The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (33 page)

“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 2 in 6 trillion.

Bob Buell was not living at his ranch house during the summer of 1982. 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 powder-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 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 often fantasized about kidnapping women and doing 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.”

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.

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. That van and Buell's new one were very similar, but Ross' 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.

But they didn't just share seats and vans, they shared women, too. Women like Buell's secretary.

Frantz: “And the three of you were in bed together?”

Ross: “Yes.”

Frantz: “And at that time the vibrator was used?”

Ross: “Me and Bob both used it.”

Ross' hair was a little curly and Buell's was straight, but otherwise the two shared an uncanny resemblance. In fact, when a police officer responded to a noise violation at the house in July 1982, he mistook Ross for Buell. (Ross may have shown him Buell's driver's license.) And a closer look at original interviews with bystanders at Krista's last softball game raises important questions as well. One who identified Buell in a lineup also said, “There was another man standing beside him with a camera and mirrored sunglasses on.”

The detective asked her if she meant that Buell was taking photographs.

“No, the man beside him was taking photographs. [Buell] did not have a camera.”

Roy, the boy who stood just a few feet away from Krista's abductor when she was taken, said repeatedly that the man he saw that day was not Buell, but that the man was similar in appearance.

Ross did not have an alibi for the day Krista was abducted. He told police that he was probably visiting his parents that weekend, but couldn't remember for sure, and this apparently was never confirmed. Detective Derflinger asked Ross to submit fingerprints and his photo, but he refused. Derflinger ends his written report with this note: “P.S. He has started to grow a beard, but I don't think that means anything.”

When interviewed by Franklin Township Detective Ron Fuchs about whether Ross had ever helped Buell alter his vans, Ross was more evasive. “Ralph's answers are contrary to other information already gained and he appeared to be deliberately lying and trying to cover up the incident,” Fuchs stated. In fact, Ross had helped his uncle move seats from Ross' van into Buell's new van.

A witness told police that he saw the jeans and shirt that were found at one of Krista's crime scenes lying near the road at around 11:30 the morning of July 23. Police believe Krista's body also must have been dumped that morning because the items strewn about the road were not seen before then. The jeans and shirt are assumed to have been dumped at the same time. But Buell was at work until noon that day. And, according to his girlfriend, the only reason he took the rest of the day off was to help her fix her clothes dryer. She produced a receipt that showed she had purchased a dryer belt that afternoon. By the time Buell had a chance to stop by his house, it was 4:50 p.m. In a letter to the Rev. Sanders during his incarceration, Buell stated that he remembered the time because he thought it was odd that his nephew was home so early on a work day, and Ross's hand was wrapped in bandages. “He told me he had injured his hand at work and had to go to the hospital to get his hand x-rayed and bandaged,” wrote Buell. Ross's employer had no record of the injury, according to police records. Buell's girlfriend also told police that the last time she saw the boxes that had contained the van seats they were in the garage next to the garbage cans.

A week after Krista's body was found, Ross abruptly quit his job in Akron and moved home. He went to work at his mother's craft store and, for a while, managed small booths for her at area malls, flea markets and fairs.

And then there is the evidence that detectives didn't find. When they confiscated Buell's van, they vacuumed every inch of the interior, but did not find one hair or fiber from Tina Harmon, Krista Harrison or Debbie Smith. They never bothered to test Ross' van. The fingerprint on the plastic bag did not match Buell's, nor did DNA collected at the scene.

 

B
Y
1984, B
UELL WAS BEHIND BARS
, but young Ohio girls continued to disappear.

In 1989, 10-year-old Amy Mihaljevic was abducted from Bay Village. Like Debbie, she made a phone call to her mother when she was most likely already with her abductor. She resembled Krista Harrison. And even though Amy was from Bay Village and Krista was from Marshallville, two cities separated by 58 miles, Amy's body was discovered a short distance from where police found a bloody garbage bag containing part of Krista's scalp. Like Tina, Amy's body was found in a field, on an incline, placed so that it could be easily seen from the road. Amy's body had also been stored someplace before being moved to the “dump” site. On Amy's body, the coroner also discovered gold-colored fibers, but they were never compared to those gathered in the Tina Harmon and Krista Harrison homicides because Buell was already in prison. Wayne County Prosecutor Martin Frantz says his Sheriff's Department destroyed the evidence after Buell was executed, though some samples may still be kept by BCI&I.

