on the streets to kill again and again and again.”

  When Buell is done, some unseen signal is given on the other side of the glass. Trexler notices a change in Buell’s breathing. He watches Buell close his eyes and watches his chest heave up and down and watches his Adam’s apple finally stop and then there is total silence.

  It is September 24, 2002. After 18 years on death row, Robert Buell is dead.

  Later, when the Death House is empty again, Buell’s typewriter goes home with Millhoff. His personal collection of court transcripts, police files, letters, and handwritten notes leaves with Sanders. That box of documents, in time, finds its way to me.

  The box is full of secrets.

  Evidence found inside suggests a strange possibility: that Buell was telling the truth when he said he didn’t kill Krista Harrison. And that he knew who did.

  * * *

  In the early 1980s, someone was killing little girls in Ohio.

  The first incident appeared to be the abduction and murder of 12-year-old Tina Harmon in the fall of 1981. Tina was a cute, round-faced girl from the small town of Creston with shoulder-length hair and a taste for Camel Light cigarettes. Back then, the only real entertainment was the game room at the Union 76 truck stop in Lodi, a few miles away. Tina was known to hang out there whenever she could hitch a ride.

  According to police reports, on Thursday, October 29, 1981, Tina got a ride into town from her father’s girlfriend, who dropped her off in front of a convenience store with a group of friends. Tina bought a Fudgesicle and bummed another ride from her teenage brother, who took her only as far as the next Lawson’s. Eventually, she made it to Lodi; several witnesses, including a local detective, remembered seeing her there that evening. Tina was last spotted in the presence of an unshaven man in a jean jacket, who appeared to be in his early 20s.

  The girl’s body was found five days later in Bethlehem Township, about 40 miles from her home, dumped beside an oil well in plain sight of anyone driving down the road. She was fully clothed and had been placed neatly on the ground. She’d been raped and strangled shortly after she was abducted. Oil well workers who had visited that access road the day before had seen nothing, and this supported the detectives’ theory that Tina’s body had been stored someplace else before being placed in the field.

  In her pocket they found a book of matches from the Union 76 truck stop. On her clothes, the coroner found dog hair and several “trilobal polyester” fibers the color of nutmeg.

  Less than a year later—July 17, 1982, a stormy Saturday—Krista Harrison was snatched from a baseball field across the street from her home. She had been collecting cans with a 12-year-old friend, Roy, who later told police that around 5 p.m., a dark-colored van pulled into the park. The van had bubble-shaped windows, black seats, and a roof vent.

  The driver climbed out and approached Krista. The man was white and looked to be about 25 to 35 years old. He was skinny, with a mustache and dark brown hair that curled near his shoulders; he looked Italian, the boy thought. The man said something to Krista and she went and sat on the bleachers overlooking the diamond. The man then sat down next to the girl and reached underneath her blouse. When Krista started to cry, the man whispered something into her ear. Roy could not hear what was said, but Krista walked to the man’s van, opened the driver’s-side door, climbed between the front bucket seats and sat on the floor. The man climbed in, too, and then leaned out the window. “Bye, Roy,” he said. He pulled the van onto the road and quickly sped away.

  Witnesses later said that a strange man resembling Krista’s abductor had attended one of her summer softball games, photographing her with a 35 mm camera. Classmates told police that on the afternoon Krista was abducted, she had gone to the Village Snack Shop game room and when she left, a strange man had blocked her way and tried to get her to dance with him. The man had dark hair that was curly on the ends.

  And in the weeks leading up to her abduction, there had been several prank calls placed to the Harrison residence when Krista was home.

  Krista was missing for less than a week. On July 23, two turtle trappers discovered her b
ody next to an abandoned shed in a field in nearby Holmes County. She was fully clothed and wrapped in plastic. The coroner discovered carpet fibers on her, the same trilobal polyester fibers that had been found on Tina Harmon. Like Tina, Krista had been strangled to death shortly after being kidnapped and her body had been stored in a fly-free environment—a trunk of a car, or a van—before being moved to the field. Like Tina, she had been sexually assaulted, possibly with a vibrator.

  The next day, a second crime scene was located in West Salem. In the weeds next to the road, police found a green plastic garbage bag covered in Krista’s blood and hair. Beside the bag was a Budweiser blanket and pieces of blood-stained cardboard.