The case of 13-year-old Barbara Barnes of Steubenville is similar too. Barbara disappeared in December 1995, on her way to
school. She was found two months later, strangled to death. But Barbara's killer went to great lengths to hide the body, in a muddy embankment in Pittsburgh. She was discovered when the river level rose with the thaw.

 

“I
UNDERSTAND
the circumstantial evidence could be put to Ralph Ross as well as Robert Buell,” says Frantz in his office today. The prosecutor is a gracious host and opens his files to the
Free Times
because he truly believes he sent the right guy to the Death House. He sees the Harrisons in public sometimes and can meet their eyes.

“I know that during the investigation, Derflinger had those feelings. We ruled [Ross] out, but I can't remember how. I've always felt in my heart that Buell was guilty.”

Pastor Ernie Sanders disagrees.

“Buell never killed those girls,” he says. “He was by no means someone you would call a perfect citizen, but I know he didn't do it. I told him I was suspicious of his nephew, but he just kept saying that [Ross] was not smart enough to pull something like that off. You see, Buell thought he was smarter than everyone he knew. He told me that when he talked to Ralph about kidnapping women, he specifically told Ralph not to cross the line. He said not to take kids. And Ralph never argued with him, but Buell said he wasn't happy about it. A month before his execution, he told me, ‘You know what? You were right all along. Ralph set me up.' And I believe him. Ralph had access to Bob's clothes and the clothes found at the crime scene were too small for Buell anymore. He'd left them for Ralph.”

Today, Ralph Ross Jr. lives in a small house just outside Steubenville, where he grew up. He works for a cable company. He was arrested earlier this year and charged with possession of marijuana.

He spoke to this reporter on the stoop in front of his house in 2007. “I don't think Buell did it,” he says. “But I don't know who did. They never questioned me about the deaths. Why would they?”

When asked why he didn't allow the detective to take his fingerprints, he becomes defensive. “What if something come up?” he says. “I told them if they wanted it to get a court order and take it. If they needed it, they could have got a court order.”

He puts his hands in his pockets and looks over the river that meanders below his house. Ross says he started talking with his uncle about kidnapping and brutalizing women when he was 13 years old, and the conversations continued until Buell was caught.

“Times were different back then,” he says. “I was hanging out with my cool uncle. I thought it was just guys talking when we talked about taking those women. I should never have said anything about it to the cops.”

Asked about Krista, he abruptly ends the conversation. “I don't have anything more to say,” he says. He goes back inside, stands behind his screen door and glances up and down the sidewalk. Asked if he had anything to do with Krista's abduction, he shuts the door and disappears into the darkness.

 

Jack Swint, author of
Who Killed…Cleveland
, provided Buell's box of documents, which were cited in this story.

 

J
AMES
R
ENNER
is a staff writer for the
Cleveland Free Times
. He is also the author of
Amy: My Search for Her Killer
, a true crime book that chronicles his investigation into she unsolved murder of Amy Mihaljevic. Renner was named one of Cleveland's Thirty Most Interesting People by
Cleveland Magazine
in 2005, after he adapted a short story by Stephen King into a film, which Renner directed. It premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival later that year.

Coda

I have spent the last three years researching the strange abduction and murder of Amy Mihaljevic, a crime that occurred in 1989, in Bay Village, the idyllic Cleveland suburb made infamous by the Sam Sheppard case. The FBI agents and police detectives that have worked Amy's case for eighteen years believe that her murder was the first and only one committed by her killer, because his “MO” does not match any subsequent crime. I began to wonder if that assumption was incorrect.

While it's true that there appears to have been no similar murder committed in northeast Ohio after Amy's, I quickly found three that occurred just a few years before. However, these murders were attributed to a man named Robert Buell, who had been executed in 2002. Still, I tracked down the original case files, to see—just for my peace of mind—that the police and prosecutor who sent Buell to the death house got the right man. After reviewing the files, I quickly came to believe that Buell was innocent of these crimes and that the real killer still lives among us.