  Then, a second sweep of the area where Krista’s body had been found turned up a pair of dirty jeans, spotted with blood and specks of powder-blue paint. There was a hole in the left knee. A man’s plaid shirt was also found.

  The evidence was sent to the crime lab at the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, which determined that the plastic bag that Krista was wrapped in and the cardboard box found at the second scene had once contained van seats that had been ordered through Sears. On the bag was a fingerprint.

  Sears provided detectives with the names of everyone in the area who had ordered similar seats. The list was long, but every name was checked out. Bob Buell was on the list and was interviewed, but the detective did not feel that Buell was being deceptive and so he did not become the focus of their investigation.

  The FBI commissioned a criminal profile of the perpetrator by Special Agent John Douglas, whose pioneering studies of the habits of serial killers inspired the book The Silence of the Lambs. Krista’s killer should be in his early to late 20s, Douglas said. He is a latent homosexual.

  “When employed, he seeks menial or unskilled trades,” wrote Douglas. “While he considers himself a ‘macho man,’ he has deep-rooted feelings of personal inadequacies. Your offender has a maximum of a high school education. When he is with children, he feels superior, in control, nonthreatened. While your offender may not be from the city where the victim was abducted he certainly has been there many times before (i.e., visiting friends, relatives, employment). He turned towards alcohol and/or drugs to escape from the realities of the crime.”

  Detectives from several jurisdictions and FBI special agents worked diligently to find the man who killed Krista and Tina. But the evidence could not be matched to a likely suspect, and each new lead only led them to a different dead end.

  And then it happened again.

  On Saturday, June 25, 1983, 10-year-old Debbie Smith disappeared from a street fair in Massillon. Later that day, Debbie called home. She sounded upset but would not say where she was. On August 6, a canoeist found Debbie’s body on the banks of the Tuscarawas River. She had been raped. She had most likely been stabbed, although the body also showed signs of blunt force trauma. Melted wax was found on her body, and the candles from which it had come were recovered nearby.

  These murders were still on the minds of police and area residents two months later when Franklin Township police received a chilling call from a Doylestown resident. There was a shaved, naked woman with a handcuff attached to one wrist standing in her kitchen, the caller said. The woman had shown up on her doorstep, claiming that she had been held captive in the house across the street—a little ranch house owned by Bob Buell.

  The victim was a 28-year-old woman from Salem. She worked at a gas station, and on the night of October 16, 1983, she had been painting the office floor when a middle-aged man came up behind her with a gun and ordered her into his van. He pushed her between the front seats and handcuffed her hands behind her back. Then he drove her to his house, into an attached garage, and told her to go into the bedroom and undress. Inside, the man handcuffed her to a leather bench and spent the rest of the night raping, torturing, and degrading the woman in increasingly vile and unique ways. When it was over, he shaved her head and tied her to his bed. In the morning he went to work, promising to return around lunchtime.

  But the woman escaped, and when Buell returned home, a Franklin Township cop was waiting. Buell was arrested and charged with multiple counts of rape and kidnapping.

  At the time, Buell was 42 years old. He had a college degree and was employed by the city of Akron, writing loans for the Planning Department. He was dating an attorney. He had a daughter at Kent State. Those who knew him described a neat, clean, orderly man, almost to the point of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  He didn’t exactly fit the FBI’s profile of their child killer. But when other agencies got word of Buell’s arrest and recognized his name from the list of men who had purchased van seats from Sears, police descended upon his home with an array of search warrants. They found everything they were looking for, and more.

  In a guest bedroom, painted powder-blue, detectives discovered a roll of carpet the color of nutmeg. The fibers were trilobal polyester and matched fibers found on the bodies of Tina Harmon and Krista Harrison. In the closet were jeans with a hole worn into the left knee. The pants were the same size and brand as the pair found near Krista’s body. They also found dog hairs that matched those found on Tina, a newspaper clipping on the abduction of Debbie Smith, and candles of the same brand that were found near Debbie’s body.

  Investigators took Buell’s van, too, a 1978 maroon Dodge with new black seats from Sears. Inside was more of that same nutmeg carpeting.