Since this story was originally published in the
Free Times
, things have not gone well for Ralph Ross, Jr. He was fired from his job installing cable for Comcast after the article circulated around the office. FBI agents were seen at his office, questioning coworkers. However, Wayne County prosecutor Martin Frantz refuses to officially reopen the Krista Harrison case—the murder for which Buell was executed. Instead, detectives are “reinvestigating” the murder of Tina Harmon, which remains an open case, even though identical fibers were discovered on the bodies of both Tina and Krista. Those fibers have recently been compared to similar fibers found on the body of Amy Mihaljevic. They do not match.

FROM
Esquire

T
HE PALISADES NUCLEAR PLANT
in Covert, Michigan, is real. It produces 778 megawatts of electricity, and the electricity keeps the lights burning for about half a million residents. The nuclear reactor inside the nuclear plant is also real. It gets really hot, and anyone driving on Interstate 196 on his way to Grand Rapids or St. Joe can see thin clouds of steam rising from its cooling towers, as constant a presence as the weather. The steam is real; it's water from Lake Michigan, pumped in to keep the reactor cool. The nuclear power plant is on the shore of Lake Michigan, right next to the tourist town of South Haven and about eighty miles from Chicago as the crow flies. Lake Michigan is real, definitely, though it comes off as an illusory ocean, offering the horizon as its only boundary. South Haven is real, too, although it empties out in the cold of winter. And Chicago? As real as the millions of people who live there, and the strange American fervor they generate. Chicago is so damned real, and so damned American, that it's hard to imagine an American reality without it—it's hard to imagine an American reality if, say, a
terrorist attack on Palisades Nuclear contaminated the big lake for the next thousand years or so and emptied out Chicago, not to mention St. Joe and South Haven and Covert.

Which is why it's a good thing that the security manager at Palisades Nuclear for the last year and a half is real, too, with real qualifications for the job. His name is William E. Clark, and he has been in the Army, he's been a cop, he's done some contracting work for the Department of Energy, he's gone to Kosovo on a diplomatic mission, and after Katrina, he worked for Blackwater, the security company, outside New Orleans. He started at Palisades in early 2006. He has a new house and a new wife and has told people, “I would shed blood to keep this job.” As a statement of determination, this is reassuring…but what if he means it as a statement of fact? What if William E. Clark has told people—told me—that he has in fact shed blood many times, in many places, over the course of many years? What if William E. Clark says that he worked for Blackwater in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as in New Orleans and killed so many people that he considers himself a cold-blooded murderer? What if he says that his job as the security manager of a nuclear plant on Lake Michigan is both a reward for all the killing he's done and a means for keeping him quiet about it?

 

T
HE GUILT IS REAL.
The shame is real. He is not proud of the things he's done, although that doesn't stop him from talking about them. He's not proud of what he had to do in Vietnam, his son says. He's not proud of having to kill someone in New Orleans, his ex-wife says. He wakes up with nightmares, his new wife says, because he's starting to see the faces of the human beings he once saw through the rifle scope. And so this story represents his attempt to come clean. He is a bad person, he says, but he wants to be a good person—he wants to be thought of as a good person. He wants to be
purified,
shriven. He is telling his story
because he knows it will destroy him. He is telling his story because he knows it will set him free.

He has kept stuff, over the years, because he knows that nobody will believe him. He has kept the stubs from all the boarding passes, the keys from all the hotel rooms. There are hundreds of them, and he keeps them in thick wads and piles. He has kept a business card for one of his aliases, Zeke Senega, a reporter for
The Irish Times
in Dublin. He has kept his passports, including the diplomatic one that was required for the work he did for the State Department. And he has photographs. He has a folder full of photographs from what he calls an “operation” in Iraq—an operation that ended with two jihadists slumped dead in the front seat of an Opel, their car windows spiderwebbed with the ghosts of two precision gunshots. He also has a photo album, which he calls the Book. The Book is not very different from a lot of photo albums—it is a record, in snapshots, of the places he's been and the people he's met—except that the mostly unsmiling men staring at the camera are usually wearing camouflage and armed to the teeth. And in the middle of the Book, there is one photo, black-and-white and larger than the rest, of William E. Clark cradling a rifle to his chest in what appears to be a jungle. He does not seem to be posing, and indeed he looks a little sick—his mouth slightly slack and his long face droopy with exhaustion. And yet when he remembers the circumstances of the photo, he relishes them: “That picture was taken in El Salvador in 1996. I wasn't supposed to be there. Nobody was. Suddenly this UPI photographer shows up, taking pictures. I said, ‘If you don't put that camera down and give me the film, I'll shoot you. I'll kill you and get away with it. Because I don't exist.'”