  Police put Buell’s picture into a lineup which was shown to witnesses. Several people who had attended Krista’s last softball game identified Buell as a stranger they saw watching the game. A check of Buell’s time cards revealed he had taken time off from work the day Krista’s body was dumped.

  As Buell’s face became a front-page and TV news staple, other women came forward claiming they had been abducted and raped by him, then released. One woman from West Virginia told a grim story almost identical to the Salem victim’s, down to being handcuffed in the bedroom so that Buell could go to work.

  But all of these women were in their late 20s or older. So FBI Special Agent Bill Callis commissioned a second criminal profile to help explain what is referred to in his report as “the missing link” between Buell’s practice of raping and releasing grown women and his presumed taste for raping and killing young girls. Serial killers tend to stick to one sex and age group and tend to escalate in violence over time; they generally don’t start just letting victims go. This second report was not prepared by John Douglas, but by another profiler in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. It blamed Buell’s mother.

  Buell pleaded no contest to the rape charges and was sentenced to 121 years in prison for those crimes. He was only charged with one murder, Krista’s, even though police believed he had also murdered Tina Harmon and Debbie Smith and maybe more. But as one detective put it, “How many times do you need to kill a man?” Buell was convicted of Krista’s murder on April 4, 1984. The jury sentenced him to die.

  * * *

  Martin Frantz was assistant prosecutor for Wayne County during Buell’s lengthy trial and played a significant role in sending the Akron city employee to the Death House. Today, Frantz is county prosecutor and remembers the case well, down to the names of eyewitnesses, 23 years later. He has no doubt that Buell killed those girls.

  “It wasn’t in the trial,” he says, “but we had someone figure out, mathematically, how many people in the world could possibly be connected to all of that circumstantial evidence that we found inside Buell’s home. It was something like 1 in 6 trillion.”

  Actually, it’s at least 2 in 6 trillion.

  Bob Buell was not living at his ranch house during the summer of 1982, when Krista was abducted. His nephew was. Ralph Ross Jr. was a skinny 20-year-old from Mingo Junction, a factory town just outside Steubenville. He had dark hair that curled near his shoulders and was growing a mustache. In February 1982, Ross moved to Akron to drive a truck for an auto parts manufacturer. His uncle Bob let him stay in the p
owder-blue guest room. Usually Ross had the house to himself because Buell spent most nights at his girlfriend’s place. In exchange for room and board, Ross did chores around the house. It was his job to bag and take out the garbage.

  Ross was Buell’s ex-wife’s brother’s kid, but they shared a special kinship that was thicker than blood. For instance, they plotted to kidnap women and “do things” to them inside Buell’s van.

  “What are some of those things?” asked Wayne County Sheriff’s Department Detective Dennis Derflinger, in an interview with Ross, shortly after Buell’s arrest in 1983.

  “Tying them up, shaving their crotch, putting a gag in their mouth, using a vibrator, that’s about all,” said Ross.

  Ross went into a little more detail about these conversations when questioned by Frantz in front of a grand jury.

  “Can you tell us what you remember about what Robert Buell said when he was talking of these fantasies and riding around in the van?” asked Frantz.

  “I would like to say something,” Ross replied. “It was me as well as him that was discussing whatever we were discussing.”

  Frantz: “So both of you were talking about it?”

  Ross: “It was a two-way conversation.”

  Frantz: “Just tell us what Buell said.”

  Ross: “Well, he would talk about, if we would pass up a girl or something on the street, talked about ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have that girl for this evening,’ and I would say, ‘yeah, sure would.’ ”

  Frantz: “What else was said?”

  Ross: “Well, I said I would doubt if she would go out with me or get together, that I didn’t know her, just passed her up on the street. And he said well—or we both suggested—that we could get her into the van if we wanted to.”

  Ross specifically remembered cruising Marshallville, where Krista lived.

  When Ross moved into Buell’s house, the roll of nutmeg carpet was still being stored in the living room, where it had been for years. It matched the color of Buell’s old van, a golden-brown 1977 Dodge that Buell had sold to Ross in 1980 and which Ross was still driving that summer of 1982. That van and Buell’s new one were very similar, but Ross’s had a sun roof and bubble windows. And Ross’s van was a little dirtier; Buell had let his daughter’s dog sleep in it before selling it to Ross.