 

T
HE VOLUNTEER IS REAL—
so real that her name cannot be disclosed, nor any identifying details. She is one of the Americans who volunteered their time after Hurricane Katrina flooded the
Gulf Coast in 2005. She worked at a makeshift shelter where people were very sick and couldn't be evacuated. There were drugs at the shelter, a store of narcotics, to keep the sick people comfortable. There had to be protection, and Blackwater USA supplied it, through a government contract. The volunteer was happy that Blackwater was there, because she kept hearing stories of what was happening in New Orleans—its descent into lawlessness. It was a very scary time. In fact, one night one of the Blackwater contractors at the shelter said he had received intelligence to the effect that a New Orleans gang had found out about the drugs at the shelter and was on its way. He assured her that she would be safe, because he had just come from Iraq, and after what he'd been through there with the jihadists, he wasn't about to be scared by American lowlifes. He was a senior member of the Blackwater team, and he made sure that if anyone so much as even parked around the block from the shelter, there was a Blackwater contractor in his face. Nothing happened that night, and nothing
ever
happened, for she had her own personal protector.

His name was William E. Clark, but he told her to call him what everyone called him—Zeke. She was struck by the apparent contradictions in him. He made her feel secure, but he seemed so terribly wounded, both literally and metaphorically. He had a problem with his neck, an injury that occasionally caused him to pass out. When she asked him how he got it, he told her that he couldn't say, that he was prohibited from saying. Little by little, though, it came out, because secrets come to light during the night shift, and stories get told in the dark. He'd done terrible things for his country. He'd had to do terrible things, but that was because of his willingness to do them. He wasn't so willing anymore. He was doing the worst thing someone like him could do: He was growing a conscience. No, worse than that: He was
talking
about it. He was talking to her. He had never talked to anyone about the terrible things he'd done, not even his wife of thirty years. He felt safe with the volunteer, as she felt safe with him.

He scared her a little, of course. She had never met anyone like him. He showed her how to use one of his guns. She had never fired a gun before and was surprised how much she liked it. But she also felt that he was watching her. He even said that he was. He would call her on her cell phone, in the middle of the night, when she couldn't see him. “I'm sick of just watching you,” he would say and describe everything she was doing, so that she knew she was being watched. It was obsessive, and once they came together, they came together obsessively. She was in thrall to him, as he was in thrall to his stories and his terrible past. She didn't know whether to believe his stories, but when she got home, he sent her videotaped footage of people being executed in what he said was Iraq. There were voices on the video, and one of them sounded exactly like Zeke's.

 

D
EATH IS REAL.
Its reality is unsurpassed, and the people at the disaster-relief conference in Houston last July were on intimate terms with it. They were morticians, they were forensic anthropologists and forensic dentists, they worked suicide hotlines, and they handled the public relations when airplanes went down. Now they were all standing up and saying who they were and where they came from and why they were interested in doing work that few people wanted to do—why they wanted to take care of the dead left behind by mass disasters. As the attendees were introducing themselves to one another by both name and profession, a man stood up and said, “My name is William Clark, and I'm a designated marksman for Blackwater.”

He stood out as soon as he stood up. He was lean and he was lanky, with his face and everything else about him aligned on a vertical axis—he had a full head of springy hair rising straight up off his scalp in a kind of modified brush cut and a Fu Manchu mustache bracketing his rabbity front teeth. There was an arrogance in his military bearing and a desire to shock secreted in the
monotonal nonchalance of his voice. I was one of the people who gave him the reaction he was looking for, and when I asked him if I could speak with him, he seemed as though he'd been waiting for me to ask the question.

We met in a small room away from the main auditorium and away from the other attendees of the conference. I was well aware of Blackwater and its reputation as a private security company whose armed contractors had changed the rules of engagement in Iraq and elsewhere, even in New Orleans. I was also well aware of the reputation its contractors had for not talking, and so I was surprised when William Clark sat down and, in the same manner he used when he was introducing himself in the auditorium—a manner at once matter-of-fact and challenging—he started not only talking but confessing. Yes, he said, he was one of
them
—a “merc,” or mercenary, for Blackwater. He was a sniper. He had been a countersniper for the security details assigned to protect Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and Paul Bremer, the former American proconsul, in Iraq. He did overwatch, which meant he sat up on rooftops and shot people who looked dangerous. “Hey,” he said, “thirty-seven Al Qaeda and twenty-one Baathists can't be wrong.” At first, he was blithe on the subject of killing, saying that the Blackwater contract was “perfect for a guy like me—a thousand bucks a day, and you get to kill people legally.” Then he said that he must be “missing a chromosome or something—I don't have the moral firewall that keeps normal people from killing.” He had met people doing body-retrieval work when he was in New Orleans for Blackwater, and when they told him what they did, he said, “You're a taker-outer? That's funny—I'm a putter-inner. Maybe we can work together.” It was a joke, of course—the kind of bitterly defensive joke he liked to make—but then he'd started giving the matter some thought. He was fifty-three years old. He was old for the kind of life he led, the life, in his words, of “an operator,” “a shooter,” “a trigger puller.” In effect, he had given his life to take lives, and it had cost him almost
everything, including, he said, as he held up his left hand and displayed a denuded ring finger, his thirty-year marriage. He was trying desperately to adjust to civilian life, but a lifetime habit of chasing headlines didn't die easily. He was at the conference because he was hoping that maybe there was a way to chase headlines without having to kill anybody.

 

I
CALLED THE NUMBER
he gave me a few days later and asked for William Clark.

I told him I was the reporter he met at the disaster-relief conference. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I remember. You just threw me off, asking for William.”

T
HERE WAS A STORY HE TOLD
about his first day at Palisades. He was already at his desk when his boss came in. His boss said, “I just want you to know you're not my first choice for the job, so if you're in over your head, please tell me.” Zeke couldn't help himself. He answered, “Well, you're my first choice to throw out the window.” The boss beat an immediate retreat, and later, it had to be explained to Zeke that threats are taken very seriously in the modern corporate workplace. “But yeah, he knew who he was hiring,” Zeke said when I asked him if his boss at Palisades knew what he had done for a living. “He knew he hired an assassin.”

He had been screened, and the screening was real. He had been checked and vetted. The screening was standard but rigorous—it was the same screening everyone got when they were applying for a job that gave them complete freedom of movement and access at a nuclear power plant. His piss was checked, and so were his finances. He was given a psychological test and a polygraph. His references were called. Zeke claimed to have extremely high-level security clearances—a TS/SCI with the Department of Defense and a Q clearance with the Department of Energy—but Randy Cleveland, who's in charge of employee screening for the company that operates Palisades, said that he doesn't generally check security clearances, because he's in the business of granting security clearances of his own. Besides, he said, “I don't know how much work Zeke did that by its nature you wouldn't be able to validate. Some of these operations, he tells us, were of such a covert nature that you have to do an extreme amount of digging to find out about them, if you can find out at all.”

So they knew. What's more, they
all
seemed to know. On the first day I visited Zeke at Palisades, some of his security guards were receiving special-operations training at the plant's practice range, and all day long the people who came to observe the training seemed to know not only Zeke but also his history. The idea for the training was
based
on his history—based on his certainty that the jihadists he'd fought against in Afghanistan and Iraq would be able to take Palisades without much of a fight if the security guards weren't given the proper training. He wound up convincing the owners of Palisades to pay $50,000, he said, for the creation of an elite strike force from the ranks of his security guards, which he would call the Viper team. He wound up inviting Aaron Cohen, a former Israeli commando Zeke had seen giving commentary on Fox News, to come to Michigan and provide Viper training. He wound up convincing a local agent from the FBI and a local agent from the Department of Homeland Security to participate in the training and become members of the Viper
team. He wound up convincing representatives from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to come and observe the training, which he called the first-ever partnership between a private security team and federal law-enforcement agents for the purpose of critical-infrastructure protection. And so they all came to the practice range, and they all gave Zeke credit for making Viper training happen, although a senior manager at Palisades confided that Zeke was far better at creating elite strike forces than he was at doing paperwork and dealing with corporate politics. But this was not surprising, the manager said, given who Zeke was and where he'd been—given that Zeke had gone to Afghanistan and Iraq looking to die and had instead wound up a security manager at Palisades.